jamest wrote:... trust in governments and banks approaches zero.

You need to discern between what happens inside your head, and what happens in the billions of other peoples' heads around the world.

Decline in the trust in governments is happening in the West (i.e. USA and some European countries), but even were it every individual in those nations, that doesn't even account for 1/5 of the world's population. In reality, it's a minority in those countries too.

As for the alleged decline in trust in banks... I think that's just pure fantasy. A tiny clique of people have no trust in banks. Their lack of trust will have no impact on banks or banking at all. Their trust, or lack thereof, has no impact on the banking system.

I do think crypto is here to stay, but I think the primary reason for it being here to stay is for shady practices, and because already extremely rich people have the means to make themselves richer.

At this juncture, I would advise any individual anywhere in the world to invest at least [say] 20 percent of their savings in crypto and/or physical precious metals.

At this point, I would advise any individual anywhere in the world to spend the money to have have bariatric surgery. I'm not a doctor, have no qualifications, and haven't genuinely spent any time at all mastering the fundamentals to say this with any credibility, but I will still flap my lips while pounding my chest because I think it makes me look impressive, and I don't care if what I say is worth a wank.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing ... ng-crypto/

GPU prices are dropping, and they have been for months. A new report from Bloomberg shows just how quickly they’re crashing, claiming that prices have dropped by as much as 50% as the market deals with the crypto fallout.

I personally would advise people to avoid cryptocurrency as I want to buy a new PC soon and don't want to take a mortgage out just to buy a GPU.

Spearthrower wrote:

jamest wrote:Bitcoin plummets by about 80+ per cent every 4-ish years. This 4-yearly cycle has been mentioned in this thread plenty of times and the last time it happened was 2018, so for anyone au fait with the space all is quite 'normal'.

Well, if the prediction is so certain, then you and anyone else who 'knows' this pattern would be set to make an absolute fuck tonne of money.

Yes, and we never see these fuck tons of money, do we? Jamest should be fucking loaded right now.

Is he?

The_Metatron wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:

jamest wrote:Bitcoin plummets by about 80+ per cent every 4-ish years. This 4-yearly cycle has been mentioned in this thread plenty of times and the last time it happened was 2018, so for anyone au fait with the space all is quite 'normal'.

Well, if the prediction is so certain, then you and anyone else who 'knows' this pattern would be set to make an absolute fuck tonne of money.

Yes, and we never see these fuck tons of money, do we? Jamest should be fucking loaded right now.

Is he?

JamesT bought Bitcoins when they traded at $3500 a pop. We don't know how many of them, but we do know that they peaked at $67,000 and now they are down to around the $20,000 mark. There are two things we can conclude:

1) You don't realise a profit or loss until you cash in.
2) Bitcoin is more volatile than any of the traditional currencies.

We also know that JamesT's prophesies of four-digit hyperinflation and the death of more than half the world's population that he said would be due to an economic collapse triggered by government regulations limiting freedom of movement has been postponed to an unspecified time in the future.

We have not been told how cryptocurrencies can survive the abovementioned apocalypse.

Spearthrower wrote:https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/gpu-prices-not-falling-crashing-crypto/

GPU prices are dropping, and they have been for months. A new report from Bloomberg shows just how quickly they’re crashing, claiming that prices have dropped by as much as 50% as the market deals with the crypto fallout.

I personally would advise people to avoid cryptocurrency as I want to buy a new PC soon and don't want to take a mortgage out just to buy a GPU.

Regardless of the future of crypto, I'd think that the bottom has at least dropped out of GPU mining and prices are trending back to normal.

All the big players are either using ASICs or moving to proof of stake these days.

Hermit wrote:
1) You don't realise a profit or loss until you cash in.

It seems to be the memescape of crypto investors that they don't acknowledge this indisputable reality. You haven't profited until you actually withdraw at least your original stake and put that elsewhere... somewhere safe from such extreme volatility, in this case.

Hermit wrote:
2) Bitcoin is more volatile than any of the traditional currencies.

