Category: Bitcoin

The Loft Blog presents Financing Innovations

The first Bitcoin transaction was $40. That Bitcoin is today worth more than $610 million. What do Angelenos think about this? Investment mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb says Bitcoin (BTC) Is Like the Tulip Bubble. He adds that Bitcoin will skyrocket, and then plummet toward zero, but Bitcoin lacks the beauty and fragrance that accompanied Tulip Mania. Telab says that buying Bitcoin is just as irrational as shorting it. Nevertheless, Wall Street, the SEC and banks have begun to embrace Bitcoin as a legitimate financial technology. In fact, a new Bitcoin ETF Exchange Traded Fund just launched on the stock market this week, exposing more retirement accounts to the cryptocurrency. Just two bitcoins now provides the down payment on the average Los Angeles home. With or without growing acceptance from financial institutions and governments, many Loft Blog readers have strong feelings for or against blockchain investments and NFT artworks. Downtown L.A.’s most popular social critic and commentator artist Brother Andy explains:

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Cryptocurrency: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly And You

Editorial by Brother Andy

“YOU SNOOZE, YOU LOSE,” SAYS THE EARLY BIRD WITH THE WORM

Should YOU invest in bitcoin…or some other form of cryptocurrency? Can you “hit it big” or “lose your shirt” with digital currency, or have both happen in a matter of milliseconds? By the time you are ready to participate, you might not be able to invest in a viable way that will make a difference, sort of like joining a horse-race in the last meter in progress, walking to the finish, and expecting to be included in the winner’s circle…? Is your hesitation to buy digital currency based on reliable first-hand knowledge from experts or off-handed second-hand wives’ tales from nagging naysayers? What if cryptocurrency becomes the standard global currency and you aren’t prepared, unable or unwilling to adapt? Then what?

In the end, is bitcoin really just another classic example of the inevitable forehead-slapping of should-have, could-have, would-have of “future shock” or the latest trendy scam by clever egg-head computer geeks leading to utter ruin and painful regret, and, as it turns out, you’re the smart one for opting out? Fortune or fraud? Another downer Theranos debacle or a timely Facebook-like exciting game-changer?

Dear God, wasn’t social media complicated enough to deal with — and now you have to learn how to do “mining”? WTF!

WHAT DO YOU KNOW?

Perhaps the greatest challenge of digital currency is the understanding — or the misunderstanding, the lack of education — of what they are and how they work. Fear of the unknown, anxiety over the new, insecurities and doubt, permeates the actual truth about cryptocurrencies — a well-thought-out interactive application tool with known benefits that far outreach imagined liabilities of skeptics. Nothing makes people more sensitive than money — above sex, politics and religion.

Digital currency is a social experiment that has been around long enough to prove itself. What is the delicate criteria for assessing financial risk, reward, and practical utilization with cryptocurrency? Being a “decentralized” commodity means no messed-up management in which to complain or hold accountable, no slick advertising or marketing, no crafty sales pitches getting you to unwittingly sign on the dotted line, ultimately concluding in your financial collapse. If this is what you think, you’re probably thinking of insurance companies.

The most telling factor for you is: you don’t know anyone personally who has bought cryptocurrency and profited, making the whole thing 100 percent conceptual and 100 percent not tangible. You can’t conceive of how you will pay for real-world goods/services with bitcoin since the system isn’t universal enough at the moment to feed a parking meter, let alone purchase the largest investment of your life in buying a home with it.

Bitcoin can appear to the uninformed to be a crazy rainbow-colored mythical unicorn that lives in a far-off other-world, wholly unrelated to the cold cash-in-hand human ATM existence you experience day in, day out. On a good day, cryptocurrency could be mistaken for a kind of obscure 401K that may come to fruition sometime when senility sets in but hopefully you don’t get hit by a bus in the meanwhile and are unable to spend the win-fall in this lifetime. The chances of your paper “wallet” being thrown away by accident is pretty great. That’s why you don’t play the lottery. You say aloud, exasperated, to no one in particular, “I’m too old for all this stuff…”, returning to fret over how to send a text on your ancient flip-phone.

