You are missing the effect on wage rises - that they become wage drops. This is where the system breaks. If everything is 5% cheaper next year then that includes the value of your labor. Your company is getting 5% less income because the price of its products is dropping. That filters through to you...
Yes, all these people hyping deflationary currencies miss this. And they miss the next important consequence of that. Most people have more debt than they do savings. Deflation is good for you if you have lots of savings, but not lots of debt. Most people owe $100k or more on a mortgage, but have only a few $k (if that) in savings. Deflation is a benefit for your meager savings, but is a huge hindrance for your much more sizable debt.
When you buy a mortgage, you owe a fixed amount of currency. With inflation, over time your income tends to increase slightly year to year, and over the years the mortgage becomes a smaller and smaller part of your income, making it more and more affordable. This is great because if you buy something you can afford, you can generally count on being able to afford it until it's paid off (job loss and severe employment cut being the exception, but that will hold true for deflation also, so lets not consider that). But with deflation, it's the opposite. You get your mortgage, and the payment amount stays the same, but every year your income drops slightly, and thus every year your mortgage payment becomes a bigger and bigger portion of your income. A mortgage that is affordable when you buy it will one day become unaffordable for you.
I don't think that's what people intend, but that is the natural consequence of a deflationary currency.
I don't know. That chart you linked was pretty telling. He used to hold 300k shares. Then his typical average went to 350k shares, drifted up to 400k, then drifted up to 500k shares. There was some fluctuation, but over time he was generally increasing his holdings pretty reliable. Then bam!!! End of November comes and he sold every last share that he was allowed to sell (Intel rules say the CEO musk own 250k shares, and he sold down to exactly 250k).
One odd thing about that chart. The numbers on that chart dont exactly add up between consecutive transactions (previous total +/- shares traded should equal new total), but they are at least reasonable close. But then the 2nd to last line we see he has a balance of around 500k shares (which is consistent with the trend), but that the last line where he ends up with exactly 250k shares left, but it says he traded almost 900k shares to get to that point. Not sure what that discrepancy is about.
To avoid the appearance of impropriety, executives often are required to schedule stock sales months ahead of time. That's what happened here.
Yes, but how many months ahead of time in this particular case? From some of the released information so far, we know that Google contacted Intel about their discovery of this issue on June 1, 2017.
According to the link below (warning...anti-adblock popup), the sales were arranged in October, LONG after Intel was aware of it. Between June and October, it's almost certain information about the magnitude of this vulnerability and the impact of fixing it had made it all the way up to to the CEO. http://www.businessinsider.com...
He confused me at first with the mention of VMs as, like you, I initially thought he was talking about Virtual Machines (especially given the context of cloud computing and hardware sharing). But he was actually talking about Virtual Memory. Not sure how he got from one topic to the other, but it's pretty clear:
"Memory is crazy cheap these days compared to your time and security and energy and wallet thickness; you should have lots and lots. If you don't, then there's your error."
Bitcoin - particularly the technology behind it - had utility as a way to store and transfer value securely and quickly across the world. It's still cheaper other cryptocurrencies to send 'money' to the other side of the world than it is to use a bank or Western Union.
What? Western Union, maybe (I'm clueless about what their actual fees are so can't speak there), but sending by bank is pretty damn cheap. But more importantly, if Bitcoin is not being used as a currency, then using bitcoin for any sort of uses like this is still terrible. Because now not only do you still have the bank involved taking their cut, but you also have to pay the exchanges their cut, then pay the miners their transaction fees, then at the other end they pay another exchange to transfer back into actual currncy. You have't eliminated anything, but merely added another layer of fees into the transaction.
By the way....WTF happened to the quotes around the word database? They weren't in his post, and I simply copy/pasted it into my quote tags. I am NOT using an apple device (oneplus one, lineage os, chrome browser). How did they get converted from normal ASCII quotes to Unicode? Is this something new in chrome? Some setting in lineage? I haven't see that before.
As much as I hate sympathizing with the Blockchain!!! PR machine, the cloud is an environment where blockchain might actually make sense; you have (at least in theory) a very portable, yet verifiable âoedatabaseâ with distributed validation.
