Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

Flobee

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I have no venom. Disagreeing with you doesn't mean I have "venom". Its called disagreeing with you. I have stated many times (and I guess you dont read it), I have bought and sold BTC and I am currently short Puts on IBIT contracts. Maybe @Blazin or @Jysin can explain to you what writing Puts on IBIT mean. Perhaps you don't follow options.

I am going to try this again, like I said this is a convo. I am not full of venom or some such. Shit ask Chanur Chanur what I am like on Twitter.

We, meaning you and a couple of others so far on this thread, have a disagreement on what certain words mean. And I think that is the crux of it. in the financial world, instruments have a value. Many times that value is what something is worth to the buyer. How that value is determined is what varies between both market participants and the individual instrument. Stocks are "generally" valued based on a numerous amount of metrics that are commonly referred to as fundamentals. But not always. <Cough> PLTR <Cough>. Even worse would be the meme stonks. But I digress. Crypto has a value. Be it Doge, BTC or even the Hawktuah coin (praise be her name). This is because someone is willing to buy them.

What crypto does not have, and this is where we are hitting a speedbump, is an intrinsic fundamental value as defined by the financial world. An instrument can have more than one type of value. Options have both time value and intrinsic value. Stocks have book value, stock price value etc. The stock price of a profitable company is generally priced as a multiple of its earnings. Crypto, all crypto, doesn't have this. No matter how much you believe it does, it doesn't. It has value, but its the value someone is willing to pay for it. That's it. The blockchain isn't BTC. You don't buy and sell the blockchain. You buy and sell BTC. If I own BTC, I don't own the blockchain or even the smallest portion of it. A bored Ape NFT sold for $3.4m. The buyer valued it as such. It did not and does not have an intrinsic value of $3.4m, it has that value strictly because someone was willing to pay that for it.

That's all I am saying. I recognize that BTC only has the market value of the current buyer. You may or may not. This is entirely different than how most stocks are valued. Macy's the department store chain has a floor value. Its stock cannot go to zero. Why? Because it owns real estate valued in billions if not tens of billions. If its stock price falls below its book value at some point it gets bought and can be sold off piece by piece for a profit. This is the difference in the terms value and fundamentals I was trying to explain. BTC isn't Macy's. BTC price can go to $1m and Macy's can't (realistically). BTC price can go to zero, and Macy's can't. The reasons lie in intrinsic value.
Yea I totally agree with this and I, at least tried, to point out that we were using the term fundamentals differently.

I'm in no way trying to say that Bitcoin is valued in the same way a stock is, I don't thing anyone is trying to say that.

Regarding you owning Bitcoin that's not really the same as liking or disliking it. That point is really irrelevant and perhaps I should have just left it out. Similarly with using Boomer I'm lumping you into a category, perhaps unfairly, of a trait in my Boomer friends where they struggle separating their understanding of how things have worked historically to how they work now.

I stand by the reasons I believe Bitcoin has value as stated in previous posts but perhaps we were simply talking past one another
 
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Sanrith Descartes

I was forced to self-deport from the /pol thread
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I stand by the reasons I believe Bitcoin has value as stated in previous posts but perhaps we were simply talking past one another
Welcome to FOH :)

As to the BTC Jesus thing, it wasn't meant to insult. Ok, maybe a little bit. I chat about this stuff online all day and for some folks it is like a religion. There really is no conversation. My apologies. I like the image though and I am definitely going to be using it on Twitter :trollface:
 
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Tmac

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I have no venom. Disagreeing with you doesn't mean I have "venom". Its called disagreeing with you. I have stated many times (and I guess you dont read it), I have bought and sold BTC and I am currently short Puts on IBIT contracts. Maybe @Blazin or @Jysin can explain to you what writing Puts on IBIT mean. Perhaps you don't follow options.

I am going to try this again, like I said this is a convo. I am not full of venom or some such. Shit ask Chanur Chanur what I am like on Twitter.

