Gyroscopic Investing

dualstow wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 8:23 am Ethereum, well ether, is one that I am curious about. Kind of a next generation after bitcoin? I’m still reading up on the subject.
Do you have any opinion on it?

I would highly recommend reading "An (Institutional) Investor’s Take on Cryptoassets" to understand my and many other "bitcoin maximalists" (bitcoin only/mostly folks) perspective.

https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/john ... ets+v6.pdf

TLDR: bitcoin is money, altcoins are chuck e cheese tokens

Thanks!
@ Chuck E Cheese. Just when I had convinced myself that you were European.

bitcoininthevp wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 6:22 am

whatchamacallit wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 7:34 pm Quick search on btc is not bitcoin went to a new coin:

"Bitcoin sv"

It is a fork of a fork of bitcoin.

It is much cheaper below $200 still. Might be worth a gamble.

Apply your normal thinking to other assets to the crypto space.

Gold is expensive, but this sand.... Might be worth a gamble.

Apple is expensive, but this penny stock... Might be worth a gamble.

There is the other side that you probably can't see now since you probably have at least several BTC.

Most people will feel like they missed out on HODLing a whole BTC and that has a psychological effect that deters from participating.

If people start seeing another coin that seems to have potential and they can afford a whole coin it will be more attractive.

I think I will look into the next trend and start telling people "BTC is not bitcoin".

dualstow wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 9:52 am Yep, the energy comes up often and it is massive. i mentioned in the lengthy Giveaway thread that a friend wanted to go in on mining and I just didn’t want to deal with the utility bill.

That begs the question...at what price does mining bitcoin become a losing proposition? What happens if miners can't turn a profit?

doodle wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 5:13 pm That begs the question...at what price does mining bitcoin become a losing proposition? What happens if miners can't turn a profit?

I'm sorry. I'm a pedant. This sort of stuff horrifies me. "begging the question" is a bad translation of "assuming the conclusion" NOT "suggesting the question".

Carry on.
Mark

Mark Leavy wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 10:01 pm

doodle wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 5:13 pm That begs the question...at what price does mining bitcoin become a losing proposition? What happens if miners can't turn a profit?

I'm sorry. I'm a pedant. This sort of stuff horrifies me. "begging the question" is a bad translation of "assuming the conclusion" NOT "suggesting the question".

Carry on.
Mark

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words- ... question

doodle wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 5:13 pm That begs the question...at what price does mining bitcoin become a losing proposition? What happens if miners can't turn a profit?

It's already hardly profitable.
Here, people are making some gains combining the BTC price increase with electricity thefts. Do not know how widely spread in US the electricity theft is, though here the increase of BTC price leads to increase in the news like 'yet another miner was caught today stealing electricity in the neighbourhood of ... '. Free lunch is yet to be invented.

Vil wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 12:35 am

doodle wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 5:13 pm That begs the question...at what price does mining bitcoin become a losing proposition? What happens if miners can't turn a profit?

It's already hardly profitable.
Here, people are making some gains combining the BTC price increase with electricity thefts. Do not know how widely spread in US the electricity theft is, though here the increase of BTC price leads to increase in the news like 'yet another miner was caught today stealing electricity in the neighbourhood of ... '. Free lunch is yet to be invented.

So if bitcoins price is cut in half due to some market shakeout.. and with the continued halving events the amount of Bitcoin rewarded for work continues to decrease what happens if a large number of miners call it quits? Does the everything grind to a standstill? Will transactions take days to process?

doodle wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 7:49 am

Vil wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 12:35 am

doodle wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 5:13 pm That begs the question...at what price does mining bitcoin become a losing proposition? What happens if miners can't turn a profit?

It's already hardly profitable.
Here, people are making some gains combining the BTC price increase with electricity thefts. Do not know how widely spread in US the electricity theft is, though here the increase of BTC price leads to increase in the news like 'yet another miner was caught today stealing electricity in the neighbourhood of ... '. Free lunch is yet to be invented.

So if bitcoins price is cut in half due to some market shakeout.. and with the continued halving events the amount of Bitcoin rewarded for work continues to decrease what happens if a large number of miners call it quits? Does the everything grind to a standstill? Will transactions take days to process?

No idea. Can't recall where I read it, but Nvidia announced some changes in their product range and specs e.g. cutting some of the performance if regular GCs are used for mining. So, do not know whether that will change also the product pricing model miners rely on. Too many unknowns for my taste.

