What is being misunderstood here is that Bitcoin is neither a security or a currency...it is a store of value. The value is not only derived from the scarcity, but from the ease of storage and the liquidity compared to other stores of value such as gold and real estate. Therefore, it is actually a new recursive store of value meaning it's own utility makes up part of the value. This might have been what the video was trying to articulate at 11:15:11:40
Former store of values: -black tulips -pets.com shares -beanie babies -diamonds (try to sell a brand new one on the secondary market) -the Nikkei index -pet rocks I heard a real good comment on crypto: Bitcoin operates on the notion that future results are guaranteed by past performance.
Bitcoin is an obfuscated ponzi scheme propped up by fake dollars (tethers USDT). There are some use cases and arguments in favor of the decentralization, but it's greatly exaggerated and people will believe anything when the price is going up. Nicholas Taleb turned his back on Bitcoin, just like any sensible person does after a while. It sounds good and appealing, but the truth is far from.
Sounds more like he's using math to justify his regret of missing out while I drive around in a (2008) Lambo. It's true you can be too smart to make money in stocks or to make money in general. Also you guys act like bitcoin's never gone down lol... Just in the last two cycles it's gone from 18,000 down to $3,000 then up to $68,000 and down to $16,000 and now we're back up at $60,000. Who exactly is being ponzied?
All of those are physical items (or stocks lol) and none of them are recursive. Also, not one of those would allow me borrow money against them a 6am on a Sunday in my boxers eating cheesies.
Isn't Taleb rich from his hedge fund days or something? He could buy a thousand lambos... He was in Bitcoin relatively early but then figured out it's not what it claims to be. However it doesn't matter what Bitcoin is or isn't for as long as Tether keeps printing fake dollars out of nothing, it increases bitcoins price.
How early? So he was savvy enough to figure out back when bitcoin was in the hundreds that he wanted no part of it and now we are at 60k? lol wow that's some solid analysis. I was looking at bitcoin when it was $400 and was considering putting 10k into it, but didn't understand it enough so never followed through. $400 in 2015 seemed high btw. I don't try to pretend that its a ponzy scheme just because I missed out on that round.
Dude, do you have problem understanding english? Taleb said exactly the opposite. He's saying there is no store of value for Bitcoin because, unlike gold or other precious commodities, there's nothing to fall back on. All you're left with is buyers pumping up the price to infinity, or what he calls "Ponzi" (cf. 4:15)
Yeah because he can't grasp the concept. I'm correcting his hypothesis. Basically whenever somebody is claiming bitcoin is a ponzi scheme you can just replace everything they say with "blah blah sour grapes...blah blah I wish I bought some years ago... blah blah I'm going to tell everyone its a ponzi scheme to make myself feel better blah blah etc."
One of the things that really helped shape my opinion on bitcoin is learning about how money is just a ledger. And this makes total sense. If we go to the roots and look at the barter system, we quickly understand that its difficult to trade goods or services without something in the middle, since a direct exchange between two people is usually difficult. Fast forward to today, and money is really just the middle man of transactions. I go to work and expend my energy, for which I receive dollars, and then I hope to exchange those dollars for food and shelter. The trouble happens when those dollars are easy to print. This means that the ledger has a massive hole that someone can shovel in a ton more entries without anyone knowing where they came from. When the government prints, they instantly devalue my work. I have to expend energy to earn those dollars, but the government just prints them. Now gold in this example is presented as being superior because if it fails to provide the transaction benefits, it can always fall back on the utility aspect. Maybe the price of gold at 2k represents the monetary premium, but even if it stopped being used for money one day, its still looks good as jewellery and it works great as a conductor in electronics. So yes, it has multiple purposes and value outside of the monetary premium which people call intrinsic value. Bitcoin on the other hand has absolutely no value outside of the monetary premium, which is something that causes people to go bat shit crazy. But what if the entire planet accepts the monetary and store of value properties of bitcoin? What if governments, after their failed fiat has died, also accept only bitcoin? What if everyone agrees through their desire to hold bitcoin, that bitcoin will be the best way to exchange value and store your work for future use? Now it has a ton of value and doesn't need anything else to fall back onto because this is what we all want to use. If we consider that there is $900T of everything out there, priced in USD, but we instead price this in bitcoin, then this means that bitcoin has lots of upside. For all the bitcoin haters out there, I would hope that you all at least see that reckless government spending doesn't end well. What then would you propose to fix this problem? Do you think it will be solved by voting someone into office? Do you want it to be solved via war? Do you want the government to peg the currency to something else they cannot print? We all intuitively understand that printing something with ease, which should be difficult to acquire, is what is necessary to fix the system. So if not bitcoin, what? Keep in mind, we want the best ledger. We don't want gold bricks that someone says they for sure have, but really, we have no idea if they have it. We also don't want a bunch of countries to agree on something, because that agreement is full of loopholes. We want something that is very easy to count, and something that everyone has access to verifying. We also want to make sure that nobody can change the rules. As a side note, I hear lots about how even though China doesn't like the US having reserve currency status, they don't want to be the next world reserve currency. Its got many drawbacks, even if it has benefits. I think most smart people realize that something neutral is the best, as long as we can ensure that it is neutral and cannot be strong handed. As a last point to steer everyone in the right direction, think of how the internet exploded on the scene. It worked very well because it didn't matter what country you were in. The protocol was exactly the same. No matter where you were, all the computers could talk to eachother easily since they all spoke the same language. The entire world agreed on a standard for how the internet would work and the way information would be sent and received. Hmmm.... I wonder if we could come to some sort of standard for money as well, but at the same time, keeping all the properties listed above.