Conflating volatility with risk
There's a lot of misinformation out there when it comes to people giving financial advice while simultaneously pretending as though they aren't giving financial advice. Spoiler alert: this post is financial advice. I will not be saying "not financial advice". That is a thing ignorant people say who don't understand securities law. I will not tell you to do your own research. You are literally doing a little research right now simply by reading this post, are you not? Should you get a second opinion? Maybe, that's up to you on a personal level.
Conflating volatility with risk
Lot's of people in finance like the make blanket statements as though they apply to every situation. People who invest in real-estate or dividend stocks often like to pretend that investing in any asset that doesn't provide passive income is really just a "gamble". As if they've unlocked the secrets of investing and there's no other way to do it other than the strategy they use. Other's will dunk on crypto as "illegitimate" because they don't submit a quarterly earnings report like their favorite corporation does. Who cares if securities can print their asset out of thin air as long and the company is turning a profit, right?
Not a security
Ultimately my favorite quote from these type of midwits is this idea that Bitcoin doesn't belong in a retirement account. Why doesn't it belong in a retirement account? Well, it's too volatile! You shouldn't be gambling with your future like that! It's irresponsible!
In reality it's irresponsible to not have Bitcoin in your retirement account, and this has been the case for many years now. In fact the entire premise of a retirement account negates the very volatility that midwits claim Bitcoin has.
Here is the chart dating back to 2013.
Bitcoin only goes up. In fact it only goes up so hard that you can't even see what it did in 2013 on a linear scale. In order to see what Bitcoin does on long timescales (the type of timescale you use for a retirement account) you can't even chart it linearly, it has to be done on the base-10 logarithmic scale in which every notch is 10x higher than the last one. No other asset in the history of ever has needed this kind of functionality to track the exponential growth over long swaths of time. Bitcoin has rightly been classified a "unicorn asset" due to these only-up mechanics of the network.
HODL?
So not only is Bitcoin an only-up asset over time but quite exponentially so. Price crashed 80% in 2013, 2017, and 2021? Irrelevant. In fact that is a feature not a bug, as it wipes out all the weakness and scams from the market and breeds newfound strength... you know... the thing that real capitalism does when you aren't subsidizing failed zombie corporations with taxpayer money. Being in the red for a year or two is irrelevant in a retirement account. This shouldn't even have to be explained, but in a world where people legitimately believe that 2.1 Quadrillion sats isn't scarce, I suppose anything is possible.
Give a man a pizza and he'll eat for a day, but cut that pizza into a quadrillion slices and he'll eat for a quadrillion days.
The entire theme behind the HODL ideology was to stack sats and not worry about the volatility over long periods of time. What does a retirement account do? It holds assets for a long period of time without having to worry about short-term volatility. So not only is Bitcoin appropriate for a retirement account but also a retirement account is arguably the very first place Bitcoin should be appropriated.
Conflating volatility with risk
Risk and volatility are completely different things, but are often considered the same thing. You might not want to put a tech stock in your retirement account. Why? Because it's risky. Tech can be outdated. What looks good today can be completely outdated tomorrow. A decade ago it looked like Google would be the only game in town for the end of time. Now the advent of AI shows us that anyone can build their own Google from scratch with a $10k rig and open source tech like Deepseek. Google stock could crash to zero if open-source solutions render that model obsolete.
But what if Bitcoin is rendered obsolete?
What about all these other tokens? What if one of them takes over and leaves the Bitcoiners in the dust? This is a logically inconsistent narrative that can't happen for a couple of different reasons. The most glaring one is that none of these thousands of cryptocurrencies is even attempting to be a better Bitcoin. Bitcoin does a couple things very well, a couple things very poorly, and doesn't even attempt half of the stuff these other coins are doing (for good reason). The tradeoffs are heavy.
