This ad reminds me of the old story about how Joe Kennedy knew it was time to get out of the market in 1929 when his shoe-shiner started giving him stock tips. In a way, I think this ad might be evidence of the exact opposite thing it is saying.
For Bitcoin this is about it gaining mainstream recognition, in a way it still is not recognized, since some countries want to ban it, in others it is unregulated and so on.
But for 1929 is about when even people that normally wouldn't be investing, think they are good investors because they are investing and getting impressive returns, it means the stock market is overheated, and more sensible investments are not giving enough returns.
That said we are in a 1929 situation right now, in my opinion, not only stocks keep rising, but seeing even meme cryptos skyrocketing, a rise in employment in cassinos bigger than employment in production (according to jobs data in US), and seeing people that can't pay their own expenses properly "investing", makes me think something is seriously wrong with the economy, not just in US mind you, I am seeing in other countries a rapid proliferation of investment advice online courses and coaches, rapid gains in questionable investments, a rise in popularity of scams and pyramid schemes, basically people want to save, can't figure out how to save, and are burning money in the cheapest options (meanwhile a good choice would be buy land for example, but despite me being in the top 5% richest in my country, I can't afford any, at all! I live in a "projects" style rented apartment and despite me wanting to actually farm, all my income is going in paying the ever increasing food, medicine and rent costs! I can't afford buying property, much less electronics, toys, etc... that would move the economy beyond the bare mininum).
The point of this ad is not "use Bitcoin as a currency" it is "buy Bitcoin as an investment".
This really is about "people that normally wouldn't be investing, think they are good investors because they are investing and getting impressive returns".
I'll reference a previous related comment of mine to avoid rewriting everything here [1].
In short, the root cause behind everything you're talking about is low interest rates and money supply inflation. Rich people have been on an asset buying spree (primarily real estate but not only) by borrowing at close to 0 interest, which makes ownership of those assets more and more out of reach from everyone else as they bid each other up.
'Coincidentally', the world happened to be in lockdown during the bulk of this money printing, limiting inflation in consumption goods and making this transfer of wealth stay outside the zeitgeist.
The gambling craze among the lower classes is the tail-end of that.
A fun continuation is that Joe Kennedy made a lot of money insider-trading. He then helped to create and was the first Chairman of the SEC, closing off numerous avenues for others to get wealthy how he did.
Let’s not respect the gusto. Just going to quote a brilliant observation shared on hn yesterday by wolverine876.
“There's a 'hot' subculture in our society that says 'if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying', that refers to lies as 'hustle', that rewards and embraces deception as just agressiveness and boldness, as a norm for life and business and even a celebration of human nature - as if the worst elements of human nature define us any more than the best, as if we don't have that choice (at least, that's how I am trying to articulate it).”
I'm not sure either. They make no effort to subvert or even argue against that trope. Why reference a trope that argues the opposite of your point without putting in any effort to refute it?
Maybe it's the same as how scam emails are intentionally obvious.[0] They want to filter out anyone smart enough to spot a scam before they waste time. In Luno's case, they might be trying to filter out anyone with any shred of investment knowledge.
They're trying to fool noobs into believing they are the smart money: "Look at this hype, if I get in now I can make a ton of money before the house of cards collapses".
People were referencing exactly this in 2018 when BTC hit $20k and even taxi drivers were talking about cryptocurrency. It then crashed a bit and people felt vindicated. Little did they know at the time that it would rise again all the way to $60k, and people are fucking buying decommissioned power plants to mine… And it’s not just BTC, meme shitcoins created within an hour are apparently serious business now. Rationality is mostly out of the window, it’s hard to predict anything anymore (well, at least harder than ever).
Bitcoin “crashed” again, it’s at 39k. Also, people where right at 20k, it fell down to 3k which was a much better time to buy.
Really though the only numbers that matter are when you buy and when you sell. Some people got rich buying at 30$ and selling recently, others lost money buying at those same prices but selling at the wrong time.
In 2017 a lot of people I know randomly called me to ask about bitcoin. I didn't own any at the time but I knew it was only a matter of time before it would crash. It can't be a good sign when people who never heard about it before suddenly start wanting to sell property in order to invest in it.