Which is exactly why someone like jamest actually saw gains in the first instance that induced him into evangelism. But it's like there's a cognitive dissonance between the fact of this volatility being how they accrued value on their stake, and their religious chanting about how much more stable crypto is than fiat money.

The best word for it, of all the words I've ever encountered, is mumblefuckery - it's just a mumblefuckery of economics. Words and phrases chanted at each other in place of, and in fact in direct contradiction to, widely understood economic and financial principles.

Matt_B wrote:
Regardless of the future of crypto, I'd think that the bottom has at least dropped out of GPU mining and prices are trending back to normal.

Takes a while for local prices to catch up with the trend - still falling here on the domestic market.

Spearthrower wrote:

Matt_B wrote:
Regardless of the future of crypto, I'd think that the bottom has at least dropped out of GPU mining and prices are trending back to normal.

Takes a while for local prices to catch up with the trend - still falling here on the domestic market.

Yeah, I don't believe that GPU prices have bottomed out just yet. As well as the crypto crash, there's also a new generation just around the corner and TSMC have reportedly refused a request from Nvidia to scale down production. All of which suggests that prices should keep falling, for a while at least.

Spearthrower wrote:
But it's like there's a cognitive dissonance between the fact of this volatility being how they accrued value on their stake, and their religious chanting about how much more stable crypto is than fiat money.

I don't know the exact figures off the top of my head, but fiat currency devalues via inflation each year and in fact the USD has lost about 99 per cent of its buying value in about a century.

Bitcoin is quite volatile but the general trend from the onset has been very much upwards from close to zero to today's value. It's not that bitcoin is more stable than fiat money, it's just more valuable to hold than fiat money.

jamest wrote:
I don't know the exact figures off the top of my head, but fiat currency devalues via inflation each year and in fact the USD has lost about 99 per cent of its buying value in about a century.

Bitcoin is quite volatile but the general trend from the onset has been very much upwards from close to zero to today's value. It's not that bitcoin is more stable than fiat money, it's just more valuable to hold than fiat money.

If everyone else in the world was just stuffing cash under their mattresses, you might have a point, though still only based on bitcoin prices so far, because as pretty much every legitimate investment is required to say, past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. But there is nobody in the world who was paid a dollar one hundred years ago, trying to spend that same dollar today and thinking, "oh no it's lost 99% of its value!"

minininja wrote:

jamest wrote:
I don't know the exact figures off the top of my head, but fiat currency devalues via inflation each year and in fact the USD has lost about 99 per cent of its buying value in about a century.

Bitcoin is quite volatile but the general trend from the onset has been very much upwards from close to zero to today's value. It's not that bitcoin is more stable than fiat money, it's just more valuable to hold than fiat money.

If everyone else in the world was just stuffing cash under their mattresses, you might have a point, though still only based on bitcoin prices so far, because as pretty much every legitimate investment is required to say, past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. But there is nobody in the world who was paid a dollar one hundred years ago, trying to spend that same dollar today and thinking, "oh no it's lost 99% of its value!"

Of course the general trend in bitcoin price could at some point reverse, but as the saying goes "The trend is your friend".

All we know for sure is that except for rare and brief deflationary periods of time, fiat currency is guaranteed to devalue by a handful of percentage points (a rough guess) every year. That's why it's dumb to have lots of money under the mattress or even in low-interest savings accounts. Far better - except in risk-off times such as these - to generally have your money invested in commodoties/stocks/property/metals and/or even crypto.

I don't even hold any crypto at the moment as I sold everything earlier in the year. Stocks are falling too, so I decided to just hold USD (the best performing fiat currency available to me) with a view to riding out the storm.

I guess I'm a little confused; wouldn't now be the time to buy? Since prices are falling, you can naturally get more for your dollar, whereas selling now would only result in getting less for the stock/bitcoin/etc that you paid for.

So if you sold your bitcoin earlier in the year, why wouldn't you reinvest now that the price has fallen off? Why simply hold onto whatever cash you have?

