Wolf of Wall Street dealt primarily with boiler rooms(actually Boiler Room is a better movie to describe that). The Big Short while it did a great job at explaining how they housing market collapsed and that specific short position, it didn’t really explain how shorting works.
Oh, stop injecting facts into the discussion, Michael.
Narrowly avoided making a fortune this week, when I realized I should short Bitcoin and it was as sure a thing as the housing bubble (and still probably is).
Then realized I had no idea how to short Bitcoin and missed the historic 11 year, $10,000 plunge. Boo.
Somebody who knows educate me on where and how I can place shorts on BTC and I’ll tip you after my first mil.
I don’t think you can’t short money, you could short a bitcoin ETF or some kind of traded capital investment tied to its price.
This might help you understand better
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Actually thinking about the above some more, i guess you if you could borrow bitcoins from some lender then immediately turn around and exchange that BTC for USD. You then pay back the lender with BTC you bought at a lower price, after it drops in value relative to the USD, and you would have successfully shorted it.
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Bitcoins aren’t money though. They are a commodity asset, like gold, but with a much more highly volatile value, so they’ll never be a fiat currency. More like burying gold in your backyard and hoping you don’t lose the key to the box (or the coin’s actual location, because they’re stolen all the time). And pray there’s never another gold rush anywhere in the world…
When I say I haven’t figured out how to short BTC, what I mean is I haven’t found the right exchange etc. Bill Gates famously said this 2 years ago:
“As an asset class, you’re not producing anything and so you shouldn’t expect it to go up. It’s kind of a pure ‘greater fool theory’ type of investment,” Gates said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
“I agree I would short it if there was an easy way to do it,” he said.
He was swiftly corrected by Tyler Winklevoss, no less. So I’m looking into that now.
So, there are definitely ways to do it, typically with future derivative contracts, but I’m just not familiar with that sector of the trading market to know where to go…yet.
If I had been 4 days ago, I’d might have been able to make a 6-figure gain. 
And I only knew it would happen because while everyone is praying for AMC and GME to keep bumping, I’ve been binge reading investor reporting on BTC. There are people trying to drive BTC to $100,000 this year…I want to be ready for that bubble if it does happen because again, it’s practically assured to keep doing this.
The top investors in the world have already said nobody in the retail market is going to make money off BTC in today’s market UNLESS you can spot the next short. I’ve noted the big drops so far, and they are fucking huge.
Comparing bitcoin to gold is silly. Gold at least has some intrinsic value. BTC is a currency in every sense I can understand. It only has value in the sense people will accept it or its exchanged value in a different currency for goods and services.
It’s more like a meta-currency, where the supply is a known finite, and inflation is built in. It’s only value, as you say, is that people want it now in the hope that they can trade it later for something worth more. Well, there’s also the anonymous aspect - “better than cash,” from that perspective.
As computing power increases, and people “lose their wallets,” as Rabbit mentioned, bitcoin will eventually exhaust. When that gets closer to reality, I suspect that bitcoin will crash, hard.
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I believe people exchange BTC for goods and things and not just currency. Especially in the black market economy.
Every Bit coin is just represented by a unique series of characters that are encrypted by some kind of algorithm that tracks transactions and the exchanges of these unique character strings and generates more strings according to the velocity of the transactions taking place??? So for the current BTC only 21 million unique sequences exists. Could that not be extended some how by adding another character in the algorithm or just incorporated that algorithm into another? Can’t you also own fractions of one coin?
I don’t really understand the technical side all that well, that is why I stay away from it.
I think Elon Must also recently said he would be willing to accept BTC in change for Tesla’s
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This is correct, but the exchange is based on the notion of being able to have more intrinsic value at the buyer’s end. I’m saying that the exchange model itself is going to fall apart, because as there becomes less and less in circulation, the demand will dry up.
Here’s where you make the “there’s only one true Mona Lisa,” argument. And, honestly, the Mona Lisa is worth nothing, because you cannot buy it or sell it or exchange it for goods or services.
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If bitcoin exchanges (or currencies like it) are hard to track and tax. I think that might inherently keep it in some kind of demand.
I really don’t know enough about it. I have heard demands for some kind block chain to be used in the stock market as an intermediator to certify the trading of stocks and bonds… it will be interesting to see where it goes.
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Yes, but read the quote block I screencapped, above. Unlike cash, you can take bitcoin with you, when you die. That means, at some point, somebody is going to have the very last bitcoin (barring some move to a Star Trek-like economy, where everyone can just create shit out of thin air).
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Yah but the author is just speculating, i can’t even find how he arrived at the numbers of lost coins he’s guessing about.
Maybe its only like 200.
If your just talking about deflation in general… that is a real possibility with a fixed supply. But as i stated ealier I beleive you can own fractions of one coin so maybe a supply cap is not really a problem.
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Shit, man, you have no idea - bitcoin didn’t just start out at $50k per coin. It started out as fucking worthless. The only place that accepted it was a pizza joint in like SF or something like that. People got in, mined, figured out it was pointless, and just abandoned.
I guaranfuckingtee it’s way more than 200 which are lost.
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maybe there is a better way to arrive at number based on something more than you and authors gut feelings about it.
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I mined it. I know from experience it’s more than 200.
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Tell that to the billionaires comparing BTC to Au. I didn’t make that up.
BTC has intrinsic value. You can actually measure it in W (kg⋅m2⋅s−3), but I’m not going to bother with that right now. I’m too heartbroken and tired.
Here’s what I’ve learned over the last 48 hours from reading Michael Burry, Warren Buffet, and thefefore Benjamin Graham, and David Dodd.
Shorting BTC is a sure thing, but you have to watch for the toxic aggregation of assets to the point where a critical mass of it is at-risk. BTC is volatile, but it will always fall bigly at periodic intervals, and you can read those moments by paying attention and forgetting about dumb Reddit slavedaytrader shit like AMC and GME.
What I’ve also learned after researching about 12 companies offering BTC short positions…practically all of them are involved in investigations, refusing to agree to basic market regulations, or are literally a business conspiracy to defraud American investors. One of the most popular markets for this is Predictious, which is just shutting down in 30 days for no reason, and you better take your money out now (!!!).
The best short strategy on BTC may simply be to watch for the each bubble burst, and then buy Satoshi’s hard low, knowing that some brillionaire like Musk is going to also buy low with you because they can afford a few hundred million Satoshi.
Then, when you feel the bubble is going to go again, sell, rinse, repeat. You’re well on your way to an overall 400% profit like Burry, unless of course BTC becomes the NWO’s currency. I’m willing to make that bet.
That’s a very different strategy than most retail investors seem to be doing…“I’m gonna invest in BITCOIN, it’s the next TESLA, WOOOHOOOOOO!”.
Also, invest in water. It might end up being more valuable than gold and BTC combined.
That is not a short strategy, you are describing; buy low, sell high. The most basic market strategy.
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