I work in home mortgage if anyone needs advice on how to get approved for a loan.

I'm thinking of suing ABC for damages

So, people really shouldn’t mess with crypto unless they already have a 401k and some slow growth safe investments, right? Do we need an advisor for things like IRAs or can we do all that through TD Ameritrade?

@this_that5553 Check out the convo on IE general

Yeah, I don't invest because it pisses me off so much. But the pump and dump scheme seems to be what everyone is doing

It's sad, because Monero and Ethereum are legitimately good technology. But people just latch on to whatever crypto has the most hype and the hype is completely artificial. People are talking about Lite Coin too now. Like WTF. Lite Coin sucks ass, but the hype is randomly around it again

Dude, the entire concept of crypto currency is fragile af. If the world economy ran on crypto, even if it was a good one, I would be very uncomfortable

I agree. But the shitty thing is that nobody actually uses these coins. They just buy and sell the coin themselves

Yeah dude

The fact that there is _zero_ commerce around this stuff should be a huge warning flag

^^^^

There are several huge red flags

e-stores that use bitcoin do _very_ little business in it. I guarantee. To the point where stores have just stopped supporting it

Let's be honest, NEETs do not spend much money on goods and services

Anyway, I'm gonna watch some tutorials on TD Ameritrade or something lol

I've used Schwab since I was 21, can't complain

@John O - yeah me too I like it a lot

@this_that5553 I like to use Bitcoin to buy stuff because a lot of merchants give discounts for using it

From what I understand though it is used a lot more in third world countries that don't really have a credit card infrastructure

Third world countries also don't have much of a landline phone infrastructure, so those places were very quick to adopt cell phone towers and basically "skipped" ever setting up landlines

So I’ve been listening to the “Money For The Rest of Us” podcast in my free time. I know very little about how finance works, and I thought it would be a decent way to learn some basics. But I can’t decide if the guy is a charlatan or ‘guru’ figure or if he is actually knowledgeable. Has anyone with more in-depth knowledge on the subject gotten a good read on the podcast? And if he is an intellectual fraud, are there any other good podcasts you’d suggest instead?

@Tim - NH not sure about podcasts but reddit has some good finance related sections. If you are having trouble understand what a topic is you can always post the thread here and we can review/discuss

@this_that5553 buy a broad based vanguard mutual fund. They have the lowest fee structure. Aim to choose a fund with broad exposure to the market rather than something sector specific. That’s how you eliminate company or industry specific risk.

You won’t become a billionaire overnight but I believe in avg the market appreciates ~7% per year so you can do the math as to how much you’ll make overtime given your contribution level and expected date of withdrawl

@Zyzz Solid advice, thanks

Does anyone want me to give a seminar on how financial options work? not a "here's how to get rich trading options", but rather "here is what options are and how they work." The knowledge you would gain from this would be applicable to trading options on stocks as well as other financial instruments such as bitcoin.

@Deleted User I think that would be great. I remember someone here was asking about that the other day though I can't find the convo now.

Yeah, people were talking about it in IE General, and with the upcoming BTC futures I thought it might be a topic of interest.

@Deleted User id be interested

OK, I'll plan to do a 30-minute seminar Sunday the 10th at 9PM ET. @Zyzz let me know if you want to team up. I'll do it on the "voicechat" channel of this server. LMK if that time doesn't work for you. I'll send a channel annoucement later today if no one objects to the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojgznbLrcxQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xmi-GtBG5vw @everyone Spencer gives a good take on bitcoin that I agree with 100%. The jist is people are buying bitcoin to sell bitcoin they don't actually want to hold it they just want to flip it and make money off of it. Anyone who is holding bitcoin should carefully consider how a 50-90% decrease in price would make them feel. I suggest you sell your holdings.

All newbs should lurk on the Reddit Personal Finance forum. and buy Ric Edelman's 'The Truth about Money'

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics

Whats everyones thoughts on Lending Club?

