Why would they in the first place? It would be like a newspaper buying gold. If investors want to buy bitcoin they can just do that.
If i understood it correctly, meta wants to slap its own crypto-currency on everything.
That was called Libre
Buying BTC doesn’t help them do that.
“our crypto is backed in value by bitcoin”
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They’re selling shares of their company, META stocks, to the shareholders that then vote on their liquidity portfolios. Not selling Crypto. Owners of a hypothetical META crypto don’t benefit from or have any say in how the company operates.
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Alternatively to BTC they could spend that money on holding their own hypothetical crypto so as to create market cap and buy/sell volumes appealing to crypto investors.
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Businesses are following the lead of Microstrategy with keeping BTC on the treasury books to increase profits and hedge against inflation.
But now they’re essentially just a bitcoin proxy, they even changed the logo to have a bitcoin on it.
Now that there’s lots of ETFs and stuff, why buy Microstrategy and not just bitcoin?
Their value-add is that they financialize their bitcoin holdings to grow their bitcoin-backed shares faster than the bitcoin itself. Higher risk than just holding bitcoin or ETFs that just hold bitcoin, but something like 30-40% better returns.
In good times. We’re yet to see how they do in a bitcoin winter.
What does “financialize their bitcoin holdings” mean? Do you mean they use leverage (i.e. debt) to buy bitcoin than they could otherwise? That’s nothing new and is a common ETF strategy (see BITX). And yeah, it also means the bad times hit much harder.
They issue “convertible notes”, which this coindesk article explains far better than I could because I am not a finance head and honestly do not fully understand them.
Yep, that’s leverage. They sold notes which can be converted to shares of microstrategy. So while they don’t have to issue more shares right now (which would dilute shareholders and lower the value of individual shares), they will have to in the future given the conditions on the convertible notes. If they have to convert those notes into shares while the price of bitcoin is dropping, it’s a double whammy because the value of their holdings (which their value is entirely based on) drops AND they’re diluting individual shares by having to issue more shares. This wards off investors which will tank the price even more.
If you own a share of meta then you own a share of meta and meta owns a mix of assets ranging from physical to various liquidity, whether its USD or BTC there isn’t any difference in this regard.
Because holding USD is a liability these days.
Is it?
Seems like petrodollars have been riding high for decades.
!remindme in one year
Since you’ve missed the news, the USA has been overtaken by a fascist christian white supremacist party who gut social programs, cut science funding, literally completely disbanded the department of education, increased the defficit, and enacted large Tariffs on every other nation.
the USA has been overtaken by a fascist christian white supremacist party
For the third time (assuming you don’t count Congressional cycles) in twenty years. I’ve spent a solid 13 of the last 25 years living under a Christian Fascist presidency. Why am I supposed to assume that will devalue the dollar this time around?
You’re either pretending this administration isn’t worse than any previous example or you are woefully naïve.
Apparently GameStop are considering it too.
Yeah but GameStop’s entire existence depends on crypto meme hype, while Meta’s depends on extracting our data as efficiently as possible
Gamestop already did last week
I’m out of date then.
BECAUSE CRYPTO IS A SCAM
Fundamentally, no. That’s just what it’s become.
I agree and in fact I feel the same with AI.
Fundamental cryptocurrency is fascinating. It is mathematically sound, just like cryptography in general (computational complexity, one way functions, etc) and it had the theoretical potential to change existing political and economical structures. Unfortunately (arguably) the very foundation it is based on, namely mining for greed, brought a different community who inexorably modified not the technology itself but its usages. What was initially a potential infrastructure for exchange of value became a way to speculate, buy and sell goods and services banned, ransomware, scam payments, etc).
AI also is fascinating as a research fields. It asks deep question with complex answers. Research for centuries about it lead to not just interesting philosophical questions, like what it’s like to be think, to be human, and mathematics used in all walks of life, like in logistics for your parcel to get delivered this morning. Yet… gradually the field, or at least its commercialization, got captured by venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, regulators, who main interest was greed. This in turn changed what was until then open to something closed, something small to something required gigantic infrastructure capturing resources hitherto used for farming, polluting due to lack of proper permit for temporary electricity sources, etc. The pinnacle right now being regulation to ban regulation on AI in the US.
