Johnny Doe
Well-Known Member
Where do you get a bitcoin wallet? I want to get some, low value, but don't really know how
Bitcoin discussion and news
- Thread starter camouflage
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The atmosphere of the late '20s (financially speaking at least) can be summed up in the following (likely apocryphal) anecdote. In the winter of 1928, Joe Kennedy decided to stop to have his shoes shined before he started his day's work at the office. When the boy finished, he offered Kennedy a stock tip: "Buy Hindenburg." Kennedy soon sold off his stocks, thinking:
“You know it's time to sell when shoeshine boys give you stock tips. This bull market is over.”[1]
A timely move considering that the stock market would soon resemble the fate of the airship Hindenburg itself.
From Great Depression - RationalWiki
Clickbait adverts are the shoeshine boys of the early 21st century.
“You know it's time to sell when shoeshine boys give you stock tips. This bull market is over.”[1]
A timely move considering that the stock market would soon resemble the fate of the airship Hindenburg itself.
From Great Depression - RationalWiki
Clickbait adverts are the shoeshine boys of the early 21st century.
mauvais
on reddit or something
The target demographic of these ads don't understand it either.
It's a bit of a derail but: CFDs (contract for difference) and so on are complicated things best left to day traders, and certainly they can lose their shirts. You pay to borrow some stock that you never own, and basically bet on it going up or down, but in such a way that your bet is leveraged.
If leveraged betting doesn't mean anything to you either, imagine a buy-to-let. A house costs £1m. The BtL landlord puts down a small deposit and, for the rest, agrees a loan with the bank in which they'll pay say £500 a month, for two years, purely to service the interest on the loan. At the end, they have paid £12,000 to the bank. If the house is now worth £2m, they've made £1m minus £12k - a very nice return. Of course, if the house is now worth £500k, they've lost £512k. Now imagine that but with stocks over the period of an hour or a day. Dangerous stuff, and for consumers it's gambling again, in this case being targeted at internet numpties.
Copycat trading is much the same thing in but a variant of it which you're given access to one of these systems (itself a potential con) and encouraged to copy the trades of someone else, or indeed a chain of people. Pyramid scheme ahoy.
The bitcoin version of this stuff is a simpler, zeitgeisty face on the same kind of idea. 'Oh, I know what Bitcoin is', says the punter. And then gets shafted by the powerful sucking force of a market they've no idea about.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
It is a pyramid scheme, of course. Has to be - bitcoins are essentially useless things, whose value comes from their rarity, the difficulty in obtaining them, the near-impossibility of changing them once you have them, and the increasing number of people sold on the idea of getting some. Comparisons with the bulb mania of Amsterdam seem apposite, but also comparisons with gold, which was used as currency for all the above reasons - rarity, permanence, essential uselessness except as decoration. You even metaphorically 'mine' them. It's a rather weird move away from fiat currency back to something resembling the gold standard.
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
What, Capitalism? Surely you're wrong.
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
Terribly elitist.
Bahnhof Strasse
Met up with Hannah Courtoy a week next Tuesday
My old nan told be that no one out there is ever gonna give you a pile of money for doing fuck all.
She was wise.
She was wise.
Bahnhof Strasse
Met up with Hannah Courtoy a week next Tuesday
Yeah man, if the cunt was wearing Reebok classics he'd never have gone to the shoe-shine boy and been stuffed.
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
Yup, that's the model, gold.
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
Not read the article as of now but I wondered about the possibility of a credit-bubble sparked by a bitcoin land-grab.
bimble
floofy
The anti-elitist rhetoric of the whole decentralised egalitarian trust-free democratic vision of the shiny new bitcoin world is somewhat undermined though don't you think by the fact that a very small number of young men who bought in at the beginning are now squillionaires because other people, like the folk who are buying it now from adverts on the tube, decided to join in.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Its entire value is built on a bubble, though. If the 'real cost' of a bitcoin is the computer time needed to mine it, that can be quantified pretty accurately. Everything on top of that is bubble - they have no use for anything other than as a means of transaction, which is why I don't quite agree with kabbes that bitcoins are commodities. They're rather, like gold, an essentially arbitrary thing chosen as a symbol to store value so that you can add a time/space gap between selling one thing and buying something else. Fiat money in many ways was an advance on that idea, doing away with any physical manifestation of the value-store.
I get the point that bitcoins are impossible to forge and don't require third-party verification, and I see their value in that sense - an electronic version of gold that, unlike gold, can be sent anywhere in the world in an instant. And in that sense, their suitability for illicit digital transactions is obvious, but they're going way beyond that now, surely, getting into territory where fiat currency could just as easily be used. Dunno how it will turn out - they've done the hard bit, which is convincing people that bitcoins are worth having, but it seems to me extraordinarily liable to crash and spiral into hyperinflation very very quickly once people realise that they really don't need bitcoins except to do dodgy stuff. Either the range of dodgy stuff available will increase as a result or the thing will crash spectacularly.
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
I think that was intentional, not the demographic profile itself which tends to be a funnel for the sugary crust of all sorts of new ideas or developments that spring up in society (educated white males with money to spend and usually harassed less intensely by societies capricious whims) not to mention being a driver for where new money goes in the first place. Bitcoin wasn't invented to challenge greed and gain, it was invented to use those things as a food-source and look how far it's come.
