3) Inflation indexed store of value -- basket of items representative for me.
4) Rapid transactions
Can we do it?
#BTC failed to be currency, open-Ponzi speculative game. A currency must earn interest: currencies weren't born from govt design but from commercial credit. A deflationary currency blocks borrowing. #BTC is just an open Ponzi scheme: money made by someone is taken from someone else.
Stephen Diehl explains it better: Because on top of the zero-sum mechanics, if it siphons wealth off to insiders then the pool to pay out returns shrinks. What @nntaleb said is right, it's economically equivalent to an open Ponzi scheme.
What's more concerning to me is the cryptocurrency market as a whole. Perhaps there is an argument to Bitcoin being a kind of "digital gold" even if it is all but useless as a currency. But events like Dogecoin hitting a $50B market cap are very unsettling to me.
I used to take part in "Dogecoin Socks for the Homeless" events. It was wonderful, everyone was trying to make something good out of what we all knew to be a meme. I am shocked now to look back on those wallet addresses which once held ~$1,500 and see they'd be worth $285,000 (had I held). Of course, it might be that I'm just angry I wasn't the one to become rich, but the mania right now is really, seriously, insane.
Many people who are FOMO-ing in thinking this will make them millions with a few hundred dollars invested will be hurt when the "number go up, number go down" cycle turns to "number go down."
> Perhaps there is an argument to Bitcoin being a kind of "digital gold" even if it is all but useless as a currency.
Gold is less useful than most people think:
> In a 2012 paper entitled "The Golden Dilemma",[1] Claude Erb and Campbell Harvey examined some common assumptions about gold. First they looked at gold as an inflation hedge, analyzing gold returns from 1975 (the year the U.S. came off of the gold standard), through March 2012. They found that, due to its real-price volatility, gold had not been a good inflation hedge over the short- or long-term.
It's only of note because of historical accident and it's use in certain cultures (along with silver as well). The Incas had piles of gold, but only used it for jewelry and such, and not as a currency.
If we didn't have the culture references of the Gold Standard, I don't think most people would accept a shiny rock as anything special. Or at least gold (Au) specifically, and not any other Period 6 element:
Money only works because we all agree to believe in it.
The book Money by Jacob Goldstein is the best thing I have read on this. It covers the useful fiction that is money and how it has has shaped societies.
From the inception of coins in ancient Greece, the first stock market to current day cryptocurrencies. When people first came up with coins and paper money, don't you think people questioned their value?
"At the heart of the story are the fringe thinkers and world leaders who reimagined money. Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, created paper money backed by nothing, centuries before it appeared in the west. John Law, a professional gambler and convicted murderer, brought modern money to France (and destroyed the country's economy). The cypherpunks, a group of radical libertarian computer programmers, paved the way for bitcoin.
One thing they all realized: what counts as money (and what doesn't) is the result of choices we make, and those choices have a profound effect on who gets more stuff and who gets less, who gets to take risks when times are good, and who gets screwed when things go bad."
For the record I am in on crypto including Dogecoin, just as I am in on FAANG, just as I am in on index funds, just as I am in on property. I honestly people not diversifying would be hubris.
There is the fallacy that "real" markets are somehow super-efficient in moving peoples money exactly where they need to go to achieve tangible effect. This is just a myth, however in the crypto ecosystem it becomes entirely transparent. There's probably a lot more than $1T worth of money which is allocated randomly in regulated markets (i.e. gambling money). Part of this is moving to crypto because it's easier to handle.
One way to look at crypto is that each coin is a digital version of a casino chip and you need these chips to gamble in the casino.
At the end of the day it’s just another phenomenon. Cryptocurrencies are many things to many people. You may lament for the person that looses a few hundred dollars but what about all the people who spent money on Pokémon Go just because they wanted to get involved in an activity with their friends.
There’s nothing wrong with getting hurt if you chose to ignore the risks and risked more than you were willing to lose.
That "article" doesn't add anything beyond the fact that "this guy wrote a tweet and here's what it said".
Why is such low quality filler getting traction on HN? Is it because anti-crypto posts push people's buttons? Every day there is something like this posted, and like clockwork the comments are full of the same arguments both on the pro and anti crypto sides.
there is a wonderful irony to Taleb saying this because his ideas, especially the concept of having 'skin in the game,' have been extremely popular among the most ideologically orthodox of the Bitcoin crowd.
