Are members invested in Bitcoin/crypto?

Evitzee

Markets always have corrections, that's their nature. But people panic, listen to the doomsayers and sell out at the worst time. These times require patience, if you have quality companies in your portfolio just calm down, this too shall pass. And you always need sufficient cash for these times, a few years if one is retired. Remain calm. Live your life and don't focus on the wild market gyrations.

Walrus

Just wanted to pass on your assessment to him.

STANDY

Wait to all the corrections from the fall out from half the worlds wheat supplies not being accessible due to the issues in Ukraine..
Food inflation is going to go crazy.

Everyone is talking stocks and gas and missing the food / agricultural issues coming.

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/wheat

Archer

Your decision mate...

dsio

Just went down to $19k usd, not even sure what triggered that sudden drop

Tony C.

Some of the technical details are over my head, but this appears to be an interesting argument against the likelihood of Bitcoin succeeding in the long run:

Bitcoin is Not a Store-of-Value

Walrus

I just all looked fake to me, it was real, but it was real fake if you know what I mean. So I had some fun with it and I’m still glad I got in the sector early I just have no clue where we go from here. But I think things are gonna be bad with a lot of other things than crypto for a while. What’s next housing?

Tony C.

I never got involved, but am glad that you made some money in the space. I do think that BC has a chance to be a survivor, but beyond the damage being done to broader crypto through the exposure of frauds and Ponzis at the moment, I would say that it still faces some extraordinarily big challenges.

As you mention, its rise was clearly correlated with the central banks' extreme monetary policy experiment since '08, and now that those policies are predictably failing, BC has lost an enormous amount of (dubious) fuel. It has also been clear from the outset that BC would ultimately be opposed by governments and CBs, as it is not within their control. We see now that the CBs are talking up their own, competing "digital currencies".

Then there is the energy issue, parsed out through the link in my previous post.

And yes, I agree that housing is likely to be hit hard. How can it not?

Tony C.

@Walrus

As touched on above by @queriver, it is important, I think, not to get stuck viewing gold only through a USD lens. In fact, it has been at or around all-time highs in a number of currencies over the past couple of years, and has largely served its primary purpose as insurance, or a store of value, during times of great economic stress.

People living in several South American countries, Turkey, Lebanon, the EU, Japan, etc., would all have been well, to very well served by holding gold, as opposed to their domestic currencies, in recent years.

The USD context is more complicated, though also interesting. For reasons that some would argue are dubious, the USD has remained a go-to asset when there is a "flight to safety". So when there is turmoil, the rise of the Dollar can, at least to some extent, mask the strength of gold, as as they rise concurrently.

Also, consider, for example, that in September of 2011, when gold reached a then new all-time high against the USD, the DXY was ~77; in August of 2020, when gold broke the $2k barrier, the DXY was ~92. Today it is 104! So there definitely appears to be some hidden strength there, this time around.

Though I prefer not to emphasize it, there is also manipulation in the (paper) futures markets. It is easy to see, as no party that has a legitimate interest in profiting from a trade would dump hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts all at once, let alone during the quietest market periods. I doubt that the U.S. government is directly involved, but have little doubt that they have proxies who are happy to do the dirty work.

I was wrong about how long the CBs could keep the balls in the air during this awful, failed experiment, but do believe that the "everything" bubble was initially pierced some time ago, and that what we are now experiencing is an acceleration of the unavoidable deflation. So in terms of gold's performance, particularly in USDs, these are, I would say, early innings, and it would surprise me greatly if it were not to shine brightly over the next 2-5 years, given the near certainty that the Fed will cut rates and start printing again sooner, rather than later.

Walrus

When that other thread that talked about gold and stocks more was open I did go down the rabbit hole of gold and silver manipulation, some of it was conspiracy stuff some of it was banks and funds getting caught red handed and fined

"We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake. Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it.

It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now succeeded. The US Fed was very active in getting the gold price down. So was the U.K."

Sir Eddie George, Governor Bank of England to Nicholas J. Morrell, chief executive of Lonmin Plc, 1999

The previous two crypto bubbles, in 2013 and 2017, both quietly deflated without much fuss. The 2021–2022 bubble is collapsing with lots of noise and explosions!

Fear spreads by contagion. There have never been enough dollars to cash out the paper wealth in crypto. So the whales — the largest crypto holders — are swinging their weight around to try to cash out before you can.

***
Weekend at Bernie Madoff’s

Crypto is correctly modeled as a single integrated casino — and not at all as an industry of competitors. The US dollar exchanges, such as Coinbase, Kraken, and Gemini, are the cashier’s desk, and the action happens at the unregulated floating offshore tables.

Don’t pay too much attention to the disquieting noises coming from the back rooms.

Tether has reduced its market cap by 15 billion USDT in the last month. Tether has claimed that these are redemptions, or a reduction in their holdings of “commercial paper.”

Tether are extensively documented as repeated liars, e.g., in the New York and CFTC settlements — but their statements of late tend to be true from a certain perspective. Like a child trying to not technically lie. So it can be worth trying to reconstruct the sequence of events that Tether is misleadingly describing.

Our guess is that the “commercial paper” is loans of USDT, with the loans themselves having been accounted for in the reserve as the assets backing the tethers. Examples include the loans of tethers that Tether made to Celsius and to many of the other DeFi lenders.

Did the tethers get paid back, or did Tether write them off and cancel the tethers? We haven’t seen reports of tethers in circulation being frozen — which is a thing that Tether has done in the past.

Tether’s helpful Twitter bot army reassures us that Tether does not own any Evergrande bonds. We repeat, Tether does not own any debt issued by Evergrande. [Twitter]

Don’t forget: Tether only redeems for its direct customers, who number less than ten, and are all Tether’s large and very good close friends.

But there seems to be genuine internal conflict in the greater crypto casino. Tether is complaining about — get this — “malicious redemptions.” The whales are getting out, and they want their money — or “money” — back from Tether.

Tether is making noises about getting a proper audit again — that thing that Tether has never had done. This time, it’s with a “big 12” firm — or Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino thinks so, anyway. Ardoino says he’ll name the auditing firm once they finish the audit. [Euromoney; Twitter]

Tether’s books literally don’t have a history to audit — for many years, their reserve was only documented in a shared spreadsheet, which they sometimes remembered to update.

Number is going down, crypto’s bid to infiltrate the real economy has failed, and the knives are out.

Observer

I recently sold half my eth and last year sold enough of my BTC for the remainder to be essentially free.