Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

Don't buy a coin just to diversify. These ain't blue chip stocks. I'm not a 'bitcoin maximalist' but virtually every other coin is trash, including top 10 ones. Put the majority of your money into BTC, which has outperformed all of them. You won't get 100x from BTC anymore but it's a lot safer. Alts are pumped and dumped and that's why they go up fast and down faster. If you do buy an alt for lulz or whatever, don't be afraid to take some profit if it shoots up. If BTC tanks then it pulls down all of the alts with it anyway.

If you're not really into this, then it's easy to get fooled by somebody promising that their coin is revolutionary and is going to topple bitcoin. The reason why BTC is so successful is that the BTC devs are conservative, try hard not to cause network disruption and avoid bloating BTC with stupid features, which only serve to increase the attack surface. This is a natural consequence of requiring a broad consensus to implement changes. BTC also can't (realistically) be 51% attacked like alts can.

BTC is what you want if inflation is your main concern. I wouldn't touch ETH until you understand the tech to some degree. Most alts run on Ethereum so I definitely wouldn't touch them until I understood ETH. I would suggest getting some BTC to start and use that as a launching point to get educated on crypto. Next step being ETH so you can interact with the Defi applications which are probably going the be the hotness in the next couple of years.

Regarding exchanges I would suggest Gemini if you want ACH or Kraken if you're willing to wire money (assuming US). Kraken has slightly lower fees, but unless you're trading it doesn't matter much. Don't keep your crypto on the exchange, for a number of reasons but most of all so that you learn how custody works with crypto. Custody is what makes it special IMO. As for a hardware(cold) wallet I would suggest getting a trezor or a nano



I use Metamask as a hot wallet, but you won't need that unless you're doing stuff with Ethereum.


Outside of that I would suggest reading the Bitcoin whitepaper to get started learning about why this all exists and what they're trying to do:


Similarly I would suggest reading the whitepaper for any coin or project you're looking into. They're not always trustworthy, but it gives you a starting point for what they are ostensibly trying to do. I don't know of any good "dummies" guides although I'm sure they exists. Its still the wild west so best to just buy a little bit and start digging in. Plenty of info out there once you start using it and trying to figure things out.

The Bitcoin Standard is a good book to familiarize with this world.

So I've been keeping my eye on the developments of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) and this article has a pretty interesting take on them, essentially stating that they're probably too little too late.

Central banks researching CBDCs are motivated by finding an additional means of monetary inflation to the existing means of issuing increasing quantities of fiat currencies. By issuing CBDCs directly to the public, commercial banks are by-passed, and central bankers hope to forensically target where the inflation is applied. A successful introduction of a CBDC could eliminate the impediment of contracting bank credit which occurs at the end of every credit cycle.

The further benefit for central banks is it will increase their power as an organ of the state at the expense of commercial banks, potentially becoming more important than the state itself. However, the current economic situation is deteriorating more quickly than a working CBDC can be introduced, so the whole exercise is likely to be too late to have any relevance to monetary policy in the foreseeable future.

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I think they're being a bit optimistic that countries aren't even going to try since it will fail anyway. I think we see many non-US countries create CBDCs to try to get off of the dollar standard. Once the first country releases one we're going to see a number of countries rush to try to catch up since this is essentially a way for them to further centralize monetary control.

IMO everyone should be concerned about this as the privacy issues alone are staggering without even considering issues on a monetary policy level. Owning decentralized currencies is a way to hedge against monetary policy risk in general, but especially if heavily centralized currencies are our future.

Buy Bitcoin.

I'm just starting this podcast, but I really like both of these guys and so far its pretty great.

Both OG financial guys that are now all-in on Bitcoin/crypto. Explain their perspective from the inside of the financial machine. I've listened to a TON of Simon Dixon and he's heavily influenced how I look at the financial system. He was the original venture capitalist for crypto and also called just about everything thats happened financially in the last 10-15 years. Including the financial crash from COVID + the emergence of CBDC's and its all on Youtube.

Falxy-US said:

Can someone "explain like I'm 5" how a bitcoin hardware wallet works?

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In a nutshell the hardware wallet works with a public-key private-key architecture.

Your public key is the hardware wallet address that you use to receive funds (addresses are hexidecimal numbers ex. 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa) and the wallet itself holds the corresponding private key required to access that wallet.

If you don't have the hardware wallet (private key) you cant remove funds from the wallet. Hence why hardware wallets are called "cold storage" because they are stored offline in a physical device.

You can send funds to any public key without any permissions but in order to move funds off from a public key, you need the private key

Falxy-US said:

So, the bitcoin is not actually stored on the wallet. It's still stored online or whatever, but you have to have the hardware wallet key to be able to withdraw coins?

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Exactly.

Think of the blockchain as a big shared database. Falxy-US wallet has 1 BTC would be a row on this database. In order to move the BTC from that row to a different row requires the hardware wallet's private key to authenticate the transaction.

This is why you can lose your actual hardware wallet, but as long as you don't lose your seed phrase, recover the private key. This is also one reason why Bitcoin has inherent value. It is a distributed ledger that no one has centralized control of. No one can take your money unless you fuck up securing your wallet.

Looking for a blockchain for their CBDC experiments. Monetary reform is coming?

Ethereum is positioning to replace SWIFT in the banking system. Consensys is the company behind the research and development of Ethereum. This is pretty huge

Relevant crypto news is coming fast and furious recently. Fidelity just filed for institutional investor fund for Bitcoin.

The early documentation provides little in the way of details about the fund, and shows zero investors have currently participated. We do know that the minimum investment to join the pooled investment fund is $100,000, indicating this is likely only for institutional and accredited investors.... the firm recently published the results of a survey of 800 institutional investors from the U.S. and Europe, finding that 36% of respondents were already invested in digital assets, while 60% said digital assets had a place in their portfolio.

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The time for retail investors to get in is right now. If you're interested but intimidated by the technical knowledge aspect then just buy and leave on an exchange until you've done the research. We're probably within a year or so of the price popping. I mean DYOR, but it would suck for the price to make the move that is starting to look inevitable and you're stuck with your dick in your hand because you didn't want to research the tech aspect.

LachiusTZ said:

Eh, I feels like I said missed the boat in Bitcoin.

Prolly put more into ethereum tho

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If you buy the digital gold narrative then its worth keeping in mind:

Bitcoin Market Cap - $212 Billion
Gold Market Cap - ~$10.9 Trillion

If you think Bitcoin could hit gold's market cap that is about $610,000 per bitcoin. They'll always mine more gold, can't make more bitcoin.

Here is a visualization chart that I used for gold's market cap. Shows the space for growth in crypto well.