So… yes, technology itself can be fascinating, useful, even important and yet how we collectively, as a society, decide to use it remains what matters, the actual impact of an idea rather than its idealization.
The purpose of a system is what it does. Crypto is used to bypass regulations, generally for illegal or immoral things. Its also been used as a ponzi scheme over and over, I guess we call them rug pulls now but its the same bullshit.
Crypto is for gamblers or drug addicts, generally. Sometimes they are both. Sort of reminds me of the mortgage crisis in 2008 with people saying it wasnt the system just people abusing it. The system was built and modified to enable abuse.
Crypto is not used to bypass regulations. Failure to regulate is on the state, not the crypto. It is easier to regulate crypto because of the public multiple ledger system that is the Blockchain, allowing you to trace tokens all the way back to their conception.
The purpose of Crypto is that it removes the need for a bank for transactions and holding of nonphysical currency. Adoption rate proportional to total population is what gives them stability and makes them less susceptible to scams or pump and dumps.
Crypto is not used to bypass regulations.
From the very beginning it was sold as a way to work outside the existing banking system and all it did was recreate the earlier days of banking with little-to-no regulation.
It is easier to regulate crypto because of the public multiple ledger system that is the Blockchain, allowing you to trace tokens all the way back to their conception.
The key to regulation is enforcement. While some regulation was put on the books, the government has been very lax with enforcement. Obvious pump and dump schemes, which would be illegal with securities, are left completely alone with crypto. Ridiculous amounts of leverage has been used to pump up the value of bitcoin, including fraudulent printing (see Tether). Also, while the bitcoin ledger is public, you can shuffle and obscure entry and exit points enough to make it anonymous.
The purpose of Crypto is that it removes the need for a bank for transactions and holding of nonphysical currency. Adoption rate proportional to total population is what gives them stability and makes them less susceptible to scams or pump and dumps.
It removes the bank and introduces mining consensus. In the case of bitcoin, this consensus is slow and costly so people have built more centralized networks on top of it. Those are your new banks right there. Plus there is the issue of mining pools becoming too large and thus having more say in the consensus. Now talk about Proof of Stake and you’ll find it’s just a system where the more you hold, the more power you have (i.e. like the rich who hold more money).
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Right, reminds me of the hacker mindset or more recently the workshop I did on “Future wheel foresight” with Karin Hannes. One can try their best to predict how an invention might be used but in practice it goes beyond what its inventors want it to be, it is truly about how what “it” does through actual usage.
What any unregulated market becomes.
A lot of scams are dependent on the presence of regulations.
Regulations aren’t perfect, but the banking industry has gotten vastly more full of scams since congress repealed Glass Steagall. Regulations offer a structure to punish fraud and scamming. We need clear defined rules to at least attempt to control markets from their worst possible outcomes.
Frankly movement is all that matters. Too deregulated looks like cryptocurrencies, too regulated looks like PSTN which every phreaker could own, because it relied upon laws for its defense, not technical robustness.
There’s no system that remains working when just kept standing, all that matters is that we can quickly rebuild any part of it. Which is why modern legal systems and modern Web suck so much, they’ve lost that trait.
Idk. I’ve been reading about Bitcoin since the very beginning and while I don’t think it’s necessarily a “scam” the whole project was based on a flawed hyper-libertarian economic theory that inflationary currency is inherently evil and that the ideal currency has a fixed quantity, requires effort to produce, and becomes rarer over time. From that standpoint, I feel like Bitcoin has failed in its original mission. You simply cannot use it as a day to day currency and everyone is just using it to gamble essentially. I do agree that if crypto had been an outright scam from the beginning, Satoshi would have rugpulled already, though.
In what way is Bitcoin not fundamentally a scam? There are multiple interpretations of “Bitcoin is a scam” you can take, and honestly with most of them I think it’s been true the whole time.
