Uh, yeah, right. I agree with your sentiment, but don’t have a lot of hope in your expectation. Investing in feeble, over-priced college tuition didn’t work out that way. Investing in poorly vetted mortgages also allowed people to make tons of money with little risk due to the aforementioned bailouts. 
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For college tuition, the issue is government regulation that made student loans harder to discharge in bankruptcy and the DoE a lender. These should be private sector loans only with no special treatment (unsecured). Lenders would have much tighter lending criteria and higher interest rates would lead to lower demand for bogus degrees and universities not becoming pseudo resorts of casual questionable learning.
Second bailout was mostly about sub-prime mortgage lending practices. A lot of that could have been fine and corrected itself if not for the packaging of these mortgage-backed securities into derivatives (CDOs) nobody knew any more how risky they were. Throwing in rating agencies with conflicts of interest and investment banks becoming too big to fail, it’s easy to see in hindsight where it was going but not as clearly volatile/risky as bitcoin. There was after all some tangible collateral (real estate) underneath it all.
That’s why for Bitcoin, great if it works for your portfolio but should it somehow not pan out, you should be SoL with nobody to blame but your own greed making you fall for a get-rich-quickly scheme.
Sadly, our society has a history of fostering a huge accountability gap so I’m not that hopeful that these crypto investment won’t creep up by getting packaged into other investments under the BS of asset class diversification.
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Right, and in many ways BTC isn’t risky for the market because everyone knows it’s risky. No one will lend you 100x leverage on billions backed by BTC or doggie coin or whatever. Worth repeating from earlier in this thread
Safe assets are much riskier than risky ones . This is I think the deep lesson of the 2008 financial crisis… Systemic risks live in safe assets. Equity-like assets — tech stocks, Luna, Bitcoin — are risky, and everyone knows they’re risky, and everyone accepts the risk. If your stocks or Bitcoin go down by 20% you are sad, but you are not that surprised. And so most people arrange their lives in such a way that, if their stocks or Bitcoin go down by 20%, they are not ruined.
On the other hand safe assets — AAA mortgage securities, bank deposits, stablecoins — are not supposed to be risky, and people rely on them being worth what they say they’re worth, and when people lose even a little bit of confidence in them they crack completely. Bitcoin is valuable at $50,000 and somewhat less valuable at $40,000. A stablecoin is valuable at $1.00 and worthless at $0.98. If it hits $0.98 it might as well go to zero. And now it might!
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+1
NPV of future cash flows. Everything else is speculation/greater fool
some of us don’t want “Wallets” but rather trade/convert online platforms. Much like GLD vs physical gold
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This times ten. There are a couple sites like this that I frequent, where overmoderation chokes legitimate discussion. On Bogleheads it’s LadyGeek that tends to be draconian. The particular issue that really annoyed me recently was a discussion on Washington State’s long term care tax and strategies to avoid/minimize it. There was some reform being debated in the legislature last year that would have potentially impacted people that filed for an exemption. But because pending legislation was considered political talk… posts were deleted on it. I found it ridiculous, the whole point of a forum like this is discussing the what-ifs.
Bitcoin, imo, is a legitimate topic for discussion at this point. You can, and should, be able to argue its merits or faults to death. Speaking of bad advice - you had a ton of people there advocating for folks to throw money into bonds because it was “safe” - something that hasn’t exactly panned out in a rising interest rate environment.
To be very clear, these are private sites and they can do whatever they want. I’m not arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to do so. But I am saying that overmoderation makes some sites a lot less enjoyable than they could be. This is one reason why I like this community - we can discuss pretty much anything we want within reason and boundaries are generally respected.
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GLD vs physical gold is a clear difference in how you hold and transact your gold asset. Buying/selling them is gonna be different depending on form of storage.
By contrast, whether you hold bitcoins in your wallet at Coinbase (just one example) or in a ETF from Blackrock, you’re still going to use a private business website/app to transact your bitcoins either way. Underneath it all, they will still be held in a wallet. Only one of them will charge you regular fees even if you just buy & hold them.
