Topic: rpietila Wall Observer - the Quality TA Thread ;) - page 53. (Read 907212 times)

Please stop replying to that lame attempt at an AnonyMint copy. It's obvious he's just paraphrasing him, with all his 2015.75, Armstrong this, confiscation that.

Also, AnonyMint would never mistake "advise" for "advice".

People can be (and many are) just as greedy with Bitcoin.

The reason ETFs (will) exist is they are easier (in almost every way), safer (in some ways), and more compatible with the existing system of laws and regulations (especially for mid-market professional investors) while offering similar upside.

this is why I started raising chickens a couple years ago (gaining a skill with little effort and big payback).  a easy animal to care for and converts bugs and simple fora into high protein units (eggs).  canning and gardening are on my to do list as well.  living in the sticks has big advantages, but may require shooting intruders/raiders if things get ugly.

Good point as long as everyone is trustworthy. Would hate to have to off the fucker that stole my cornbread!

Guns and soup?  Too terrible to contemplate.  I will fallback on basic skills and hope cooperatives arise.

Nestmann's logic appears to be flawed, because:

http://www.epi.org/publication/retirement-inequality-chartbook/


Governments typically force all retirement funds to invest in sovereign bonds during a sovereign bond or fiscal crisis, e.g. afair Poland and Argentina have already nationalized the pensions.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/09/18/pending-pension-crisis-they-are-only-a-promise/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/09/22/pension-funds-being-taken-to-fund-infrastructure/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/01/29/cycles-obamas-tax-free-bonds/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/12/14/the-three-bombshells-tucked-inside-the-continuing-resolution-to-fund-the-govt/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/693-2/2012-2/obamacare-the-investment-tax/

It seems to me, since the Roth IRA funds have already been taxed they are at less risk as compared to traditional IRAs which haven't been taxed yet.

I don't have specific advice, but generally my thought is don't wait until the "writing on the wall" is so clear that everyone wants to cash out, because the authorities will likely confiscate as they sense a stampede out. The retirement funds are already targeted in government white papers. They do not think that is your money.

Perhaps the public retirement funds are the largest target, and perhaps only the wealthy private retirement accounts make sense to expropriate. I will go find a nestmann.com blog about that.

Edit: http://www.nestmann.com/why-the-feds-wont-confiscate-your-retirement-plan-but-they-will-do-this

I have both non-retirement and retirement investments.  If/when the rules for retirement investments are changed then we will have to evaluate the new rules and take action accordingly, e.g. withdraw despite penalties, etc.  As trouble rises then investment choices need to be adjusted.  Do you have specific investment advise based on your world view?

It is really great that we are thinking about the needs of the investor. And we should. But also we need to think about how to create a compelling use case for the currency. Anonymous currency is useless if we have to convert it back to fiat and slam into capital controls (confiscation via taxation, penalties for hiding wealth, guilty until proven innocent, totalitarianism, gestapo, etc) before we can spend on it merchants. And merchants can't survive if they don't also accept credit cards so the capital controls (deflation and bankruptcy dominoes) can destroy the merchants long before we get around to spending our anonymous currency (assuming they also accepted crypto currency along with credit cards but they went bankrupt before we got to spend our anonymous currency).

Crypto currency needs a virally popular use case pronto (before the Sovereign Big Bang ETA 2015.75 ideally!) that can't be done with credit cards (the mainstream banking system).

Edit: the modern economy requires holistic economies-of-scale. We need to be scaling up the use of crypto-currency faster if we are going to be ready to displace the capital controls abyss that will accelerate after 2015.75.


No doubt it will be higher. But you also have the very real risk of a meltdown of law and order and thus Roth terms will not be honored everything will be taken from you. I truly believe we are heading off the rails entirely (2018ish).

Is this not enough hard evidence for you of what we are up against (make sure you note the image of the SEC letter admitting what was destroyed in the WTC twin towers on 9/11).

Holding Bitcoin in a retirement account is not trivial; personally I am especially interested in Roth IRAs (I am predicting the future tax rate will be higher).  Holding an ETF in a retirement account is pretty straightforward although it does take a measure of trust (although not necessarily in a "central" authority).  What's needed is a viable ETF built on top of a block chain.

Agreed.  Also fixed typo.

As a side note, anonymous crypto alts could mostly be spared this ETF nonsense, because people holding those value privacy and want direct ownership in contrast to the latter wave of bitcoin gone wall-street ETF holders.

The underlying root of why ETFs exist is greed. It is not Bitcoin's fault.

