Class B doesn't have proportional voting rights. Class A is expensive, because he wants long-term investors to have class A and have more voting rights than the Class B peons. It makes sense to have your supposedly longer term people have a higher voting power than the supposedly shorter term people.

You could always argue class A doesn't attract the type of investors it should, and I have no opinion on that. However, right now if you can't even trade Class A, by definition you've locked in long-term investors.. :)

It doesn't matter who funds who, or which states are better. You're seeing a population shift, which looks like it should favor Republicans. It'll be interesting to see how that impacts future elections.

BTC is deflationary so will always go up in value, as long as people are willing to ascribe it ANY value. It's not a currency right now, it's an asset, which is why its deflationary nature is not a problem. I assume it'll never become a currency, because if it did the deflation would be a problem. However, I still am unwilling to invest because I don't understand why a virtual asset that is not a currency has any value at all.

What's monetary premium? I googled and it seems a buzzword, generally meaning "the value people attach to things that can be used as stores of wealth", only used by crypto adepts. Is that what you mean by it?

In which case, agree, that's the main economic value of gold and collectibles (though not the only one); it's not the case for real estate, which you can rent out and live in and allows you to not pay rent, and it's not the case for stocks, that represent a legal share of a company from which you're owed profits, distributed as dividends or not.

Our currency is not defective. How is it defective? Because we have a central bank that controls it, and there's the risk of inflation? Inflation is miles better than deflation, economically speaking. BTC, if truly used as a currency, as deflation built in. Inevitably someone will lose access to their key and their BTCs are gone.

What does "money in the free market is a winner take all situation" mean? Regardless, if you assert that BTC is here to replace gold, and can do so as long as BTC is better than gold on the 5 properties listed (I'm not even sure why), ok... I'd argue BTC fails a lot of these. Example, a hardware wallet, I break the wallet your BTCs are gone. Where's the durability? Gold if stolen or melted is still gold. I don't get BTC, and maybe I'm old or stupid, or maybe it just is a pointless thing someone created as a thought exercise that has now gone too far. Time will tell.

I agree with asset != investment. BTC is interesting, because it's a virtual asset; not only does it not produce an economic output itself, it also cannot be used for anything, unlike traditional assets.

The reason you could say it's a pyramid scheme is BTC, despite its creators best intentions, doesn't work as a currency. Right now it's just an asset, and the transactions done with it are similar to bartering or swapping gold bars. At the end of the day, people transfer BTC back to $ (or any fiat currency) in order to perform their other day-to-day transactions. The thing is, to exchange BTC back into $, someone has to be willing to pay $ to get your BTC. As the price of BTC increases, a smaller and smaller # of actual BTC gets exchanged, for the same (or a higher) nominal value in $. What ends up happening is very early adopters sit on a massive mound of BTC, or at least a fair amount of BTC, that they can't cash out unless someone else is willing to pay. For BTC to have "real" value, which in our world is a fiat currency backed by the government, it requires new people (arguably new gamblers and suckers) to pay out the original owners.

That's why I also think of BTC as a pyramid scheme, it produces nothing, and for it to have value it requires a stream of new people willing to pay for it. It's not that different from gold since we have way more gold reserves than can be used industrially, but at least gold has some uses. If we stop mining gold entirely, at some point we will use all of our gold reserves (unless we recycle gold 100%), and will need to mine more. This will never be the case for BTC - BTC is a bad solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.

This is the part a lot of people don't understand, and makes me really go "wtf". You buy the NFT but don't own the copyright, essentially you own what, a link? Who the hell cares about your link, if you don't have a copyright to the artwork? The artist can still sell t-shirts with that artwork and make money off of it, and you don't get a dime. What's the point?

On the other hand, people are exchanging intrinsically valueless bits (ETH or BTC or what not) for other intrinsically valueless things, so I guess it's fine. I just cry for all the energy and resources consumed for nothing.

