Re: Bitcoin, crypto currencies, block chain

[Guest]

I'm no fan of Jamie Dimon but this long quote is spot on and obviously Jamie is no dummy. It's the very best quote that sums up the fallacy and fraud of Bitcoin. If a friend were to ask me about Bitcoin, I would show them this quote and say this is all you need to know about Bitcoin.

Here’s a transcript of some of Dimon’s comments:

“I could care less about bitcoin. I don’t know why I said anything about it. The blockchain is a technology which is a good technology. We actually use it. It will be useful in a lot of different things. God bless the blockchain. Cryptocurrencies, digital currencies, I think are also fine. JPMorgan moves $6 trillion around the world every day, and we don’t do it in cash, it’s done digitally. If it can be done digitally with the blockchain, so be it. But it will still be a dollar cryptocurrency. What I have an issue with is a non-fiat cryptocurrency. So crypto sterling, euro, yen, they are all fine. I don’t personally understand the value of something that has no actual value. You all can do whatever you want and I don’t care.

“I could care less what bitcoin trades for, how it trades, why it trades, who trades it. If you’re stupid enough to buy it, you’ll pay the price for it one day. I’ve also told people that it can trade at $100,000 before it trades to zero. Tulip bulbs traded for $75,000 or something like that.

“The only value of bitcoin is what the other guy’ll pay for it. Honestly I think there’s a good chance a lot of the buyers out there are out there jazzing it up every day so that maybe you’ll buy it too, and take them out.

“I quite mean that by the way. People are very good at manipulating the press these days and getting news out. Every day, you have CNBC, nonstop bitcoin — Who cares about bitcoin? The world economy’s so big, JPMorgan alone, $6 trillion, we move all this money, and bitcoin in total, all these currencies, $50 billion dollars, maybe a billion dollars trades a day.

“The other thing I’ve always [said] about bitcoin, governments — and this is not a technological statement — governments are going to crush it one day. Governments like to know where the money is, who has it and what you’re doing with it, in case you haven’t noticed. Right?

“And governments like to control their currency, like to control their own economy. So China’s already put curbs on it. Japan, they say Japan accepted bitcoin. No they didn’t. What I gather Japan did was they call it J-coin. It’s a yen cryptocurrency. It’s not a non-fiat [digital currency].

“People have said legitimately ok, it’s close to gold. Not really. Gold is limited, it’s been around for along time. [People also say bitcoin is] close to a fiat currency. Not really. A fiat currency is when a government says this is your legal tender, you have to give it and accept it.

“And a central bank — of course they can misuse it. The central bank [can also] inflate it. So there is a use case for bitcoin. If you live in Venezuela, North Korea, if you’re a criminal, great product. I mean that. It’s better than cash or deposits in that country. Cuba.

“But this is the last time I’m ever going to answer questions about bitcoin because I really don’t care.

“When I made that ‘stupid statement’ [calling bitcoin a] fraud, my daughter sent me an email saying, ‘Dad, I own two bitcoins.’ My formerly smart daughter.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/13/jamie-d ... tupid.html

[Guest]

Dimon was born in New York City, one of three sons of Greek immigrants Theodore and Themis (née Kalos) Dimon, and attended The Browning School. His paternal grandfather was a Greek immigrant who changed the family name from Papademetriou to Dimon to make it sound French, and worked as a banker in Izmir and Athens. He has an older brother, Peter, and a fraternal twin brother, Ted. Dimon's father and grandfather were both stockbrokers at Shearson.

He majored in psychology and economics at Tufts University, where he graduated summa cum laude. At Tufts, Dimon wrote an essay on Shearson mergers; his mother sent the paper to Sandy Weill, who hired Dimon to work at Shearson doing budgets during one summer break.

After graduating, he worked in management consulting for two years before enrolling at Harvard Business School, along with classmates Jeff Immelt, Steve Burke, Stephen Mandel, and Seth Klarman. During the summer at Harvard, he worked at Goldman Sachs. He graduated in 1982, earning an MBA as a Baker Scholar.