Whatever Satoshi Nakamoto was/is, it knew capitalism well enough to develop the perfect predator of incentives to move in the market environment.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Plus it's a means of dodging taxes. There's nothing democratic or egalitarian about bitcoin. If the model actually is successful long-term (which I doubt it will be tbh), its net effect will be to concentrate wealth even more in the hands of a few.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Do you remember exactly how he thought it could be a force for good?
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
Be your own bank, democatiscm of money etc.
bimble
floofy
Eroding the power of the nation state, people all over the world who may not have bank access being able to send remittances without being clobbered by moneygram etc, replacing paypal's hegemony.. there was a very long night of it. But mainly it was the beauty of the maths and the democraticness of the blockchain system he was talking about, mostly way over my head.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Ah ok. Wafer-thin r/w libertarian nonsense, in other words. Blockchain is very clever, from what I've read of it, but there's nothing particularly democratic about it - it just means you don't need outside verification. But privacy doesn't necessarily equal democracy. Democracy involves the ability to perform actions as a collective with accountability from those making the decisions about those actions. It also involves the need to pool wealth for the common good. In the above vision, you have the ability to corner off whatever money you have and make sure nobody else can get at it. That just makes the rich richer and screws everyone else. Whatever power dynamic is already in existence, this system will strengthen it.
imo this is typical of a particular kind of American r/w 'anarchism' whose analysis cannot see beyond the atomised individual.
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
Be that as it may, I find the open-source Core project kind of fascinating. A multi-billion dollar project where anyone ncan rock up, review, propose, submit code and walk off and that this method has worked thus far... it's remarkable. I wonder how much of a champion of open source methodology Bitcoin Core will continue to be, all that money bearing down. We've already seen the first contest between different crypto-factions of crypto-right (centralization-orientated chip-patent-holding data-centre barons etc) and crypto-left (decentralization-minded low-barrrier-to-entry open-source maximalists).
I've given up on the idea that a different kind of Money can somehow lead to justice. In my opinion it's never been about the Money, it's about Power, it always is. Power is above Money in any scenario. Money buys sure, but Power takes. I don't think that bitcoin can really change the underlying tendencies of Power, although there can still be massive transfer payments, new monied elites, retreating old-guards etc. Bitcoin 'Leftness' is like the American Labour movement- not questioning capitalism, just the distribution of spoils.
not-bono-ever
meh
The FCA have started issuing industry warnings about Bitcoin trading ( arse covering ) and have begun to examine the BC offerings by CFD companies in the UK. Unofficially, Some of these outfits have breached their own risk limits as they are unable to match in the often the one way direction in their CFD markets and have occasionally covered the hedge themselves to keep liquidity as they were unableto lay it off, or have halted offering spreads intraday until they assesed their cover. be very wary of this shit, very wary, its a fools game - even stop losses will not trigger of this imploded,as it will fall straight through stops. And you will get zero comback from a random net pseudo depositary or a difference supplier if they are running out of Tonga.
Just fucking dont
Just fucking dont
not-bono-ever
meh
My nan used to tell me that only cunts used bad language. She was right.
Bahnhof Strasse
Met up with Hannah Courtoy a week next Tuesday
Clever old fuckers, these nans.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I understand the interest in the system. New Scientist last week ran an article about blockchain and its other potential uses. It's a very clever idea, and it's been demonstrated to work by bitcoin. And I largely agree with your second paragraph, but a currency unmediated by any kind of outside regulation can only benefit one class of people - those already with the power. I'd argue that it is the antithesis of democracy - it is a means of preventing even the possibility of a degree of democracy. The currency itself may have an open source, low-barrier, anyone can use it nature, but that says absolutely nothing about the nature of the value it is being used to represent.
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
I dunno, I mean the power to save is a power. Say you have five bitcoins, whatever percentage of the less than 21 million bitcoins that will ever be, that's your percentage of whatever the overall bitcoin denominated economy is worth, including the current value in dollars or whatever. As long as the bitcoin economy grows and even if it shrinks, your savings in bitcoin represent your percentage of that. That's tremendously powerful isn't it, compared to an inflationary currency that these days you'd have to invest in the stock-market to at least try and see it not evaporate in value. Then again you need to have at least a certain amount of wealth for this sort of thing to even be a problem.
I think bitcoin is too much a contested space to say it locks in anyone's power-structure though. All that can be said is that in a bitcoin denominated world, there would still be a power-structure and it would mostly involve rich people being looked after by powerful people.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
The fact that there is a set number of them is irrelevant - just means that, instead of adding zeros to bank notes, you take zeros off the value of each bitcoin. I'm not in any position to give investment advice to anyone, but I would treat buying bitcoin for profit exactly the same way as buying a bet on a horse race. I wouldn't flutter any more than I could comfortably afford to lose.
Also, if you buy bitcoins and sit on them expecting them to go up in value, you're not adding anything of value that might merit that increase. It's the ultimate bubble in that sense. With a bank, your interest comes from the fact your money is circulating. Bitcoins take value out of circulation and a wide-scale saving of bitcoin would cripple an economy. Everything would grind to a halt - and so the real value represented would decrease, and the value of bitcoin would fall. And when it falls, it could fall spectacularly. I fully expect that to happen, and it will cause a lot of people to lose out.
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
Can you expand on your understanding of the first bit, about just taking off zero's?
Not sure about the second bit either. Not consuming when you don't deem it necessary can't be a bad thing to do on a Sunday afternoon on our limited little planet, surely? I mean if value is in the spending, then all that's really happened here is that the 'hodler' now has more of the choice to spend or not. If she doesn't, what's the harm?
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