| MW & Crypto 17:00 - May 19 with 23485 views | karl |
He maybe is the world's richest man?
On the podcast he was asked about investing in Crypto and, almost matter of factly, said not to go near them.
1 week later they've crashed, he's got the markets in his hand!
Hopefully he shorted on them and gave Les and Lee the tip too so we've got oodles of cash to burn on transfers again!!
Edit
Russian Bot on the other hand may be looking for a hand out... [Post edited 19 May 2021 17:01]
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| MW & Crypto on 21:58 - May 19 with 9032 views | DWQPR |
I’ve worked in financial services for well over 30 years and to be honest I still don’t get cryptos at all. Anyone who has ‘invested’ in them must be absolutely mad. They are not currencies in any way. I long for the day that Bitcoin collapses and for once it seems the Chinese are right in that they have just legislated against them. |  |
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| MW & Crypto on 01:24 - May 20 with 8855 views | Jigsore |
I mean anyone who's made any real cash from them has got out a long time ago. Once Elon Musk got on them you know they were fcked. |  |
| “The thing about football - the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football.†|
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| MW & Crypto on 08:02 - May 20 with 8657 views | dutch |
MW and Crypto. Is Mark Warburton the richest man on earth? | | | |
| MW & Crypto on 08:13 - May 20 with 8626 views | nix |
| MW & Crypto on 21:58 - May 19 by DWQPR |
I’ve worked in financial services for well over 30 years and to be honest I still don’t get cryptos at all. Anyone who has ‘invested’ in them must be absolutely mad. They are not currencies in any way. I long for the day that Bitcoin collapses and for once it seems the Chinese are right in that they have just legislated against them. |
I don't really get them at all but it just seems like some kind of Ponsi scheme, I can't see how else they have any value? Could you shed any light? |  | | |
| MW & Crypto on 08:32 - May 20 with 8576 views | LythamR |
I think Bot will be fine, the most recent "Pump" drive seemed to be pretty much over, Coincidently around the time of his last post on here.
Even on todays crashed price its still 237% up year on year, it may well go lower still of course but I think any celebrations over its demise might be premature. |  | | |
| MW & Crypto on 08:41 - May 20 with 8554 views | Metallica_Hoop |
David Bewick(sp) on LBC this morning (I like to think it's Konk) told Nick Ferrari its way above his pay grade to understand them, be very careful if investing and know what you are doing.
He's been trading since 1977 I think! |  |
| Beer and Beef has made us what we are - The Prince Regent |
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| MW & Crypto on 09:03 - May 20 with 8491 views | Northernr |
| MW & Crypto on 08:32 - May 20 by LythamR |
I think Bot will be fine, the most recent "Pump" drive seemed to be pretty much over, Coincidently around the time of his last post on here.
Even on todays crashed price its still 237% up year on year, it may well go lower still of course but I think any celebrations over its demise might be premature. |
Awwwww, pleeeeeeeeeeeeease?  |  | | |
| MW & Crypto on 09:23 - May 20 with 8435 views | LazyFan |
| MW & Crypto on 21:58 - May 19 by DWQPR |
I’ve worked in financial services for well over 30 years and to be honest I still don’t get cryptos at all. Anyone who has ‘invested’ in them must be absolutely mad. They are not currencies in any way. I long for the day that Bitcoin collapses and for once it seems the Chinese are right in that they have just legislated against them. |
Same here.
But originally it was useful to people who needed to move wealth around. By people, I mean dodgy people, such as criminals, tax dodgers (also criminals) and covert government operations (also criminals). People who did not want to use common means to move money around, especially when converting it out of its original base currencies.
Crypto was useful for this as it's hard for the governments to trace it, especially when they were for ages not even watching for it and most law enforcement around the world still are not watching it. Then even if you watch for it you have to understand it, even if you do that, you need to build a case against the criminals and then you have to explain that understanding to a jury who don't understand it.
When criminals make it difficult to prosecute then they become harder targets and the law usually gives up. We see this often with white-collar crime and hence the low cases against this type of crime.
With nothing to stop it as it's unregulated and gaining ground with criminals, it gains momentum and is mis-sold by chancers (exchanges and boiler traders) as a new currency and attempts at legitimacy a constantly marketed at everyone else. People like Musk buy into it until they are eventually starting to understand it. Don't believe Musk when he says it's now about the environment as other crypto does not have that problem and he does not care about the environment for his batteries that go into his products. Now Musk knows it's flawed and he's out.