After graduation from Harvard Business School, Sandy Weill convinced him to turn down offers from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Lehman Brothers to join him as an assistant at American Express. Although Weill could not offer the same amount of money as the investment banks, Weill promised Dimon that he would have "fun". Dimon's father, Theodore Dimon, was an executive vice president at American Express.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Dimon

A Baker Scholar is a person who graduated in the top 5% of the class at Harvard Business School. That makes him well qualified to talk about Bitcoin, unlike hacks like Michael Saylor. Dimon knows money forwards and backwards.

[John]

Some of these articles are out of date.

[Guest]

Jamie Dimon says bitcoin is ‘worthless’

Published Mon, Oct 11 20211:26 PM EDT
Updated Mon, Oct 11 20218:28 PM EDT
Taylor Locke

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon calls bitcoin ‘worthless,’ as the cryptocurrency tops $57,000
Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO, isn’t a fan of bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value.

“I personally think that bitcoin is worthless,” Dimon said during an Institute of International Finance event on Monday, CNBC Pro reported.

But, “I don’t want to be a spokesperson — I don’t care. It makes no difference to me,” he said. “Our clients are adults. They disagree. That’s what makes markets. So, if they want to have access to buy yourself bitcoin, we can’t custody it but we can give them legitimate, as clean as possible, access.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/11/jpmorga ... hless.html

[Guest]

The 2017 quote is the best summary of what Jamie Dimon has said to give someone a basic understanding of why Bitcoin is worthless. For those who want more, there is more out there and I'll quote it later. But Jamie himself hasn't said anything that is better than the 2017 quote and I quoted it because he is clear and a credible source with proper qualifications.

[Guest]

Russia proposes ban on use and mining of cryptocurrencies

By Elena Fabrichnaya
and Alexander Marrow


Summary

Russian c.bank proposes ban on cryptocurrency use
Regulator warns of risks to financial stability
Analysts say wider impact negligible for now
Ban on cryptocurrency exchanges also proposed

MOSCOW, Jan 20 (Reuters) - Russia's central bank on Thursday proposed banning the use and mining of cryptocurrencies on Russian territory, citing threats to financial stability, citizens' wellbeing and its monetary policy sovereignty.

https://www.reuters.com/business/financ ... 022-01-20/

[Guest]

Personality and Psychological Traits of Bitcoin Investors

ANOVA analysis revealed that investors (Bitcoin and share) had higher NS, RD, and ST scores, lower HA, SD, CO scores, higher FoMO and MDQ scores, and lower STAI-T scores than non-investors. Moreover, Bitcoin investors had higher NS scores and lower CO scores compared to share investors.

Our results are consistent with a study by Conlin et al. (2015) that showed that stock investors display distinctive personality traits such as high NS, RD, and low HA, compared to non-investors. In addition, our results are in line with previous studies suggesting that stock investors and non-investors show differences in personality traits, such as openness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (Oehler et al., 2018; Tauni et al., 2017).

Previous research has shown that there is a correlation with the dimensions of the Big Five and the traits of the TCI (De Fruyt et al., 2000). NS, which refers to the tendency for behavioral activation and exploration when faced with novel stimuli (Cloninger et al., 1993), is positively related to the extraversion trait of the Big Five (De Fruyt et al., 2000). NS is also associated with exploratory activity in response to novel stimulation, impulsive decision-making, and sensitivity to reward cues (Cloninger et al., 1993). HA is the tendency for behavioral inhibition when faced with danger (Cloninger et al., 1993). Nervousness is an indicator of high HA, whereas being relaxed in potentially harmful situations indicates low HA (Cloninger et al., 1993). RD is the tendency to maintain previously rewarded behavior, especially with respect to signals received from others (Cloninger et al., 1993). RD is positively correlated with extraversion and openness (De Fruyt et al., 2000). Persons with high RD are motivated by emotional stimuli, are more social and interactive with others, and seek others’ approval (Cloninger et al., 1993). Conceptually, RD is likely to be associated with FoMO as well as with a higher online use. SD is an individual’s self-determination, while CO refers to the acceptance of other people (Cloninger et al., 1993). Low CO is related to social intolerance, revengefulness, opportunism (Cloninger et al., 1993), and a less agreeable personality (De Fruyt et al., 2000). ST refers to the experience of spiritual ideas (Cloninger et al., 1993). In light of these characteristics, our results show that investors are more exploratory, extraverted, impulsive, sensation, and reward seeking, less risk averse, and more influenced by sentiment and social interaction than non-investors. In addition, investors place more value on acceptance from others rather than on their own, and are more socially intolerable, revengeful, opportunistic, less agreeable, but also more spiritual.