This remark smarts only slightly less than if someone like Satoshi or Nick Szabo came out and called Bitcoin a failure, or at least admitted it was fated to become a naturally occurring Ponzi all along.
unfortunately I suspect that Taleb is merely setting up a pivot into some other crypto ponzi wherein he is better positioned to realize gains (and the guru praise he craves) from diverting his followers away from Bitcoin. I wouldn't be surprised if that "not Bitcoin" turns out to be Ethereum.
HN got very popular in the last few years, so I guess it became much harder to moderate.
I wish the rules got stricter over time (stay strictly within the hacker/startup/tech mindset), but also as software is now a multi-trillion dollar market, politics has to be involved.
Bitcoin has spectacularly succeeded as a reliable litmus test to identify people and companies who are actually charlatans and get-rich-quick scammers with nothing better to offer than self-serving shilling and crypto-woo-woo, who contribute nothing to the world but hot air, burning coal, and global warming.
I know it's a losing battle, but I can't help but tilt at this particular pedantic windmill.
Not all financial scams are Ponzi schemes. Most are not. Ponzi schemes involve shady bookkeeping by the operator that conceals the source of fake profits.
If Bitcoin were an actual scam (and I don't think it is) it would be a pump-and-dump. Most ICOs were clearly pump-and-dumps.
There is a huge variety of financial scams, and it would be a fiscally safer world if more people knew about them.
* You buy them because they increase earnings and eventually produce dividends at a very high yield to your initial investment.
* The company can issue shares suppressing the price.
* The company can do stock buybacks, increasing the price.
* Brokers can naked short, suppressing the price.
Fiat currency
* You need it to pay taxes and debts.
* Endless Printing.
Gold
* Bought because of limited supply.
* Supply can be increased by settling futures in fiat, or more gold mining or naked shorting.
* Very few have custody.
Bitcoin
* You buy it not for dividends.
* No naked shorting. No stock buybacks because there is no company. Limited new issuance because code=law.
Bitcoin's use case is a reliable means of calculating reciprocation for value provided that can't be interfered with by 3rd parties to the transaction via dilution unless they expend meaningful effort by mining.
Just wait until people realize the stable coins are not stable either.
There's 1000 or so entities that control 50% of circulating btc. These insiders run the game, they have more information than you and they control the very few exits out there so you cannot really win without being extremely lucky.
Everyone thinks they are smart enough to get out before the next idiot, there's no universe where this ends well for anyone outside the exchanges, miners, and market makers.
Many many people have already gotten out, with things ending brilliantly for them. Out of being smarter? No, through pure dumb luck. But this notion that "the average person who holds forever can't win, ergo nobody can win" doesn't make your analysis look particularly insightful.
So, now we know Nassim Taleb missed the crypto boat. As did I and many others. Because if he didn't he wouldn't have posted this.
And what nonsense. "A currency must earn interest" <- this guy is really full of sh*t sometimes. I really do not understand why he has the reputation that he has.
It's perfectly possible to lend your bitcoins to someone and generate a return on it, that's what contracts are for and has nothing to do with the currency itself.
I’ve accidentally made a fortune on Bitcoin when, for a while, I had set up a small e-commerce payment flow to accept BC and forgot about it.
I noticed when it broke because transaction fees at some point escalated to €50 or so. Looked up the address and there had been a few dozens transactions on it over the years, paying €100 with 20 BC or something like it. The total was a little over 900 BC. I found the private key in an email I had sent to myself.
So trust me when I write, from a beach on a Corona-free island in the Atlantic: Taleb is right. BC sucks. The only thing worse than BC are the greedy halfwits promoting it.
As an experiment in economics, Bitcoin is pure genius. The inventor quite obviously deserves a Nobel. Due to two flaws (its inability to seamlessly scale and its environmental impact), and due to its community which specifically failed to fix those issues and just generally failed in life, Bitcoin ended up as the red-hot carcass of a spent star it currently is.
Um , Taleb was a supporter of BTC a couple of years ago [0] and has owned BTC and is now selling it [1]. I think what he did falls in the category of "When facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
Wait, isn't this the guy with the whole shpeel about having skin in the game? And, didn't he also sell most of his BTC in February? If so, then I guess he would want us to just ignore him.
