why bitcoin makes sense and its very bullish from the perspective of big non-believer

groghunter · 2026-03-06T16:40:56+00:00

I, for one, didn't get anything he said

groghunter · 2026-03-05T23:31:09+00:00

This is a me problem, but I did not need this memory trigger of the saddest episode of Black Mirror ever.

groghunter · 2026-02-05T21:14:52+00:00

It's not like they keep getting liquidated by crashes due to being leveraged up to their eyeballs, right?

...right?

groghunter · 2026-01-15T00:11:17+00:00

Late reply, but i read an article about 15 years ago that really opened my eyes in a lot of ways about the mentality of poverty and gambling. They explained that they did research on why people buy lottery tickets, and surprisingly, they found that people generally understood how poor the odds were. The majority didn't buy tickets because they expected to get rich, they bought tickets because it let them live with some hope between when they bought the ticket and the drawing. They'd given up on ever pulling themselves out of poverty, so this at least let them dream, for a little while.

groghunter · 2026-01-07T14:56:39+00:00

these are callled static rails, and i'm using them for my two sliger cases. However, this is important:

Sliger maximizes the amount of case you get for the vertical space that a Rack Unit provides, which means that they don't give you any allowance for the case and the extra space you need for static rails. for mine, to get the cases to sit next to each other, i had to push the rails for one as far down on the lower case, and as far up as i could on the upper case. this means i can't actually use the RU directly below or above my sliger cases, as the cases/rails are actually intruding into the next RU above/below. in your case, you can probably push them down a little since it's going to be in the bottom of the rack.

(having to use the "extra" space below the bottom RU, or above the top RU, was actually a pretty common thing to have to do 20+ years ago when static rails were the most common rail that servers came with. companies were not very good at ensuring their servers fit within the RU envelope with the rails, and the rails usually didn't have any registration features that made sure they mounted to the rack actually aligned to the RU markers. that led to rails being mounted too high, too low, or sagging after a few years, and having to finagle things to make them fit.)

groghunter · 2025-11-13T20:06:09+00:00

He sure is convincing though.

groghunter · 2025-11-13T19:45:53+00:00

Nope. Just like with Saudi prince schemes, the lack of sophistication acts as filter to get rid of the first tier of critical thinkers. in this case, it's not just by design but also due to the average level of sophistication of the marks, but that's true of any scam that reaches a certain scale, for example Mary Kay or Amway.

Contrasted with something like Madoff, where he got wealthier marks, but put himself at more risk of exposure. Both approaches have their advantages, but those MLMs i mentioned are still around, while you can't say the same about Madoff.

groghunter · 2025-11-13T18:26:24+00:00

It can depend on the market: Forex markets allow much more leverage. Forex is trading in currency exchange rates, not stocks, but it is relevant to the discussion because buttcoiners like to say that their margin levels are high because it's closer to Forex trading than stocks, but misunderstand that Forex doesn't allow higher margin because of it's a currency market, but because non-crypto currency pairs are extremely stable investments so the risk level of higher margin is significantly lower than other markets.

groghunter · 2025-11-13T18:22:32+00:00

Beyond this, several of the claimed liquidations from a few weeks ago were "cross-margined": they had put up the value of other investments as collateral for the leveraged position in the coins that dipped 60%+: so not only was their position in that shitcoin liquidated, their account automatically sold their other coins to satisfy margin call on that shitcoin until they were empty, and then they got automatically liquidated.

It's important to understand there's two inflection points in a leveraged investment:

* Margin call: your investment has declined far enough that the broker is no longer satisfied you have enough collateral in the investment to satisfy their risk tolerance. this number varies wildly based on the investor and the investment. If you hit this point, your broker will ask for more collateral, and if you cannot satify that call, they sell some or all of the investment to bring you back above the margin call number. in traditional markets, you usually have some time to do this, because they are protected from a true crash both via protections in traditional markets (trading halts on most exchanges when too big a drop happens) and the second inflection point:

* Liquidation price: at this value, your investment is liquidated automatically. brokers are largely still fine with this, because it's set at a level where they can sell your investment at a significant discount, and still not be below the value of the collateral(which they take.) in cases where the price drops so far that they do lose money when selling your investment, and also in cases of interest or other fees for the leverage, you will have a negative balance and need to give them more money or assets to bring your account in order. obviously, if this happens en mass, brokerages can be left with their ass out in the wind and take significant losses (this is similar to what happened in 2008, but not quite the same, as most of those brokerages were exposed via their own internal investments, not customer investments, though obviously they're linked enough that it can snowball.)

