Anyone seen this already? Former Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza moves into crypto.
We all know about Elon Musk, Michael Saylor, Cathie Wood and the likes are bullish on Bitcoin. Now Ben Baldanza is getting involved in crypto as well. “With traditional investing end users don’t usually have that kind of control. We want to encourage users to come into the new age of decentralized finance”.
Disclaimer: Not financial advice, do your own research.
Bitcoin, cryptocurrency are just words to me. They might as well be something out of Star Trek. I don’t understand them and probably never will. I live in hope that they don’t become compulsory, at least for the next 30 years
The only person in the above list I have heard of is Elon Musk.
But I do have one question “are cryptocurrencies really currencies or are they investment tools, as the article suggests?”
Is this an advert?
@Peter: No, no advert. I was just surprised that the former Spirit Airlines CEO also went into crypto. He paved the way for the Ultra Low Costs models: First Spirit Airlines… then RyanAir… EasyJet, WizzAir.. all making us pilots basically pay-to-fly…And COVID cost lots of us our jobs, and conditions are even getting worse (for myself included: initially unpaid leave…then “let go”).
gallois wrote:
But I do have one question “are cryptocurrencies really currencies or are they investment tools, as the article suggests?”
They are not currencies. I guess they can be called investment tools.
Thankyou A_A
I think they need to work on the brand! dVesting sounds mighty close to divesting :)
Bitcoin, cryptocurrency are just words to me. They might as well be something out of Star Trek. I don’t understand them and probably never will.
That’s entirely reasonable. Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin invention feels like the internet did 40 years ago (when, correspondingly, the Internet Protocol was about 10 years old). At that time the people who used it were rather a minority and those who understood it were an even smaller subset of humanity. I recall that in the 1980s many people dismissed and distrusted the internet in the same way as Bitcoin today. A few of us used it (and were duly ridiculed). Sadly, I didn’t realise quite how it would change the world.
I live in hope that they don’t become compulsory, at least for the next 30 years
Well, it has taken four decades for engineers to build all the layers that we take for granted on the Internet and Transmission Control protocols, so you may be in luck.
Some people see Bitcoin as a worthless Ponzi scheme for drug and arms dealers (although, being in the latter business, one does rather take exception to being associated with the former).
Others see Bitcoin as an invention on a par with TCP/IP; an engineered means of exchange and store of value which has the potential to be politically and economically disruptive. Today, you can carry a billion $ worth of BTC in your head and take it anywhere in the universe. Or you can transfer it to anyone else in the world almost instantly, without involvement of any third party and at minimal cost. Anyone who says the same of fiat currency is either delusional or disingenuous – the fiat banking system is only “free” in the sense that the British NHS is free (i.e. wholly or partly funded by others through stealth taxes).
A layer built on Bitcoin already allows secure communication and anonymous intercontinental cost-free micropayments, (so that instead of mining their customers’ data for targeted advertising etc., internet search engines could charge a couple of Sats per search).
I reckon we’ll see at least another 10 years technical development before use of Bitcoin-based technology becomes quasi-indispensable. Then, as now, it won’t be compulsory, but when was the last time that any of us chose to use a telex machine instead of email?
Jacko wrote:
Others see Bitcoin as an invention on a par with TCP/IP; an engineered means of exchange and store of value which has the potential to be politically and economically disruptive
It is an easy trick to say: “even informed people once thought the market for computers is 5 units globally” to try to make every stupid invention as the potential next world changer – and basically to say that everybody who doesn’t see it that way is narrow minded. Bitcoin has already proven, that it has very limited use to exchange value and no use at all to store value! The requirement for something to store value is, that it value is comparatively stable. The BTC value is the opposite of stable.
But I like the comparison between btc and TCP. BTC to some extend is really to money what email is to traditional mail. Just that there is no technical way to predict if an email will be sent in half an hour or in 2-5 days. And that every email you ever sent and you will ever send is plain text readable to anybody that ever received an email from you and know who you are. And that before you can send an email dozens of monkeys need to type in hundreds of pages of encyclopedia britannica – just to prove that you are really serious about writing an email.
Very likely, that an Email system with all these “features” would also have replaced Royal Mail, isn’t it?
Jacko wrote:
and at minimal cost.
The cost ist orders of magnitude higher than with traditional means of money transfer. Do not mix up cost and price – these are two very different things. The cost for an international bank to bank wire transfer are in the ballpark of fractions of a ct.
Jacko wrote:
A layer built on Bitcoin already allows secure communication and anonymous intercontinental cost-free micropayments,
“A layer built on bitcoin” is not bitcoin and therefore does not have its security feature – it’s a scam on a scam. In addition: Nothing based on Bitcoin is really anonymous. The core principle of bitcoin is that everybody that you ever paid with BTC and knows your real life identity (e.g. because they sent a shipment to your home address, converted btc to money or money to btc for you or just know you because you paid the tap at your regular pub with it) can trace all payments you made in the past and all payments you will make in the future. In a bitcoin only world your financials are 100% transparent forever to everybody you ever paid.
My only interest in money has.always been what I can exchange it for.
I got money for work other people wanted, and was promised more money after I stopped working at 65.
Doing press-ups was never a source of money, as no value to anyone else.
Bitcoin seems to be created originally by useless computer action.
It is like Pokémons, collectables, or Picasso’s. Only worth what others will pay in real money. New collectables have a poor reputation as investments in the medium to short time scale.
Bitcoins won’t survive to be found by archaeologists in 5,000 years time as priceless relics