The open ponzi-scheme comment is stupid and he knows it. Bitcoin behaves like any scarce asset, such as real estate. There's a limited amount available and price goes up when there are more buyers. Price goes down when there are less buyers. Trading assets on open markets can not be a ponzi. No one is lying to anyone. No one is promising profits to anyone. Bitcoin is very new and that's why the price goes up so fast. As it grows, it will grow slower and slower, until it stabilizes.
It did not fail as a currency. The last year has been huge for bitcoin as a currency, with the opening of Visa and Paypal networks to it, in addition to decentralized solutions. And that's just the beginning. To be really usable as an currency and as an unit of account, the price needs to stabilize first, which takes time.
It's open-source software. That's what's important. Everyone can make improvements. When software is not instantly perfect, can you say that it has failed? Software gets better and better as time goes by.
Pretty uncontroversial. It's clearly failed as a currency, and is more of a collectible for speculative investment. It may one day become functional currency, but it certainly isn't today.
3) Inflation indexed store of value -- basket of items representative for me.
4) Rapid transactions
Of these points, only (1) or (2) were ever a goals. And Bitcoin has succeeded spectacularly there. (4) is debatable. Read the white paper and the original discussions on Bitcoin Talk. Retrofitting goals on a project after the fact is just dishonest.
If you want something inflationary, why not a basket of currencies via the traditional finance system? One reason I like Bitcoin is because it's a deflationary asset which makes it unique among most other assets.
This site is overwhelmingly negative towards Bitcoin, but I feel like the negativity would only make sense if you had to make a binary decision to put most of your wealth in Bitcoin or none of it.
Having just some Bitcoin say 5%, is a reasonable way to preserve your wealth against what I find to be a very opaque system of finance where a lot of trust is being placed in a handful of people to keep things running smoothly.
If the U.S. government, the Federal Reserve, some crazy trade-conflict or other global unforeseen event takes place that results in unusual currency fluctuations, it's nice to have some of my wealth contained in a digitally secure global financial system.
Obviously people think otherwise. We're tired of inflationary currencies that allow the government to devalue our hard work at their whims, because of their bad decisions and their borrowing money with usury. It's their problem, me and so many other people don't want to be a part of it. Deflationary is the way to go.
People keep complaining of the growing wealth gap, where inflationary currencies sit at the very center of the whole pyramid scheme. Look at what's happening in Venezuela or Lebanon.
An honest question, understanding crypto and its true viability as a non-fiat currency or an anti-inflationary digital gold is simply above my pay-grade.
I'm wondering if there are any smart plays out there to take advantage of the volatility and/or the inefficiencies in the blockchain that has zero directional delta exposure to the underlying crypto-market.
I'm talking about the exploiting the inefficiency of some crypto-proxies like GBTC or MSTR that had 40-150% premium over their stated market value of their BTC holding at one point. Or similarly, doing some kind of long black swan tail trade (on both 500K and 5K BTC scenario) that minimizes the theta burn as much as possible to 0. Or even sympathy trades involving other physical commodities/precious metals. These are my current vague ideas. Would love to hear more from much smarter folks than me!
I'd love to find one. It's really difficult because crypto is a fundamentally inefficient market. It's practically impossible to meaningfully short-sell (except via futures) and the ratio of shorts to longs is about 1:19.
If you have a ton of collateral, one option would be to buy 5BTC and short sell a corresponding futures contract. The contango is massive, we're talking 2% per month. This requires of course a decent bankroll, 310K to spend at Coinbase and then about 3M in margin to short a BTC future on IBKR.
On the other hand it's a "risk free" 20% per annum, 0 delta play.
I’ve read most of Taleb’s books. And follow his contrarian investment advice. Being anti-fragile makes a lot of sense.
Looking beyond his typical ad-hominem attacks. i.e. ‘Questioned by the user ‘Ultra_Mega_BTC’, who said that “the market is saying the opposite”, Nassim Taleb called him an “imbecile”.’
I wonder, if there’s something more to this. As in, what is he selling? He’s got the spotlight... more books? Or a drop in bitcoin... buying bitcoin on a down cycle.
These supposed problems, are not what bitcoin is supposed to solve. His trading advice is 90% of your money in riskless assets (T-bills). The rest in the riskiest investments one can find. He must’ve not bought into bitcoin ;)
As long as there are oppressive financial systems (central banks, the world bank, the current financial pyramid) crypto (decentralized) currencies are going to be around and will provide a needed _service_. The harder the folks (running the 'official Ponzi scheme') fight crypto the more valuable crypto currency technology will be, more smart folks will pay attention to it and it will evolve further.
