I check out Reddit once in a while for random inspiration. It's a jungle out there and I like cutting through it with the brute force digital machete that is Alfidi Capital. I never know whether I'll find pearls of wisdom or juvenile ramblings. It's usually more of the latter but that's okay. Arrested development adolescents need to let their primal screams out somewhere. Better that they spew to Reddit threads than deface a bathroom stall.
The Reddit community on Bitcoin must be oodles of fun for people with no lives. It is the only corner of the financial world where overgrown infants, naive dreamers, and other cutting-edge crybabies can congratulate themselves for knowing nothing about money. They find a worshipful audience on Reddit. I've selected some of the best recent comments from the Bitcoin subreddit below in italics. Errors in spelling, capitalization, and other fundamentals of intelligible communication remain as their authors intended. I will not identify the perps because they may want to grow up someday. My own comments always follow.
So i should recommend to my 70 year old grandma to put all her savings into bitcoin (what's the easiest way to teach her bitcoin? took me years to teach her email/skype... think she might be dead before she's able to transfer funds on her own)? How will this stop the government from taking her tax refunds which are not in bitcoin? What happens if the price drops under the current 400$? I love bitcoin and what it stands for but you needa stop drinking the Kool-aid.
The Reddit community on Bitcoin must be oodles of fun for people with no lives. It is the only corner of the financial world where overgrown infants, naive dreamers, and other cutting-edge crybabies can congratulate themselves for knowing nothing about money. They find a worshipful audience on Reddit. I've selected some of the best recent comments from the Bitcoin subreddit below in italics. Errors in spelling, capitalization, and other fundamentals of intelligible communication remain as their authors intended. I will not identify the perps because they may want to grow up someday. My own comments always follow.
So i should recommend to my 70 year old grandma to put all her savings into bitcoin (what's the easiest way to teach her bitcoin? took me years to teach her email/skype... think she might be dead before she's able to transfer funds on her own)? How will this stop the government from taking her tax refunds which are not in bitcoin? What happens if the price drops under the current 400$? I love bitcoin and what it stands for but you needa stop drinking the Kool-aid.
Stop right there, dude. The apple didn't fall too far from the tree if grandma's tech learning curve is indicative of this Bitcoiner's abilities. Oh BTW, the government can and will assess the value of your Bitcoin for tax purposes since the blockchain is publicly available. I think the easiest way to learn Bitcoin is to watch a video of 1990s teens playing with "Magic: The Gathering" cards. That's kind of how the Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange got started anyway. Kids using cards to pretend to be wizards is just like grown adults playing with digits and pretending to be bankers. See, it's really easy for granny and her quilting bee.
I bought about $1,000 worth just for the sake of holding on to it long term. It's a decent chunk of change for me but it's also an amount I'm comfortable losing. But this is exactly why I'm not discouraged over "losing" almost half of my $1k investment. There will be another spike at some point and I will either hang on until that happens or until I lose it all.
What was your cost basis for tax purposes? Can you prove it? The IRS will want to know and federal tax returns are due in four days. Oh, wait, I'm talking about a bunch of people who think they don't have to pay taxes. Never mind, idiots. Just hang on until you lose it all. It's funny that this person conflates "long term" with some point where they may "lose it all." This person is definitely not Warren Buffett.
Long term speculators don't create as much instability.
Say what? What exactly is a "long term speculator" anyway? That might be a conventional investor like me who performs a valuation analysis before committing to an investment, but to Bitcoiners I'm just another gambler. Moral equivalency is great when you don't have to account for cognitive deficiencies.
Bitcoin is way more influential than Dogecoin is. Marketing does matter, or else our dog-based coin wouldn't have gotten this far. DOGE is honestly a lot more style over substance but obviously style is important to people. I hope that Dogecoin will teach Bitcoin about style in the same way that I hope that our community looks towards Bitcoin for substance.
Dogecoin teaching style . . . means Bitcoin will need an animal mascot. Somebody already picked the honey badger. Bitcoin teaching substance . . . means Dogecoin will be based on nothing. Oh, that already happened. Maybe these Reddit people aren't as cutting-edge as I had assumed.
This sort of thing is baffling to me on the altcoins. A new business shows up and because it has an address, and an office there is immediate trust in them. We have seen large scale operations fail time and time again. We need businesses involved in the currency but we also need healthy skepticism when it comes to verification.
Dogecoin teaching style . . . means Bitcoin will need an animal mascot. Somebody already picked the honey badger. Bitcoin teaching substance . . . means Dogecoin will be based on nothing. Oh, that already happened. Maybe these Reddit people aren't as cutting-edge as I had assumed.
This sort of thing is baffling to me on the altcoins. A new business shows up and because it has an address, and an office there is immediate trust in them. We have seen large scale operations fail time and time again. We need businesses involved in the currency but we also need healthy skepticism when it comes to verification.
The above comment might be the all-time winner for far-out fantasy. It deserves a prize of some sort but Alfidi Capital has no prizes to give. Follow this one down the rabbit hole. A business with a known physical office and identifiable employees is somehow less trustworthy than a bunch of random hashes floating through cyberspace that hackers can steal and duplicate. Yeah, ooookaaaayyyy. This implies that the only thing more trustworthy than Bitcoin would be something completely unverifiable, like a fantasy land of fairies and unicorns. Wait a minute . . . that takes us right back to "Magic: The Gathering" again! Brilliant.
I just can't believe people would run scams as public figures, when it's so easy to do it in the Bitcoin crowd as anonymous figures. People around here are very trusting of anonymous figures.
OMG! OMG! Just when I thought there was an all-time winner, another gem falls out of the sky! Here's a Bitcoin fan admitting the ease of scamming the rest of the community. Anonymity is some kind of holy grail on Reddit. It allows emotional cripples and shut-ins to pretend to be knowledgeable. Anglo-Saxon cultures have long recognized anonymous communication as a form of free speech because it can shield unpopular authors from abuse. The downside is that the rest of us have to wade through Bitcoin garbage to find comedy.
In the bitcoin world embezzlement is indistinguishable from a hacker attack.
Exactly. They both come with criminal penalties in the real world. In the Bitcoin underworld, these things confer street cred. I expect the next crypto-coin fork to allow graffiti artist tags.
I still believe that bitcoin is the most regulated currency in the world. Criminals are way too vulnerable when using bitcoin.
This is awesome. Precisely one IRS decision covers Bitcoin, and that was all anyone needed to move Bitcoin into the "asset" column of a balance sheet. Calling it the "most regulated currency" ignores the wire transfer protocols, bullion holdings, transfer pricing agreements, and other facts that govern real currencies. Calling criminals "vulnerable" in Bitcoin insults the abilities of the thieves who busted Mt. Gox out of millions. They still haven't been caught. I know, Bitcoiners, facts are hard to understand. It's so much more fun just to make things up.
The bottom line on all of these Reddit commenters is that they are dumber than dumb. There may be some pseudo-intellectuals in there to give the Bitcoin community a natural ruling elite but they function much like wooden decoys on a duck hunt. They make it easier to identify the fowl that respond to hunting calls. Reddit brings out the worst in people who are too immature to be trusted with adult responsibility. Bitcoin will never be a currency but its advocates' stupidity is pure Internet gold.
