Actually, not.  No way.  A serious long-term store of value does not need hype-driven P&D!

People don’t buy gold to chase moons, to get rich quick, or to obsess over “when $100k?”.  (Well, not unless they are idiots.  Serious goldbugs are not idiots.)  Gold buyers are largely motivated by a desire to avoid losing value; I believe that’s what a “hedge vehicle” means.

Gold’s lower volatility compared to Bitcoin is in gold’s favor, not in Bitcoin’s favor.  I would kill for Bitcoin to have gold’s level of volatility.

(Related—  A few days ago, I began to write a reply to a post by OgNasty wherein I observed offhand that altcoins don’t actually take much capital from Bitcoin:  They take away some of the wild volatility driven by short-term speculators seeking rapid 500% price movements.  That’s is a good thing.  If we didn’t get a wild blow-off top last year as in 2017, that’s a good thing—and if we now avoid an 85% correction from last year’s high, that’s because alts took the wild blow-off-top, and they are now taking the drastic correction.  This also relates to discussion of “Bitcoin dominance”, a mostly-meaningless number.)

No philipma1957 you can’t… only bitcoin CEO can ban me for this.

Bitcoin isn’t keeping up with real inflation, either.  $30k range in January 2022 was a drastic YOY loss compared to $30k range in January 2021, for starters.

A few months ago, I wrote a long rant to a friend about how the market is corrupted because traders figure PnL in dollars—everything is dollarized...  Years ago, a higher proportion of Bitcoin traders figured PnL in BTC.

Adjusted to pre-Covid dollars (adjusted for real inflation, not manipulated USG stats), I think we have probably already dipped far below 200 WMA.  Maybe even below 2017 ATH.  How much food, energy, real estate, etc. did $19k buy in 2017?  How many dollars are required to buy the same now?

I foresaw this problem years ago.  Sometimes, I hate to be proved so right.

As for gold—I never understood why some Bitcoiners have a grudge against gold.  It doesn’t make sense, and it’s counterproductive.

Now my account will be suspected to be a sockpuppet as well...

Thanks for the golden smerit shower... #nohomo

Agreed, and due apologies for misunderstanding you.  But all markets are massively manipulated:  Gold, Bitcoin, everything else...  It is in the nature of free markets that markets do not price according to a rational appraisal of value, all theories to the contrary notwithstanding.  For in a free market, parties with terrifically high capital can be expected to manipulate the market.

Of course, this is nothing compared to the two-decade extreme “bear market” suppression of gold from the 1980s to 2000s.  I believe that that actually occurred for political motives that few people understand, and that I will not discuss here.  (Off-topic/inviting political flamewars not relevant to Bitcoin... something to do with gold-producing countries under international sanctions.)

I think that when Bitcoin is that heavily manipulated, it will signal in a sad way that Bitcoin has matured into a serious, powerful force in international finance.  Alas, I have a small suspicion that that may be starting now—and we are not yet ready for it.  We clearly no longer have the robustness reflected in that “Slaying of the Bearwhale” video I have been obsessively re-watching to comfort myself these past few months (for the newbies: 30k BTC dump under market price was fully absorbed in less than 4 minutes, then the price sprang right back to what it had been—as if nobody even noticed that someone had just dumped 30k BTC).  IMO, we need much more real-world adoption of Bitcoin as money to sustain the kind of pressure that the highly-capitalized market manipulators can bring to bear.


Pick any timeframe you want.  My overarching point still applies:  Bitcoiners are misled just like everyone else, due to a fixation on pricing in dollars, PnL in dollars, etc.^*  Inflation does not only steal away value:  It also corrupts pricing and distorts markets.

We are arguably under 2017 ATH right now, adjusting for real inflation.  Forget about 200 WMA.

---

^* Pricing, measures of value, and how dollarization corrupts everything.  In my internal thought process, I have fully broken out of the dollarized mindset.  It feels natural to me to price in BTC, to price in XAU—to price in the currencies that I think have long-term value, not shitcoins like USD, EUR, et al.  And I strictly treat BTC exchange as forex, absolutely nothing like a stock!  I identify BTC as my native currency, and fiat as foreign exchange.  But most people are stuck measuring value in dollars; and worse, most people think of Bitcoin as a sort of a quasi-stock.  These is a major points that deserves little essays.  If I do that here, it will need to wait until after I finish a reply to Jay...

I am sick and tired of the stupid "Terrorist Financing/Money Laundering, illegal this illegal that rhetoric!!... Show me any other currency in the world that isn't being used for illegal purposes! Do we ban every other currency as well?

I am sure somewhere in this world, cattle is being traded for opium.. someone is bartering food for other products/services.. avoiding some taxation system.. do we ban that as well?

And that above illustrates my point... nothing to do with head count but rather country of influence... country with massive geopolitical and economical influence has banned bitcoin so many times, yet Bitcoin is not dead, far from it!

I love to see the reaction on El Chapo's successor face when he checks his bitstamp account and it down 40% or -$100B, I mean these cartels are laundering their money via bitcoin right?...

Why are you trying to explain that to me?

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FWIW, that was my thinking when I got trapped in a leveraged position, where I could not survive a drop far below MicroStrategy’s DCA (then around $31.5k; I don’t know if that’s changed).

That was also my thinking during the mini bull run late March/early April:  Big investors really need for the number to be up.  (Eight consecutive green daily candlesticks—followed by nine consecutive red weekly candlesticks:  I now suspect that it was a bull trap designed to let Blackrock/Citadel start building huge short positions—carefully timed about a month before the big Fed meeting, as part of a larger strategy to trash Bitcoin, shatter Terra, and melt down the “crypto” markets generally.  Breaking Terra also gave a huge political lever to anti-Bitcoin forces, just when USG is looking to get this evil Bitcoin thing under control—unfair, but politics are unfair.  This is an hypothesis, a speculative hunch, not a known fact!)

I still think so.  I am now balancing that with more attention to parties with opposite motives.

By the way, it is not only simple paper losses for large BTC positions.  E.g., MSTR stock is effectually tied to BTC price.