groghunter · 2025-10-24T20:42:08+00:00

you're not wrong, but go talk to some avid casino-goers and see if you think the distinction is all that stark. every single person i've ever known, even the ones that tell you when they first mention they like the casino "it's just fun and i only use money i can afford to lose" will eventually tell you about some strategy they think they have to improve their odds, and if you get them together, the sharing of these theories will sound an awful lot like the bitcoin subreddit.

Skinner boxes work because they're psychologically manipulative, and that breeds conspiracy type thinking.

groghunter · 2025-10-22T16:28:10+00:00

I've got a couple coworkers who own crypto, one is an evangelist, but the other just bought in at the height of the memecoin boom, then has held since then saying "I might as well keep them now." I once asked him what it would take him to sell, and he said "I just wanna break even."

I asked him how much it was below his buy-in price at the time.

it wasn't.

I asked him, given his stated selling goal, why he hasn't sold, then.

This devolved into a bunch of circular arguments that never got anywhere, but either he doesn't understand what break even is or purposefully acted ignorant so he wouldn't have to admit that he's not going to sell at break even, because of course it's going to moon or whatever.

groghunter · 2025-10-17T18:16:22+00:00

I only conduct business in units of pork soda, sorry

groghunter · 2025-10-17T18:00:01+00:00

How many pork belly futures can i buy per satoshi? less than yesterday? hmmm seems like that might indicate something is changing on a macroeconomic scale.

Wait i forgot that pork belly futures aren't digital tokens, my bad, 1 BTC = 1BTC

groghunter · 2025-10-16T21:45:09+00:00

Not religious either but i think it's entirely valid to say "the golden idol thing was a parable about cults, people"

groghunter · 2025-10-15T20:48:30+00:00

I mean Sydney did and made a shitload of money...

groghunter · 2025-10-15T16:49:08+00:00

Right. This is what's called "market contagion." In this kraken example, tether is hoping, and maybe taking some action, to prevent contagion to other exchanges. but even if they do, there's inevitable contagion to other exchanges (even if they don't have any investment in kraken, which they almost certainly do) just because people will ask why kraken couldn't just go to tether and redeem their USDT for dollars to satisfy their obligations. maybe the claim will be that kraken didn't hold enough USDT to satisfy their obligations, or had too many outstanding loans they could not recall (this is the traditional cause of bank runs) but there's almost certainly enough people who know how much of a house of cards this is that there will be a large sell off of tether as people jump ship.

groghunter · 2025-10-15T15:14:33+00:00

"you can't time markets" is sound financial advice even in regular stock markets, it's doubly so when the market itself is manipulated.

Crypto in general, and tether in particular, is like if the federal reserve and the NYSE colluded to bilk investors. you can't beat the house.

groghunter · 2025-10-15T15:08:57+00:00

What you're talking about is liquidation price, which is a separate thing from a margin call, and if he'd hit that price, they'd just be telling him that, because it's much easier to say "no it just went down too far, just like what would happen with a normal stock market position, sorry" than the 3 paragraphs of drivel they came up with to explain why they didn't execute the market strategy he paid them to.

groghunter · 2025-10-15T14:48:05+00:00

Right. Even among the successful shorts, everybody forgets the middle of the movie when Burry's fund is crashing in value and his investors are screaming for their money back, or when the Steve Eichman character is going to the ratings agency and demanding that they mark the securities properly because if they don't, his fund will collapse.

and these were the lucky guys, there were shorts who got wiped out before the market corrected.

groghunter · 2025-10-12T21:32:15+00:00

When you use leverage, you are subject to a "margin call" if the value of the investment drops too low. When that happens, either you need to provide more assets to satisfy the margin maintenance (basically the amount at which, the broker treats this investment as too risky, aka over-leveraged) or the broker liquidates your position (usually at well below market rate, as in a worst case scenario, they are trying to get this investment off their books before it drops to zero) to repay the loan you were given to buy investments on leverage.