Since there is no way on Earth that the financial elite will just give up and go away, demand for crypto transactions will be ever present. They can pass laws to make it illegal, but that means that servicing the demand is going to be even more profitable. Consider that the risk of owning an outlawed crypto currency is nowhere near to carrying around a kilo of white powder...
Every time a windbag (insider/rich guy/financial guru), like Taleb or Bill Gates, bad mouths crypto, it should be considered an endorsement of the concept.
Which crypto you choose to put your fiat into however, is your business.
[+] [-] throwaway4good|4 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1382446478539550727
WHAT WE WANT CRYPTO & CURRENCY FOR:
1) Currency w/o a government
2) Stable/reliable for contracts
3) Inflation indexed store of value -- basket of items representative for me.
4) Rapid transactions
Can we do it?
#BTC failed to be currency, open-Ponzi speculative game. A currency must earn interest: currencies weren't born from govt design but from commercial credit. A deflationary currency blocks borrowing. #BTC is just an open Ponzi scheme: money made by someone is taken from someone else.
Stephen Diehl explains it better: Because on top of the zero-sum mechanics, if it siphons wealth off to insiders then the pool to pay out returns shrinks. What @nntaleb said is right, it's economically equivalent to an open Ponzi scheme.
[+] [-] sebmellen|4 years ago|reply
I used to take part in "Dogecoin Socks for the Homeless" events. It was wonderful, everyone was trying to make something good out of what we all knew to be a meme. I am shocked now to look back on those wallet addresses which once held ~$1,500 and see they'd be worth $285,000 (had I held). Of course, it might be that I'm just angry I wasn't the one to become rich, but the mania right now is really, seriously, insane.
Many people who are FOMO-ing in thinking this will make them millions with a few hundred dollars invested will be hurt when the "number go up, number go down" cycle turns to "number go down."
[+] [-] throw0101a|4 years ago|reply
Gold is less useful than most people think:
> In a 2012 paper entitled "The Golden Dilemma",[1] Claude Erb and Campbell Harvey examined some common assumptions about gold. First they looked at gold as an inflation hedge, analyzing gold returns from 1975 (the year the U.S. came off of the gold standard), through March 2012. They found that, due to its real-price volatility, gold had not been a good inflation hedge over the short- or long-term.
* https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/
It's only of note because of historical accident and it's use in certain cultures (along with silver as well). The Incas had piles of gold, but only used it for jewelry and such, and not as a currency.
* https://www.tourinperu.com/blog/inca-gold-culture-invasion-r...
If we didn't have the culture references of the Gold Standard, I don't think most people would accept a shiny rock as anything special. Or at least gold (Au) specifically, and not any other Period 6 element:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Period_6_element
Is there perhaps something special about Group 11 element (Cu, Ag, Au) that they should be treated as "currency"?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_11_element
They are certainly useful from a tooling perspective in some ways, but beyond that?
[+] [-] miohtama|4 years ago|reply
It's the sign of the peak of the bull market. There is going to be hangover.
[+] [-] rvz|4 years ago|reply
Signalling a great big crash, waiting to happen.
[+] [-] GoldenMonkey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] senojretep356|4 years ago|reply
The book Money by Jacob Goldstein is the best thing I have read on this. It covers the useful fiction that is money and how it has has shaped societies.
From the inception of coins in ancient Greece, the first stock market to current day cryptocurrencies. When people first came up with coins and paper money, don't you think people questioned their value?
"At the heart of the story are the fringe thinkers and world leaders who reimagined money. Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, created paper money backed by nothing, centuries before it appeared in the west. John Law, a professional gambler and convicted murderer, brought modern money to France (and destroyed the country's economy). The cypherpunks, a group of radical libertarian computer programmers, paved the way for bitcoin.
One thing they all realized: what counts as money (and what doesn't) is the result of choices we make, and those choices have a profound effect on who gets more stuff and who gets less, who gets to take risks when times are good, and who gets screwed when things go bad."
For the record I am in on crypto including Dogecoin, just as I am in on FAANG, just as I am in on index funds, just as I am in on property. I honestly people not diversifying would be hubris.