But blockchain's value isn't just in distributed storage, validation, or anything like that. Its value is how difficult it is to tamper. Why is it difficult? Because to tamper with it, you need to control the majority of it, which requires a massive investment in computational power. This works for bitcoin, because there is a broad community interest (including monetary incentive) to participate, which means to control it you'd have to invest many billions of dollars in hardware and electricity to take control. But for a private company, how much money are they going to invest to maintain this continual busywork network to secure their data? Any hacker with a botnet will easily be able to rewrite the chain however they desire. So unless they can convince the public to invest massive public resources to secure the private corporate data, the only new feature of blockchain vanishes instantly. You are better off just having a very well locked down signing server to serve as a notary for all transactions, or something like that depending on which feature you ACTUALLY want.
Funny, but that's literally what's going on...people are trying to find a way to wedge "blockchain" into everything. Things ive heard:
Medical records. Like, really? You want your medical records shared publicly? Or do just want things like document integrity and version history (ie: the features that aren't unique to blockchain) without the group consensus part (ie: the only feature that blockchain brings to the table over previous ideas).
Public records (marriage, property, etc). Really, who should be the authority here, if not the state/county/city? Trying to prevent them from altering records without your permission? How do you think they are going to do foreclosures and leins? Want to protect against unfiled documents on a title search? People can just as easily fail to properly record documents with blockchain. It offers much of nothing to the existing process.
We're really just seeing a buch of blockchain-for-the-sake-of-blockchain ideas. Any insufficiencies in existing processes can be resolved through non-blockchain means. If those processes need to be reengineered for blockchain, they could just solve the issue with a smaller, less invasive update without blockchain.
Conventional Slashdot wisdom dictates that Comcast, and all monopoly internet ISPs, have not, do not, and will not invest money in infrastructure upgrades. The monopoly status means they can coast in a non-competitive environment with current network technology while nickel and diming everyone to death. So obviously wherever they got their information that Comcast is spending money on infrastructure is complete BS. It just doesn't fit the narrative.
Keyword being monopoly. Comcast has always done upgrades....in areas where they don't have a monopoly. I've got 3 choices for cable providers, and comcast has always done a good job of providing upgrades to have the fastest speed options available. But the problem is when they DO have a monopoly. I remember one of the stories that was here on slashdot years ago. Some town only had Comcast as an option, but Comcast wouldn't upgrade them beyond 10Mbps (this was a while ago, and I don't recall the exact numbers, so forgive me if it's off). Then the town decided to setup a community ISP with 100Mbps service and.....oh, what's that? Comcast is now busting ass to offer 100Mbps service in that area much sooner than the community ISP can be up and running? Wow, what a surprise!!!!!!
so that users are aware of when their batteries are no longer capable of supporting maximum phone performance
Bullshit. Even a severely degraded battery is capable of supporting maximum phone performance. No other phone on the market slows down no matter how bad the battery gets. This is a bullshit scam on their part. If they want to provide users the OPTION of favoring full-day battery over performance, then give then the OPTION. But apple doesn't like options. They like to decide for you, and part of that is deciding that if you don't like a slow phone you must either pay them for a new battery or you pay them for a new phone. One way or the other, you WILL pay them and you WILL like it.
No, my argument is that shorting is a foolish game to play, because even if you are 100% correct about where it winds up in the end, you could still lose everything you invested because it took a slightly different path to get there. Regular investing doesn't have that risk. Even if it crashes to zero and then eventually recovers,. you will still get your expected return as long as you didnt sell during the crash. But with shorting, if it spikes to 10 times the price, you get margin called and cant cover it, and then it crashes down to zero, you still lose out because you were forced to liquidate during the brief spike.
That's my point. I keep seeing this over and over and over again on slashdot. "put your money where your mouth is and short it". It's always said in a manner that implies shorting carries no risk if you are right about the impending crash so you might as well short it. That's not true, and it's a moronic challenge to make.
Your article should be called 5 ways to "short" bitcoin, as only the last one is actually shorting. The other 4 are not actual shorting. The first one isn't even remotely close to shorting. Margin trading is just trading where your funds are backed by a loan. I'm not even remotely sure why it's in that list, as you profit when the stock goes up. The ones that do resemble shorting (from the aspect that you can profit when the price drops) are also very risky because you have to know the precise timeframe in which the fall will happen.
In short, your linked article invalidates nothing I said
Instead of blabbing like a moron about how people should put their money where their mouth is and short it, why don't you educate yourself on how shorting works first? Shorting is extremely risky. Even if you are absolutely correct that it's going to zero, even a very brief spike in value could cause you to get margin called and lose everything you've invested before you get the opportunity to realize a gain on when it crashes to zero. Shorting is almost always a foolish gamble, even when the "investment" itself is a foolish gamble.