Greg the Grouper wrote:I guess I'm a little confused; wouldn't now be the time to buy? Since prices are falling, you can naturally get more for your dollar, whereas selling now would only result in getting less for the stock/bitcoin/etc that you paid for.

So if you sold your bitcoin earlier in the year, why wouldn't you reinvest now that the price has fallen off? Why simply hold onto whatever cash you have?

I think I explained this on the previous page of this thread. The world, not just its economy, is in great turmoil right now. I'll be watching the news carefully and keeping one eye on the FED with a view to possibly buying back in after I've seen confirmation of an upswing above the 200 week moving average.

jamest wrote:I don't know the exact figures off the top of my head, but fiat currency devalues via inflation each year and in fact the USD has lost about 99 per cent of its buying value in about a century.

Which explains why everybody in the US owned cars in 1922, whereas only the very rich can afford to buy one today.

Also, in 1920 45.6% of US families lived in homes they bought or were in the process of paying off. By 2018 this rate had dropped to 64.2%

You have no fucking idea what you're talking about when you mention the buying value of the US$.

I don’t see a four year “cycle” here.

I see one period of four years between peaks but that’s really it.




Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Finding local maxima is easier on a logarthmic scale chart*, but it's probably fair to say peaks have occurred roughly in:
June 2011, November 2013, December 2017 and April 2021.

It has been 4 years ish between peaks on two of the last three occasions. Whether it would be wise to predict that as a pattern set to continue indefinitely is perhaps a different question.

*e.g.

jamest wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:
But it's like there's a cognitive dissonance between the fact of this volatility being how they accrued value on their stake, and their religious chanting about how much more stable crypto is than fiat money.

I don't know the exact figures off the top of my head, but fiat currency devalues via inflation each year and in fact the USD has lost about 99 per cent of its buying value in about a century.

But that's an abstracted value - purchasing power is not so abstracted. Even when the value of a currency falls, that doesn't mean its lost its purchasing power.

And compare 99% of value over a century to what % has been lost by bitcoin in a few weeks.

jamest wrote:Bitcoin is quite volatile but the general trend from the onset has been very much upwards from close to zero to today's value. It's not that bitcoin is more stable than fiat money, it's just more valuable to hold than fiat money.

It's not that bitcoin is more stable than fiat money?

Isn't it? Isn't that a statement made repeatedly by proponents of crypto?

Do you think I am unfairly characterizing this as a common argument made by bitcoin evangelists?

I would hazard a guess that I can find instances of you making the above claim in this thread.

jamest wrote:
I don't even hold any crypto at the moment as I sold everything earlier in the year. Stocks are falling too, so I decided to just hold USD (the best performing fiat currency available to me) with a view to riding out the storm.

But you literally just recommended that people invest substantial portions of their savings into crypto.

jamest wrote:At this juncture, I would advise any individual anywhere in the world to invest at least [say] 20 percent of their savings in crypto

On July 16 in fact, so only 2 days ago!

jamest wrote:
All we know for sure is that except for rare and brief deflationary periods of time, fiat currency is guaranteed to devalue by a handful of percentage points (a rough guess) every year. That's why it's dumb to have lots of money under the mattress or even in low-interest savings accounts.

Even low interest savings accounts more than cover any loss through deflation for the majority of the time.

It's dumb to have a lot of money under the mattress because mattresses catch fire, don't stop burglars, can have all manner of improbable things happen to them thereby destroying the money.

jamest wrote: Far better - except in risk-off times such as these - to generally have your money invested in commodoties/stocks/property/metals and/or even crypto.

I agree it's 'better' towards a certain outcome.

If you are the kind of person who feels its important for your money to make money, and you're prepared either to put the time in yourself or pay someone else to do it on your behalf, you can typically guarantee that you can grow your money faster than you would through a standard saving policy offered by a commercial bank.

But it's not like that's 'free' because even if you do it yourself, you still have to invest time and effort, you have to make good decisions routinely, and you have to suck up your losses. You're investing intangibles, but they still represent value.

For me, that value is worth more than any money I could potentially make.