My explanation is I don't take any remark as a literally as you do, especially in a disingenuous fashion meant to further a political argument.
Ex. Ball player says, "we're going to kill 'em tomorrow".
You: "omg this athlete says he's going to murder his opponents at the game tomorrow."
Me: "no he didn't lol."
You: "FULL STOP. Here's the quote. He literally said it. Did he not say the word "kill 'em"???? Why are you denying that he said he was going to kill people? Clearly he has communicated his intent and endorsement of murder, we need no further context for this speech. "
Do I have to to search through them all to give you soundbites of him saying less extreme advice like "invest an amount your comfortable with" (which is an actual quote.) Does the context of his speech even matter, or are you playing the social media game of clipping soundbites? Because that doesn't sound like you're actually giving anything else he says credit, you're providing no intellectual capital to this conversation. You're playing politics and news opinions.
The point is what are you trying to achieve by putting these one off quotes on blast? As if in the hundreds of interviews he's had, this is the most relevant and significant quote.
You're trying to cast dispersion on the popular characters behind Bitcoin because you hate Bitcoin, correct?
Edit to include the quote in above video:
"Okay, look, it's totally strange to have a financial instrument, which is scarce and capped, because you can print more tech stocks, you can print more bonds, you can mine more gold, you can issue more fiat currency. On the other hand, in the engineering world, when you're designing pneumatic systems or hydraulic systems, nobody ever built a pneumatic system with a leak, a hydraulic system with a leak. Your swimming pool doesn't even work with a leak, right? Everybody knows if there's a leak in the fuselage of the airplane, it's not going to fly, it's going to explode. So, you don't have a leak in a nuclear reactor. Do you ever try to go across the ocean and a ship with a leak?
Okay, the idea of a closed system is basic to every freshman in engineering. I'm an MIT engineer. We talk about something called adiabatic lapse. An adiabatic system is no leak. A closed system is when you have mass in the system that can either leave or can be added, and all you can do is inject energy. So, Bitcoin is the classic textbook closed system. There's 21 million coins, virtual bars of gold in the system. You can't remove any, you can't add any. There's no inflation.
On the other hand, what you can do is you can heat it up. If you're buying Bitcoin above the 4-year or the 200-week moving average, you're heating up the system. If you're buying it below the 200-week moving average, you're cooling down the system. The entire thing's like a massive monetary battery, a capacitor. It's storing energy. What we've done is created a system where I can take $100 million of monetary energy, I can put it into the Bitcoin network. It'll sit there for as long as you can imagine, and there's no power loss. That's the genius of it.
If I told you I was going to inject another million Bitcoin or two or three million Bitcoin, I'm bleeding off, I'm diluting the energy. So, when I describe it as a closed system, what I'm saying is for the first time in the history of man, we created a monetary energy network that will store the energy over time with no power loss. We've never had a money. We've never had a thing that could do that. Gold didn't do that. Copper, silver doesn't do that. Fiat doesn't do that. Stocks and bonds don't do that. So, it's really an engineering breakthrough.
But hey, he said the literal words "mortgage your house", so we'll just repeat those words out of context to show that he must be a sleazeball scumbag right.
Its fascinating to me people take what he says literally, probably because they need to argue against proponents of the things they hate.
If you ever watch any of his interviews he rationally examines monetary policy and his reasons for liking Bitcoin. He is an MIT graduate in (Aeronautics?) Engineering, and makes analogies to closed energy systems.
He's not just saying "buy bitcoin". He's doing it himself. He's actually borrowed billions of dollars against his company to make such bets. That's skin in the game. That's conviction, as real as it gets. Still, someone people will try to say he's manipulating the market, he's only doing this to pump and dump. Maybe, but his company's is public, and so his balance sheets are public. What bigger bet could you possibly make then borrowing billions of dollars you don't have?
What he's describing what his literal path, and what he's actually done, and how he got obsessed with Bitcoin. If you think he's advising people to invest money they don't have, then I'm afraid you aren't actually paying attention to the conversation.
Are you trying to argue that transaction capacity is the most important metric?
If so, then you don't want Bitcoin. You can use Paypal.
However if you want to own an asset that can't be debased by central banks, where your transactions can't be censored, where you can participate from anywhere geographically, then you might want Bitcoin.
Those features come at a transaction capacity tradeoff.
Yes, but can you convince the hardcore PoW maximalists to join your fork? IMO Bitcoin is doing its best to be a raw, pseudo-physical element.
That means immutability, costs rooted in the physical world, etc. The community will change its protocols sparingly and slowly.
To some who prefer rapid change and development this is unattractive. But to Bitcoiners, decentralization and immutability are the foundations of this new type of property. They are uninterested in technical gains that come with complexity and risk.
I once worked at a startup which had put together a binder of documents, declaring the company's vision, values, principles, etc. They strongly suggested new hires go through it at least briefly.
Publicly listed companies are equally available opportunities for anyone participating in the contribution rate-limited game of Roth IRA maximization.
Private share contributions give huge asymmetric upside to private investors/founders. Yes they take risk in that their shares still have to end up being worth something one day, but clearly the upside tax advantages are ridiculously unbalanced against the middle class because not everyone has access to early stage investments.
So, even the playing field by:
- Letting anyone invest in early stage companies (this has many other implications)
Inflation is absolutely a "bad" thing in the same way that gaining weight from eating ice cream is "bad". It is the consequence of indulgence. An increase in the cost of living is generally never a "good" thing.
The question is if it is controlled and the tradeoffs worthwhile.
One problem with this that now you need expertise in building a cheap, high quality school. And how do you know your product (education) will be better than competing products?
And by what metric do you compare the effectiveness of your school vs competition? "Retaining customers", so does that mean we judge a school's quality by year over year revenue growth, since that indicates customer retention?