Misclicked the moderation, posting to remove it. On that note not being able to update your moderation blows.

I saw it in 3D in theaters when it was released. The 3D was very well done, but... it's still not a great movie to me. The essence of a movie, which is the story, was just mediocre. Sure it did/will advance the technology around movies, but let's not pretend Avatar is a great movie. You can still just love it, that's your right, but a documentary doesn't become a better documentary because it's projected in IMAX.

That's a really interesting comment. Most companies do try to find a buyer when they get out of a business ("refocus on our core"). Does Google have any history of doing something similar? I can't think of any from the top of my head. In the past, you could argue those businesses were from their 20% of time employees can devote to random stuff, but it cannot be the case for every single thing Google has discontinued. It's obviously not the case for Stadia. Why does Google not try to sell a division?

I've seen enough stupid acquisitions to think some random buyer would be interested in acquiring Stadia. There has to be something else, I wonder if operations are so interconnected at Google that they wouldn't be able to sell any of their LoB as a stand-alone business.

Yeah, your scenario is the inverse of this one. In this case you have virtual land, that cannot be taken away from you because of the blockchain. It will always be yours until you sell, but unlike real land, you can't grow stuff on it, nor can you actually live on it. In an event where property is no longer recognized and the rule of law is gone, I'd still rather have physical land that I can maybe defend than virtual land that is definitely mine but does nothing.

You're right, I was hasty in that suggestion. It's pure rumors at this time. The SEC has only released a statement saying they're monitoring the situation, whether that means they'll monitor what Citadel is doing or what WSB is doing is unknown.

I hope they're going to investigate Citadel and RH, because frankly, controlling the trading platform, backing one side of the game, and then blocking the trading platform from performing trades that could devalue your side is more than just scummy.

Of course this is a surprise. I wouldn't be surprised if the rich and powerful have access to material information that they act upon, despite it being blatantly illegal. I am not surprised that high-frequency trading firms can get their trades done faster through technical means. I am not surprised that the rich can be called "accredited investors" and can invest in HFs, PE funds, and other investment tools that the common person cannot. Those are all things driven by other market participants, so to tip the game in their favor. It sucks, but that's the game, and they play to win.

I am surprised that a trading platform can forbid you from participating in the game however, since that's the only purpose of a trading platform. The fact the SEC wants to sue the WSB gamblers is even weirder. This comes across as a market manipulation enforced not by the market participants, but by the market facilitators and regulators. Before, you always had the impression that you could win at the game, even if it's biased against you. Now it's been made explicit the little guy will not ever be allowed to win, due to the market infrastructure/system. That's new.

The exchange (NYSE for example) has brakes to limit volatility, great. Those have triggered in the past week, and GME trades were temporarily stopped. All fine by me, this is limiting ALL actions for ALL investors.

Robinhood is a trading platform, not an exchange, mainly (only?) used by small fish. What you're telling me now is if I were rich, and called my broker friend at JPM, he could place the order, but my neighbor can't. That's not okay.

To be clear, Robinhood doesn't allow you to buy GME WITH YOUR OWN MONEY. It's not just preventing your from using margin, it's literally banning you from buying that stock, period.

It's my own damn money, if I can place all of it on black in Vegas, I should be able to put all of it in GME.

This is now plain stupid. I can't find a justification for why a trading platform can prevent the purchase of specific tickers. Don't tell me it's to protect ignorant retail investors; people that gamble on GME and BB and what not may not fully understand what they're doing, but they willingly chose the risk, and should reap the rewards or the losses (and I have no doubt there will be many of both, depending on when you jump in). It's also not to protect the "market", since the WSB people are not doing enough to destabilize the market, just certain tickers, and they're mainly screwing some HFs and then themselves. Let them, most of us who hold ETFs don't give a crap.

If a big enough trading platform can limit trades on certain tickers, wouldn't that become some form of market manipulation? How is this even legal?