You read/see one tilted story after another in the yammering media about the wildly unfortunate million dollar pizza or the poor schmuck who has millions in cryptocurrency parked in a locked external drive he can’t get into to retrieve his money because he has forgotten the codes. Despite the internet trolls and media jackals over-turning every rock and coming up empty-handed, the faceless creators behind bitcoin being anonymous makes it seem super-spooky, undoubtedly materializing from the pit of hell that is the Dark Web. The internet is the Devil.

You see/hear endless headlines of scary hacker threats to bitcoin that are entirely out of context, especially in light of how many neighborhood bank robberies there are. Yet, without question, you put ALL your money in the bank at an offensively low interest rate, knowing full well banks make money off your money, and the stingy bastards don’t share profits, and then they have the nerve to insist you are not worthy of a loan, making you feel worthless. You FEEL good you have money in the bank nonetheless — perhaps not as much as you should have. No one really knows what the benevolent FDIC is — a relative of the Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy — but that shadowy blank spot doesn’t stop you, either. You FEEL as though your money is profoundly safe and apparently that’s enough, as good as a yawning greasy-haired rotund guard at the door with a gun.

The bank could be taking your money and turning it into cryptocurrency — cheaper and faster than international exchanges — and you wouldn’t know the difference, just as long your account balance reads in dollars.

Governments adopting cryptocurrency is the surest way they have to collect taxes from it, since digital currency is presently on the down-low, which is why there is sudden interest after decades of usage. Who would fess up on record to making a killing off-record?

If the government took your due taxes, turned it into cryptocurrency, at the end of every year they could give you back the principle, keep the difference, and everyone involved is ahead. That’s a cute idea but not their style of doing things. Socialists taking from the rich and giving to the poor is more like it, squelching incentive, as though a civic responsibility on your part to give it up with honor. God, you’re so patriotic… right into poverty levels.

Casinos don’t steal your money right to your face like an armed hold-up. They make you FEEL as though it’s fun to hand YOUR precious money directly to them with you knowing the odds are astronomically against you to win all the while. Tireless irresponsibility and recklessness never cease to entertain, whereas common sense pertaining to cryptocurrency is boring as hell.

Look, if a nefarious wayward hacker did get into bitcoin — havoc ensues — how long do you think it would take before the other hackers hack into his digs and put on an ugly deep freeze worse than death on the culprit? Sure, these dudes play games, but here, they’re not playing around. They’re not in it for the money anyway. They are bigger than the government and they know it and the government knows it. Serious.

The Federal Reserve puts their trust in God and, without embarrassment, boldly say so on every bill. Investors of digital currency rely on consistent, provable mathematical science and in fellow human beings who recognize the common good and mostly keep it to themselves. If digital currency can’t be “trusted,” Third World cartels wouldn’t use them to laundry money, right?

Staunch governmental regulators are taking the maverick digital currency freedoms as personal affronts — stewing, grumbling, hot to demand something be done in order to justify their jobs, while not having a leg to stand on. The camera-hog Feds want their undeserved cut, which they will, in turn, waste once getting it, as usual, while making loud threatening chest beating noises, because digital currency is happening faster than brute control can be implemented. After all, there is no CEO to haul in before Congress for a circus-like hearing that bares no fruit. You’d think they’d be used to being caught with their pants down by now, but no…

There isn’t a law that says you can’t start your own currency. Someone has already conveniently done it for you and they don’t want credit for it, whereas the government takes credit for everything. After all, Al Gore invented the internet.

