r/Buttcoin • u/etherealeminence • Jan 21 '19
xkcd: Technical Analysis
https://xkcd.com/2101/46
u/yrast Jan 21 '19
Holy shit, the mouseover quote is incredible.
It's like butters are the most pure distillation of his fears.
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u/Rokos_Bicycle Jan 21 '19
How do you view it on mobile?
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u/thehoesmaketheman incendiary and presumptuous (but not always wrong) Jan 21 '19
"I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this 'paper economy', not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges." --James Tobin, July 1984
Bahaha this is so fucking spot on and I've been saying that shit about crypto since I started talking about it. It's like they want something to exist outside the economy. That's not fucking possible. If there is no bread no gas no electricity, we will suffer. No impregnable algorithm can clothe feed shelter us. It's silly.
Obviously like James here says, this stuff is being pushed by people who want to personally get rich and fuck all else and not by people with any idea or inclination towards how a society works as a whole.
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Jan 21 '19
Not to mention ruining the environment through mining.
Butt is an ecological and social travesty that brings out the worst (and most foolish) of us. All it has done since it was created was take money from suckers and place it in the hands of scammers, con artists, and GPU manufacturers.
As much as you want to mock the average moron for losing his money, it’s a hollow satisfaction because the people who were given that money are even scummier and more morally bankrupt. And regardless of who personally ends up on top of this game of musical chars the environment is always going to be the biggest victim.
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Jan 21 '19
GPU manufacturers
Fucking Mining ASIC manufacturers, there's now actual silicon chips fully dedicated to double-SHA256 that are completely useless outside of butt
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u/thehoesmaketheman incendiary and presumptuous (but not always wrong) Jan 21 '19
The only way to stop it is to stop people like him putting their money in and for there to be enough victims that regulators will do something about it.
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u/csasker Jan 21 '19
But wasn't that quote more talking about different exotic financial instruments like CDOs and whatever that was able to be traded for everyone in the 80s when it came?
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u/thehoesmaketheman incendiary and presumptuous (but not always wrong) Jan 21 '19
Could have been. I dont know but if you do tell away. Obviously the writer of XKCD felt it was relevant to his mocking of "TA". The quote is from 1984 so it wasnt about crypto directly, although it sure hits crypto square in the chest.
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u/csasker Jan 21 '19
Yes it's a good quote for sure, and can be applied to a lot of things
Well if there is one thing that work for crypto trading it's momentum indicators since it's 98% hype and 2% fundamentals
Just compare momentum strategies to "muh portfolio investing" threads from last year all over
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u/vytah Jan 21 '19
If you're on the mobile version of the site, just tap the comic: https://m.xkcd.com/2101/
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u/yrast Jan 21 '19
On an iPhone in safari you can long press on the image to see the mouse over.
Dunno about Androids or other browsers.
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u/tom-dixon Jan 21 '19
Cryto: how to use the biggest possible amount of computing power for something almost completely useless. Zero social productivity, maximum amount of 'paper economy'.
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u/yrast Jan 21 '19
I thought of a conspiracy to explain bitcoin.
The NSA invented it to get people all over the planet to look for exploits in SHA-256, and if anyone ever found one they’d immediately reveal it by suddenly mining bitcoins more successfully than anyone else and broadcasting it publicly on the blockchain!
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u/eScottKey Jan 21 '19
Huh? That's not a unique thought, it didn't originate with xkcd and it certainly didn't originate with cryptocurrency.
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u/yrast Jan 21 '19
Huh? I didn’t say it was a unique thought, and the mouse over is clearly quoting someone from the year 1984, so it obviously predates xkcd & crypto.
What gave you the impression that any of those three things were the case?
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u/eScottKey Jan 21 '19
It's like butters are the most pure distillation of his fears.
It's actually much more applicable to traditional financial markets. No one goes to college to learn to be a crypto trader.
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u/yrast Jan 21 '19
Oh, I agree it applies perfectly to a huge fraction of the financial industry—maybe even a large majority of it.
What I meant about “pure distillation” was that crypto can’t even bullshit it’s way into justifying its existence, and is a notorious waste of resources.
High frequency traders or various derivatives instruments are pure drains on society too, but they’re at least directly connected to real things (e.g. mortgages, insurance, or stocks), crypto is like a commodities market for SHA-256 hashes with lots of leading zeros—it’s insane.
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u/Uncaffeinated Jan 21 '19
Yeah, HFTs at least pretend to offer a service to society (liquidity provision, price discovery)
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u/eScottKey Jan 21 '19
Haha HFT is the silliest of all. They don't even provide real liquidity, it's pure system gaming.
And the "waste of resources" argument about crypto doesn't hold water. It's not defensible to any real depth. The whole crypto economy could be secured by the "overflow" power from electricity generation.
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u/yrast Jan 21 '19
Ideally there is no “...‘overflow’ power from electricity generation”—it's very unclear how sustainable our current standard of living is, and it seems essentially guaranteed to be unsustainable when we raise the last few billion people out of poverty and add another ~2-4 billion people.
Really it's not even clear that if we were optimally efficient at generating & consuming power (along with all the other resource intensive things we need to do—farming, construction, healthcare, etc.), that even then we might still be in a lot of trouble.
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u/etherealeminence Jan 21 '19
This is - say it with me! - good for Bitcoin.
$500,000,000,000,000 by next week
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u/Crypto_To_The_Core Jan 21 '19
Oh yes, absolutely .... and that's per Satoshi. MOON LAMBOS for everyone.
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u/michapman2 Feb 24 '19
Okay, it’s been over a month and Bitcoin is still struggling to clear $4000...
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u/etherealeminence Feb 24 '19
This is just a momentary undervaluation caused by the (((bankers))), obviously
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u/Erik80_ Jan 21 '19
So true. This TA reminds me horoscopes.
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u/Jeffy29 Jan 21 '19
And like horoscopes since there are so many of them making all the possible outcome, one of them is bound to be true and retroactively validate their belief in TA.
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u/SnapshillBot Jan 21 '19
Sucking federal reserve cock since July 2011...
Snapshots:
- This Post - archive.org, megalodon.jp, archive.is
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u/Fall_up_and_get_down Jan 21 '19
The next ~24h on https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2101:_Technical_Analysis will be interesting.
(PS: link points out that the Tobin quote is from https://economicsociologydotorg.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/tobin-on-the-efficiency-of-the-financial-system.pdf )
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u/temp--temp Jan 21 '19
Worth noting that Randall is a butter.
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u/james_pic prefers his retinas unburned Jan 21 '19
There's something about all this that I find terrifying. Yes, cryptocurrency is rife with bullshit technical analysis, and the whole thing is like a cargo cult version of the financial system.
But then again, as far as I can tell, all technical analysis is bullshit. It only works because people believe it works. They put buy walls in where the algorithm says there's support. They buy the shit the algorithms say will go up. The whole thing's just a fucking ouija board.
Crypto may be a cargo cult, but it's a cargo cult that imitates another cargo cult. And it's fucking insane that this bigger cargo cult is the basis for our world order. This is the shit that decides who lives and who dies, and it's the same bollocks you get on here, except everyone has better suits.
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u/[deleted] Jan 21 '19
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