Making a "faster" crypto is not competing with Bitcoin. Being "fast" is not something Bitcoin cares about or needs. Having smart contracts on other platforms does not make Bitcoin less valuable. It makes Bitcoin more valuable because Bitcoin is heavily connected to everything else through the liquidity pools. The idea that open-source tech competes like corporations would compete with each other showcases ignorance through blind projection. Linux Mint doesn't compete with Linux Ubuntu does not compete with Kali Linux. Literally nobody cares. Use what you want.
The other big reason why Bitcoin can't just up and die like a corporation/security is that Bitcoin is a network and a community that exists from bottom up architecture rather than top-down CEO leadership and intellectual property. You can't send a cease and desist to community; just ask China. Bitcoin can't declare bankruptcy or even go bankrupt to begin with. If big players leave they are replaced immediately. It's antifragile just like life itself. A person or individual can die easily, but a community or group is much harder to kill.
Will businesses even need bank loans to scale up?
Why sell your soul to the banks when you can just store value in an asset that just goes up? $3M is nothing. Are VCs being deprecated? Guess we'll find out.
What about something like Hive?
Should you put Hive into your retirement account if it becomes an option? Absolutely not. Platforms like ETH and HIVE can and have changed their economic models based on the decisions of a small group. That's a great case to be made that it's too risky to throw into the retirement account. However, that's not even the main reason it shouldn't be done.
DPOS vs BTC
The biggest reason to avoid throwing something like Hive into a retirement account is that you're giving governance powers to a centralized entity. BTC in a retirement account can't affect Bitcoin governance, but Hive or any other proof-of-stake coin in a retirement account chips away at the security of the chain. Same with leaving your assets on an exchange: a problem in which we are already painfully familiar with. I don't know about you but I don't want some intern from Blackrock upvoting posts, witnesses, and DHF projects on our network. That's sounding like a nightmare scenario to me. Pass.
Conclusion
The reason why finance bros tell you not to put Bitcoin into a retirement account is the exact reason why you should put Bitcoin into a retirement account. Bitcoin is a volatile asset, but not a risky one. A solid Bitcoin investment requires the one thing that a retirement account has an abundance of: time.
FYI you can hold HIVE (or any crypto) in a self-directed retirement account where you hold the keys, so it wouldn’t have this issue. I have been doing that since 2017!
I kind of wanted to expand on this more in the OP but it seemed a little fringe.
Perhaps I should have defined a "retirement account" as a Roth IRA or something.
My wife switched jobs a few years back and did institution to institution transfers to set up two retirement accounts, a “large” one to be professionally managed and a “small” one that I’ve managed. Mine went into crypto assets. It’s now the bigger of the two accounts.
How embarrassing for them :D
I bet your wife was shocked for like 5 seconds.
You don't think BTC can be centralized? My bet is on Don Jr. saying "hold my beer."
That wasn't the topic of this post nor did I make any such implications.
I said people can delegate their BTC to a custodian in a retirement account and that will not centralize the governance (it does centralize distribution). Perhaps this is a source of confusion.
The fact that people don't realize what they are giving aways with their 401Ks is amazing. We have centralized the voting power to pretty much every company to a few people with passive investing.
This is the best and stupidest sentence I've read in a really long time. I'll buy your merch.
I don't even bother to put those disclaimers in my posts anymore. If I like a token I am going to talk about it. If you buy it and it goes to crap, it's your own dang fault!
that's the spirit
My only regret was selling my little bitcoin back in 2017, the truth is most folks back then never knew bitcoin would be the top of all coins, however with the massive rise in the price of bitcoin do you think its too late to add it as a retirement plan?
This is a question that was asked at $100, $1000, and $10000.
The answer is the same.
Number go up.
lolzxz hmmm guess life is always a risk though 🤷 absolutely right
Only up
Interesting perspective on including Bitcoin in retirement accounts! Do you think that, as more institutions adopt BTC, its volatility will decrease, making it even more suitable for long-term investment strategies?
Hm well I just spent my last thousand words talking about how less volatility makes it less suitable for long-term investment. Volatility is also relative. Volatile as compared to what? I have no faith that USD, the thing we use to measure volatility, won't become volatile itself.