@Zyzz Thanks, yes this is stuff that has been in the back of my mind. I'm just slowly selling my btc piece by piece

I was in around june july time, so my selling off 33% of my btc I've gotten my money back

@Deleted User I used lending tree as a borrower, it was fine on my end.

I invested 100 bucks back about a year ago and forgot about and ended up making fairly good positive returns but have been reading some bad reviews lately on Lending Club itself.

@Deleted User Like what?

Returns or the bad press?

Bad press

There was a scandal in the administration. During the founding the owners bought a bunch of loans to boost popularity

And the other big peer lender has been outperforming lately

From what I've seen as well, many people use automatic investing and then aren't happy when they have so many loan defaults because they don't look at who they're lending money to.

huh

@Deleted User I've run about $20K through lendingclub and gotten a 5.4% return so far. It will probably go down a few more percentage points by the time my existing notes conclude.

I've been happy with it, but I'm not doing automatic investing or putting any additional capital into it. I've read too many negative things about it.

@ThisIsChris congrats on the nice gains. i wouldn't leave anything on the table that youre not comfortable with losing. i wish i could be more optimistic about BTC but i have no way of valuing this currency so i have no way of telling if its over or undervalued. if this were a company we could do a discounted cash flow analysis or compare its PE ratio to peers and have a better understanding as to its valuation. i was talking to @Deleted User about this earlier but i believe BTC is rising off of the "Greater Fool Theory" also look up the Holland Tulip Mania. I would not be surprised if it plays out similarly. We shall see

@here Sunday the 10th at 9PM Eastern, I will give a short seminar explaining options on the "voicechat" channel. My goal is that anyone listening will come away understanding what options are, the difference between a call and a put, the meaning of "strike price," "expiration," and "exercising," and the basics of how options are priced on the open market. If you understand these you'll be able to understand an options chain, and you'll have a solid foundation to understand sophisticated options trading strategies. I'll try to make it interesting, informative, and fun.

I've been very satisfied with Lending Club, I have automatic investing set up, and the returns have been good. I've used it for years now.

What's your rate been if you don't mind sharing?

The market obviously would have done far better, but the interest from Lending Club has always been solid. Yeah just a minute let me go get an accurate number.

5.92 for me.

nice!

Which is rather lower than it was.

It was up in the mid sixes.

So now I'm a bit chapped.

I was over 10% for the first six months

I don't look at it much, it just makes money.

and then....

@Deleted User i got into lending club back in 2014. I stopped buying notes about 2-3 years ago because i had an inordinate amount of defaults. i used a screen on what used to be called nickelsteamroller.com that showed very low default rates. the defaults in my portfolio exceeded what i thought i should have had by a lot. my return was about a 6% or so (according to them - which is higher than what it actually should be). with the risk of fraud and abuse, the understanding that the company makes money off of originations (incentive to make loans at any cost - even to those who shouldn't get loans), and lack of liquidity(I need a higher return than 6% for the lack of liquidity) I have decided to discontinue investing in LC notes. If you are looking for a 6% or so yield with good liquidity i can point you to some preferred stock

What tranches do you primarily invest in? @Why Tea

Point me at some preferred stock then.

@Zyzz That's exactly why I stopped automatic investing.

@Why Tea CLNS-J, AHT-I, TWO-C. Those are all the ones I am in.. they all yield ~7%

Thanks for the tip, @Zyzz

So Lending Club loans are financed by masses of Lending Club investors?

Correct

A loan is split up into $25 segments called "notes"

So you buy a bunch of $25 pieces of different loans @Rick

@Rick So if one loan goes bad, it doesn't hit you very hard if you own many notes because it's a very small fraction of your portfolio.