Edit: I think some folks are parsing my sentence incorrectly, and I can’t blame them. I didn’t do a great job communicating. When I said “in what way is it not a scam” I didn’t mean to make it sound like an exclamation like “how can you not think it’s a scam!?”, I am saying, “which specific way of people referring to it as a scam do you believe is wrong?”
Bitcoin is not directly a scam. Rather it is a vector for scams. It makes scamming just a bit easier until regulations catch up.
Now, the various meme coins are directly scams. You are guaranteed to lose money buying into them.
It’s not a scam. It’s also not immune from valid criticism, but people who call it a scam don’t understand it well enough to make those criticisms.
I think you’re doing a disservice by saying everyone who calls it a scam doesn’t understand it well enough. It’s not like everyone saying it is a scam are doing it for the same reason. There’s a variety of reasons people have for doing it.
People can all have different reasons for a thing and yet all still come to the wrong conclusion. Bitcoin just doesn’t meet the criteria for a scam. It’s one thing to not like or trust it for legitimate reasons. It’s another thing to denounce the thing you don’t like or trust with an invalid accusation.
What’s the criteria for something being a scam in your opinion and why do you believe others whose criteria is different from yours don’t have legitimate reasons and make invalid accusations?
No, it’s your accusation. You tell me why you think this FOSS software protocol is a scam and if I don’t think your arguments hold water, I’ll tell you why. You’ve got a navigator avatar, dev in your username, and a programming home instance. I imagine you’re capable of educating yourself enough to make some sound arguments on the topic and a bit of factual contribution to the discussion.
In what way is it?
Decentralised currencies are fundamentally too expensive to operate, while providing dangerously little safety and a far worse user experience than fiat.
The scam part is the idea that any crypto coin is an asset with inherent value, when in fact the price is created entirely by new investment, in other words it’s just a ponzi scheme
I think you may have misunderstood. I’m saying people call it a scam for a variety of reasons, so when someone says it isn’t a scam, I’m asking which way of calling it a scam are they saying it’s not a scam in relation to.
In the way that none of those other ways are fundamental to it’s intended use by it’s creator as an actual currency.
There are plenty of things that aren’t created by scammers to be scams that people call scams.
That exactly my point.
It’s not, but there are plenty of crypto scams. It’s not an investment and it’s also not a particularly good store of value, but it is decent for P2P transactions, with some coins also providing privacy.
If that’s not your use case, don’t buy cryptocurrencues. Most people shouldn’t buy them until more places accept them for payment.
Most people shouldn’t buy them until more places accept them for payment.
It’s not going to happen. You can’t price things when the value of the currency changes every 10 minutes.
That happens to every currency, BTC is more volatile than many, but things can be priced.
Also until twiddling is made illegal, prices can be set by some other currency or some function, and be calculated in BTC from that, and displayed on electronic price tags for example.
That is not what’s stopping people from paying for things in bitcoin. When you buy something in BTC you pay the equivalent to whatever you would have paid in the local fiat. And on the vendor side, merchant services often convert that paid BTC into fiat in the moment after the sale. Both parties are insulated from volatility in the context of the exchange. What actually keeps people from paying for day to day goods and services in BTC is Gresham’s Law, the observation that nobody wants to pay for purchases with an appreciating asset, so long as there’s also a depreciating asset they could pay with instead.
Never gonna happen is a bit of a stretch. It used to be a thing. Steam accepted bitcoin. They stopped accepting it due to volatility and high transaction fees at the time. You still price things in your local currency but convert at checkout. There are “plug and play” payment processors who can handle it now… Spar in Switzerland accepts it.
But imo, its not something regular people should be using anyway.
The fact that they stopped due to volatility kind of proved my point.
I thought your point was it was never happening? I provided examples where it did happen in the past and where its happening now. Volatility of the price vs USD is not the biggest issue if the payment processor gives the vendor USD back after the transaction. If the vendor believes in crypto, they can decide to keep it as well. Had Valve chosen to hold their crypto earnings in 2016 for a few years, they’d have seen even larger profits. But thats beside the point. I personally believe they canned it more because of transaction fees. At the time, bitcoin network was oversaturated due to an explosion of popularity which reduced it to unusable levels for everyday transactions.