Well, of course. Bitcoin is zero-sum. For every winner, there has to be a loser. It's not like investing in Chinese solar panel makers or wind turbine makers in Denmark, which generate actual revenue and profits.
Bitcoin needs a growing supply of suckers. At some point, the sucker supply runs out.
Well none of this has any effect on the bitcoin network now does it? What's being controlled is subway ad-space and perhaps people's ability to transact with fiat (in order to exchange it for bitcoin).
> Well none of this has any effect on the bitcoin network now does it?
After having been stripped of most of the functionality that gave BTC it's original value proposition, you might be surprised at the degree to which it really does need ads like this to attract fresh investors.
BTC killed it's most powerful tool for cementing it's position as the leading cryptocurrency, it's network effect.
They killed it by merging "full replace by fee", making it trivial to cheat bitcoin-accepting merchants during times of higher network congestion. This made it even super risky for merchants and many opted out. They even had a much safer alternative (FSS-RBF) ready to merge.
They killed it by using the size of OP_RETURN to gaslight Counterparty, a company that was trying to build a rich smart contract ecosystem (yeah like Ethereum has now) on top of bitcoin. This was the second time the core devs' hatred of smart contracts killed new use cases for the coin. The first time led Vitalik to create Ethereum.
They killed it by blanket censoring on all the big bitcoin related communication channels all discussion about increasing the blocksize and/or building/supporting alternative BTC full nodes. This censorship completely fractured the community and directly led to the network fork called Bitcoin Cash. As a result of this fork, many of the oldest supporters and infrastructure devs left BTC forever.
Such as? It was started as an experiment -- I think it's been an insanely successful experiment. Don't be pedantic here and claim it was supposed to be some kind of money, but it's not.
It's much more than that now, and in inspiring Etherium and all the other new paradigms, it's totally changed alot of people's thinking.
> Don't be pedantic here and claim it was supposed to be some kind of money, but it's not
From the Bitcoin whitepaper, page 1 paragraph 1 sentence 1
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution
Transferring large sums cheaply without either party needing bank accounts, speculation, inflation/"doomsday" hedging, private transactions (public, but not necessarily tied to your identity), smart contracts (escrowed transactions for example).
The bitcoin whitepaper puts forth some pretty clear ideological statements. Similar things had been tried before, this was the first successful, widespread attempt. I would hesitate to call it "experimental".
You might call me pedantic as well, however I would argue that your definition of successful differs from others; it certainly is insane though, greed as a leading metric tends that way.
Yes and it has similar causes. Very low (in fact negative) interest rates set by the FED and ECB on top of „quantitative easing“ policies. After the subprime crisis and especially now due to the Corona crisis we have unprecedented monetary expansions.
This is why people cannot simply put part of their earnings into a simple savings account anymore — traditionally a low-risk way to accrue interests and leaving the risky investment schemes to more knowledgeable people. In these times everybody thinks to be a good investor ...
People calling for banning Bitcoin should rather consider where this trend is ultimately coming from and start questioning our current monetary system instead.
Personally, I am quite positive towards certain cryptos but I think these crazy pumps and dumps we see currently are not only fueled by technological craze but especially by bad monetary policies implemented by irresponsible governments addicted to deficit spending on the one hand and central banks supporting the abuse. In the long run Bitcoin and DeFi blockchains might actually help bringing back reason and humility into the financial sector but currently they are driven by a huge surplus of money created by the very people in power now demonizing cryptos.
I'm not a cryptocurrency promoter. I bought early (~2012) and researched how it works and why and have watched the aforementioned disinformation campaign kick in over the last six months.
Everyone who disagrees with your point of view isn't a conspiracy theorist. Have conversations with people, don't be ignorant.
Remember the conspiracy nuts who said WMDs were a lie? Or the nut jobs who said the lab escape origin for Sars cov 2 should be taken seriously? Yea. I didnt see the comment you just replied to but Im pretty mad at people who dismiss everything they've been told not to like the way you just did.
Considering how tightly traditional securities are regulated, that is quite likely. In fact, is such advertising even allowed? I can't recall ever seeing a "BUY $CORP" billboard in my life. All advertising even vaguely related to investing has half its time/space dedicated to disclaimers.
