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An article in today's WSJ supports Gregmal's point of view. https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-housing-market-is-nearly-4-million-homes-short-of-buyer-demand-11618484400?mod=hp_featst_pos3 "The U.S. housing market is 3.8 million single-family homes short of what is needed to meet the country’s demand, according to a new analysis by mortgage-finance company Freddie Mac." "“We should have almost four million more housing units if we had kept up with demand the last few years,” Mr. Khater said. “This is what you get when you underbuild for 10 years.”

A recent article in the WSJ described a large home builder selling an entire community of new homes to a public company and generating twice the profit that they would have made selling them to individuals. That seems a bit like an investment mania in a world starved for yield. Maybe everything will stay ok as long as rates stay artificially low for another 10 years and current nominal prices stay put while inflation adjusts them in real terms. But if rates return to normal levels, all bets are off. Price to rent ratios don't make any sense compared to historical norms.

I'm thinking about taking screen caps of posts on this board and selling them as NFTs with very reasonable prices starting in the low thousands. I'll even give Sanjeev 50% of the profits since it's his board. Anyone want to buy a NFT of one of their own posts from me?

In a sign of the crypto-times, a piece of digital art just sold at auction for $60,000,000. It is a collage of a bunch of graphic images. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/11/most-expensive-nft-ever-sold-auctions-for-over-60-million.html If you'd like to view it without shelling out the $60,000,000, you can see it here for free: https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/beeple-first-5000-days/beeple-b-1981-1/112924

Thanks for the responses. "If the US is serious about releasing a digital dollar..." Doesn't that already exist in substance? I get paid electronically in US dollars. I pay my bills electronically using US dollars. I pay merchants the same way. I'd guess that 99 percent of my inflows and outflows are electronic and in US dollars. So why do I need a different electronic currency? "If you are going to wait until you can spend crypto everywhere you shop the opportunity to get in early will be gone." What opportunity? Buying bitcoin doesn't give you partial ownership of the system any more than having US dollars in a bank gives you partial ownership of the bank or paying for things using a Visa gives you ownership of Visa.

If the point of cryptos is DeFi, do you really have DeFi if you use CeFi to add funds to your wallet and use CeFi to reconvert your crypto to cash to pay for things? The dude in this video literally transfers funds from his bank account to his crypto wallet, then pays for things at a store by reconverting his crypto to cash on a debit card.

Interwoven in these posts about energy use are suggestions that the real value is the system that bitcoin is creating: "Bitcoin and a handful of other smart-contract based tokens have the ability to replace the entire global infrastructure for finance" "it had the potential to eat the entire payment/processing/settlement industry at the very least." The only problem with this is that buying bitcoin doesn't give you ownership of the system where the real value purportedly is.

The point? The two investors in Google at least agree on what it is - a business. With bitcoin, most advocates can't agree on what they've sunk their money into. A payment network? Software? A bank in cyberspace? An egalitarian progressive technology? A few posts ago, I asked if someone could provide me another example of a currency whose price was solely stated in other currencies and no one could. It's interesting to me that many advocates don't even refer to it as a currency anymore, despite that being the purported original intent. I'm not arguing that this won't go to $100k or $1 million, what I'm positing is that the very fact that hardly anyone can actually articulate what they have sunk their money into isn't a good sign supporting the substance of their speculation. BTW, I don't mean to insult anyone I just truly don't get what I'm seeing here and I am open to being educated. Can I ask a question of the advocates - My understanding is that tracking bitcoin transactions requires a lot of computing resources. Right now, there is an incentive to compute because new bitcoin is mined as a result. What happens when substantially all bitcoin has been mined? Will there be a continued incentive to do all the computing necessary to track what will then presumably be an exponentially higher number of transactions? If not, will the premise behind the network (distributed ledgers) fall apart?

Reading through this thread, it's interesting to see that even bitcoin advocates can't seem to agree on what bitcoin actually is. Last week when the Microstrategy CEO was on CNBC talking his book after borrowing $1 billion to buy bitcoin, he said the following: "bitcoin is a bank in cyberspace" "it's a store of monetary energy" "the price of bitcoin reflects the monetary energy of the bank in cyberspace" "bitcoin is property not a security" "bitcoin is the most widely held investment asset in the world" "bitcoin is the dominant digital monetary network" "bitcoin is an egalitarian progressive technology" "it's the ideal institutional safe-haven asset" "it will replace stock indexes like the S&P 500 and the Dow, bond indexes, and the like"

Avoiding a slowly depreciating currency by buying something that has and could depreciate 50 percent overnight is a better option?

Thanks for the response. "How do you quote the value of the dollar if not in relative terms of what it can buy? Whether that be in goods, labor, or other currencies, the only value of any currency is relative. Why would crypto be different?" In a store in the UK, they don't state prices in terms of US dollars, they say the price is XX Pounds sterling. Same with other countries. Bitcoin et al. are supposedly their own currency, but nothing is priced in Bitcoins (not even its own currency). How can something be its own currency when it is never stated in its own currency units? "So when it comes to moving USD it's either cheap or fast - but you don't get both." So, illegal transactions and very large transactions that need to happen really fast are the two advantages of virtual currencies? How often do people need to move large amounts of funds really fast and is the price/existence risk of holding Bitcoin instead of cash worth the $15 savings for a wire fee for what is likely to be an infrequent transaction? "in this instance, the coin/token IS the network." Again, it sounds like the reason for buying virtual currency is access to a speedy transaction. What would happen to the price of virtual currencies (as stated in U.S. dollars) if big players in the payment processing industry announced tomorrow a new system using their networks that would allow for exchanges of large amounts of dollars really fast? Thanks again.

Three questions: Bitcoin et al. are purportedly their own currencies, albeit in virtual form. Are there any other currencies whose prices are stated exclusively in terms of currencies other than their own? I can easily move, exchange, and transact in U.S. Dollars electronically with little or no cost. Aside from non-traceability for conducting illegal transactions, what is the advantage of a virtual currency rather than a real one? Why is buying a virtual coin or token more logical than buying a virutal car, virtual land, a virtual business, or virtual tulip bulbs?

One thing that drives me bananas is when posts "quote" (i.e., copy) a chain of 10 other prior posts instead of just quoting a pertinent sentence or two to which they are replying. Maybe this is something that can be improved in the COBF 3.0.

Sounds similar to what happened in the airline industry in recent years. They all stopped competing so hard on price and rationalized their fleets. Now the real question is how long will it last?

Experts have been predicting climate catastrophes for decades and I'm still waiting for one to come true. See this link for some fascinating examples... https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1109923374568890368.html If we can't predict the weather next week with a high degree of accuracy, I have a hard time believing we can predict the weather 100 years from now. It's ridiculous that everything is now being blamed on global warming climate change: hot spell - climate change, cold spell - climate change, dry season - climate change, wet season - climate change. I remember after hurricane Katrina, experts predicted that due to 'global warming' we were going to start seeing major hurricanes regularly. And then we had no major storms for many years. It doesn't matter how inaccurate their predictions are, the experts just keep right along forecasting doom and becoming ever more fervent each year. We now have young people pledging not to reproduce because they don't want them to suffer through end times that are just around the corner. It's really a sad state of affairs that so many otherwise rational people have joined the doomsday cult that is 'climate change.' I'll make a prediction on this topic though. 11 years from now, when the world doesn't end as AOC has predicted, she'll have a new and improved forecast that says the world is still going to end but that it will just be another 12 years out. Gotta keep the fear mongering strong!