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CTDOCodebases|4 years ago|reply
At the end of the day it’s just another phenomenon. Cryptocurrencies are many things to many people. You may lament for the person that looses a few hundred dollars but what about all the people who spent money on Pokémon Go just because they wanted to get involved in an activity with their friends.
There’s nothing wrong with getting hurt if you chose to ignore the risks and risked more than you were willing to lose.
[+] [-] SturgeonsLaw|4 years ago|reply
Why is such low quality filler getting traction on HN? Is it because anti-crypto posts push people's buttons? Every day there is something like this posted, and like clockwork the comments are full of the same arguments both on the pro and anti crypto sides.
Am I an idiot for expecting better from HN?
[+] [-] ChainOfFools|4 years ago|reply
This remark smarts only slightly less than if someone like Satoshi or Nick Szabo came out and called Bitcoin a failure, or at least admitted it was fated to become a naturally occurring Ponzi all along.
unfortunately I suspect that Taleb is merely setting up a pivot into some other crypto ponzi wherein he is better positioned to realize gains (and the guru praise he craves) from diverting his followers away from Bitcoin. I wouldn't be surprised if that "not Bitcoin" turns out to be Ethereum.
[+] [-] xiphias2|4 years ago|reply
I wish the rules got stricter over time (stay strictly within the hacker/startup/tech mindset), but also as software is now a multi-trillion dollar market, politics has to be involved.
[+] [-] asdev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KyleBerezin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diego_moita|4 years ago|reply
This is why I disgust this Taleb guy: he usually has good insights but defends them with the worst arguments. Or no arguments at all.
I felt his "Black Swan" book is a very good idea stretched into hundreds of pages of arrogance and condescendence.
[+] [-] timoth3y|4 years ago|reply
Not all financial scams are Ponzi schemes. Most are not. Ponzi schemes involve shady bookkeeping by the operator that conceals the source of fake profits.
If Bitcoin were an actual scam (and I don't think it is) it would be a pump-and-dump. Most ICOs were clearly pump-and-dumps.
There is a huge variety of financial scams, and it would be a fiscally safer world if more people knew about them.
[+] [-] narrator|4 years ago|reply
* You buy them because they increase earnings and eventually produce dividends at a very high yield to your initial investment.
* The company can issue shares suppressing the price.
* The company can do stock buybacks, increasing the price.
* Brokers can naked short, suppressing the price.
Fiat currency
* You need it to pay taxes and debts.
* Endless Printing.
Gold
* Bought because of limited supply.
* Supply can be increased by settling futures in fiat, or more gold mining or naked shorting.
* Very few have custody.
Bitcoin
* You buy it not for dividends.
* No naked shorting. No stock buybacks because there is no company. Limited new issuance because code=law.
Bitcoin's use case is a reliable means of calculating reciprocation for value provided that can't be interfered with by 3rd parties to the transaction via dilution unless they expend meaningful effort by mining.
[+] [-] sub7|4 years ago|reply
There's 1000 or so entities that control 50% of circulating btc. These insiders run the game, they have more information than you and they control the very few exits out there so you cannot really win without being extremely lucky.
Everyone thinks they are smart enough to get out before the next idiot, there's no universe where this ends well for anyone outside the exchanges, miners, and market makers.
[+] [-] tom_mellior|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zetazzed|4 years ago|reply
Clearly, International Postal Reply Coupons are the better solution here.
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
And what nonsense. "A currency must earn interest" <- this guy is really full of sh*t sometimes. I really do not understand why he has the reputation that he has.
It's perfectly possible to lend your bitcoins to someone and generate a return on it, that's what contracts are for and has nothing to do with the currency itself.
Coming soon: one NT's own crypto coin.
[+] [-] IAmEveryone|4 years ago|reply
I noticed when it broke because transaction fees at some point escalated to €50 or so. Looked up the address and there had been a few dozens transactions on it over the years, paying €100 with 20 BC or something like it. The total was a little over 900 BC. I found the private key in an email I had sent to myself.
So trust me when I write, from a beach on a Corona-free island in the Atlantic: Taleb is right. BC sucks. The only thing worse than BC are the greedy halfwits promoting it.
As an experiment in economics, Bitcoin is pure genius. The inventor quite obviously deserves a Nobel. Due to two flaws (its inability to seamlessly scale and its environmental impact), and due to its community which specifically failed to fix those issues and just generally failed in life, Bitcoin ended up as the red-hot carcass of a spent star it currently is.