Except the author in the story got his timeframe entirely wrong.I went to bed shortly after midnight US eastern time, and by then, I had been watching the crash happen for the last 4 or 5 hours. On the west coast, it would have begun about 4 or 5 PM. It started around $16k, and by the time I went to bed, it had already fallen into $13k range, and then bounced back up into the $14s. Sometime later it continued falling again. Looking at the charts, as far as I can tell it only fell to a bit below $12k, not $10k as the author suggests, though I suppose it's possible there were some sales in the $10k range (bitcoin is a very inefficient market...there are routinely $3-4k gaps between the various exchanges, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if there were some people moving big money back and forth between the exchanges capitalizing on these discrepancies).
So I'm not sure where the author gets the $10k figure from, but as for his timeframe and claim that it all happened overnight while we slept, I suspect he just woke up and heard the news, went back and checked the charts to see what he missed, and didn't understand what UTC meant when he did so.
I clicked the link in the story intending to read the article, but somehow ended up on Ars Technica instead of The Onion. Come on, slashdot...get some actual editors already and make sure your damn links work.
There's a reason there are regulatory agencies and laws and all that Big Government nonsense
Yep, and that reason is "to steal all your money", right?
because in the past institutions had the same business model and same scams in traditional finance, but eventually they started to steal some powerful people's money so regulation happened, backed by "Thugs With Guns", as the libertarian useful idiots say.
Wait...so are you trying to tell me that government isn't evil, a completely free market isn't a panacea, and that these pesky laws and regulations might actually serve some real legitimate purpose and that the worshipers of our wonderful, infallible blockchain are going to have to repeat history to rediscover why we did all this stuff in the first place? Go figure.
What mechanisms are in place (perhaps a trick question as I'm expecting the answer is "none) to prevent the exchange from telling all 5 customers "sorry it took a while, we could only get you $1k for your coin" and pocketing the extra $22k?
Because the entire blockchain is public record. Anyone can look at it. Example: https://blockchain.info/
Wonderful. The block chain is public record. So I can publicly see that "my" wallet transferred out 1 bitcoin, and 0.999 of it went to some other persons wallet and the remaining 0.001 of it went as a transaction fee to the miner's wallet. A few flaws in this:
1) it doesn't say anything about what the transaction price was, so unless I can identify the actual person on the other end and get a truthful answer from them, I have no way to know what price they paid
2) I understand bitcoin very well, but I'm not familiar with how the individual exchanges record their transactions directly on the blockchain. When you have your money at an exchange, do you even really have your own individually identifiable wallet on the blockchain, or is it stored in some sort of community wallet that's shared across all exchange members? The latter was my impression, because I seem to recall reading that when you buy on an exchange you don't have to pay bitcoin transaction fees unless you want to have the funds transferred into your own personal wallet off the exchange. I don't see how it would be possible in the current bitcoin environment to record a transaction on the blockchain free of fees unless the explanation was that the individual transactions aren't actually taking place on the blockchain but just within the exchange's private accounting. I'd love for someone more knowledgeable about the inner working of an exchange to be able to confirm or correct me on this. If my guess is correct, then you technically wouldn't even have your own distinct transaction on the block chain to verify anything at all.
In the event of a crash, it may take a while before you can cash out. Presumably because, until that exchange can actually find you a customer willing to take your crashing BTC for any price more than 1 cent, there's nothing they can do with it. But what is to stop the exchange from lying to you about how much you actually sold for? Say there are 5 customers with 1 coin each, BTC is crashing and is down to $10k. All 5 customer say "SELL NOW" but the exchange say "it may be a while". They manage to sell on coin for $10k, another for $8k, another for $5k, one for $3k, and the last for $1k. What mechanisms are in place (perhaps a trick question as I'm expecting the answer is "none) to prevent the exchange from telling all 5 customers "sorry it took a while, we could only get you $1k for your coin" and pocketing the extra $22k?
The problem is that so many people who know nothing about either Tulip Mania or Cryptocurrency throw this phrase around like it's some sort golden pass to predicting the future. And it's getting tedious.
It's at the point where I soon as someone mentions tulips it's like a big flashing sign that says I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about but I'll offer my opinion anyway.
