Bitcoin

wild greens

Well-known member
When it 8/900 the other week I thought market had been forced with a couple of moody trades but there must be something else to it

Fucked if I know. it was 200 or so when I was using Empire I think? That's a big old jump
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Reminds me of my brother who got sucked into a pyramid scheme for a few months. Desperately trying to get all his friends and family to buy in and feeling hurt and betrayed when we wouldn't. He also ended up in hospital once after buying penis enlargement pills on the Internet. Same thing really.
I have to ask, what happened, did it swell to such enormous proportions that he couldn't carry it around, or did it burst or what?
Definitely one of those "be careful what you wish for" type scenarios.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
This is interesting. The question seemingly about whether XRP is a security or a currency - kind of like the question about whether jaffa cakes are a cake or a biscuit (though obviously not so important)

The SEC asserted that Ripple's XRP token is a tradable asset, known as a security, and thus subject to its regulations.
The firm argues that XRP is a currency and therefore does not have to be registered as an investment contract.

I have to admit that this is something that I don't know about. The regulations for being a currency or being another type of security and being traded as one or the other - is one more onerous than the other or are they just different? I've always assumed the latter as a general rule of thumb type thing but of course I've never looked into it properly.
I mean I guess that from one point of view at least, the best thing is to be some kind of exotic security that is traded with minimal rules... but of course that will make the market smaller and make it harder to buy and sell.

Bitcoin and Ether have been ruled out of trading exchanges that offer the buying and selling of stocks and bonds.
In 2018, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission said both could be traded as commodities, like currencies, oil or cotton.

I don't understand that quote. It seems to say that currencies are a type of commodity, is that right?

What is a currency anyway? What is money? Can anyone offer a definition of that to get us started? I can't.
 
This is interesting. The question seemingly about whether XRP is a security or a currency - kind of like the question about whether jaffa cakes are a cake or a biscuit (though obviously not so important)



I have to admit that this is something that I don't know about. The regulations for being a currency or being another type of security and being traded as one or the other - is one more onerous than the other or are they just different? I've always assumed the latter as a general rule of thumb type thing but of course I've never looked into it properly.
I mean I guess that from one point of view at least, the best thing is to be some kind of exotic security that is traded with minimal rules... but of course that will make the market smaller and make it harder to buy and sell.



I don't understand that quote. It seems to say that currencies are a type of commodity, is that right?

What is a currency anyway? What is money? Can anyone offer a definition of that to get us started? I can't.
Read the bitcoin standard by Saifedean Ammous, about half the book is about what money is. It's a great book and he'll receive the Nobel prize for economics before the decade is out. He sent me a manuscript before it was published in 2017.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
It's a very big topic. But I meant it kinda rhetorically, not to say that I have a great understanding of money, but I do think that most people tend to lazily think they know what it is but they don't at all. I'm in that position of at least knowing that I don't know. If that makes sense.
 

luka

Well-known member
We did a thread about this I think. I remember badgering vimothy to give me a definition but he couldn't
 
Pretty much all our current problems stem from the free and easy debasement of the money in our pockets by central banks. Money that can be debased so easily, by printing in the trillions, is worth very little, as is demonstrated by inflation over time. Meanwhile, a cow or loaf of bread, for example, costs the same in gold as it did hundreds and thousands of years ago. Gold is hard money, but not the hardest. The hardest money that can not be debased or diluted is bitcoin.

Ammous uses the glass bead example. Merchants traded with west Africans by making payments in glass beads. These were easily produced in Europe, but difficult time to come by in West Africa. So the locals sold goods and land in return for "precious" glass beads. Europeans bought up west Africas resource for nothing. Now we're the west Africans and pounds and dollars are the beads, easily produced by our masters to do business with us.
 
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catalog

Well-known member
delanda talks about money being about efficient means of transfer. barter is what we had before, but it's very inefficient cos you have to wait until someone has got exactly what you want til you make a swap.

so money is a representation/projection.

you could also ake the analogy with thw web/internet - the way google or other search engines works is that they carry a representation of the page, which becomes the search index. so the index is not the actual thing, it's just a representation of it, a map. money is similarly an index that allows us to standardise. a map of the territory.

and of course it's a promise to pay.

but where it gets complicated is the 'matthew effect' ie where it becomes a commodity in its own right.

(matthew effect = 'to him that hath shall be given, and he shall be given in abundance, but from him that do not hath, shall be taken away, even what he do not hath').
 
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