So, what's the flaw?
Money is only as good as the organisation that backs it as it's a promise of value. Can you trust that promise? Most money is backed by governments who usually do not go bust. But even some of them do go bust sometimes, Argentina in the 90's. Also, a saviour for governments like the IMF will come in and help out (although sometimes they are worse than the disease).
Whereas Crypto is backed by the people who use it and exchanges so, businesses and some dodgy people and some good misguided people. That's a recipe for disaster as when the business that backs it goes bust as many businesses do (some exchanges have been hacked), there is no saviour to rock up as they are not governments and like any business, they are more likely to go bust than compared to governments. Thus the risk is higher than say sterling. And this is a product that really has no track record as money, whereas money like sterling has been around for hundreds of years and is backed by the UK government with commodities such as the gold reserves.
But people only see the price go up (even though it goes down many times) and that they could make money. They also don't see the other costs, like the environment and so on. Now people are getting wise to what it really is and we shall I predict to see it go up and down until it goes down. We wont see the end yet, but it wont end well as its backed by anything stable really. |  |
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| MW & Crypto on 10:44 - May 20 with 8307 views | dannyblue |
I understand it this way:
Every time a financial transaction happens, it is written down in a ledger. Some money gets added to one account and subtracted from another. In the normal world, a centralised institution like a bank writes the ledger and makes sure the money doesn’t end up in two places at once. In the crypto world, Satoshi Nakamoto devised a system to safely log a transaction on a distributed ledger shared across a network with no single centralised institution in control.
To make this work without anyone cheating:
- A transaction happens and a competition is announced.
- Computers on the network do a Piece of Work (completing a mathematical task).
- The computer that gets the answer first wins the right to write the transaction in the ledger (add the block to the chain).
- As a reward the winner receives some cryptocurrency, which is created from nothing specifically for the purpose (mining).
- The difficulty of the Piece of Work is altered automatically to control how much new cryptocurrency is created.
The problem is that the Piece of Work acts as a handbrake:
- Whoever wins the competition has to spend A LOT of energy on processing power to win the competition.
- Whoever doesn’t win the competition HAS ALSO spent a lot of energy on processing power.
- The more valuable the reward of currency is (if for example bitcoin has gone up and up), the more people will compete to win it, and so the more the winner will have to spend on energy to win, and, of course, the more energy will have been wasted by those who don’t win.
- The more transactions there are, the more such competitions will occur.
So more valuable the currency becomes and the more it is used, the more energetically expensive it becomes. But you can't remove this handbrake because then someone might be able to cheat and double spend.
People argue about the exact numbers, but in 2018 bitcoin used <25% of the energy of the entire banking system. In 2021 it used almost 50%. This is about the same energy as a mid-sized European country. These are numbers from people promoting crypto. But bitcoin only does a tiny fraction of what banking does. There are hundreds of thousands more 'normal' transactions than crypto transactions each day. If it was ever to become more significant, if it was to approach even 10% of what banking does, the energy consumption would be astronomical! Right now, remember, it's still almost impossible to buy anything with it.
Bitcoin and other currencies are massively energy expensive compared to their usefulness, and this will only get worse if they’re used more. They have a handbrake that cannot be removed that makes them totally impractical at any scale. Decentralised digital currencies have incredible potential, but this potential cannot be released until someone invents another protocol that keeps them legit but doesn’t cost the earth.
Until then, this incredible rise in price we have seen, despite current falls, is based on hype not potential growth, because structurally bitcoin and similar cannot really sensibly become much more prevalent than they are today, at least if as a planet we have any intention of trying to meet carbon emission targets. |  | | |
| MW & Crypto on 10:44 - May 20 with 8307 views | karl |
| MW & Crypto on 09:23 - May 20 by LazyFan |
Same here.
But originally it was useful to people who needed to move wealth around. By people, I mean dodgy people, such as criminals, tax dodgers (also criminals) and covert government operations (also criminals). People who did not want to use common means to move money around, especially when converting it out of its original base currencies.
Crypto was useful for this as it's hard for the governments to trace it, especially when they were for ages not even watching for it and most law enforcement around the world still are not watching it. Then even if you watch for it you have to understand it, even if you do that, you need to build a case against the criminals and then you have to explain that understanding to a jury who don't understand it.
When criminals make it difficult to prosecute then they become harder targets and the law usually gives up. We see this often with white-collar crime and hence the low cases against this type of crime.