We, meaning you and a couple of others so far on this thread, have a disagreement on what certain words mean. And I think that is the crux of it. in the financial world, instruments have a value. Many times that value is what something is worth to the buyer. How that value is determined is what varies between both market participants and the individual instrument. Stocks are "generally" valued based on a numerous amount of metrics that are commonly referred to as fundamentals. But not always. <Cough> PLTR <Cough>. Even worse would be the meme stonks. But I digress. Crypto has a value. Be it Doge, BTC or even the Hawktuah coin (praise be her name). This is because someone is willing to buy them.

What crypto does not have, and this is where we are hitting a speedbump, is an intrinsic fundamental value as defined by the financial world. An instrument can have more than one type of value. Options have both time value and intrinsic value. Stocks have book value, stock price value etc. The stock price of a profitable company is generally priced as a multiple of its earnings. Crypto, all crypto, doesn't have this. No matter how much you believe it does, it doesn't. It has value, but its the value someone is willing to pay for it. That's it. The blockchain isn't BTC. You don't buy and sell the blockchain. You buy and sell BTC. If I own BTC, I don't own the blockchain or even the smallest portion of it. A bored Ape NFT sold for $3.4m. The buyer valued it as such. It did not and does not have an intrinsic value of $3.4m, it has that value strictly because someone was willing to pay that for it.

That's all I am saying. I recognize that BTC only has the market value of the current buyer. You may or may not. This is entirely different than how most stocks are valued. Macy's the department store chain has a floor value. Its stock cannot go to zero. Why? Because it owns real estate valued in billions if not tens of billions. If its stock price falls below its book value at some point it gets bought and can be sold off piece by piece for a profit. This is the difference in the terms value and fundamentals I was trying to explain. BTC isn't Macy's. BTC price can go to $1m and Macy's can't (realistically). BTC price can go to zero, and Macy's can't. The reasons lie in intrinsic value.

You’re a smart guy and you clearly understand traditional valuation frameworks. But your framework is built around corporate finance, and Bitcoin doesn’t live in that world. You’re trying to measure a non-corporate monetary asset the same way you measure a cash-flow-producing business.

You’re right that Bitcoin doesn’t have "CORPORATE" fundamentals but neither do:
  • gold
  • commodities
  • currencies
  • fine art
  • land without improvements
  • eurodollars
  • barrels of oil
  • collectibles
  • even the USD itself (post-1971, when we fully detached from gold)
It’s not Macy's. It doesn’t produce earnings. IT'S NOT A BUSINESS. It’s not judged on PE ratios or cash flow multiples. So saying “BTC has no intrinsic value because it has no earnings” is the same argument gold skeptics make about gold, yet gold has held value for 5,000 years. Same with oil, art, collectibles, foreign currencies, undeveloped land, and basically every non-cash-flowing asset on earth. None of those have “corporate fundamentals” either, yet nobody claims the euro or a barrel of oil has no intrinsic value.

Bitcoin is a completely different asset class, so you have to use different fundamentals.

Bitcoin’s fundamentals aren’t earnings, they’re monetary and network-based. Things like:
  • fixed supply (21M)
  • non-sovereign issuance
  • decentralized
  • settlement finality
  • global liquidity
  • network security
  • miner investment
  • adoption
  • credible neutrality (no CEO, no board, no government)
Those are its equivalents to “fundamentals.” No one on a trading desk is valuing BTC using discounted cashflows. They look at it the same way they look at gold or FX. AS A MONETARY ASSET whose value comes from scarcity, utility, and demand for a store of value outside traditional systems.

And yeah, theoretically BTC can go to zero. So can gold. So can the euro. Saying something could go to zero doesn’t actually distinguish it.

The real question is whether the asset has monetary properties people value. Bitcoin clearly does and it’s now part of major ETFs, held by institutions, custodied by BlackRock/Fidelity, used as collateral, integrated into the global settlement stack, etc. That’s why “zero” is basically off the table from a practical market standpoint.
 