[+] [-] vmurthy|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://news.bitcoin.com/black-swan-author-pulls-a-180-nassi...
[1]https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1360276917992230919
[+] [-] pavlov|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepvibrations|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aqsheehy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|4 years ago|reply
Build your own Digital Bitcoin Pusher Games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypXHkfdVvYM&ab_channel=WhatT...
[+] [-] jude-|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Geee|4 years ago|reply
It did not fail as a currency. The last year has been huge for bitcoin as a currency, with the opening of Visa and Paypal networks to it, in addition to decentralized solutions. And that's just the beginning. To be really usable as an currency and as an unit of account, the price needs to stabilize first, which takes time.
It's open-source software. That's what's important. Everyone can make improvements. When software is not instantly perfect, can you say that it has failed? Software gets better and better as time goes by.
[+] [-] ummonk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aazaa|4 years ago|reply
1) Currency w/o a government
2) Stable/reliable for contracts
3) Inflation indexed store of value -- basket of items representative for me.
4) Rapid transactions
Of these points, only (1) or (2) were ever a goals. And Bitcoin has succeeded spectacularly there. (4) is debatable. Read the white paper and the original discussions on Bitcoin Talk. Retrofitting goals on a project after the fact is just dishonest.
And who is this "we" anyway?
[+] [-] GhostVII|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kranar|4 years ago|reply
This site is overwhelmingly negative towards Bitcoin, but I feel like the negativity would only make sense if you had to make a binary decision to put most of your wealth in Bitcoin or none of it.
Having just some Bitcoin say 5%, is a reasonable way to preserve your wealth against what I find to be a very opaque system of finance where a lot of trust is being placed in a handful of people to keep things running smoothly.
If the U.S. government, the Federal Reserve, some crazy trade-conflict or other global unforeseen event takes place that results in unusual currency fluctuations, it's nice to have some of my wealth contained in a digitally secure global financial system.
[+] [-] dylkil|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gher-shyu3i|4 years ago|reply
People keep complaining of the growing wealth gap, where inflationary currencies sit at the very center of the whole pyramid scheme. Look at what's happening in Venezuela or Lebanon.
[+] [-] 1996|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmurt7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noname123|4 years ago|reply
I'm wondering if there are any smart plays out there to take advantage of the volatility and/or the inefficiencies in the blockchain that has zero directional delta exposure to the underlying crypto-market.
I'm talking about the exploiting the inefficiency of some crypto-proxies like GBTC or MSTR that had 40-150% premium over their stated market value of their BTC holding at one point. Or similarly, doing some kind of long black swan tail trade (on both 500K and 5K BTC scenario) that minimizes the theta burn as much as possible to 0. Or even sympathy trades involving other physical commodities/precious metals. These are my current vague ideas. Would love to hear more from much smarter folks than me!
[+] [-] ornornor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arcticbull|4 years ago|reply
If you have a ton of collateral, one option would be to buy 5BTC and short sell a corresponding futures contract. The contango is massive, we're talking 2% per month. This requires of course a decent bankroll, 310K to spend at Coinbase and then about 3M in margin to short a BTC future on IBKR.
On the other hand it's a "risk free" 20% per annum, 0 delta play.
[+] [-] rodiger|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Marciplan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GoldenMonkey|4 years ago|reply
Looking beyond his typical ad-hominem attacks. i.e. ‘Questioned by the user ‘Ultra_Mega_BTC’, who said that “the market is saying the opposite”, Nassim Taleb called him an “imbecile”.’
I wonder, if there’s something more to this. As in, what is he selling? He’s got the spotlight... more books? Or a drop in bitcoin... buying bitcoin on a down cycle.
These supposed problems, are not what bitcoin is supposed to solve. His trading advice is 90% of your money in riskless assets (T-bills). The rest in the riskiest investments one can find. He must’ve not bought into bitcoin ;)
[+] [-] laszlo-kiss|4 years ago|reply
Since there is no way on Earth that the financial elite will just give up and go away, demand for crypto transactions will be ever present. They can pass laws to make it illegal, but that means that servicing the demand is going to be even more profitable. Consider that the risk of owning an outlawed crypto currency is nowhere near to carrying around a kilo of white powder...
Every time a windbag (insider/rich guy/financial guru), like Taleb or Bill Gates, bad mouths crypto, it should be considered an endorsement of the concept.
Which crypto you choose to put your fiat into however, is your business.