That's funny. I feel the same way every time some bitcoin fanboy mentions fiat currency, deflationary currency, any a myriad of other phrases, all while acting like bitcoin is some magic pill to cure all that ails you even though they don't seem to understand what the ailment is, or if it really even exists in the first place. Kind of like they're saying "what? My intestines are filled with bacteria? That's terrible!!!! Give me something to kill all that bacteria so I'll feel healthier!!!!"
Nothing stopping you betting against it. Put your money where your mouth is.
You seem to be overlooking a HUGE obstacle to betting against it (at least in any sensible manner). Lets say I'm convinced it's going to 1 cent, and you are convinced it's going to $1million. If you "put your money where your mouth is" then (if you are right) you've got nothing to lose and no risk. Even if the prices crashes all the way down to 1 cent and then rebounds all the way to $1 million, you make out on the profit you expected.
On the other hand, if I "put my money where my mouth is", even if I'm correct about the result, I'm still at huge risk of losing everything I have. If the price shoots all the way up to $1million before crashing to 1 cent an hour later, I'm screwed even though I'm right. That's because before I can realize my predicted profit at 1 cent, I get margin called at $1 million (if not well before), and unless I have 50 times as much money as my original investment that I can sink in to cover my shorted position, I lose it all. So even though I'm right, I walk away empty handled.
Wait, so the claim is that Tesla could be CAUSING a shortage?
How are they causing a shortage? By buying up all the batteries they can get. Why are they buying up batteries? To eliminate their manufacturing problems. What were the manufacturing problems they were having? They couldn't get enough batteries.
Oh yeah, that makes total sense. It's not a battery shortage causing Tesla to buy up batteries....it's Tesla buying up batteries that is causing a shortage.
You do realize a lot of people invested real money into these schemes.
And not just their own money. Plenty of people leveraged their credit card line and are deeply in debt. It is the modern version of going to vegas, maxing out your credit cards, and placing it all on black. If it hits, you win big. If not...well, there's always bankruptcy.
Slashdot Mirror
You are missing the effect on wage rises - that they become wage drops. This is where the system breaks. If everything is 5% cheaper next year then that includes the value of your labor. Your company is getting 5% less income because the price of its products is dropping. That filters through to you...
Yes, all these people hyping deflationary currencies miss this. And they miss the next important consequence of that. Most people have more debt than they do savings. Deflation is good for you if you have lots of savings, but not lots of debt. Most people owe $100k or more on a mortgage, but have only a few $k (if that) in savings. Deflation is a benefit for your meager savings, but is a huge hindrance for your much more sizable debt.
When you buy a mortgage, you owe a fixed amount of currency. With inflation, over time your income tends to increase slightly year to year, and over the years the mortgage becomes a smaller and smaller part of your income, making it more and more affordable. This is great because if you buy something you can afford, you can generally count on being able to afford it until it's paid off (job loss and severe employment cut being the exception, but that will hold true for deflation also, so lets not consider that). But with deflation, it's the opposite. You get your mortgage, and the payment amount stays the same, but every year your income drops slightly, and thus every year your mortgage payment becomes a bigger and bigger portion of your income. A mortgage that is affordable when you buy it will one day become unaffordable for you.
I don't think that's what people intend, but that is the natural consequence of a deflationary currency.
I don't know. That chart you linked was pretty telling. He used to hold 300k shares. Then his typical average went to 350k shares, drifted up to 400k, then drifted up to 500k shares. There was some fluctuation, but over time he was generally increasing his holdings pretty reliable. Then bam!!! End of November comes and he sold every last share that he was allowed to sell (Intel rules say the CEO musk own 250k shares, and he sold down to exactly 250k).
One odd thing about that chart. The numbers on that chart dont exactly add up between consecutive transactions (previous total +/- shares traded should equal new total), but they are at least reasonable close. But then the 2nd to last line we see he has a balance of around 500k shares (which is consistent with the trend), but that the last line where he ends up with exactly 250k shares left, but it says he traded almost 900k shares to get to that point. Not sure what that discrepancy is about.
To avoid the appearance of impropriety, executives often are required to schedule stock sales months ahead of time. That's what happened here.
Yes, but how many months ahead of time in this particular case? From some of the released information so far, we know that Google contacted Intel about their discovery of this issue on June 1, 2017.