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Tmac

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Seems like the core misunderstanding here is that you're using the corporate finance definition of intrinsic value (cash flows, liquidation, book value) for an asset that isn’t a corporation.

You can disagree with it, you can think its monetary properties are overrated, you can think it’s overvalued. But saying “BTC has no intrinsic value” because it doesn’t have earnings is just category error. Wrong framework.
 
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Kirun

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Yes, Bitcoin isn't a corporation. Nobody is pretending it should be valued like Macy's. But calling everything that isn't a business "a monetary asset with fundamentals" is just moving the goalposts. Gold has industrial use, real estate has utility, commodities get consumed, currencies have legal tender backing, eurodollars settle real obligations. Bitcoin's value proposition is entirely synthetic. If confidence dries up, there's no fallback use-case holding the floor.

The "fixed supply, final settlement, censorship resistance" spiel is the same checklist every maxi recites, but none of that protects price if jurisdictions choke liquidity. Gold survived bans because it has intrinsic physical demand everywhere on the planet. Bitcoin doesn't. It survives because enough markets allow convertibility. Remove or restrict that, and the "store of value" narrative collapses fast.

And yes, institutions hold BTC now. That cuts both ways. You can't claim Bitcoin is an anti-establishment monetary alternative while pointing to BlackRock, Fidelity, and the ETF complex as proof it won't go to zero. Once Bitcoin depends on legacy rails for price support, it's not an insurgent monetary system anymore. It's just another regulated risk asset trying to behave like a currency without actually being one.
 
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Sanrith Descartes

I was forced to self-deport from the /pol thread
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You’re a smart guy and you clearly understand traditional valuation frameworks. But your framework is built around corporate finance, and Bitcoin doesn’t live in that world. You’re trying to measure a non-corporate monetary asset the same way you measure a cash-flow-producing business.

You’re right that Bitcoin doesn’t have "CORPORATE" fundamentals but neither do:
  • gold
  • commodities
  • currencies
  • fine art
  • land without improvements
  • eurodollars
  • barrels of oil
  • collectibles
  • even the USD itself (post-1971, when we fully detached from gold)
It’s not Macy's. It doesn’t produce earnings. IT'S NOT A BUSINESS. It’s not judged on PE ratios or cash flow multiples. So saying “BTC has no intrinsic value because it has no earnings” is the same argument gold skeptics make about gold, yet gold has held value for 5,000 years. Same with oil, art, collectibles, foreign currencies, undeveloped land, and basically every non-cash-flowing asset on earth. None of those have “corporate fundamentals” either, yet nobody claims the euro or a barrel of oil has no intrinsic value.

Bitcoin is a completely different asset class, so you have to use different fundamentals.

Bitcoin’s fundamentals aren’t earnings, they’re monetary and network-based. Things like:
  • fixed supply (21M)
  • non-sovereign issuance
  • decentralized
  • settlement finality
  • global liquidity
  • network security
  • miner investment
  • adoption
  • credible neutrality (no CEO, no board, no government)
Those are its equivalents to “fundamentals.” No one on a trading desk is valuing BTC using discounted cashflows. They look at it the same way they look at gold or FX. AS A MONETARY ASSET whose value comes from scarcity, utility, and demand for a store of value outside traditional systems.

And yeah, theoretically BTC can go to zero. So can gold. So can the euro. Saying something could go to zero doesn’t actually distinguish it.

The real question is whether the asset has monetary properties people value. Bitcoin clearly does and it’s now part of major ETFs, held by institutions, custodied by BlackRock/Fidelity, used as collateral, integrated into the global settlement stack, etc. That’s why “zero” is basically off the table from a practical market standpoint.
See this is all I was saying from the beginning. Do I think it will go to zero. Most likely no. But most likely isn't the same as it can't.

The funny part about being an investor is I dont have to like the investment. In some ways its better if I don't. I currently am not looking to get IBIT shares because I believe in BTC. I am looking for IBIT shares because I know without hesitation that a fuckton of other people believe the living shit in it. And I can make money off of that belief. I know that they value it out of nothing more than belief.