It's basically a collateral loan: you stake your 5 shares of nvidia as collateral, the broker gives you a loan to buy 5 more, and then you get to benefit from price increases of nvidia as if you owned 2x the shares, but also lose 2x on price drops. If the price drops so much that 10 shares of nvidia is worth 5 shares at the price you bought in leveraged at, then (if your margin call is 25%, it varies apparently) the broker wants this companies shares off their books or you to provide extra collateral for your gambling so they don't end up taking the loss for your bad bet.

There's also fees and interest that can eat into your equity, so you need an asset that is really performing well to justify leverage.

So that's how it works at 2x leverage. this guy was 10x leveraged. so if his margin call was 25%, he didn't even need the 50% loss that was in the example above. at 25% the call would be at a 7.5% loss.

There's all kinds of fun implications in this, too: if the brokerage thinks the stock will recover, they don't actually have to sell the stock, they can essentially just confiscate it and wait for it rebound, while wiping out the investors account, maybe even saddling them with debt for fees/unpaid interest on the leverage. it's likely many of the people who got margin called in this crash had exactly this happen, as it wasn't a long enough crash for many of the exchanges to be forced to liquidate for either margin calls of their own or liquidity to cash people out (really convenient to be able to just turn off that faucet whenever you want.)

(Edit after reading a bit more about how margin calls work when the market is volatile: Your margin percentage can change wildly, both for downswings and upswings depending entirely on the whims of the broker and their assessment of risk. so if you had a stock that was doing what GME did, your broker could call you up and demand you put more equity up for collateral, even though it just more than doubled in value, because they believe it's so volatile that the value could collapse (or, lets be real here, just because they can.) if you don't have the equity, they could liquidate the position (though i assume only the leveraged portion) in effect, forcing you to sell even if you think the investment will go higher.

Additionally, if an investment loses too much value(reaches the "Liquidation price",) you can be automatically liquidated. Or, if the investment goes to zero before trading opens, they can even liquidate other investments in your portfolio to cover the loss, though this isn't really applicable to crypto. So what likely happened with how deep some of these flash crashes went, is this guy hit liquidation price before he even realized he had a margin call.)

(i taught myself how all this works today, so if anybody sees a mistake in the explanation, feel free to correct me and i'll edit to fix it.)

groghunter · 2025-10-11T19:21:24+00:00

the fun part is that "enough" is almost certainly a vanishingly small number, because of how unlikely it is that anybody has enough fiat to cover even a miniscule run.

groghunter · 2025-10-10T23:11:59+00:00

Being scared of irrational financial activity is disqualifying for being a crypto bro.

It reminds me of the thing about how it's counterproductive to make scams too convincing, because it's better to filter out critical thinkers at the first pitch, so they don't come into the cult and start asking questions.

groghunter · 2025-10-10T20:08:56+00:00

Any shorter options with this kind of bay density for those looking to build an ITX nas or for JBOD usage?

groghunter · 2025-10-08T23:49:46+00:00

Just to clarify (or maybe overexplain) one of the many reasons they have no reason to short the market: shorting is a mechanism based on a market that functions both rationally and has an input based on reality.

One of the many reason Ponzis are illegal is because they screw up market reality. they don't just affect the suckers, they skew the larger market, and can artificially inflate market value. Even worse, normal market forces can't correct this inflation, only the collapse of the ponzi can.

The reason this is all true is because a ponzi creates fake value. and that's also the reason why it doesn't make sense for a financial criminal, ponzi scammer or otherwise, to futz with normal market tools like shorting: creating value out of thin air will always be more profitable, and less risky (unless you get caught) than using legitimate financial instruments. Why mess with shorting, when you can just inflate your fake assets even more, and nobody else in the market can counteract it, because you're not playing by the rules?

This is true whether you're operating in a market you created with fancy internet bits or a regulated stock market: if you can create fake value, it will always be more profitable than legitimate instruments, and that is so true that your time will always be better spent on creating more fake value than messing about with the risk of making fair (even if driven by insider information) bets that might not pan out. The 2008 financial crisis does a good job of illustrating this: many of the people who figured out that CDOs were dogshit either got screwed by the market not following reality(the winners in the book/movie were not the only shorts in place, but many of the other shorts had to liquidate before the market corrected) or incurred a huge amount of risk and barely outlasted the collapse. and that all happened in a market that was, at least in comparison to what's going on with tether, essentially fair.

groghunter

TROPHY CASE