Very good point! Volatility always depends on the benchmark, and if the dollar loses stability, the rules of the game change completely.
One thing I can guarantee is that USD will continue to lose value. USD have lost most of their value during my lifetime, in fact, and while my life expectancy isn't that long, I expect USD to lose most of the value they have now before I die.
Life is utterly dependent on a couple things, that, if disrupted, would eliminate all life on Earth. BTC is utterly dependent on one thing, the physical network owned by BlackRock. BTC, and the internet, and each individual voice on the internet, exist at BlackRock's pleasure, and one at at time or all together, Larry Fink's whim could silence them. Life on Earth can be destroyed if the integrity of the Earth is disrupted physically, which hasn't happened in >4B years, but could. There is a risk.
But BTC is dependent on the whim of Larry Fink, the current BlackRock CEO. The network doesn't have to lose physical integrity for BTC to fail. It just has to refuse to transmit BTC transactions, and censorship is one of the easiest things in the world to do, apparently, since it happens all the time. But those are at different scales, and not at all pan-global. Also, various regulators interfere with network transmissions all the time too, and have forced KYC on the CEX's. I agree this strongly suggests the legacy financial people intend to keep BTC around, for now. But they could shut any single HODLer down at any minute without consequence, even Roger Ver. The finesse and granularity with which censorship can be applied is all but infinite.
It is ludicrous to suggest people that don't own that physical network are some kind of force of nature that can prevent that network from doing whatever the hell Larry Fink wants it to. It's also silly to compare BTC to terrestrial life, because being dependent on Larry Fink's whim to exist isn't comparable to the resilience of terrestrial life, or it's dependence on the physical integrity of the planet.
My confidence in the status quo, and Larry Fink, is pretty low, unlike my confidence in the integrity of planet Earth. If you're betting it all on BTC, you're betting it all on Larry Fink's permission. I don't think you have any hold on him, or any clue what he intends to do, or what those he answers to have in mind. I've worked too hard for stuff I don't have anymore to take that kind of risk with the stuff I still do.
There is a risk that Larry or his bosses have something in mind for BTC that will extort you with your valuation of your holdings. If they tell you that you can only exchange your BTC for mealworm burgers and Nestle brand water, you'll probably roll with it, since you won't be able to do anything about it, and that's a lot of bugburgers and water, after all. They're not going to offer me anything for my non-holdings of BTC either. But I don't want any bugburgers so I'll be growing my own food, because I'm investing in that instead of BTC. Seems like a fool's gambit, if you trust Larry Fink.
I don't. Good luck.
Life and evolution are the literal definition of antifragility.
Not much more to say on that front.
If the world worked in exactly the way that you describe here then these people at the top level would not be wasting billions of dollars trying to manipulate public opinion. Actions have consequences. More often than not it is the path of least resistance that gets taken, but yet you are constantly positing about the path of hardest resistance being chosen and the entire world being lorded over by a single centralized entity.
That is simply not how the world works.
It's a good thing too because if the world worked the way you are constantly saying it does than your silly little homestead isn't going to save you when there are drones and robots looking over your shoulder 24/7. Like oh they can shut off the internet on a whim but they can't walk over and take all your land and throw you in prison. Okay then.
A lot of the comments you make on my posts are the same old doomsday scenarios. I don't need to waste time preparing for what happens when a tiger is clamping down on my neck. It's not going to happen, and in the one in a billion chance it does happen there's not a god damn thing I can do about it. If I start seeing tigers walking around outside my home then I'll make sure to arm myself. Not before.
You don't think having billions of people working for you is a worthy goal? Also, this is hardly the venue to explicitly detail 'exactly' how everything works, so that's not a fair criticism. Also, no one knows 'exactly' how these banksters operate. Here's some actual scholars that have been researching 'how it works' in their academic positions for their entire professional lives, and I bet their perspective is novel to you. At ~1hr 30min they state 'This is science' to underscore their vast evidentiary basis for their claims, including DNA, documented history, and current political affairs.
Shortly thereafter the the guy uses the phrase 'The power of the entire world working for you...' (~1:32:00) IONO mang, DYOR.