The higher FoMO scores of investors (Bitcoin and share) compared to those of non-investors indicate that the former are more sensitive to rewarding experiences than the latter (Przybylski et al., 2013), which is consistent with previous studies suggesting that FoMO is a crucial driver in investment settings (Pichet, 2017). This is also linked to a higher RD in the TCI. The higher MDQ scores of investors over non-investors reflect investors’ higher affective instability and impulsivity (Paterniti and Bisserbe, 2018), which are conceptually linked to neuroticism of the Big Five. The lower trait anxiety scores of investors are linked to their lower HA tendency compared to non-investors (Jiang et al., 2003). FoMO, MDQ, and STAI-T scores did not differentiate Bitcoin investors from share investors.

Bitcoin investors exhibit common personality and psychological features of general share investors, but are distinguished among them by their high NS and low CO. The temperamental characteristics of Bitcoin investors may be linked to their investment styles in this study, represented by more experiences of loss, greater percentage loss, higher trade frequency, and more problems (e.g., chasing losses) due to Bitcoin investments. Oehler et al. suggested that more extraverted individuals would pay higher prices for and buy more financial assets when assets were overpriced, compared to less extraverted individuals (Oehler et al., 2018), which explains why Bitcoin investors have invested in Bitcoin despite the formation of a price bubble. Revengefulness and opportunism explain chasing losses and excessive trading. Additionally, Bitcoin investors’ higher NS and lower CO scores were the same as gamblers’ TCI profiles (Janiri et al., 2007), reflecting their gambling tendencies. The K-CPGI scores of Bitcoin investors in this study were significantly higher than those of share investors. Based on these results, we suggest that Bitcoin investors have a higher propensity to gamble than share investors. In summary, Bitcoin investors have a tendency to trade excessively, and when compared to general investors, they seem to be overly active, sensation-seeking, impulsive, opportunistic, and revengeful.

The main value of this study is the adoption of clinical scales such as TCI to compare investors and non-investors, Bitcoin investors, and share investors. Although these scales are mostly popular psychological tests in current psychiatric practice and research (46), they have never been applied to research on the Bitcoin market to the best of our knowledge.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10 ... 02295/full

[Guest]

It will get there, I'm not worried about it, it's you that has the fear of missing out - you missed out you think and don't realize how much further it will run, so you have hate - which is typical of the losers who don't use their brain regarding this pristine asset.

"fear of missing out" - FoMO

It's common for people who experience emotions like FoMO to think that other investors or potential investors are experiencing the same emotions, and that others can be fooled based on those emotions, and those others will take the Ponzi off their hands at higher prices.

The higher FoMO scores of investors (Bitcoin and share) compared to those of non-investors indicate that the former are more sensitive to rewarding experiences than the latter (Przybylski et al., 2013), which is consistent with previous studies suggesting that FoMO is a crucial driver in investment settings (Pichet, 2017).

But that's not the case, which is why specific personality types chase bubbles at the top and get caught whereas others don't.

[Guest]

Sure enough, Gensler soon approved the first bitcoin futures-based ETF, the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF, which began trading on Oct.19. A second bitcoin futures ETF, the Valkyrie Bitcoin Strategy ETF, began trading on Oct. 22.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/10/decisio ... n-etf.html

These bitcoin ETFs based on derivatives were introduced a month before Bitcoin crashed. This is probably not a coincidence.

[Guest]

Billionaire Stan Druckenmiller Warns Crypto, Meme Stocks, Bonds Are in a Bubble: 'This Bubble Is in Everything'

MARKETS AND PRICES
by Kevin Helms

Nov 7, 2021

Klarman, who is the CEO of hedge fund Baupost Group, reportedly asked him: “If the bond market is what everybody’s keying off of and the bond market is in a bubble, then everything’s a bubble, is that fair?” Druckenmiller replied:

Yeah, crypto, meme stocks, art, wine, equities … This bubble is in everything, every asset on the planet.

https://news.bitcoin.com/billionaire-st ... verything/


Nov 7, 2021 was the all time high in Bitcoin before it crashed!