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[Bitcoins] The Fainting Goat of Money
Posts
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Must own his own airport, he'd never get through security with more than 3 ounces.
Stealing is easy.
Fencing can be a bitch.
I want to place some big bets against it.
Depends on what "not going anywhere" means.
It'll probably still exist in some niche fashion. It will never be a mainstream currency. Dogecoin is more of a currency.
It's weird because most people treat it like mining for physical materials like gold, where it'd make sense to do what they're doing on some tangential level. But no, they're mining useless numbers and holding on to them for some reason.
You could use bitcoin to sign messages.
Only one wallet can have a bitcoin, and everyone in the network knows who this wallet is, so if someone sends you a message with a bitcoin from that wallet, you know for sure that bitcoin came from that wallet so the message is from the entity controlling that wallet.
It is crypto-currency after all.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
lol no. They get really angry about it.
That's almost bordering on quantum encryption there.
But why? I don't get it. Aren't they basically the same thing?
It'd be like getting mad because there's other currencies besides US Dollar in the world wouldn't it?
Think of it more like it'd be like getting mad because people are using monopoly money and people are way more willing to accept it over USD. But it's not USD, it's this idea of a dollar bill that was mathematically calculated.
Bitcoin:
Dodgecoin:
Because instead of buying dogecoins you should be buying bitcoins to raise the price of the bitcoins they own.
Bitcoin is "accepted" more places (read: immediately exchanged to USD in the transaction so the person selling something isn't actually getting the bitcoin).
Dogecoin is being used as a currency in more places because it's basically worthless. Instead of being hoarded because IT'S TOTALLY GOING TO MAKE ME RICH, GUYS, people will throw out dogecoin tips for comments they like and other bullshit like that - people don't CARE about dogecoins, so they're willing to spend them and it's actually being used like a currency.
Showing my approval and pissing off bitcoiners at the same time. Nice!
I dunno man. There were people who'd spent money on dogecoins that were bitching when they decided to make it mildly inflationary.
Those were most likely Bitcoin refugees who weren't in on the joke.
Please submit yourself to the nearest zoo for observation and breeding program.
Apparently judging from reddit people give you dogecoins for comments
Ironically, I believe.
Y'know why this example is especially hilarious to me? I know multiple people who actually bought bad meat from a producer... and they just kept buying meat from the same producer.
It's almost as if decision-making isn't as simple & straight-forward as certain demographics seem to think.
Look. The meat is safe BECAUSE there is no regulation, okay? It's simple. If the meat were bad, no one would buy it. If no one buys it, it gets pulled from the shelf. So, since it's on the shelf, that means people are buying it, which means its safe.
IT IS SO OBVIOUS.
So a lot of people get into Bitcoin because they like the idea of a decentralized currency. It may not be everything they is, but the core idea of having a currency which isn't controlled by a group of banks is one that I can see appeals to some people. So they get into it with the knowledge that hey - this experiment is something which is volatile but they want to support on principle. If it goes down, okay, that sucks. But a lot of people don't think about the second way you can lose money: on a new investment type, there isn't the established history for the financial entities which the investment is done via, nor are there the safety nets which have been put into banks BECAUSE of that history (FDIC insurance, for example). It doesn't occur to people to think about that, so they invest more than they might otherwise do - instead of thinking "this is all money that I can afford to lose and that's that," they're thinking "if push comes to shove I can cut my losses and withdraw from the market." That's not the case.
I'm doing a similar thing with Lending Club. For those of you unfamiliar, it's similar to Kiva, but local to the states and for a profit - instead of going to banks, people for small loans (typically a few grand to, say, 25k or so) approach LC. LC does the credit check/income verification/etc, then assigns a rating to the loan, with an interest rate, etc. Then a bunch of people drop $25 increments into the loans. Once it's established, monthly you get a small amount of repaid principal and interest, and the loan is paid back over time. The person who takes the loan gets a better rate than you would normally get from a bank, the lenders themselves directly get the interest instead of a very small amount of interest from a savings account (where the loan interest would normally go to the bank). I like this idea. It appeals to me as a general concept. So I'm buying in to a small degree because I want to support it even though I recognize it's higher risk than other investments might be (thus far, I've had 3 defaults, and some other ones which have gone into payment programs where they're basically 5 year loans instead of 3 year loans as planned). Others have completely paid off, most are just paying as expected - my annual returns right now are 9.5%. But what you would going in is that the risk is the loans you choose....but that's ignoring the concept of Lending Club itself going bankrupt. If that happens, I'm straight up SOL. Because of that, I'm not putting too much into it ($1000 base investment, although my account is now up to $1250 or so thanks to my gains).
So yeah. It's funny, I can laugh at it, and I disagree with the advantages those people see from decentralized currencies, but at the same time, I kinda get where some of the people really wanted it to succeed even beyond seeking personal profit. But the main thing to take away from this is a general concept when it comes to any sort of investment, but especially new investment types: Never spend any money you can't afford to lose.
Not quite. If LC goes bankrupt you will be entitled to their assets the same as any other creditor. Your agreement probably stipulates the type of priority you have but lets assume everyone in your class (of micro lenders) is second to last (behind institutional loans, ahead of capital). You will get some money out of that so long as there is some money left (bankrupt doesn't mean no money it just means assets<liabilities)
The only time there is basically no money is if the whole thing was a scam, and the money is gone. But Lending Club is essentially a bank, and so i will assume that you can(and would have given a large enough investment) check(ed) if its conforming to such regulations.
BTC exchanges have no such protections. The only way they fail is if they have no money. They're not based in places you can easily get to them, they avoid regulations.
The money itself is locked up in the individual loans, hence the risk - while there is an aftermarket to resell loans should I want to withdraw, we're talking a much smaller market than, say, stocks, so it's not nearly as liquid. Basically, looking at my notes, I could probably extract myself from LC in relatively short order if I knocked down my returns to the 6-7% so the person buying them gets their cut, too, and guarantees that they'd move in a reasonable timeframe. The laws concerning microlending like this vary from state to state, and there's a number of states which prohibit people from buying straight from LC, but who can get aftermarket loans. It's a little weird. I know in CA I had to provide proof of income over a certain amount before being allowed to participate.
Like I said, it's more an experiment/support for an idea I like than a proper investment strategy. I've got a TON more in 401k/IRA/proper stock account/savings account. Truth be told, I rarely think about it until I get one of the emails saying "hey, you've got enough in your account to get another note." My main point is that I can kind of relate to what some of the "true believer"s are going through - less so the people who dumped a whole bunch of cash into it without thinking because they were looking to get rich quick and ruined themselves.
e:
I believe you're correct insofar as the bankruptcy stuff is concerned, but Lending Club is not a bank. There is no FDIC insurance on this stuff. It's straight up peer-to-peer lending of loans, with a small portion of the interest going to pay for the site/running of the process.