You should be focusing on why other vendors are still supporting crypto and asking yourself why.
Fees are predictable. Volatility is not. If you can’t make sure the money you are paid retains its value then the price you are selling something for is also volatile rather than inert.
I like GNU Taler, and I would like there to exist not just such a payment system, but also an electronic currency system without blockchains (global synchronization is a pain), unfortunately currencies are not like most applications.
I also wrote two smartass paragraphs completely wrong after this, and now thinking about it - Taler is as good a solution as possible. It’s basically what can be done. You can’t decentralize an issuer or a bank, except for the BTC way. If you can, then you can’t plug it in seamlessly , you need some synchronization (would be a shame if a failed transaction made it into Taler as passed).
If I understand that correctly.
Gosh. It’s year 2025, I’ve achieved nothing. I was blabbering on these subjects in year 2011! I’ll be 29 in less than a month. But so cool that someone is making the humanity better.
Taler is cool, but it solves a completely different set of problems vs cryptocurrencies, and is ripe for being replaced with alternatives, undermining its primary purpose.
Here are a few of the problems being solved here:
- transaction fees
- privacy
- decentralization
- independence from fiat
Taker largely attacks the first two, and cryptocurrencies largely attack the second two, and I’m mostly interested in the middle two. However, since Taler doesn’t do either of the last two, it’s subject to either being ignored (i.e. if no banks are willing to support it) or directly competed against with something that sacrifices one of the first two, and customers won’t get the option of Taler.
I think Taler makes a ton of sense for something with its own currency, such as microtransactions or a browser extension for rewarding creators (say, in lieu of displaying ads). I don’t see benefits for banks who make a ton from credit cards. There are some cryptocurrencies that hit the last three (e.g. Monero), so that’s what I’m excited to see take off.
No, it’s not. SOME cryptos are scams. Saying it all is a scam is ignorant.
My portfolio disagrees.
Y’all should have bought BTC when the price was hovering around $19K about 3 years ago. I told you the price was going to go up, but no one listened. Now it’s at $105K, I’m $60k richer, and y’all are still whining and complaining that it’s a “scam”.
Hate to break it to you, but bitcoin isn’t to crash and burn anytime soon. It’s still early; buy in now or regret it for the rest of your life.
My Enron stock disagrees.
Your attack missed!
You can pull the Enron card when talking about investments in general; your comments do 0 damage.
The point did fly over your head, you’re right about that. Pointing at the current value of your scam investment as proof of it not being a scam does not make it legitimate.
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What argument? You pointed to the price of bitcoin going up and I pointed out that scams go up in value. Then you think it doesn’t apply to bitcoin because…? Oh, that’s right, you didn’t make any argument other than “number went up”.
Same way fiat is.
Édit: damn, and I thought bitcoiners were obnoxious You guys take the cake with so much copium.
Oh stop it
What’s the GDP of Bitcoinistan?
Can’t be any worse than the GDP of the 2025 fascist USA
I mean, it is worse
They’re the same with AI. Had these people been interested years ago, they would be sitting pretty. But they kept telling everyone it’s garbage. Now it’s just sunk costs for them
I’m sure that if they found a set of keys for a Bitcoin wallet, they would just throw it away.
I certainly wouldn’t keep anything in cryptocurrency. I would transfer it to something stable.
I mean if I found a wallet with a million euros worth of bitcoin, I’d sell half and keep half. If it rises significantly, sell half of the remainder. And so on.
If I found a wallet with like 5k worth of BTC on it though? Just sell it all right away, it’ll do more for me now than say 10k in 5 years which is an insane long term return tbf.
With how volitile the USD is under ahem this administration, Bitcoin is probably the slightly less shittier option.
If only there were some other major currency, maybe controlled by some larger union of countries so that one country’s poor decisions can’t tank it
Greece has entered the chat
It returns 50-80% on average… so yea, it’s better in that context.
I didn’t really parse what your comment is saying. Are you saying that whenever you buy BTC you later sell it for half your buy average? Or are you saying like 150%?