I most assuredly do not want BTC to go to zero. There is no money in it. I want it to stay volatile as fuck and go up big and down big. There is lots of money in that.
 
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Sanrith Descartes

I was forced to self-deport from the /pol thread
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Seems like the core misunderstanding here is that you're using the corporate finance definition of intrinsic value (cash flows, liquidation, book value) for an asset that isn’t a corporation.

You can disagree with it, you can think its monetary properties are overrated, you can think it’s overvalued. But saying “BTC has no intrinsic value” because it doesn’t have earnings is just category error. Wrong framework.
Intrinsic value isnt just earnings. I said this. A company with negative earnings can still have a large book value. Again its why I used Macy's as an example.

And, BTW, all those commodities you mentioned (gold, oil etc) all have actual values beyond someone wanting them. This gives them a floor. Both have lots of industrial uses that are obvious and dont need a deep discussion of.
 

Flobee

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Yes, Bitcoin isn't a corporation. Nobody is pretending it should be valued like Macy's. But calling everything that isn't a business "a monetary asset with fundamentals" is just moving the goalposts. Gold has industrial use, real estate has utility, commodities get consumed, currencies have legal tender backing, eurodollars settle real obligations. Bitcoin's value proposition is entirely synthetic. If confidence dries up, there's no fallback use-case holding the floor.

The "fixed supply, final settlement, censorship resistance" spiel is the same checklist every maxi recites, but none of that protects price if jurisdictions choke liquidity. Gold survived bans because it has intrinsic physical demand everywhere on the planet. Bitcoin doesn't. It survives because enough markets allow convertibility. Remove or restrict that, and the "store of value" narrative collapses fast.

And yes, institutions hold BTC now. That cuts both ways. You can't claim Bitcoin is an anti-establishment monetary alternative while pointing to BlackRock, Fidelity, and the ETF complex as proof it won't go to zero. Once Bitcoin depends on legacy rails for price support, it's not an insurgent monetary system anymore. It's just another regulated risk asset trying to behave like a currency without actually being one.
Golds value is not from industrial use, it's from being trusted collateral. You don't agree, but you're wrong. This isn't subjective.

You always talk about Bitcoin as if it's USD price is its value, it is not. Anyone arguing otherwise does not understand what this technology is.

It's use case is synthetic though I'll agree there, in the sense that its value is its utility as a payments ledger which is entirely dependent on confidence. The BTC argument is simply that it will continue gaining market confidence as it continues to function as advertised. If it ever fails to do so it would be worthless, yes.

Bitcoin is anti-establishment in the sense that it replaces the current monetary paradigm. Part of this is suit-coiners whether Bitcoin people like it or not. Bitcoin is for enemies after all.
 

Chanur

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I have no venom. Disagreeing with you doesn't mean I have "venom". Its called disagreeing with you. I have stated many times (and I guess you dont read it), I have bought and sold BTC and I am currently short Puts on IBIT contracts. Maybe @Blazin or @Jysin can explain to you what writing Puts on IBIT mean. Perhaps you don't follow options.

I am going to try this again, like I said this is a convo. I am not full of venom or some such. Shit ask Chanur Chanur what I am like on Twitter.

We, meaning you and a couple of others so far on this thread, have a disagreement on what certain words mean. And I think that is the crux of it. in the financial world, instruments have a value. Many times that value is what something is worth to the buyer. How that value is determined is what varies between both market participants and the individual instrument. Stocks are "generally" valued based on a numerous amount of metrics that are commonly referred to as fundamentals. But not always. <Cough> PLTR <Cough>. Even worse would be the meme stonks. But I digress. Crypto has a value. Be it Doge, BTC or even the Hawktuah coin (praise be her name). This is because someone is willing to buy them.