It's similar to investing in a bond fund.

except you're tapping into consumer lending, not corporate or municipal lending

@Zyzz Thanks I think there's definitely a lot to that Greater Fool Theory. I've thought for a long time about how one might price bitcoin, and here is my swing at it: Bitcoin's main use is as a transaction network. If you want to transfer money to someone you could use one of several networks, like bank networks etc, or you can use Bitcoin. If you want to transfer money and decide to use the Bitcoin network, you first buy bitcoin and then send it to someone who sells the bitcoin. Now on your end you are trying to pay the amount owed plus a transaction fee, on the other end someone wants to get the amount owed. To simplify let's say the transaction is instantaneous (otherwise let's add a bitcoin volatility premium to the amount of bitcoin you want to send). So as someone looking to use the Bitcoin network as a service, you don't really care what the price of bitcoin is, you are trying to settle something in dollars and you are merely using bitcoin as a medium. I made the simplifying assumptions the transaction is instantaneous and let's say both buyer of bitcoin and seller of bitcoin can and do immediately exchange the dollar for bitcoin and then bitcoin for dollars.

So then to the people using bitcoin as a transaction network it doesn't really matter to them what the price of bitcoin is under these conditions, since it's only a medium for them to get dollars from one place to another.

But there are other people on the sides of that bitcoin for cash exchange, the guy selling the transferer the bitcoin, and the guy buying back the bitcoin from the transferee. Let's simplify the assumption that it is some how the same person.

So this guy holds bitcoin until people want to use his bitcoin for their transaction

You have to pay him to not hold cash

and he makes his money on the difference between what you pay for X bitcoin and what he pays out for X bitcoin to the other person

So the guy who holds bitcoin makes money by selling bitcoin high to the transferer and buying it low to the transferee. And the thing that stops him from just screwing over the transferee by not buying back the bitcoin is that there are other people who want to get in and provide this same transfering money service using bitcoin

So in the end owning bitcoin winds up sounding like owning a substrait of the infrastructure of a payment network.

So even though it's not perfect I think of bitcoins as like shares of american express or something

@Deleted User Interesting. I have seen a few Lending Club loans on credit reports. Never know that's what it was, though.

@ThisIsChris i certainly understand the demand for wanting to transact in crypto currencies but it just seems like a lot of buying and selling. i know very little about the FOREX markets and have a very rudimentary understanding of what causes currency appreciation and depreciation. But people must store their wealth in certain currencies (not everyone is going to hold 100% gold) and those currencies are usually of more stable countries (USD, Euro, GBP, JPY, CHF). I do not see BTC as stable. If you want to liken it to commodities, metals in particular, you have gold which central banks will hold and individuals will hold as a store of value. there is clear demand for long term ownership as it is agreed gold is a store of value. take an industrial metal like copper or silver. these metals have an end use. ie: they are consumed. Also new supply is important to consider as well. How is BTC created?

@Zyzz I totally agree with you that it is mostly buying and selling, I've just been trying to create a "fundamental analysis" of bitcoin to see how to think of it having an intrinsic value.

Bitcoin is created as a reward for "miners" who provide all the computing power to keep the Bitcoin network going.

@Zyzz The explanation I've heard is that BTC is computational proof of work. Not sure how that confers value but that's the response I've gotten.

That reward is also decreasing until it will eventually taper off to nothing

@ThisIsChris interesting. this concept sounds a little foreign to me. the idea of computing power needed to keep the bitcoin network going. or is that tech jargon for essentially being a market maker (which is what you described in an above paragraph)?

@Deleted User i guess i dont understand why computational proof of work is needed? is it in the same concept as having to physically mine for gold or silver?

@Zyzz So every node in the bitcoin network (including your own computer if you want) there is a record of ever bitcoin transaction, this is used to build a ledger that shows how much bitcoin each person holds. Persons on the ledger are represented by your wallet, which is a long code that people use to send you money.
Given this, if I want to send money from my wallet to your wallet, the network needs to do a lot of computational work to check the ledger to confirm that I have enough bitcoin on my row of the ledger such that I am allowed to take some of that and put it on your part of the ledger. The computational work of verifying that on this giant decentralized ledger is the computational work needed to run bitcoin

There are a lot of uses for crypto currency in general. But bitcoin isn’t very _good_ at any of them. There are better crypto systems out there. Which is why I don’t believe anyone “uses” bitcoin in good faith but rather pumps and dumps to make some cash.