With nothing to stop it as it's unregulated and gaining ground with criminals, it gains momentum and is mis-sold by chancers (exchanges and boiler traders) as a new currency and attempts at legitimacy a constantly marketed at everyone else. People like Musk buy into it until they are eventually starting to understand it. Don't believe Musk when he says it's now about the environment as other crypto does not have that problem and he does not care about the environment for his batteries that go into his products. Now Musk knows it's flawed and he's out.
So, what's the flaw?
Money is only as good as the organisation that backs it as it's a promise of value. Can you trust that promise? Most money is backed by governments who usually do not go bust. But even some of them do go bust sometimes, Argentina in the 90's. Also, a saviour for governments like the IMF will come in and help out (although sometimes they are worse than the disease).
Whereas Crypto is backed by the people who use it and exchanges so, businesses and some dodgy people and some good misguided people. That's a recipe for disaster as when the business that backs it goes bust as many businesses do (some exchanges have been hacked), there is no saviour to rock up as they are not governments and like any business, they are more likely to go bust than compared to governments. Thus the risk is higher than say sterling. And this is a product that really has no track record as money, whereas money like sterling has been around for hundreds of years and is backed by the UK government with commodities such as the gold reserves.
But people only see the price go up (even though it goes down many times) and that they could make money. They also don't see the other costs, like the environment and so on. Now people are getting wise to what it really is and we shall I predict to see it go up and down until it goes down. We wont see the end yet, but it wont end well as its backed by anything stable really. |
Very interesting
Thanks | | | |
| MW & Crypto on 11:15 - May 20 with 8239 views | Boston |
| MW & Crypto on 09:23 - May 20 by LazyFan |
Same here.
But originally it was useful to people who needed to move wealth around. By people, I mean dodgy people, such as criminals, tax dodgers (also criminals) and covert government operations (also criminals). People who did not want to use common means to move money around, especially when converting it out of its original base currencies.
Crypto was useful for this as it's hard for the governments to trace it, especially when they were for ages not even watching for it and most law enforcement around the world still are not watching it. Then even if you watch for it you have to understand it, even if you do that, you need to build a case against the criminals and then you have to explain that understanding to a jury who don't understand it.
When criminals make it difficult to prosecute then they become harder targets and the law usually gives up. We see this often with white-collar crime and hence the low cases against this type of crime.
With nothing to stop it as it's unregulated and gaining ground with criminals, it gains momentum and is mis-sold by chancers (exchanges and boiler traders) as a new currency and attempts at legitimacy a constantly marketed at everyone else. People like Musk buy into it until they are eventually starting to understand it. Don't believe Musk when he says it's now about the environment as other crypto does not have that problem and he does not care about the environment for his batteries that go into his products. Now Musk knows it's flawed and he's out.
So, what's the flaw?
Money is only as good as the organisation that backs it as it's a promise of value. Can you trust that promise? Most money is backed by governments who usually do not go bust. But even some of them do go bust sometimes, Argentina in the 90's. Also, a saviour for governments like the IMF will come in and help out (although sometimes they are worse than the disease).
Whereas Crypto is backed by the people who use it and exchanges so, businesses and some dodgy people and some good misguided people. That's a recipe for disaster as when the business that backs it goes bust as many businesses do (some exchanges have been hacked), there is no saviour to rock up as they are not governments and like any business, they are more likely to go bust than compared to governments. Thus the risk is higher than say sterling. And this is a product that really has no track record as money, whereas money like sterling has been around for hundreds of years and is backed by the UK government with commodities such as the gold reserves.
But people only see the price go up (even though it goes down many times) and that they could make money. They also don't see the other costs, like the environment and so on. Now people are getting wise to what it really is and we shall I predict to see it go up and down until it goes down. We wont see the end yet, but it wont end well as its backed by anything stable really. |
Sterling is a Fiat currency, the UK does not have the gold or commodity reserves to support it. | |
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| MW & Crypto on 11:56 - May 20 with 8157 views | swisscottage |
Block chain technology is the future of payments when used as part of an underwritten, backed currency that can be redeemed/exchanged easily and used mainstream.
Current Crypto currencies like Bitcoin, are not underwritten by governments, or anyone in fact, and are literally just a strings of bits and bytes that have no real value other than what some idiot gives to it.