Is it just you or are you implying that everyone loses/gains 50% from the magical BitGoblin?
On average, if you hold bitcoin over time, you would average that in profit.
Thank you, I appreciate the clarification.
Seriously, I do not have faith in USD anymore. What’s left of my paycheck after bills all goes to BTC, and I sell what I need on demand to cover day to day costs. Been doing this since 2019 and it has paid off handsomely.
I bet Zuck is regretting not going forward with their crypto scheme
I due not want my corporation holding Bitcoin, if I want exposure I’ll buy Bitcoin directly. They should be holding a bit of debt optimally.
TBH if the choices are USD or BTC then I think the latter has a better future at the moment.
BTC is still less stable. It will need to stop being a pump and dump cycle target before it could claim a true future.
With a Market Cap of 2 Trillion it’s pretty difficult to impact the purchase price as an individual or group. Even a small nation would struggle with it.
I think the latter has a better future at the moment.
Crypto ‘godfather’ of Bel-Air: Probe widens into L.A. deputies’ alleged links to mogul
- Federal authorities accuse Adam Iza, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur, of financial conspiracies and extortion.
- Prosecutors allege Iza used L.A. County sheriff’s deputies to carry out his criminal bidding.
- Iza has pleaded not guilty. A judge ordered him jailed despite claims that he needs medical care after a cosmetic leg-lengthening procedure.
If you want a deeper dive, check out the TrueAnon episode series Zort a three-parts-and-counting plunge into the seedy underbelly of Cryptocoin scams, extortion, leg-lengthening surgery, LASD rampant corruption, and age-gap discourse.
Oh no! Lmao. You’ve really only demonstrated that you don’t understand what Bitcoin is, that you think Iza owns and operates it.
Meta: Fuck it, we ball. (commits PR to add Bitcoin)
The Cult of the Torment Nexus knows a scam when it sees one.
Who even made the proposal?
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Who was the 1%?
Why not Dogecoin?
That was so funny I forgot to laugh.
yeah people don’t understand DOGE might be the best investment known to mankind
spoiler
because some people on this thread cant take a joke, \s
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Lmao
I would like to be shot out of a cannon with poop
You can say the same about any technology advancement. The fire, wheel, black powder, electricity, radio, tv, internet, crypto, AI, etc. The problem doesn’t reside in the technology but in the people exploiting it for evil intentions.
So what’s the positive uses of crypto then? You listed many things that are immensel useful like the wheel, fire, electricity, etc. Do you think crypto fits in that category?
I don’t want to say crypto in general, but Bitcoin in particular was born after the 2008 crisis, as a decentrized form of money, meaning storing value against the inflationary fiat money that the goverments can print in a centralized manner, destroying all your savings. I think any technology that empowers decentralization is positive. Same as fediverse. And in the case of bitcoin, having a decentrized money it’s a really positive tool for freedom to avoid centralizing the power in the governments. But I am curious on knowing why you say that there is no positive uses.
Well, the decentralization of Bitcoin only lasted so long. Now it is in the hand of a few large “mining” corporations who can afford the hardware and have access to cheap electricity.
As soon as you could exchange it for real money it just became another tool of capital to move in secret.
I believe any good thing you can say about crypto will eventually be coopted and controlled by capital.
The same is true for all “disruptive” technology unless it’s built specifically to be hostile to monied interests, like the fediverse - and even then, you have to continue defending it against incursions.
As long as those companies have to compete with each other for mining, there is some decentralization. Ofc it could be a ton more, some currencies like Monero use different hash functions that cant have custom chips made for them, making it easier for traditional CPUs to mine it, so large companies cant control vast amounts of the hash rate.
That’s oversimplifying things quite a lot. And is also not accurate.
Why do you think freedom and decentralization is always good? I don’t think bitcoin improves lives and the majority of people view it as gambling rather than currency. Sometimes its useful to get around local regulations or to pay slightly less in fees that would normally go to a bank. Its just a different western union money transfer and yet people on here are talking about it like it represents freedom and the individual spirit or some nonsense. Its main use is to scam people out of money. Its secondary use is to facilitate purchase of illegal goods. A very small fraction of the whole is people using it as an actual currency.