What crypto does not have, and this is where we are hitting a speedbump, is an intrinsic fundamental value as defined by the financial world. An instrument can have more than one type of value. Options have both time value and intrinsic value. Stocks have book value, stock price value etc. The stock price of a profitable company is generally priced as a multiple of its earnings. Crypto, all crypto, doesn't have this. No matter how much you believe it does, it doesn't. It has value, but its the value someone is willing to pay for it. That's it. The blockchain isn't BTC. You don't buy and sell the blockchain. You buy and sell BTC. If I own BTC, I don't own the blockchain or even the smallest portion of it. A bored Ape NFT sold for $3.4m. The buyer valued it as such. It did not and does not have an intrinsic value of $3.4m, it has that value strictly because someone was willing to pay that for it.

That's all I am saying. I recognize that BTC only has the market value of the current buyer. You may or may not. This is entirely different than how most stocks are valued. Macy's the department store chain has a floor value. Its stock cannot go to zero. Why? Because it owns real estate valued in billions if not tens of billions. If its stock price falls below its book value at some point it gets bought and can be sold off piece by piece for a profit. This is the difference in the terms value and fundamentals I was trying to explain. BTC isn't Macy's. BTC price can go to $1m and Macy's can't (realistically). BTC price can go to zero, and Macy's can't. The reasons lie in intrinsic value.
Sanrith is a chill dude.
 
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Arden

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Golds value is not from industrial use, it's from being trusted collateral. You don't agree, but you're wrong. This isn't subjective.

You always talk about Bitcoin as if it's USD price is its value, it is not. Anyone arguing otherwise does not understand what this technology is.

It's use case is synthetic though I'll agree there, in the sense that its value is its utility as a payments ledger which is entirely dependent on confidence. The BTC argument is simply that it will continue gaining market confidence as it continues to function as advertised. If it ever fails to do so it would be worthless, yes.

Bitcoin is anti-establishment in the sense that it replaces the current monetary paradigm. Part of this is suit-coiners whether Bitcoin people like it or not. Bitcoin is for enemies after all.

This is correct. According to the World Gold Council: “Around 10% of gold demand comes from industrial and technology uses (in industries including electronics, dentistry, aerospace and others).”

The rest is derived from the same things that make BTC valuable: global consensus it is a store of value; scarcity; durability; portability; survivability, etc.
 
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Sanrith Descartes

I was forced to self-deport from the /pol thread
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Vine Ok GIF
 

Arden

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I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating because it’s the single most important point here:

Bitcoin has been the best store of value of the modern era.
That’s not an opinion. That’s math.

You can argue “intrinsic vs. intangible,” or debate philosophy all fucking day long- be my guest. But none of it changes the scoreboard. And the scoreboard says:

Since Bitcoin’s launch, the U.S. dollar has lost roughly 40% of its purchasing power.

Since 2011, Bitcoin has risen from about $1 to ~$85,000 — an 85,000× gain, compounding roughly 55–60% a year.

Those are the numbers. They don’t care about your preferred framework.

If you want to get stuck arguing theoretical purity tests, go ahead.

But if you want a proven, high-performing store of value- buy Bitcoin 🤷‍♂️
 
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Synj

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Golds value is not from industrial use, it's from being trusted collateral. You don't agree, but you're wrong. This isn't subjective.

You always talk about Bitcoin as if it's USD price is its value, it is not. Anyone arguing otherwise does not understand what this technology is.

It's use case is synthetic though I'll agree there, in the sense that its value is its utility as a payments ledger which is entirely dependent on confidence. The BTC argument is simply that it will continue gaining market confidence as it continues to function as advertised. If it ever fails to do so it would be worthless, yes.

Bitcoin is anti-establishment in the sense that it replaces the current monetary paradigm. Part of this is suit-coiners whether Bitcoin people like it or not. Bitcoin is for enemies after all.
Something that really clicked for me before I started investing in gold back in 2015 was when I read that during the gold standard, a $20 gold double eagles were pegged to $20 of gold. I don't know why, but I had never really considered how much that affected my view on inflation when I realized how our government just printed the value of our dollars away without anything to actually back it up.