I can buy the argument that it’ll make it easier to hold them in some specific type of accounts. I just don’t think this is worth the expense ratio charged. But it’s fine with me if some are willing to overpay.
Coinbase etc are riskier IMO (I learnt the hard way with BlockFi (see posts above)
I trust Fido and Blackrock etc a lot more (they’ll get bailed out 
)
I hope nobody gets bailed out. Period. Coinbase, Fido, Blackrock, my uncle with his latest crypto hype. I don’t care who it is. I’m tired of allowing anyone to privatize gains and socialize losses. Let them crash and burn.
P.S.: full disclosure, our entire position is currently around $1500 (BTC on Coinbase.com) from ETH mined by DH in 2018-2019 as a bet (exchanged for BTC when The Merge was approaching in late 2021). Although DH still sees it as a fun experiment, I don’t particularly care if it goes back to $0 since that’d still be more than we put it (long story). In fact, I’d welcome not having to report that junk on tax returns any more.
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The reality is that those big boys are well-connected/" systemic".
I posted about the Fold debit card deal before. My calendar 2023 year-end haul was nearly $400 in rebates on my mortgage and credit card payments, sent to a Coinbase wallet I set up. While I found the price of bitcoin to be quite volatile, the entire process was pretty easy to get the cash for it.
PayPal has recently made changes in how they process some of these payments. For Chase and AMEX, the Fold deal is dead. My mortgage servicer (TMS, now Servbank) still works, however.
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The firm behind the Terra / Luna blowup goes bankrupt
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Bogleheads Thread on crypto taxes. Get in before their hatchetman moderator locks the thread…
https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=7672632#p7672632
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Although personally, we did not have any realized gains/losses, this stuff could be much easier to deal with. And at least with Coinbase, it’s not too bad. Just need to check the Taxes section to see if you have gains/losses and whether they issued you a tax form.
But this stuff IMO is possibly the best advertisement for going with the bitcoin ETF at Fidelity or another big provider. Much easier to have them figure out your tax liability. Probably much simpler tax liability anyway since you’re not gonna be staking with ETF investment.
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An ETF would also allow you to easily hold crypto within a Roth IRA, negating the need to track any tax reporting essentially.
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Definitely a new option for people to gamble with their retirement savings. But on the flip side, since the only coin having an ETF is on bitcoin, in a buy & hold strategy, you could also hold bitcoins in your wallet and not have to report anything as long as you don’t transact.
Risky – wallets get lost or stolen, passwords get forgotten 
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True. There’s always cold storage for your private keys. Very safe but can be physically stolen/lost. Otherwise, some exchanges have FDIC protection up to $250k against theft/hacks but I don’t think that’d help if your account access is compromised through a fault of your own. And most of these have very good 2FA supporting physical keys (like Yubico) and authenticator apps.
So custodian or non-custodian wallets have different risks and you’d have to weight your specific risk vs the expense ratio of the ETFs.
You are capturing the volatility of bitcoin through the ETF. The Fidelity bitcoin ETF FBTC has been down 10% and is now up 18% over the past month. For comparison, the technology sector ETF XLK has been a steady gainer of 5.7% over the same period.
Interesting bedfellows, the left and bitcoin
ELIZABETH WARREN PIVOTS ON BITCOIN, HONORS NAKAMOTO WITH FLAG OVER CAPITOL
After years of vilifying Bitcoin as money for criminals, terrorists, and climate change deniers, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) honored Satoshi Nakamoto for the 15th anniversary of the network’s launch with a commemorative flag flown over the United States Capitol, unveiled by NYC’s PubKey.
In participation of the Capitol Flag Program, Senator Warren’s office submitted a request to commemorate Nakamoto’s accomplishment of creating the first “truly inclusive financial system,” with the colors of the United States being flown above the Capitol on December 18, 2023 – a date known to Bitcoiners as HODL Day.