[Post edited 20 May 2021 12:04]
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| MW & Crypto on 12:00 - May 20 with 8143 views | Juzzie |
I don't claim to understand it's mechanics (thanks for the posts above, very helpful) but I do know you can't go to Sainsbury's and pay for your shopping with 1/300 of a Bitcoin. So it's not really 'currency' is it.
It's a trading platform used to move much large sums around (probably a lot of it is iffy as mentioned above) and quite a volatile one at that. After years of slow growth it spurted last summer then in the last month it dropped 25% then another 30% just the other day before going up a little again. That's too volatile to be used as day to day currency (even though traditional currency has known to go south but that is very rare).
[Post edited 20 May 2021 12:06]
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| MW & Crypto on 14:40 - May 20 with 7986 views | karl |
Changed days from when I used to ask to get paid in 50p notes (we had them in the Isle of Man) so it looked a lot in my wallet | | | |
| MW & Crypto on 15:07 - May 20 with 7916 views | Boston |
| MW & Crypto on 12:00 - May 20 by Juzzie |
I don't claim to understand it's mechanics (thanks for the posts above, very helpful) but I do know you can't go to Sainsbury's and pay for your shopping with 1/300 of a Bitcoin. So it's not really 'currency' is it.
It's a trading platform used to move much large sums around (probably a lot of it is iffy as mentioned above) and quite a volatile one at that. After years of slow growth it spurted last summer then in the last month it dropped 25% then another 30% just the other day before going up a little again. That's too volatile to be used as day to day currency (even though traditional currency has known to go south but that is very rare).
[Post edited 20 May 2021 12:06]
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Volatility is a problem but, in whose interests would it be to instigate such?
Bitcoin and the hundreds of other crypto currencies currently in existence, are driven by those uncomfortable with the way governments / The Fed , manipulate money. The possibility of those with nefarious reasons to use it for shady deals is inevitable, fraud exists everywhere. | |
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| MW & Crypto on 15:12 - May 20 with 7902 views | LazyFan |
| MW & Crypto on 11:56 - May 20 by swisscottage |
Block chain technology is the future of payments when used as part of an underwritten, backed currency that can be redeemed/exchanged easily and used mainstream.
Current Crypto currencies like Bitcoin, are not underwritten by governments, or anyone in fact, and are literally just a strings of bits and bytes that have no real value other than what some idiot gives to it.
[Post edited 20 May 2021 12:04]
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But governments can pull that backing at any time. For example, refusing to accept Zimbabs currency when the country was defaulting on its debt. Same for Blockchain, they can just refuse to accept it at any time (unless there is a contract and even then) and then the liquidity in the market is gone and you have a worthless non-asset.
Promises can be broken. | |
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| MW & Crypto on 15:26 - May 20 with 7854 views | Boston |
| MW & Crypto on 15:12 - May 20 by LazyFan |
But governments can pull that backing at any time. For example, refusing to accept Zimbabs currency when the country was defaulting on its debt. Same for Blockchain, they can just refuse to accept it at any time (unless there is a contract and even then) and then the liquidity in the market is gone and you have a worthless non-asset.
Promises can be broken. |
Ask the bookies. | |
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| MW & Crypto on 15:38 - May 20 with 7838 views | TheChef |
Crypto or whatever, at the end of the day isn't international finance just numbers on a screen?
I mean is anything actually backed against anything any more?? |  |
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| MW & Crypto on 21:52 - May 20 with 7649 views | swisscottage |
Quite right.
The value of any currency is down to the strength of the institutions that underwrite it.
Disasters, natural or otherwise, wars, disease outbreak scan have a significant affect.
In many regards the best most stable currency is still gold for those with enough to make trading it for common currencies at need efficiently
It has numerous strong characteristics that make it extremely useful, and its rarity and longevity (doesn't oxidise over time) help to support it as a stable currency/asset. And in fact it is still used heavily as a currency in India.
Compare that to a crypto currency that has absolutely zero use other than as a trading marker, and then decide where you'd rather put your money for the long term.
Its price will fluctuate, but in general it is the one currency that stands firm, or even increases in value in times of instability. [Post edited 20 May 2021 21:54]
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| MW & Crypto on 22:02 - May 20 with 7631 views | distortR |
| MW & Crypto on 14:40 - May 20 by karl |
Changed days from when I used to ask to get paid in 50p notes (we had them in the Isle of Man) so it looked a lot in my wallet |
And that's what first attracted me to you!
there I was, down on my heels and nursing a pint in the Bay View when you walked in with your bulging wallet.
