this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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That was true back in the days when you could mine your own coins and hold them in your own wallet, but with all the KYC requirements these days, it's pretty hard to get, say, BTC that's not traceable to you.
It's not impossible, but it's certainly not as easy as cash.
It’s just a shitty speculative investment. That’s about it. It’s just reached cult following and hasn’t completely crashed. But when it does someone is going to be left holding a really big bag
The real Michael Burry depicted in the Big Short movie is buying puts against the stock market. Its not just crypto bros that need to ve concerned. All day on Bloomberg today they danced around recession after labor day expectations.
The stock market may be in a bubble, but regular stock investments aren't the same as investing in crypto no matter how much the crypto bros insist it is. Stocks are shares of actual companies that (typically) make things, and they also produce dividends.
All that said, I think the end of QE "forever" is a thing that the C-levels of big companies are still trying to get over. I think it's much more difficult to find retail investor interest in a market where benchmark rates exceed inflation, and it looks like the AI hype juice is starting to run out.
A stock represents a share in the ownership of a company.
It has no inherent requirement that a company 'make things' or produce dividends.
Sure you can invest in companies that make nothing, have no actual value, and pay no dividends... In which case you'd be investing in something a lot more like crypto.
Or you could, you know, not invest in crappy companies nor speculative assets and spend more than five minutes "researching" a thing before sinking significant money into it. Most reputable companies pay dividends and you can even look up the average dividend yield of the stock over years.
GOOGL, AMZN, BIIB, EW, META, none pay dividends but are still generally considered sound investments (META's bullshit forced VR pivot not withstanding).
My portfolio has grown less from dividend stocks (with automatic reinvestment) than from growth stocks without dividends. Your entire positioning argument itself quickly becomes speculative nonsense the more that time passes.
Crypto is volatile and most of it is vapor ware, but as a flip side to that same exact coin, most stocks are volatile and the business plans are vaporware crafted from few centuries of practice taking peoples money. It's all a shell game of belief, don't get too lost in belief to see real trends and changes as they are happening.
There's also considerable strategy differences in terms of making money with investments versus protecting money with investments, and you'd really have to preface an argument with enough context to make it particularly valid over another.
My original point (and the one I still insist is true) is that owning shares in a reputable company and "investing" in the latest shit coin aren't the same thing for a garden variety of different reasons, but the conflationary engine that is your average crypto bro wants to pretend they all are.
And that's leaving it out that one way that the overall stock market differs from crypto greatly is that the government can, has, and likely will continue to take actions to prop it up.
Some cryptocurrency can be truly anonymous using some pretty interesting maths to verify things have properties without revealing the thing (in particular, XMR/Monero is the most well known one for doing this).
However, it's still crypto so it's kinda like instant distrust and heavy skepticism (though I'm slightly less negative than I used to be for the truly anonymous ones as I'm trans and while right now I can still get HRT through normal channels after being on DIY for a bit, a backroute via DIY is always something I like to keep tabs on and within current economic structures crypto of this kind can theoretically be useful as long as it is somewhat inflationary to reduce it's use as an investment vehicle, though I also am anti-currency in terms of my desired economic system ;3)
With things like BTC/Bitcoin or others with a public ledger, you can pay someone a lot to essentially mix your currency with several other people before sending it to new accounts to reduce traceability, but turning it to fiat currency is still often pretty traceable for the reasons you said. To me it also seems money-laundering-ish lol ^.^, there's definitely tons of sketchy shit involved. But it's crypto so that's par for the course ;p