We need to do something about that and pronto. I know most of you all don't share my doomsday outlook and by the time you realize my (Armstrong's) timing is correct, it will be too late for us to avoid a collapse into the abyss of capital controls. The idealism is nice, except the poster misses the point that file sharing had a virally popular use case.

 Any mention of Taleb automatically gets my attention.

The great thing is you have the computer already (Terminator: ...There is one more chip... *Terminator points to his head*)

Two issues with our computer is that we have is that we are clouded by emotion, and we don't have the huge dataset because people's memory is selective (in part due to that emotion - rose coloured spectacles phenomenon).

Then you have the fact that mostly people ask the wrong question: "What *will* happen?". People make the mistake of acting based on what they think *the* answer to that question is. As you said in your other post - its impossible to know the future. That path leads to ruin, imho. One might be right, but more likely one will be wrong.

The question one should ask is: "What *could" happen?" which I think is where your long tail comes in. If you assume you don't know the answer, but you consider all possible outcomes, and then position yourself on that basis. You make bank. Sure it might not be that you absolutely maximised, but better that a situation where you were just slightly wrong about the outcome but end up with nothing.

For example if we do get bitcoinmoon, my personal strategy leaves me with about 50-80% less BTC than I could have if I just HODL'd everything because I hedge against bitcoindoom. Whereas I see a lot of all in/all out posters that will just miss tops and bottoms, constantly bleed principal, fail to realise profits, get zhoutonged on margin calls etc etc all based on the mistaken premise that they can guess *right*.

Once you assume you are wrong, thats when you start making money. Thats just my style though. I'm sure all the l33t traders out there will smoke my meagre returns in the long run. (whilst the other 99% don't, hehe)

True. In Case we fail at Making bitcoin accessible enough there is danger of monetary inflation through the backdoor through these vehicles (ETF etc). One of the main selling points would be invalidated (capped supply)... In fact the main selling point for me.

True, but if people prefer to own ETFs rather than own Bitcoins then that is a fault of Bitcoin, not of the users. The technology isn't meeting the needs of the target market.

I think you covered the main attractions and pitfalls of the "3rd party fund vehicle"

It is important to understand that this was going to happen whether the "community" desires it, or not. The only matter of importance is its impact, positive, negative, or both.

On the positive side, it makes investment, or at least "exposure by proxy" available to whomever has a brokerage account and a keyboard. Without the technical responsibility of securing the keys. I would wager there is a lot of capital out there without great desire to deposit money with a sf startup or wire funds to hk, people who lack the confidence/knowledge to secure these digital bearer bonds after purchase. This is a potential opening of pent up and untapped demand. More liquidity in theory should diminish day to day volatility, which is something bitcoin needs to get more mainstream use.

Another half-positive, it could reduce the amount of on-chain transaction volume for speculation. Leaving more block space for non-speculative uses.

The two main negatives I see are the possibility of naked short selling with nefarious motives, and potential failure of funds themselves to adequately protect the assets and account for them correctly.

Too bad the discussion veered off on a rather boring tangent in a very emotional way after the above 2 posts.

I think it's a very valid discussion and I'm thinking about this myself a lot: loads of people will buy the silbert or later maybe the winklevii shares and they will brag to their friends how they own bitcoin now. At first it will probably work out and they will participate in BTC appreciation through the shares they own.

coinits is right, though: you don't own bitcoins if you own such an ETF. Afaik there isn't even a way described to take delivery unless you are a primary dealer or whatever. It's easily imaginable that the trading volume of such vehicles might greatly exceed the volume on the 'real markets' and then we'll have a 'tail wags the dog' situation.

shields answer is promising at first sight: bitcoin isn't gold. It's easy to transact and store, so it's going to be easier for bitcoin to stand up to the ETFs.

I fear the answer is a bit weak, though: the primary use case of bitcoin currently is speculation. This use case is covered by he ETF just fine. I don't see ETF share owners taking delivery on their bitcoins (it's not encouraged or probably even possible, there might even be fine print saying they can be payed out in fiat). In addition: if they were planning to own bitcoins in the first place, why did they buy the shares and not coins, then.

To people who are saying: "but a share is always backed by 0.1 real Bitcoins in custody of the ETF handlers" we can only answer: that's a solution that requires trust in a centralized entity.

I fear these ETFs might turn out to be a slippery slope and might turn out to be misused to control bitcoin price. Hello naked shorting.

Yes: the utility of bitcoin can potentially stand up to such an attack, but only if bitcoin enjoys widespread actual use.

thoughts?