I have seen ads for investment trusts in the UK in railway stations, Janus Henderson in this case. That was a for an investment house not and individual security.
I have had several of their trusts in my portfolio for decades now.
I'm quite sure actually. Every ads I've seen in the tube or ads for trading app has a clear warning text about the risks. This one has none and that's the problem, this is not about bitcoin itself.
> At least with gold, you can make something with it.
Well, no, you can't use Bitcoin for integrated circuitry. Since it's literally bits, it's not useful as jewellery either. So let's put that aside. There isn't even a point discussing it. Gold wins here, hands down. Some people do think the addresses, both in b64 and QR form are quite aesthetic tho...
What we are really discussing is the ease and cost of transacting these assets. Ask any South African armed transport guard, and he'll tell you that he'd only transport gold in a heavily armoured truck, with heavy weapons and backup. Despite that, a lot of trucks, with far less value than gold in it, get violently hijacked every year. Sometimes even with RPG's! I can't imagine the cost of all that, but let's just agree that it's extremely expensive. So I think you can safely say that gold is both harder and more expensive to mine, transact and to look after than Bitcoin. Meanwhile all you need to keep your Bitcoin safe is a private key.
Bitcoin has at least 4 highly valuable use cases.
1. It's regulation resistant. When two parties voluntarily agree to exchange Bitcoin for a trade, nobody can step in between.
2. It's crime resistant. It's almost useless for extortions due to how flagged addresses and accounts can be tracked and shut down by users and exchanges.
3. It's easy and painless to transact across borders and regulated regions.
4. It's a store of value, due to how it's an absolutely finite resource.
It beats gold hands down in all these categories. On top of that it's far more environmentally friendly than gold. But no, you can't fill your teeth with it.
None of this matters to ASA. All they care about is that the number of pounds you can swap for Bitcoin can go up or can go down, so Luno have to say that in their adverts. They'd be held to the same standard if they were flogging index funds.
- If a workaround is found to its cryptographic formula, it goes to zero immediately,
- If quantum computing is invented,
- If a government tightens the tax declarations about it, making it a pain for a lot of holders who would then look into liquidating en masse,
- If EY wanted to squash ransomware (as France does, being #1 victim) and requires “source of wealth proof” for every BTC transaction,
- If a country like US or China assimilates BTC to terrorism or evasion, since Iran has been found using it to circumvent petrol restrictions, since Chinese people use it to evade the country, any country could decide for any reason that BTC is illegal and provoke a mass sale.
It might be the case, and if it is it means that in the worst case, you'd still have 10%, which is more than the nothing that a 100% speculative asset has.
Of course they would. The speculation of future growth and sustained growth is built into the price of all stocks. And if you think that's wild wait until you learn about derivatives.
I guess on a super literal level, predicting future cash flows based on past cash flows is "speculation", but certainly not in the same way that derivatives are.
> Advertising must be clear that the value of investments, unless guaranteed, could go down as well as up, ASA rules stipulate.
One thing you can guarantee is that the value of GBP could only go down with these fools in power. Maybe we should have some rules stipulating that must be clear during political campaigning.
Surely with the debt load the UK has right now, one can only hope the GBP depreciates at a slow but steady rate over the next few years?
Here in Canada it's considered a disaster if the dollar rises too much too quickly. We're an export-oriented economy and a rising dollar depresses the manufacturing and extraction industries every time it happens.
You say GBP going down like it's an inherently bad thing and I can't figure why. If either CAD or the GBP started consistently appreciating over time, both countries would be in quite a lot of trouble. In fact the monetary policy and debt issuance policies assume slight depreciation.
I understand the macroeconomic argument, but I still think that the fact that inflation will totally destroy an uninvested, normal middle-class-sized savings account in less than a generation is a huge obstacle for normal people building wealth. That is the inherently bad thing about it.
I primarily attribute the growing "wealth gap"---the growth in the net wealth owned by the top 0.1% of people, from a 5% share in 1970 to a 20% share in 2020---to the end of Bretton-Woods and the gold standard (1971).
