If he was very agile, and if he had done the odd, unconventional, unorthodox entrepreneur thing by pressing the SELL BTC button first in May 2022, he would be super super super rich by now.
The issue with shorting something is that it's a time-limited bet. It's not enought to know that something is overvalued, you need to know that the rest of the market will be convinced that it's overvalued within a specific timeframe. It works if you're Muddy Waters or Hindenburg and have really convincing evidence (see Nikola for example) and the reach to get it out there. If you're just shorting the next Corzine because you think he's a crook you could be waiting years even if you're right. To quote from The Big Short: "I may be early but I’m not wrong” “It’s the same thing Michael!” Bitcoin is doomed. It is going to go the way of Myspace. The feature set is garbage. Regular people don't want uncancelable transactions instantaneously in unlimited amount. That may be a desirable feature for heroin dealers and extortionists, but that's not normal people. Regular people would like a simple phone call before transferring $40k from their account to an account in Botswana. It's just a question of whether it takes 10 months or 10 years to be replaced.
How's that different from going long? All trades are time-limited, long and short. It's not like we've got eternity for them to play out.
Wouldn't that depend on what the market is? For example currencies would typically have no bias long or short on a macro basis, yet most of the time, US equity markets are in a long bias mode. Wouldn't that mean that going long and waiting in, say SP, would not necessarily be time limited?
Somehow I think you're just being deliberately obtuse. There is no inherent time limit on how long my shares of company X will continue to have value. Just because you will die some day does not mean that there is no difference between leasing a car and buying a car, and that is the argument you are making. People in the US have shares they've inherited that have been held for 100+ years. If you look at Europe, I bet you could find positions even older than that. There's no inherent reason that an equity long position could not last even longer than a company like Eli lily has already been around. Options are fundamentally a short term play. The cost to buy an option increases with the duration of the contract. Eventually, (with increasing contract duration) the sale price of a short contract would cost more than the profit that could be made even if the company went to zero. Equity can last as long as a company, which can be hundreds of years. https://douglasawilson.com/companies-over-100-years-old
Regular people would also like to know that their dollars can't magically be printed up and hence devalued by a reckless government. Money is simply a mechanism to store your work. I need to do something useful in order to get that money. If the government does absolutely nothing to create another 1 trillion dollars, that means that my "saved" labor is being robbed from me. Your little list above of what people want in a currency misses the most important things that bitcoin solves.
You're making some assumptions about regular people that clearly aren't true based on their voting habits. Even if I were to take everything you just said at face value, you haven't addressed the issue that someone else is going to come along with a better solution. If Bitcoin was the only thing that could "solve" those problems you would have a point. What you are doing is like saying search engines are useful, therefore we're all going to use hotbot or altavista forever. Better ideas are going to come along and Bitcoin will be toast.
MicroStrategy denies it received a margin call against its bitcoin-backed loan, report says PUBLISHED WED, JUN 15 20221:09 AM EDTUPDATED 42 MIN AGO Abigail Ng MicroStrategy’s chief financial officer previously highlighted in May that if bitcoin were to drop below $21,000, it could trigger a margin call. “MicroStrategy has not received a ‘margin call’ against our Silvergate loan even as bitcoin prices have fluctuated recently,” the company told Reuters in an emailed statement. ____________________________________________________ now btc is at 20300. has Microstrategy received a margin call?
Explain to me then why Musk wants to buy Twitter and not just start another app himself? Heck, Trump did it with Truth Social, so why isn't that flying hugely successful? Bitcoin already has the network effect. The amount of hashpower supporting the network is immense. If you make another coin, it needs to reach a certain number of independent nodes before it will be decentralized and hence trusted. You cannot create a new coin and blockchain out of thin air and bring it to a level that it can compete with bitcoin or overtake in. Its much easier to just join the bitcoin network.
This is a fairly typical cultist response my friend, if you don't mind saying so. Just because we don't like something that doesn't mean we necessary want to take advantage of it. I thought Peloton was a one trick pony, but I am happy if people buy exercise equipment. Or we can time it right. And if we can't, the hurt is way more than the profits. The obvious "the market/stock can stay irrational longer than your broker account" adage applies. Timing is everything in trading. Not to mention by shorting the max. you can have is doubling your money, while going long with the delirious crowd can make you gazillions. So it is not a 50:50 risk reward proposal. Just look at Madoff or Tesla or Theranos, how long they ran before reality finally set in... Going against them early was dangerous.