Comment by fluoridation
10 hours ago
>You talk as if "minimum price" is objective. The "minimum price" you're referring to here is the most useless, but valued, property of the object for you. For other people, having weight can be a burden.
It doesn't matter. The things oranges are good for are known, even if they're not applicable to you personally. Those applications are objective. It is objectively true that oranges are edible, even if you subjectively don't like them. It is objectively true that an orange can weight paper down, even if you can't carry even a single orange more right now.
Of course, sometimes there's an asymmetry of information where someone might price something incorrectly (e.g. someone doesn't know that oranges can now be used as fusion fuel, so he sells it for less). But the fact that we can say that the price is "incorrect" means there is a correct price.
>Again you speak as if as if everyone assumes the same value system as you, but differ only in a penchant for gambling in the form of price speculation.
I don't see you giving any examples of what Bitcoin is good for.
Store of Value. Digital gold, with the added utility of being able to teleport across jurisdictions and being able to plug directly into the next wave of smart contracts and decentralized securitization. It's no more complicated than that.
(No, gold does not primarily derive its value from practical applications).
These tools have practical application within the financial system. Speaking as a portfolio manager, gold has drawbacks. For example there was turmoil in the gold market from the recent Trump tariffs because of Swiss refining. It's a physical product that has to be stored, which means it has negative carry/costs money to hold, and if you get it through futures you have to deal with the futures term structure. Crypto also has rich volatility to work with (useful for many classes of trader), and it can even be relative value traded against peers. With Gold you end up going to industrial metals or to Silver (which is frankly an awful asset to manage in a portfolio or trade, outright worse than some of these alt-coins).
Simply put, it's a new asset with many highly unique characteristics, that has a good mix of store-of-value and speculative elements. It's also highly liquidity sensitive (vs Gold which has a much slower impulse, because it is heavily influenced by Central Bank Reserve activity, which isn't great to have to deal as the driving factor in an asset price because it's so opaque), and cleanly embeds risk-off/risk-on animal spirits.
Let's see you are a fund manager and are looking to add persistent alphas like Trend and Volatility Risk Premium to a portfolio. Crypto can be a good addition to these systematic trading programs because it's uncorrelated with other asset classes.
Granted, I'm no "Bitcoin Maxi" (despite living offshore with the tax-dodging crypto crowd for a year, I only did my first crypto trade this year), and will be the first to admit that the majority of the space is rank speculation and wretched excess, to quote Munger, but I'm begrudgingly admitting that it's a neat asset, although I think some of the ones like ethereum that are built more around the utility aspects of distributed computing and smart contracts have more use cases. BTC is primarily the gold equivalent in the crypto universe.
Step back one more level and I'd argue there's some deeper evolution going on as well in regards to money as technology. This isn't a process that anyone totally controls. The modern Eurodollar system (Eurodollars as in offshore dollars and derivatives, 20 trillion in size, not the currency Euro) that underpins the global financial system spawned out of the ether of many would argue petrodollars, and we didn't fully get a practical or theoretical handle on it until things like the Asian financial Crisis decades later. I'll immediately say that in no way am I saying "Bitcoin is the future of money", but the recent securitization wave in the crypto space does smell to me like the system pushing into new meaningful directions. Stablecoins that can be re-hypothecated across borders without regulation and frictionlessly lever up seems like the next obvious step that will naturally take hold. Right now the Eurodollar system and thus the global financial system is tied together with a huge hedge-fund driven basis trade which propagates out fed policy via an arbitrage. It's pretty obvious that this isn't always going to be the case and eventually that link is going to be severed. Likewise with the repo market and Tbills which is where systemic leverage originates - this is another pretty arbitrary thing that has been concocted, and don't be surprised if new strange things develop.
>Store of Value.
LOL. You're about seven years behind on the narrative. Nobody "stores value" in Bitcoin by deliberate choice. Anyone who does either doesn't know what they're doing or can't sell off their holdings. Volatility is an awful property for a store of value.
>being able to plug directly into the next wave of smart contracts and decentralized securitization
That's just meaningless drivel.
Edit:
Just to button up that bottom part, since it sounds a bit wonky. It looks like there's a new sort of Eurodollar system developing, which is more accessible and more democratized. That's pretty cool.
Ex: Tether was a 7th largest purchaser of US debt in 2024, ahead of South Korea and Germany.
Instead of EuroDollars (offshore dollar denominated deposits in non-us regulated institutions - say two non-us countries denominate alone in US dollars, they have spawned additions to the global dollar liquidity system without US involvement) you have stablecoins. Some of these stable coins are backed by hard US assets (just like foreign banks May hold hard dollars or TBills to cover their exposure), but some will inevitably not be and there will be a spectrum of risk and creditworthiness that will naturally arise. Likewise, these stable coins are passed around, lent and re-lent, which originates leverage in the crypto space, much like how we use Repo markets in the "real" financial system.
To dig into the history a bit more, after the GFC things like Repo and bank reserve requirements were tightened up quite a bit. No more sending off your dubious credit default swaps to repo to originate leverage every day if you are Bear Sterns, for example. Within developed was what we know as Shadow banking (which really isn't a descriptive term for it), and to me all of this crypto stuff is really just part of that offshoot Shadow banking narrative since the GFC.
History also has a tendency to repeat itself which crypto seems to be rapidly doing. Let's look back a few years ago with the banking crisis in the US, that was really a repeat of the savings and loan crisis from 40 to 50 years ago. So in a sense we're sort of on track for the new crop of humans to repeat some of the narratives that came after that are we not? Let's take that hard data point that tether, a stable coin, is now a huge holder of US debt. There's a reason why we have entities like the FED that step in to backstop these markets (like in 2020). Let's see the crypto market keeps developing, and is highly automated and mechanized as expected. Let's say something like a security flaw in one of the major backbones with regards to quantum computing starts a bank run in the space, and these stable coins start having to liquidate their treasury holdings aggressively and mechanistically. Well there's a classic reflexive loop that in the regulated financial system regulators would step into stop. Now because it's US debt to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in real supply, this could be an actual, perhaps even mid-sized financial crisis! At the end of the day this sort of thing is exactly what I expect us to keep doing occasionally, after all humanity needs to relearn its lessons within new frameworks!
As for Bitcoin, it's the gold equivalent in this parallel shadow liquidity complex.
So yes, wonkish, but imo all of this stuff is pretty interesting and maybe even under discussed. Probably more useful to think about than stock price going up or stock price going down...
And then a note on why traditional financial participants seem to be getting on board with crypto, even people who may have initially been against it. I think it has something to do with how liquidity sensitive this stuff is. We live in a world where liquidity is ever more dominant a factor in financial markets, yet a bit paradoxically it's harder than ever to measure it. Let's take something like levels of reserves in the banking system, that thing which if it gets too low spikes repo rates and can cause an overnight crisis. Even the FED doesn't exactly know how to measure this and is largely guessing. There was an interesting research paper a little while back that proposes a new measuring system where they hook into bank transactions and measure if payments are a little late, like "did this bank pay their bill at 10am or 11:30". Believe it or not, that sounded like a large improvement over the higher frequency stuff we have! LIBOR was also replaced with SOFR, so the embedded overnight lending risk between financial institutions is not as viewable as it once was (granted LIBOR was manipulated, so at least that's better...) I've increasingly seen crypto used as a liquidity monitor. Ex: if Bitcoin explodes higher and diverges from the S&P, people will take that data point with sometimes even medium seriousness. That alone may be adding a chunk of legitimacy to the thing, and it may be self-reinforcing. Compared to the current insights we have the true nature of liquidity, maybe it isn't even that crazy an idea.