Then I realized, that if I had $20 of paper dollars in 1933 or I had $20 of gold, how dramatically less my paper dollars would be today. Then I realized again, that even at $1100/ounce, I thought, how much will my $1100 in paper dollars be vs $1100 in gold one day for my kids 20-30 years later. I bought about 50 ounces from 2015-2020 and now I realize I made the correct choice (although I wish I had put all of that in NVDA or BTC).

And while I am super late to the BTC party, I finally caught up and am in full belief that it too will have the same type of dramatic value as a storage of wealth, unaffected by printing it out of existence. At least that's my belief. I can't be certain, but I do know that world governments will continue to print fiat, never balance a budget and never have a surplus ever again. And even gold can and has been confiscated in the past.

I don't mean to drone on about inflation or the lessons I think that I've learned, but the value thing always intrigues me because I had a similar conversation with my mom. She didn't trust BTC because she couldn't hold it in her hands. And I laughed because I was like, who even transacts with paper dollars anymore? I mean, I know they exist but it's all just numbers on a screen anymore that we've all assigned value to. Try to go buy a house with cash. Good luck.

And even my precious gold. It has way more historical value attached to it, but its value is purely a social construct as is the dollar. So I don't really see BTC as any different anymore. Time will tell, but I think I'm making a smart decision because I'm 99% certain my paper dollars will be worth less than 1 BTC in the future.

1763774701851.png


Also: I don't know shit.
 
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Kirun

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Golds value is not from industrial use, it's from being trusted collateral. You don't agree, but you're wrong. This isn't subjective.

You always talk about Bitcoin as if it's USD price is its value, it is not. Anyone arguing otherwise does not understand what this technology is.

It's use case is synthetic though I'll agree there, in the sense that its value is its utility as a payments ledger which is entirely dependent on confidence. The BTC argument is simply that it will continue gaining market confidence as it continues to function as advertised. If it ever fails to do so it would be worthless, yes.

Bitcoin is anti-establishment in the sense that it replaces the current monetary paradigm. Part of this is suit-coiners whether Bitcoin people like it or not. Bitcoin is for enemies after all.
You keep repeating "this isn't subjective" as if declaring something absolute makes it true. Gold isn't valuable because of some mystical property of being "trusted collateral." It's valuable because societies chose to use it that way when they didn't have better coordination mechanisms. Once legal, financial, and institutional settlement existed, gold stopped being the core of the system. That's why 1971 proved that the economy didn't run on the metal, it ran on the enforcement layer around it.

And no, Bitcoin's value is not somehow independent of its dollar price. If the USD pair gets destroyed, the BTC cross-market collapses with it because liquidity and global settlement are priced through USD rails. Pretending price doesn't matter is just coping through semantics. Value is what the market says it is, not what your ideology wants it to be.

The "payments ledger with confidence" line actually undermines your own point though. If confidence is the foundation, then Bitcoin isn't fundamentally different from any other speculative asset. Its usefulness is downstream from the belief that others will treat it a useful. That's fine, but it doesn't make it immune to policy pressure, liquidity shocks, or macro cycles. Confidence is not a shield.

But Bitcoin being "anti-establishment" while bragging about institutional custodians, ETFs, and BlackRock onboarding it is peak irony. You can't simultaneously claim it replaces the monetary paradigm and cheer as it's integrated into the very system you say it will overthrow. What you're really describing isn't a monetary revolution. It's an asset class propped up by narrative momentum. That's why when anyone questions the narrative, the rebuttal immediately turns cultish: "You don't understand," "This isn't subjective," "You're wrong, full stop." It has all the very same verbiage of Dogma.
 
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Tmac

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The funny part about being an investor is I dont have to like the investment. In some ways its better if I don't. I currently am not looking to get DOLLARS shares because I believe in DOLLARS. I am looking for DOLLARS shares because I know without hesitation that a fuckton of other people believe the living shit in it. And I can make money off of that belief. I know that they value it out of nothing more than belief.

FTFY
 
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