Hardly. I do mention centralization, but often discuss why they will fail, because they're incapable of into society. Psychopaths don't see people as others like themselves, but as things they can manipulate to get them to benefit themselves. They can't have friends. They have to take what others have, and that's their one trick. When they don't have plebs to parasitize and democide to steal from, they will turn on each other. So, you misunderstand, or mischaracterize, my thesis.
I agree. They've already taken my real property, multiple times, through various mechanisms of courts. I'm well aware a half a dozen thugs with guns can end me and take what's mine. I'm not going to live forever, anyway. Since I don't hoard money, I'm not on their radar, though. Security through obscurity is a very weak defense, but it works for Hive, and it can't hurt. Anyway, I'm going to die one way or another, so I might as well die on a hill worth dying on.
Cataclysms happen. People differentially survive them depending on a variety of factors, depending on the nature of the cataclysm. Sometimes people just get lucky and the rock doesn't land on their head. However people that take risk into account and prepare for it preferentially survive. Throwing caution to the wind is what opponents most love to see.
Which is easier for technocrats, censoring information on the internet or sending gangs of armed thugs to dispossess people of their land? In the wider perspective all I am saying is hedge. And, don't make silly, indefensible comparisons between digital data that is utterly dependent on the permission of banksters to be transmitted and terrestrial life that has proven it's resilience for ~4B years. I'm saying that too, but mostly my point is hedge.
How could you be so wrong lmfao
He likes to go big or go home
Well, you could state in what particular I am wrong, and maybe we could figure it out. Do you think that BTC that has been around for ~12 years is comparable to life that has been around for ~4B years? That's pretty silly. Do you think that the physical integrity of planet Earth is comparable to the whims of banksters in terms of risk? Make a case. You're just making an ad hominem which is basically an admission you have no arguments.
I accept your concession.
It isn't. BTC can be transacted using just about any communication network. So your argument falls flat from the beginning. Go educate yourself.
Pray tell, what cables, radio transmitters, or satellites aren't owned by BlackRock?
The ones that are not owned by BlackRock, any other questions?
Nothing isn't owned by BlackRock.
You have long stated that Bitcoin Core is in control of the Bitcoin Protocol. You're being proven wrong on this front as well, which is pretty much the same exact concept.
Bitcoin Core was delegated power.
And now that they are saying they are going to remove the op_return 80 byte limit people are switching over to Bitcoin Knots in protest. Bitcoin Core was never in control of Bitcoin.
Mining pools are delegated power: they can't attack/control Bitcoin.
Most of Blackrock's power is also pure delegation.
You seem to greatly struggle with this idea that when people fuck around they find out very quickly. The balance of power at the top is not a pyramid; it's an inverted pyramid that can topple over for like any reason. You just think it's an easy job because they are experts at balancing the teetering pyramid and make it look easy and stable.
Blackrock is in control of very little. What they are in control of is delegated to them by their benefactors. They do not make big waves. They are masters of the Butterfly Effect. Small nudges that lead to big profitable outcomes. Larry Fink is the face of a single hedge fund (in a sea of hedge funds). His power is even more limited than Blackrock's.
Larry Fink personally pushed DEI and ESG. There's a lot of that going around. He's also the Agenda Director for the WEF, in addition to being the CEO of BlackRock. You sell him short.
i came here due to the title but you are rigth in everything :D
It takes a brave decision and commitment if there would be a huge investment set for Bitcoin and other coins
When the Blackrock BTC ETF came out I took one of my retirement accounts, which constituted about 25% of all of my retirement funds, and put it all on IBIT. When BTC got near all-time highs, I took a small bit of profits and put it into their ETH ETF.
This account now constitutes ~ 45% of all of my retirement funds. Pretty happy...
So far.
Now to decide whether to take profits and shift back to traditional investments or stick to my original plan and hold through a full 4 year cycle like I had originally planned...
It feels risky, but I think I am going to stick with original plan and let the chips fall whwere they may. 🤞