No comment on the goodness or badness of the statement, but I did think it interesting Yellen called out bitcoin as specifically being bad for the environment last week/earlier this week.

"“I don’t think that bitcoin … is widely used as a transaction mechanism,” she told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin at a New York Times DealBook conference. “To the extent it is used I fear it’s often for illicit finance. It’s an extremely inefficient way of conducting transactions, and the amount of energy that’s consumed in processing those transactions is staggering.”

whatchamacallit wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 2:54 pm There is the other side that you probably can't see now since you probably have at least several BTC.

Most people will feel like they missed out on HODLing a whole BTC and that has a psychological effect that deters from participating.

If people start seeing another coin that seems to have potential and they can afford a whole coin it will be more attractive.

I think I will look into the next trend and start telling people "BTC is not bitcoin".

Totally. This is "unit bias" and its too bad for the humans that dont buy one of the most potentially lucrative investments ever simply due to a psychology quirk.

Even worse if they buy some cheaper coin due to unit bias. Then they go from missing out on gains to likely taking loses.

Look at the list of top 10 "market cap" coins from 2013,2014,2015. Most are gone.

doodle wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 5:13 pm

dualstow wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 9:52 am Yep, the energy comes up often and it is massive. i mentioned in the lengthy Giveaway thread that a friend wanted to go in on mining and I just didn’t want to deal with the utility bill.

That begs the question...at what price does mining bitcoin become a losing proposition? What happens if miners can't turn a profit?

Apply this question to any business. The answer is the business of minting bitcoins via burning electricity using hardware (mining) is a losing business proposition when the costs of the business (mining hardware, electricity, etc) cost more than you can sell the bitcoin (product) for, for a sustained period of time.

Ill assuming your next question is: then who is mining bitcoin if it becomes unprofitable??

The same answer for any other industry. The least profitable miners will go out of business, and the more profitable miners will stay in business.

Vil wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 12:35 am

doodle wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 5:13 pm That begs the question...at what price does mining bitcoin become a losing proposition? What happens if miners can't turn a profit?

It's already hardly profitable.
Here, people are making some gains combining the BTC price increase with electricity thefts. Do not know how widely spread in US the electricity theft is, though here the increase of BTC price leads to increase in the news like 'yet another miner was caught today stealing electricity in the neighbourhood of ... '. Free lunch is yet to be invented.

A few wrong statements here.

Actually bitcoin is largely profitable right now due to the large increase in bitcoins price (revenue to existing miners) vs a complete lack of mining equipment/shortages (lack of competition/capacity).

Stealing electricity was more common in the 2011-ish era of bitcoin. That is when you could set a laptop up one night and have 50 BTC in the morning. These days, youd need specialized machines and a large amount of power (hint: not an outlet in the wall) to mine a non ~0 amount of bitcoin. There are some stories of smaller countries with miners setting up shop and using the governments free energy program to mine, but they are smaller operations and dont last long. So to note that very tiny minority here is a bit misleading.

Vil wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 8:29 am No idea. Can't recall where I read it, but Nvidia announced some changes in their product range and specs e.g. cutting some of the performance if regular GCs are used for mining. So, do not know whether that will change also the product pricing model miners rely on. Too many unknowns for my taste.

No bitcoin miners are using general purpose computing or video cards for mining. That is for some altcoin mining.

bitcoininthevp wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 10:27 am

Vil wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 12:35 am

doodle wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 5:13 pm That begs the question...at what price does mining bitcoin become a losing proposition? What happens if miners can't turn a profit?

It's already hardly profitable.
Here, people are making some gains combining the BTC price increase with electricity thefts. Do not know how widely spread in US the electricity theft is, though here the increase of BTC price leads to increase in the news like 'yet another miner was caught today stealing electricity in the neighbourhood of ... '. Free lunch is yet to be invented.

A few wrong statements here.

Actually bitcoin is largely profitable right now due to the large increase in bitcoins price (revenue to existing miners) vs a complete lack of mining equipment/shortages (lack of competition/capacity).

Stealing electricity was more common in the 2011-ish era of bitcoin. That is when you could set a laptop up one night and have 50 BTC in the morning. These days, youd need specialized machines and a large amount of power (hint: not an outlet in the wall) to mine a non ~0 amount of bitcoin. There are some stories of smaller countries with miners setting up shop and using the governments free energy program to mine, but they are smaller operations and dont last long. So to note that very tiny minority here is a bit misleading.

