Tesla just announced that it had bought 1.5 billion dollars of bitcoin and could in the future sell cars in bitcoins. Since this morning both Bitcoin and Tesla are going up in the market. Maybe there is afterall something in the saying that“Bitcoin is Tesla without the cars”1/ 20

Musk is seen as a genius, a true Midas, by many investors and millennials. For them he can never go wrong. He became recently the richest man in the world dur to Tesla stock valuation (+353% yoy). He moves markets and today´s announcement is “kind of legitimise “ bitcoin 2/

Tesla shares attained $870 which represents a Price/ Earnings ratio of 1.747 (!) on the basis of last year´s profits. Apple is at 37 and the S&P firms average is 23 (against a historical average ≈16). Future profits would have to increase a lot to justify a more normal ratio 3/

Tesla has a good product but the question is if it will sell enough cars to get such profits in face of coming fierce competition. However, this is not the question I want to comment upon. It is also not about what may interest the SEC and market conduct…4/

It was not disclosed when Tesla had made this investment. In December, Musk said that Tesla could buy bitcoin, and this was followed by many statements that he supported bitcoin. Bitcoin kept going up & Tesla investment has appreciated. The SEC will look into this 5/

Election day in US; to skip the politics and get straight to the money, here's our quarterly update. How do gold, silver, and government fiat money compare with bitcoin's 21 million? #Bitcoin is the 10th largest money in the world, ex-gold & silver. This is update #10.

2/ Bitcoin's monetary system marches on its continuously-lowering coin emission; meanwhile, other world monetary systems' units inflate, either naturally (like gold & silver ounces), or via monopolistic privilege (like government fiat money "printing").

3/ What follows isn't a lesson in stimulus or bailouts, whatever the world faces. It's an attempt at painting the monetary landscape around the globe. The dollars, euros, and yen we're all familiar with, collectively, are worth $25 trillion. This is an exercise in perspective.

4/ As many know, the response from governments worldwide to Covid-19 has been drastic, so expect big moves. Also interestingly, central banks have been much slower to update their data these days.

5/ Gold & silver is base money of the past. Government fiat is base money today. It comprises both physical cash… and a digital cash component. Bitcoin may be base money of the future. Before we get to the charts, it's important to clarify a few common misconceptions in money.

1/20 Bitcoin is too slow and expensive for payments. We all know this. To solve this problem, the Lightning network is being built on top of Bitcoin's blockchain. Will it be the end of XRP?

(Video version @ https://t.co/7zJCuKrpqx)

A thread. 👇

2/20 On a normal day outside a bull run, Bitcoin takes ~10 mins to transfer, at a cost of about $0.50. Any time network activity ramps up, those times and fees multiply. Bitcoin's Proof of Work system is painfully slow and can only handle 7 transactions per second.

3/20 To attempt to solve this problem, the Lightning Network is being developed. It's a 2nd layer network that sits on top of Bitcoin's blockchain. It's been in the works since 2015. Yes, 6 years. Do you know anybody who uses it? Me, either, but I'll get to that.

4/20 Lightning works by opening "channels" between parties. Those parties can perform as many Bitcoin transactions as needed and then close the channel. Because the transactions aren't written to the Bitcoin blockchain until the channel is closed, it's much faster.

5/20 Individual payment channels between various parties combine to form a network of lightning nodes that can route transactions among themselves. The resulting interconnections between various payment channels is the Lightning Network.

0/ Predictions for 2021:
(This is not investment advice, or any other type of advice. DYOR)

1/ #ETH hits new ATH(s).

2/ #Bitcoin breaks $55K; but BTC YE2021 close is < $30K.
wins!

3/ > 3 billion-dollar crypto IPOs successfully occur (eg CoinBase, BlockFi, et al).

4/ @SBF_Alameda’s ‘off-chain BTC folding’ strategy goes unnoticed; whole crypto ecosystem wins!

This "bitcoin is better than gold" statement going around once more show that bitcoiners have no clue about monetary history and what the purpose of a monetary system is. A thread.

1- Metal standards were never inflexible; they could not in order to operate properly. Qty of metal was changed, usually lowered, to accommodate for changing economic conditions: price of metal, scarcity of coins, financial needs of economic units (state and private), etc.

2- The purpose of a monetary system is to make the rest of the economy go. It is there to accommodate financial needs. The more elastic one can design the supply, the better.
That doesn't mean that monetary creation & destruction shouldn't follow any rules & have no constraint.

3- Rules and constraint impose depend on economic system and evolve over time has we learn how to manage better the system. In a capitalist economy, the private sector is subject to the profitability constraint. We have learned from experience that this is not enough.

3 (ii) Financial stability requires a "hedge finance" constraint for most private agents: profitability should be judged on income gains, not capital gains.
In the government sector, the constraints are ressource availability and political constraints.

The most effective meme I’ve found for Ethereum is “Digital Economy”

From there it’s easy to layout how Ethereum is the foundation for a variety of digital institutions (protocols) built upon the same principles of decentralization as Bitcoin.

1/

With “Bitcoin : Digital Gold :: Ethereum : Digital Economy” as the framing its then much easier to describe what a bet on ETH is.

I first explain DeFi (the new Wall Street), NFTs, Web3, and all the other mind blowing projects built on Ethereum...

...then illuminate how ETH is at the center of all it.

If BTC is like gold - an asset that people store value in but don’t use as money.

Then ETH is like money - the most liquid asset in Ethereum’s on-chain economy that is demanded for a wide range of economic uses.

If I get pressed on the semantics of “money” I explain how ETH is used as a medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account...

...but also eventually as the ultimate source of security for the Ethereum blockchain, stretching the idea of what money is.