Well hey, I thought, I'll show this rich, young man who smells of seafood, pleasures he never knew existed.
So we watched Simon Stainrod scoring against Preston, and Karl was smitten. | | | |
| MW & Crypto on 23:30 - May 20 with 7513 views | GloryHunter |
| MW & Crypto on 10:44 - May 20 by dannyblue |
I understand it this way:
Every time a financial transaction happens, it is written down in a ledger. Some money gets added to one account and subtracted from another. In the normal world, a centralised institution like a bank writes the ledger and makes sure the money doesn’t end up in two places at once. In the crypto world, Satoshi Nakamoto devised a system to safely log a transaction on a distributed ledger shared across a network with no single centralised institution in control.
To make this work without anyone cheating:
- A transaction happens and a competition is announced.
- Computers on the network do a Piece of Work (completing a mathematical task).
- The computer that gets the answer first wins the right to write the transaction in the ledger (add the block to the chain).
- As a reward the winner receives some cryptocurrency, which is created from nothing specifically for the purpose (mining).
- The difficulty of the Piece of Work is altered automatically to control how much new cryptocurrency is created.
The problem is that the Piece of Work acts as a handbrake:
- Whoever wins the competition has to spend A LOT of energy on processing power to win the competition.
- Whoever doesn’t win the competition HAS ALSO spent a lot of energy on processing power.
- The more valuable the reward of currency is (if for example bitcoin has gone up and up), the more people will compete to win it, and so the more the winner will have to spend on energy to win, and, of course, the more energy will have been wasted by those who don’t win.
- The more transactions there are, the more such competitions will occur.
So more valuable the currency becomes and the more it is used, the more energetically expensive it becomes. But you can't remove this handbrake because then someone might be able to cheat and double spend.
People argue about the exact numbers, but in 2018 bitcoin used <25% of the energy of the entire banking system. In 2021 it used almost 50%. This is about the same energy as a mid-sized European country. These are numbers from people promoting crypto. But bitcoin only does a tiny fraction of what banking does. There are hundreds of thousands more 'normal' transactions than crypto transactions each day. If it was ever to become more significant, if it was to approach even 10% of what banking does, the energy consumption would be astronomical! Right now, remember, it's still almost impossible to buy anything with it.
Bitcoin and other currencies are massively energy expensive compared to their usefulness, and this will only get worse if they’re used more. They have a handbrake that cannot be removed that makes them totally impractical at any scale. Decentralised digital currencies have incredible potential, but this potential cannot be released until someone invents another protocol that keeps them legit but doesn’t cost the earth.
Until then, this incredible rise in price we have seen, despite current falls, is based on hype not potential growth, because structurally bitcoin and similar cannot really sensibly become much more prevalent than they are today, at least if as a planet we have any intention of trying to meet carbon emission targets. |
This sounds like the plotline for a SF movie! |  | | |
| MW & Crypto on 23:32 - May 20 with 7508 views | karl |
| MW & Crypto on 22:02 - May 20 by distortR |
And that's what first attracted me to you!
there I was, down on my heels and nursing a pint in the Bay View when you walked in with your bulging wallet.
Well hey, I thought, I'll show this rich, young man who smells of seafood, pleasures he never knew existed.
So we watched Simon Stainrod scoring against Preston, and Karl was smitten. |
A plastic bag of 50p coins would never have got me into this situation | | | |
| MW & Crypto on 00:42 - May 21 with 7471 views | CiderwithRsie |
We need to get back to the good old days when wealth was measured in something you could actually live off, namely cattle. So far I've got a couple of steaks in the freezer and several pints of milk in the fridge, I'm hoping to have assembled an entire cow before I hit 65. | | | |
| MW & Crypto on 00:58 - May 21 with 7454 views | kensalriser |
| MW & Crypto on 11:15 - May 20 by Boston |
Sterling is a Fiat currency, the UK does not have the gold or commodity reserves to support it. |
Not directly, but the Bank of England does still hold gold reserves. 310 tonnes, in fact.
https://www.gold.co.uk/info/uk-gold-reserves/ |  |
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| MW & Crypto on 01:13 - May 21 with 7426 views | Boston |
Now think of a number and double it. There are third wo...er, emerging nations with greater reserves.
Hopefully, we'll have kicked the bucket before the shite hits the fan. [Post edited 21 May 2021 1:15]
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