I’d rather invest in Ethereum or monero or something but I can’t be bothered when I have invested in anything else yet

That is not entirely correct @ThisIsChris . BitCoin mining is artificialy (I don't mean that with any pejorative conotations) induced computational work that gets harder over time. Maintaining the ledger is computationaly very cheap (easy). In order to ensure that ledger has not been tampered with an industry standard SHA256 hash is used. Calculating the hash is also very cheap and designed to be super fast. Each hash is distributed with equal statistical probability throughout the 256bit space. Crypto currencies say this: ok, if you hash the ledger you will get a number between 1 and 1024 (numbers just for representation). Each number is equally likely. You hash computation will take 1 second. Well, we want to introduce 'difficulty' so add a random number to the ledger, cacl the hash again and make sure that hash is <256. You will now have to run the hash function between 1-4 times (1-4 seconds) so it takes longer. You have only 1 in four chance of getting it under 256. The first guy to calc it, gets the bitcoin reward. As soon as 2K blocks have been added to the ledger if it took less than 10 minutes, the difficulty goes up meaning the next hash needs to be under 128, double the difficulty. As you have more nodes, it goes faster but difficulty gets higher. The 'mining' part is artificial. It has nothing to do with the work required to maintain a ledger itself.

this of course presents a problem to the network. Anybody that can own 50%+ of the network can front run the hashes and own the entire network. So for example, guys like Goldman or NSA can get enough hashing power to front run everyone. Not say that is what they would do, but that is one of the flaws. The other flaw is that bitcoin algo depends on internet running it. A statue prohibiting bitcoin protocol at the backbone level would instantly render the entire bitcoin concept entirely moot and completely and utterly defunct. In one minute.

to be clear, i mined crypto currencies, wrote tools to operate them in our data center and i think blockchain could be a wonderful corporate tool for titles and contracts so I am not knocking it. I just don't see bitcoin or crypto currency ever being a currency but it is good to speculate on for sure. Maybe someone here knows if there are put options you can take out on it?

@eastern.patriarch Next week for the options I believe

Nice explanation

The dome on this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqF43uD3kKQ

@eastern.patriarch "I just don't see bitcoin or crypto currency ever being a currency" - I don't get it, if I can exchange it for goods and services, is it not a currency?

Sure, I am not saying bitcoin is bad. I try not to deal in absolutes. Many things can be mediums of exchange or store of value or both. Obviously the less liquid an asset is (i.e. your home) the harder it is to use it as a medium of exchange but it obviously has value. Many things today serve as money or currency or medium of exchange. I think the toal amount of paper dollars is about 1T. When you think about it, most transactions are done not in dollars, they are just _priced_ in dollars. Billions of transactions on securities markets are priced in dollars but not transacted in dollars. When you get a loan on a car, no dollars are used. What is being exchanged is your promisory note to pay for the loan (and the government's enforcement of it through repo, asset forfeiture laws, etc) for a car. No dollars are exchanged. It is barter in a way. So yes, if you can use something to exchange it for something else, you got yourself some money (currency would be the physical embodiment of money to be pedantic).

I have crypto currencies, like I said. I am not knocking it. I am saying use it, invest in it buy goods and services. Just remember that unless it is backed by the power of state (for all debts public and private) or is valuable beyond its monetary value (gold, land, old silver quarters), it cannot replace the currency backed by the state. This is not a technical problem just a legal one. There is nothing preventing the USTreas and Congress from deciding to switch everything over to bitcoin, start operating nodes in a blockchain. If you think that is where it is going, investing in it is a good idea. If you have 50K of speculative money to throw away, maybe that is a good idea too, why not? I am just saying that bitcoin is not going to be valued at US GDP/BitCoin eventual total mining output /21 million = $809,523 or even more absurd world gdp / total = $10mil per. I am not trying to argue, just offer some information that might or might not be helpful to people that look at bitcoin and think, hey maybe I can get rich off this and crypo will replace USD.

Long posts, i know. I am running database scripts now so i have to sit and watch it... lol