A lot these ideas are what we attempted to express and put numbers behind in our latest ETH 2.0

Slow and steady wins the race

Bitcoin is often critized for being slow in everything

But here is the thing: the more you complicate a design early on, the more you push it down a specific road

Get your assumptions wrong, and it's off-road

Thread/

$BTC & $USDT & the criminal cartels that pump the prices of BTC while laundering out real fiat profits through their exchange partners. While tax evasion & general financial malfeasance is problematic enough, one has to wonder what else is occurring with the laundered funds ..1/

Despite the romantic, libertarian view of Bitcoin subverting the oppression of the centralized fiat economy, in reality, the backers were also engaging in drug smuggling, assassination markets & human trafficking. 2/

While some of Bitcoin’s ideology of civil disobedience & the hope of building a shining new economy upon the distributed ledger was exciting for a time, the Bitcoin Civil War side-tracked the project heavily. 3/

Once Dread Pirate Roberts and The Silk Road was closed down, nastier websites emerged, and so too did some of the shadiest venture capitalists in the world — necessitating the split of the Bitcoin protocol away from the BTC economy in 2017. But this requires some context. 4/

Unfortunately, in the era spanning 2014-2016, venture capitalists created media entities such as CoinDesk & Cointelegraph, development groups such as Blockstream & MIT Digital Currency Initiative, exchanges like Coinbase & Bitfinex, 5/

Some thoughts on this super inaccurate piece.

tl;dr: this is not a defence of Tether/ iFinex, who I would like nothing more than to see disappear into irrelevance. However, most of the conclusions here show zero understanding of crypto market

1. First up: it’s completely inexcusable that Tether refuse to have a 3rd party audit. I can’t find a single good faith reason for this.

Bitfinex GC recently did a superb job of sidestepping that question on WBD:

2. For better or worse, USDT (tether) started as a way for people to move fiat between exchanges (a major problem) in the absence of the ability to onboard banking partners, none of whom wanted to touch crypto. USDT is now the dominant stablecoin by mkt cap & liquidity.

3. As a result of the difficulty of having a fiat on/off rail, many exchanges, like Binance, chose to be ‘crypto only’, using stablecoins in lieu of fiat. This is why the majority of inflows into BTC (article says 70%) is via USDT

4. Unbanked exchanges are in aggregate larger than banked ones. This is true, but it’s not because of a giant conspiracy to steal your BTC. Being unbanked = real regulatory arbitrages (lower cost + ability to innovate fast), and lower barriers to entry means there’s more of them.

“What do you think about Ethereum?”

A question all Bitcoiners should have a good answer to when their friends and family ask them.

A few thoughts beyond the “shitcoin” meme...

The truth that ETH devs won’t admit is that they’re a bunch of tech nerds that want to hack on something exciting. Their priority isn’t to move humanity to sound money. They want to build the next big thing and feel like they’re on the cutting edge. Typical developer / SV mindset

Bitcoin is a binary bet on the whole market. There are two possibilities:

1. Bitcoin survives and goes to $10MM a coin because it is humanity’s first perfect money

2. Bitcoin is destroyed by central bankers / governments in which case ETH will certainly meet the same fate.

We know exactly what Bitcoin is.

Perfect money: Scarce. Transferable. Divisible. It’s doing one thing, and doing it well. And that one thing has enormous upside potential. Buy it, hold it, and don’t worry about it changing.

Ethereum on the other hand…

I’ve seen Ethereum change from:

- The new Internet infrastructure (lol at Blockchain replacing relational databases)
- Crypto Kitties with massive gas fees
- ICO scam platform
- “Eth is money”
- “Eth is bonds”
- DeFi platform for a bunch of two-bit startups relying on AWS

Story time. There will be a couple crypto wallet addresses at the end of this one.

You follow this account, you know that I straddle the terminator - one foot in light, one in shadow. Good-ish bad guys, bad-ish good guys, I've never belonged anywhere else.

Right before the election, I was shown some things. How it started, it was worth following. Caution was indicated. *extreme* caution.

Given the starting context, the amount of time, the volume of information, the veracity of the parts I can check without triggering suspicion ... it's real and I think there'd be some advantage to getting it all.

This is going to require some bare metal in a facility outside the U.S.

This is something that will stay up, maybe clear till the midterm election.

And it needs a significant amount of disk space, for unpacking and sorting and such.

1/ Fear and Bitcoin.

Whenever Bitcoin has a bull run, naysayers try to cope with missing the boat by rationalizing why it will fail through “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt” or what we Bitcoiners have nicknamed “FUD.”

The global blockchain market is growing fast & it is expected to grow from USD 3.0B in 2020 to USD 39.7B by 2025 at an impressive CAGR of 67.3% during 2020–2025. The global fintech market has also significantly grown over the past 2 years & so is the case in Southeast Asia. (1/n)

2) Thanks to the increased application of blockchain & cryptocurrency in the region.
With a total pop. of 570M, a young demographic & high Internet usage, Southeast Asia (SEA) is promising for companies & investors in blockchain & crypto.

#Blockchain

3) The use of blockchain in SEA has certainly come far ahead from the time when the technology was seen as another speculative commodity or a mere passing fad.

Today, the application of decentralized finance (DeFi) is under the limelight.

4) The region’s fast-growing economies are well-positioned to drive adoption of #blockchain & crypto. As each country competes to stay relevant in today’s digital age & embrace emerging technologies such as blockchain & #cryptocurrency, large-scale adoption is the key to success.

5) Here’s an overview of where the region is headed in terms of blockchain w/ respect to digital financial transactions.

As the financial hub for SEA, Singapore plays a critical role in supporting the region to push it forward technologically & financially.