I’ll put it this way, a small fraction of responsible heroin users does not make heroin as a whole a good thing.
I don’t know why you say that bitcoin is mostly used to scam people and to purchase illegal goods. I agree that maybe a small fraction of people is using it as a currency. But, in my case, most of the people I know who have bitcoin, just have it as a store of value. Maybe I am lucky and know a lot of those “responsible heroin users” who understand that there will be only 21 million bitcoins, so what makes it valuable is its scarcity, and as long as central banks keep printing money out of thin air, bitcoin demand will grow, at least among those who understand it.
Just an anecdote but never the less.
A couple of years ago I got a job at an animal shelter in a country that’s not the one I live in. For this I was paid 400€/m in cash to cover my bills back home during the time. So I went to the local BTCatm and even though they charge an insane markup (15/20% iirc) it was still cheaper than the “minimum fee” charged by the bank/western union.
As useful as the electricity or fire? Probably not. But as a tool for low paid workers that go to another country and is sending money home to their families without having to pay half of it in fees it’s pretty usefull.
Original purpose of BTC is to prevent government from controlling and inflating the supply of money. You can’t make 1000 BTC from thin air and put it into circulation. There is no company or CEO that controls it, it’s code is maintained by open community and network secured by globally distributed miners and nodes. That’s regarding BTC, other cryptocurrency nah
Monero will:
- never allow a gov to fuck me over by freezing assets
- facilitate truly anonymous transactions over long (and short) distances.
- enable me to mine it, allowing earn money from the power generated by my roof that’d do nothing otherwise. (in addition, it’s asic resistant, meaning it can’t be mined with GPUs well, only CPUs, which basically everyone has)
- forego NFTs
It’s used as money in Vietnam and Argentina.
I know this is AI but I get tired of answering this question so this suffices:
Here’s a breakdown of some notable positive uses:
- Financial Inclusion & Accessibility: Reaching the Unbanked: Cryptocurrencies can provide access to financial services for individuals lacking traditional bank accounts, potentially fostering economic empowerment and participation in the global economy. Lower Transaction Fees: Cryptocurrency transactions can have lower fees than traditional banking, particularly for cross-border payments, making it more affordable to send money internationally. Faster Transactions: Transactions can be processed much faster than traditional methods, sometimes near-instantaneously, benefiting businesses and individuals needing quick transfers, especially across borders.
- Enhanced Security & Transparency: Blockchain Security: Cryptocurrencies utilize blockchain technology, which is inherently secure due to its cryptographic nature and decentralized verification process, making fraud and manipulation difficult. Immutable Ledger: Once a transaction is recorded on the blockchain, it cannot be altered, ensuring transparency and auditability of financial activity. Privacy: While transactions are recorded, they are often pseudonymous, providing a degree of privacy for users, unlike traditional systems that may require extensive personal information.
- Innovation & Efficiency: Decentralized Finance (DeFi): Crypto is the backbone of DeFi, which aims to build more open and accessible financial systems, including lending, borrowing, and trading platforms. Smart Contracts: Blockchain enables the use of smart contracts, self-executing agreements that automate processes and reduce the need for intermediaries, improving efficiency and reducing costs. Supply Chain Management: Blockchain technology can enhance supply chain visibility and traceability, improving efficiency and accountability, and reducing fraud in the movement of goods.
- New Opportunities & Investment: Potential for Appreciation: Cryptocurrency can serve as an investment vehicle, with the potential for significant returns, though also carrying substantial risk due to market volatility. Diversification: Crypto can add diversification to investment portfolios, as its price movements are not always correlated with traditional assets like stocks and bonds. Fundraising: While Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) have become less prevalent, blockchain technology offers new avenues for fundraising for businesses and projects.
- Other Potential Uses: Governance & Voting: Blockchain can facilitate more transparent and secure voting systems, potentially improving democratic processes. Digital Identity: Blockchain-based digital identities can enhance security and privacy in various online interactions. Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs): NFTs have enabled new forms of digital ownership and creative expression, particularly in the art and collectibles space.
