Oddbean new post about login | logout I'm going to stop talking about stacking sats. Sats is just normal money for me, now. I save some of it and spend some of it. I stack euro bills, to pay for things where they don't take normal money.
Transaction fees, exchange spread, exchange fees, bank fees, currency conversion fees, card fees... Some of these to be counted twice, once you sell fiat for sats, then you sell sats for fiat to buy food. I used to dca and put all the money I earned from work in sats, but I was losing up to 30% of it in fees. In bear markets it can be soul crushing. I am a member of Mensa, but I honestly feel like a fool, a complete idiot.
Where you doing that all over Lightning? 🤔 Agree, that 30% during a bull market is nothing, but painful during a bear market.
I'd get paid from work in fiat, then I'd buy BTC on exchanges, a few $k at a time. Everyone else living their lives, travelling and buying shit, while I was living like a bum and buying bitcoin, postponing life for later. 'Saving for later' is just a waste of life. 😭
I think it's all done over Lightning Network custodial wallets, now, so the fees have gotten quite low. Example from the Bitpanda debit card from VISA (which is not yet available in Germany 😭 ) https://i.nostr.build/M5lq6.png
We are making bankers, and scammy exchange owners rich. My personal experience was so bad (everything overly complicated, convoluted and expensive) that I never dared to recommend it to anyone because I did't want to risk causing them unnecessary stress, trouble or loss. Instead, despite the fact that I was personally buying and forcing myself to use bitcoin, whenever anyone asked me what to invest into, I'd shrug shoulders or tell them to buy gold. I should have just walked in a gold shop and bought some myself. 0 fees.
I own gold, as well, but it's nothing but a reserve asset. It's not a base money.
Yeah, it's not a lazy man's get rich quick scheme. If wealthy people invested in people and small local businesses instead of storing it in gold or the ponzi stock mmarket, the world woulld be better.
Reserve assets and investments are completely different things, tho. They're not things that are in competition with each other; they're different categories that you divide your income up into: spending and investments (LN, fiat cash, and banking account) savings (Bitcoin hot wallet) reserve asset (Bitcoin hard wallet and gold)
Is silver? (Pls say yes, I'm bagholding)
🫂 I think my religion has a very moderating effect on me, so under fiat, I was never inclined to go into consumer debt, and under Bitcoin I'm never inclined to live in a hovel and eat Ramen to stack. I'm always financially conservative, but cutting edge on the margins, and that seems to be the maximum amount of risk and sacrifice that I can emotionally and fiscally handle. Everyone needs to find their own balance.
There is a lot of rehypothecation in the space, it's a house of cards. Bitcoin went up and people would take credit agains it to put in Ethereum, then Ethereum allowed creation of millions of shitcoins. You would take credit against your Eth and pump and dump scamcoins. You make a contract for 1 billion X coins. You buy 1 yourself for $1, and the market cap is $1bn. When enough people buy, you cash out and create another one, rinse and repeat. Exchanges like Binance are a part of the whole thing, paying anon devs to create the contracts, then they shill them on twitter, list them on Binance... Devil shit, blood money. The market cap coule be "trillions" but you can't cash it out, so Saylor tells you to buy and never sell. The dude lost billions in the dot com bubble and lied to his investors by cooking the books.
I just spent a couple hours looking at Bitcoin card options and they don't really look more attractive than just spending fiat cash bills within a month or using the VISA card that gets auto-deducted in entirety at the end of the month. I think this isn't going to be really interesting unless I can just pay straight from my @Relai 🇨🇭 Lightning wallet, where I hold the keys, as that's where I want to accumulate my spending money.
i use a bitcoin node on a mini pc and only push it to my xapo card when i need to have fiat spending ability, so, it's my ... savings? it's not big enough for me to think "ok now i need actual cold storage" but maybe if i get more work in the next 5 months it will be, then i'm getting titanium and a stamping kit and seedsigner
If I remember right Nexo has a kinda cool card in Europe with some similar competitors but the whole business model isn't allowed in the US
yes, lightning absolutely wipes the floor with the speed and throughput of those payment processors... i'm sure they are nervously watching and probably even spending some on sabotage
I guess that's why they want us to use CBDCs, so that they can pretend to be real money. LOL
the problem with their logic is their system is proprietary and centralised so it's not resilient like physical cash or lightning or bitcoin the only thing that makes bitcoin and lightning less than perfect is the event of a massive internet failure, or at least where you want to use it... i am pretty sure that a LOT of money is going to already be going into R&D to EMP proof the internet...and i'm quite sure that wireless networks are gonna get the chop, they are completely worthless once there is a big enough geomagnetic storm, radios are the first thing to fail when the air is filled with electrons... shielded, grounded stuff and optic fibre can survive this, and that's basically what i expect in the next 5 years or so, such a massive event that literally everyone stops using wifi and mobile phones, because everything, i mean everything, even the ones in the warehouse, are toast
and yeah, a replacement for NFC that uses optics is also something i expect, because it can be fully faraday caged
Yeah, cash bills are really the only competition for Lightning. Don't know how far eCash will be able to take over the euro cash market. Very very alpha, so far.