But isn't it the miners that basically process the transactions? So if they can't mine profitably then how do transactions get processed?

doodle wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 7:49 am So if bitcoins price is cut in half due to some market shakeout.. and with the continued halving events the amount of Bitcoin rewarded for work continues to decrease what happens if a large number of miners call it quits? Does the everything grind to a standstill? Will transactions take days to process?

You were working ahead, I see.

If miners, for whatever reason, shut down and stop contributing their energy burning (hash power) to the bitcoin network, the threshold for how much energy needs to be burned goes down. It is a self correcting mechanism in the code. This adjustment happens every couple weeks.

This mechanism is also the reason that only so many bitcoins are "created" every so often.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply

bitcoininthevp wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 10:32 am You were working ahead, I see.

If miners, for whatever reason, shut down and stop contributing their energy burning (hash power) to the bitcoin network, the threshold for how much energy needs to be burned goes down. It is a self correcting mechanism in the code. This adjustment happens every couple weeks.

This mechanism is also the reason that only so many bitcoins are "created" every so often.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply

That's a very informative page.

I know this is a very pie in the sky thought, but that would be neat if there could be some distributed computing going on. In the early 00's, you could participate in SETI's project to search photographs of the stars, and it would happen when your computer was otherwise idle and ready to go to a screensaver.

If we could just take the hardware we have at home and the measly power outlets, and contribute to some computer somewhere with a virtual machine in return for a fractional coin in the future- never mind. Pie in the sky.

dualstow wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 11:21 am I know this is a very pie in the sky thought, but that would be neat if there could be some distributed computing going on. In the early 00's, you could participate in SETI's project to search photographs of the stars, and it would happen when your computer was otherwise idle and ready to go to a screensaver.

If we could just take the hardware we have at home and the measly power outlets, and contribute to some computer somewhere with a virtual machine in return for a fractional coin in the future- never mind. Pie in the sky.

So in some sense it’s pie in the sky some sense its not.

On one hand its exactly what bitcoin mining is.

But on the other hand while you can still run it on your laptop but you wouldn't make much and would probably overheat it and not make much money.

But would it help finish the project? I want all the bitcoins to be mined. (Yes there is a 'd' at the end).

I thought this was a nice twitter thread on "Bitcoin as super-collateral":
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1225 ... 22305.html

vincent_c, have you read 'An (Institutional) Investor’s Take on Cryptoassets'?

How do you see value accruing to smart contract platforms in the long term? In my chuck e cheese analogy, people only need chuck e cheese tokens for a brief period of time while at chuck e cheese, then immediate convert back into real money. I see the same thing for these smart contract chains.

If I need to do something in ETH, Ill use my money (BTC) to quickly/instantly pay some ETH fees and keep the rest of my wealth in BTC, the "money" chain.

Now dont get me wrong, that doesn’t mean alts cant, in the short/medium term, have massive returns. I just dont really see why Id hold non-best money (BTC) tokens for any period of time. And that means while there is non zero demand for alt tokens, it doesn’t really command a big value for those tokens.

dualstow wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 4:51 pm But would it help finish the project? I want all the bitcoins to be mined. (Yes there is a 'd' at the end).

No matter how many miners join or leave the bitcoin network, the number and schedule of new bitcoin being released will be the same.

That is the elegance, dare I say beauty, of Bitcoin's self correcting difficulty adjustment.

Today is a good day for showing the non-correlation of bitcoin, zagging while the nasdaq zigs.

dualstow wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 3:15 pm Today is a good day for showing the non-correlation of bitcoin, zagging while the nasdaq zigs.

Maybe. But perhaps it just dumps in the afterhours.

Yup, it's always ready to dump.

vincent_c wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 3:35 pm @bitcoininthevp

Would love to hear more of your thoughts on ETH.

I guess a question I have for you is whether you hold any USD cash and why if it is only the 'token' of the US economy.

I dont hold much USD. That which I do is for nearer term transactions and the rest basically emergency fund type funds.

I dont hold any ETH. I think BTC is better money so I hold that. ETH doesn’t even have a supply cap and its monetary policy is constantly shifting.

And I dont have any use for the games that I need ETH tokens to pay for. If any of the games on ETH became useful to me, like defi, likely there is a cheaper chain to play such games on. And a better money for use in such defi games (like BTC in multisig or "wrapped" form) instead of ETH.