WHAT’S WHAT

Where to turn for hardcore “facts” if the real truth isn’t presented in a fair, balanced, unbiased, easy-to-comprehend form? For a multitude of reasons, the general media in all formats is working overtime to discredit and discourage, the very media sometimes owned by the same billionaires who are manipulating the digital currencies to result in their favor. These snake-like billionaires, along with domestic and foreign countries, also manipulate the global economy and the stock market at large, while simultaneously influencing the US government toward their own greedy agendas. Substantiated digital currency numbers are messaged in media beyond recognition as to fit the dictates of themed editorial frameworks, without investigation, fueling fire to “sex up” fact-less, dull financial reports by declaring cryptocurrency on life-support, dying any second, and creating chaos in the meantime, and making pseudo-celebrities of themselves by posing as “in the know” faux experts who need you to be confused in order for them to make a living explaining it to you in real time.

The advantage of the mostly psychopathic internet billionaire CEOs over you is obvious: influential eyeballs are money; money is power, and power creates avenues for more money in all of its various forms. Cryptocurrency is peer-to-peer, everyone equal, autonomous. They don’t like that. Likewise, as the government, they like benign sheep as passive followers who mindlessly keep clicking and scrolling.

Bitcoin is decentralized by design. The rock-bottom, do-or-die threat to cryptocurrencies is in believing the relentless negative press as a twisted truth which inspires unpredictable buying/selling binge/purges as commanded by the powers-that-be. Ignorance and panic make bitcoin volatile, not the system’s original intention or clockwork-like function — unlike the massively misguided poor management involved in money, which currently effects every moment of your life — and beyond death. No system is perfect, especially when human beings are involved, but the advantage of a “hands-off” currency seem self-evident, without having to know much about it. A pyramid scheme is vertical: smaller on top, wider on the bottom, with money moving upward. Cryptocurrency is horizontal, money moving sideways, growing wider evenly.

Furthermore, you’ve convinced yourself of an elaborate conspiracy of the axe falling and somehow, somewhere, blindsided, your digital currency will be tracked and you’ll end up paying the taxes you’ve been avoiding with success so far — meaning a guaranteed jail sentence, convicted by jealous peers — and you might just be right on that one. Serious, for sure.

THE FUTURE IS NOW

With the onslaught of the Information Age, a new form of currency was unavoidable, as each advancement in human evolution has had a comparable value system, some more user-friendly than others. When you compare cryptocurrency’s volatility to the older forms of currency such as seashells, carved stones, notches in a stick, or cows, the implementation of peer-to-peer technological money is a bit more reassuring. Of course, perceived value is always risky, no matter the format. Except…if a cow dies, you could eat it.

US money is merely a note which can not be eaten — a conceptual social construct on paper and represented by coins no longer based on the gold standard by a self-serving government which runs at a staggering, exploding deficit. In 2015, it cost $1.50 to make a penny. We are assured another economic crash like that of 1929 will not occur with self-imposed governmental checks and balances in place. How’s that going? Sure, the Feds don’t have million dollar pizza stories, but they do have million dollar jet plane toilet seats galore.

The way things currently are — is not working.

IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU

The simplest, easiest, and safest process of investing in bitcoin for the average slightly above-average Joe Blow like YOU is to take your accumulated loose change to the nearby grocery store. Put the change through the green Coinstar machine and receive Bitcoin in return. Do this process whenever you go to the store. Put your paper wallets in a safe place — in your sock drawer, for instance. Now, wait. At the end of the year, compare how much you’ve put in, how much you’ve earned, and how often the value has risen and fallen in the fiscal year. Remember, the more you participate, the more you will make. If you lose money, you won’t feel as badly as you would in other circumstances when money is lost and you don’t have to beat yourself up for being stupid. You’re being cautious but optimistic while experimenting. On the other hand, rejoice in pure profits from doing nothing like the idle rich do — the way God intended….

The best advice to potential cryptocurrency investors is to not take anyone’s advice. Opinions are worthless. No one knows for sure, or they’d be mega-rich, or, at the very least, mega-richer. Life is about risk-taking. Google it. You don’t know until you try.

Brother Andy is a provocative film-maker, multi-media producer and fine artist who is currently located in Palm Springs, California.  Brother Andy is the creative force behind the art movement / art methodology Intriguism and the iconic “Jesus Chimp” image.  His passions include nudism, feminism, and animal rights.

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