According to the link below (warning...anti-adblock popup), the sales were arranged in October, LONG after Intel was aware of it. Between June and October, it's almost certain information about the magnitude of this vulnerability and the impact of fixing it had made it all the way up to to the CEO.
http://www.businessinsider.com...
He confused me at first with the mention of VMs as, like you, I initially thought he was talking about Virtual Machines (especially given the context of cloud computing and hardware sharing). But he was actually talking about Virtual Memory. Not sure how he got from one topic to the other, but it's pretty clear:
"Memory is crazy cheap these days compared to your time and security and energy and wallet thickness; you should have lots and lots. If you don't, then there's your error."
Bitcoin - particularly the technology behind it - had utility as a way to store and transfer value securely and quickly across the world. It's still cheaper other cryptocurrencies to send 'money' to the other side of the world than it is to use a bank or Western Union.
What? Western Union, maybe (I'm clueless about what their actual fees are so can't speak there), but sending by bank is pretty damn cheap. But more importantly, if Bitcoin is not being used as a currency, then using bitcoin for any sort of uses like this is still terrible. Because now not only do you still have the bank involved taking their cut, but you also have to pay the exchanges their cut, then pay the miners their transaction fees, then at the other end they pay another exchange to transfer back into actual currncy. You have't eliminated anything, but merely added another layer of fees into the transaction.
By the way....WTF happened to the quotes around the word database? They weren't in his post, and I simply copy/pasted it into my quote tags. I am NOT using an apple device (oneplus one, lineage os, chrome browser). How did they get converted from normal ASCII quotes to Unicode? Is this something new in chrome? Some setting in lineage? I haven't see that before.
As much as I hate sympathizing with the Blockchain!!! PR machine, the cloud is an environment where blockchain might actually make sense; you have (at least in theory) a very portable, yet verifiable âoedatabaseâ with distributed validation.
But blockchain's value isn't just in distributed storage, validation, or anything like that. Its value is how difficult it is to tamper. Why is it difficult? Because to tamper with it, you need to control the majority of it, which requires a massive investment in computational power. This works for bitcoin, because there is a broad community interest (including monetary incentive) to participate, which means to control it you'd have to invest many billions of dollars in hardware and electricity to take control. But for a private company, how much money are they going to invest to maintain this continual busywork network to secure their data? Any hacker with a botnet will easily be able to rewrite the chain however they desire. So unless they can convince the public to invest massive public resources to secure the private corporate data, the only new feature of blockchain vanishes instantly. You are better off just having a very well locked down signing server to serve as a notary for all transactions, or something like that depending on which feature you ACTUALLY want.
Funny, but that's literally what's going on...people are trying to find a way to wedge "blockchain" into everything. Things ive heard:
Medical records. Like, really? You want your medical records shared publicly? Or do just want things like document integrity and version history (ie: the features that aren't unique to blockchain) without the group consensus part (ie: the only feature that blockchain brings to the table over previous ideas).
Public records (marriage, property, etc). Really, who should be the authority here, if not the state/county/city? Trying to prevent them from altering records without your permission? How do you think they are going to do foreclosures and leins? Want to protect against unfiled documents on a title search? People can just as easily fail to properly record documents with blockchain. It offers much of nothing to the existing process.
We're really just seeing a buch of blockchain-for-the-sake-of-blockchain ideas. Any insufficiencies in existing processes can be resolved through non-blockchain means. If those processes need to be reengineered for blockchain, they could just solve the issue with a smaller, less invasive update without blockchain.
Conventional Slashdot wisdom dictates that Comcast, and all monopoly internet ISPs, have not, do not, and will not invest money in infrastructure upgrades. The monopoly status means they can coast in a non-competitive environment with current network technology while nickel and diming everyone to death. So obviously wherever they got their information that Comcast is spending money on infrastructure is complete BS. It just doesn't fit the narrative.
Keyword being monopoly. Comcast has always done upgrades....in areas where they don't have a monopoly. I've got 3 choices for cable providers, and comcast has always done a good job of providing upgrades to have the fastest speed options available. But the problem is when they DO have a monopoly. I remember one of the stories that was here on slashdot years ago. Some town only had Comcast as an option, but Comcast wouldn't upgrade them beyond 10Mbps (this was a while ago, and I don't recall the exact numbers, so forgive me if it's off). Then the town decided to setup a community ISP with 100Mbps service and.....oh, what's that? Comcast is now busting ass to offer 100Mbps service in that area much sooner than the community ISP can be up and running? Wow, what a surprise!!!!!!
Except that they're lying
so that users are aware of when their batteries are no longer capable of supporting maximum phone performance
Bullshit. Even a severely degraded battery is capable of supporting maximum phone performance. No other phone on the market slows down no matter how bad the battery gets. This is a bullshit scam on their part. If they want to provide users the OPTION of favoring full-day battery over performance, then give then the OPTION. But apple doesn't like options. They like to decide for you, and part of that is deciding that if you don't like a slow phone you must either pay them for a new battery or you pay them for a new phone. One way or the other, you WILL pay them and you WILL like it.
No, my argument is that shorting is a foolish game to play, because even if you are 100% correct about where it winds up in the end, you could still lose everything you invested because it took a slightly different path to get there. Regular investing doesn't have that risk. Even if it crashes to zero and then eventually recovers,. you will still get your expected return as long as you didnt sell during the crash. But with shorting, if it spikes to 10 times the price, you get margin called and cant cover it, and then it crashes down to zero, you still lose out because you were forced to liquidate during the brief spike.
That's my point. I keep seeing this over and over and over again on slashdot. "put your money where your mouth is and short it". It's always said in a manner that implies shorting carries no risk if you are right about the impending crash so you might as well short it. That's not true, and it's a moronic challenge to make.
Your article should be called 5 ways to "short" bitcoin, as only the last one is actually shorting. The other 4 are not actual shorting. The first one isn't even remotely close to shorting. Margin trading is just trading where your funds are backed by a loan. I'm not even remotely sure why it's in that list, as you profit when the stock goes up. The ones that do resemble shorting (from the aspect that you can profit when the price drops) are also very risky because you have to know the precise timeframe in which the fall will happen.
In short, your linked article invalidates nothing I said
Instead of blabbing like a moron about how people should put their money where their mouth is and short it, why don't you educate yourself on how shorting works first? Shorting is extremely risky. Even if you are absolutely correct that it's going to zero, even a very brief spike in value could cause you to get margin called and lose everything you've invested before you get the opportunity to realize a gain on when it crashes to zero. Shorting is almost always a foolish gamble, even when the "investment" itself is a foolish gamble.
Except the author in the story got his timeframe entirely wrong.I went to bed shortly after midnight US eastern time, and by then, I had been watching the crash happen for the last 4 or 5 hours. On the west coast, it would have begun about 4 or 5 PM. It started around $16k, and by the time I went to bed, it had already fallen into $13k range, and then bounced back up into the $14s. Sometime later it continued falling again. Looking at the charts, as far as I can tell it only fell to a bit below $12k, not $10k as the author suggests, though I suppose it's possible there were some sales in the $10k range (bitcoin is a very inefficient market...there are routinely $3-4k gaps between the various exchanges, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if there were some people moving big money back and forth between the exchanges capitalizing on these discrepancies).
So I'm not sure where the author gets the $10k figure from, but as for his timeframe and claim that it all happened overnight while we slept, I suspect he just woke up and heard the news, went back and checked the charts to see what he missed, and didn't understand what UTC meant when he did so.
I clicked the link in the story intending to read the article, but somehow ended up on Ars Technica instead of The Onion. Come on, slashdot...get some actual editors already and make sure your damn links work.
Now: Bitcoin Plunge Reveals Possible Vulnerabilities In Crazy Imaginary Internet Money
That's a very weird Onion article....possibly the weirdest I've ever seen from them yet. The sarcasm in the article is almost undetectable.
and a mini-headphone jack
They didn't eliminate it? What a bunch of cowards.
There's a reason there are regulatory agencies and laws and all that Big Government nonsense
Yep, and that reason is "to steal all your money", right?
because in the past institutions had the same business model and same scams in traditional finance, but eventually they started to steal some powerful people's money so regulation happened, backed by "Thugs With Guns", as the libertarian useful idiots say.
Wait...so are you trying to tell me that government isn't evil, a completely free market isn't a panacea, and that these pesky laws and regulations might actually serve some real legitimate purpose and that the worshipers of our wonderful, infallible blockchain are going to have to repeat history to rediscover why we did all this stuff in the first place? Go figure.
What mechanisms are in place (perhaps a trick question as I'm expecting the answer is "none) to prevent the exchange from telling all 5 customers "sorry it took a while, we could only get you $1k for your coin" and pocketing the extra $22k?
Because the entire blockchain is public record. Anyone can look at it. Example: https://blockchain.info/
Wonderful. The block chain is public record. So I can publicly see that "my" wallet transferred out 1 bitcoin, and 0.999 of it went to some other persons wallet and the remaining 0.001 of it went as a transaction fee to the miner's wallet. A few flaws in this:
1) it doesn't say anything about what the transaction price was, so unless I can identify the actual person on the other end and get a truthful answer from them, I have no way to know what price they paid
2) I understand bitcoin very well, but I'm not familiar with how the individual exchanges record their transactions directly on the blockchain. When you have your money at an exchange, do you even really have your own individually identifiable wallet on the blockchain, or is it stored in some sort of community wallet that's shared across all exchange members? The latter was my impression, because I seem to recall reading that when you buy on an exchange you don't have to pay bitcoin transaction fees unless you want to have the funds transferred into your own personal wallet off the exchange. I don't see how it would be possible in the current bitcoin environment to record a transaction on the blockchain free of fees unless the explanation was that the individual transactions aren't actually taking place on the blockchain but just within the exchange's private accounting. I'd love for someone more knowledgeable about the inner working of an exchange to be able to confirm or correct me on this. If my guess is correct, then you technically wouldn't even have your own distinct transaction on the block chain to verify anything at all.
In the event of a crash, it may take a while before you can cash out. Presumably because, until that exchange can actually find you a customer willing to take your crashing BTC for any price more than 1 cent, there's nothing they can do with it. But what is to stop the exchange from lying to you about how much you actually sold for? Say there are 5 customers with 1 coin each, BTC is crashing and is down to $10k. All 5 customer say "SELL NOW" but the exchange say "it may be a while". They manage to sell on coin for $10k, another for $8k, another for $5k, one for $3k, and the last for $1k. What mechanisms are in place (perhaps a trick question as I'm expecting the answer is "none) to prevent the exchange from telling all 5 customers "sorry it took a while, we could only get you $1k for your coin" and pocketing the extra $22k?
The problem is that so many people who know nothing about either Tulip Mania or Cryptocurrency throw this phrase around like it's some sort golden pass to predicting the future. And it's getting tedious.
It's at the point where I soon as someone mentions tulips it's like a big flashing sign that says I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about but I'll offer my opinion anyway.
That's funny. I feel the same way every time some bitcoin fanboy mentions fiat currency, deflationary currency, any a myriad of other phrases, all while acting like bitcoin is some magic pill to cure all that ails you even though they don't seem to understand what the ailment is, or if it really even exists in the first place. Kind of like they're saying "what? My intestines are filled with bacteria? That's terrible!!!! Give me something to kill all that bacteria so I'll feel healthier!!!!"
Nothing stopping you betting against it. Put your money where your mouth is.
You seem to be overlooking a HUGE obstacle to betting against it (at least in any sensible manner). Lets say I'm convinced it's going to 1 cent, and you are convinced it's going to $1million. If you "put your money where your mouth is" then (if you are right) you've got nothing to lose and no risk. Even if the prices crashes all the way down to 1 cent and then rebounds all the way to $1 million, you make out on the profit you expected.
On the other hand, if I "put my money where my mouth is", even if I'm correct about the result, I'm still at huge risk of losing everything I have. If the price shoots all the way up to $1million before crashing to 1 cent an hour later, I'm screwed even though I'm right. That's because before I can realize my predicted profit at 1 cent, I get margin called at $1 million (if not well before), and unless I have 50 times as much money as my original investment that I can sink in to cover my shorted position, I lose it all. So even though I'm right, I walk away empty handled.
Wait, so the claim is that Tesla could be CAUSING a shortage?
How are they causing a shortage? By buying up all the batteries they can get.
Why are they buying up batteries? To eliminate their manufacturing problems.
What were the manufacturing problems they were having? They couldn't get enough batteries.
Oh yeah, that makes total sense. It's not a battery shortage causing Tesla to buy up batteries....it's Tesla buying up batteries that is causing a shortage.
You do realize a lot of people invested real money into these schemes.
And not just their own money. Plenty of people leveraged their credit card line and are deeply in debt. It is the modern version of going to vegas, maxing out your credit cards, and placing it all on black. If it hits, you win big. If not...well, there's always bankruptcy.
So I suppose we should think of this as dollar bills with pictures of cats on them instead of pictures of dead presidents?