I'm Tuur Demeester, Bitcoin investor, economist and founder of Adamant Research. Ask me anything! (AMA Nov 26)

[Tuur Demeester]

Hi everyone,

I'm an investor and economist, founder & editor-in-chief of Adamant Research. I was previously author of the Dutch financial newsletter MacroTrends, and started recommending Bitcoin as an investment to my subscribers at $5. I participated in angel investment rounds of CoinTerra and Kraken. Before my career as an investment analyst, I was active in education (sudbury schools) and austrian economics.

This AMA is the first place our new report is available: How to Position for the Rally in Bitcoin — It's free, I hope you enjoy it!

Some Bitcoin-related writings and presentations that I have done:

Nov 2012: "Bitcoin Seen Through the Eyes of a Central Banker" (article, ZeroHedge)
May 2013: "Why you should invest in Bitcoin" (Video, San Jose Conference)
July 2013: "Keynote: Cryptocurrency is the future of money, banking, and finance" (Video, BTC London)
June 2014: "Why Bitcoin is the petroleum of our time" (Article, Coindesk)
June 2015: "Sizing up the Block size debate" (Report, Adamant Research)
Oct 2015: "Bitcoin - why it now belongs in every portfolio" (Article, yBitcoin)

Other work of mine:

2007: Co-founder De Kampanje, private sudbury school in the Netherlands
2007: Co-founder of the Rothbard Institute, an academic institute with a focus on philosophy of law and austrian economics.
2008: Translated Rothbard's What Has Government Done to Our Money? to Dutch. Read online here.
Nov 2009: "An Austro-Thomistic investigation into the nature and effects of fraud" (academic paper)
June 2010: "The Business Cycle: A Definition" (academic paper, published in 'Procesos de Mercado')
Jan 2011: "Geld, Krediet en Crisis" (translated Jesus Huerta de Soto's magnum opus into Dutch)
Oct 2011: "Mario Draghi, Hawk for Whom?" (article, ZeroHedge)

I'm pretty active on twitter, find me here: https://twitter.com/tuurdemeester

- -

Update November 27: thanks everyone for the great questions!

My response to "how do you see the price of Bitcoin faring over the next twelve months?": http://ow.ly/V6OF0

My response to a question about the limitations of Bitcoin with regards to privacy and fungibility, and about the Liquid sidechain: post9593.html#p9593

My response to "What is the biggest challenge that Bitcoin faces right now toward gaining more user adoption?" http://ow.ly/V76G3

My response to "How and when to take profit in Bitcoin?": http://ow.ly/V7xHC

My answer to "What are your thoughts on the role that academics can play in the evolution of cryptocurrencies?" http://ow.ly/V7tVC

My response to "How and when to take profit in Bitcoin?": http://ow.ly/V7xHC

My response to "what reading material and advice would you point a new investor to?" http://ow.ly/V7xNO

My response to "What do you think of gold in an environment where Bicoin would be rising ?" http://ow.ly/V7FdZ

My response to: "Can you give new people some tips on storing bitcoins?" http://ow.ly/V7G3C

My response to: "Can you share some tips on how to store bitcoins?" http://ow.ly/V7G3C

My response to "How do you recommend learning the basics of Austrian Economics?" http://ow.ly/V7IS1

My response to "Can you tell us more about Adamant Research and your role in it?" http://ow.ly/V7JSq

My response to "Is it possible that early adopters develop a 'Bitcoin tunnel vision'?" http://ow.ly/V9gKW

(An overview of all my posts is visible at this link)

[scott4013]

Hey Tuur,

Very impressive report! I know you recommend a buy and hold strategy, but still, how do you see the price of bitcoin fairing over the next twelve months?

[dEBRUYNE]

Hi Tuur!

I want to ask you something regarding your recent tweet on sidechains and privacy -> https://twitter.com/TuurDemeester/statu ... 0463382528

In that tweet, you state that you expect "blockstream's Liquid sidechain to prove that Bitcoin is a privacy friendly ecosystem".

I tend to think that BTC as a default transparent ledger will not be able to provide absolute privacy. It's possible to obfuscate your identity a little bit, but when you spend your coins again, your privacy is lowered because the receiving end knows you and thus can know details about your balance.

There is also a fungibility issue: because transactions are public, all sorts of regulation can be applied to them by centralized wallet services, payment processors and exchanges. Bitcoin isn't censorship resistant.

If you want fungibility, you need to mix your coins by default. You'll get default privacy as a bonus. In other words, a privacy oriented solution should be mandatory at the protocol level to achieve perfect fungibility. Can you elaborate on your views on the privacy issues with BTC and on the economic importance of fungibility?

[BitcoinXio]

Hi Tuur,

Thanks for doing this AMA!

Can you tell me in your opinion what you feel is the biggest challenge that Bitcoin faces right now toward gaining more user adoption?

[crypto_investor]

Hey Tuur!

I entered bitcoin at the end of 2012 and been following your talks and writings. I very much enjoy the Austrian Economics you bring to your reasoning on BTC. You are also an investment adviser, so let me ask some questions on that topic

What do you consider to be a good % of exposure one should have towards BTC in their portfolio?

I know this is probably dependent on the personal situation of the investor, but maybe you can give general advice.
Personally I have a big % of my net worth in BTC, but that is due to the exponential growth of the BTC value

I always steered clear of altcoins. I never really saw the innovation. I did had a small speculative position in LTC. Sold a lot during the LTC bubble (most of them > 0.04 BTC). I sold the remaining part of my stash once the rumors on the scrypt ASIC started to surface. Reason: LTC's USP was a more decentralized mining algorithm. Everybody with a GPU could mine, so that created a community. But since the scrypt ASICs, there is fundemantally no difference between BTC and LTC in my opinion.

What is your opinion on investing in LTC? Are there any altcoins you are following?

Personally, I think that this quote is very relevant on the topic:

There is also a fungibility issue: because transactions are public, all sorts of regulation can be applied to them by centralized wallet services, payment processors and exchanges. Bitcoin isn't censorship resistant.
If you want fungibility, you need to mix your coins by default. You'll get default privacy as a bonus. In other words, a privacy oriented solution should be mandatory at the protocol level to achieve perfect fungibility.

If you ask me, Monero is a very good altcoin to hedge a bit. Why you may ask?

*Monero solves the fungibility issue. This coin has stealth addresses (hides the receiving address, balances are unlinkable), ring signatures (hides the history of the coins making them untraceable) and will likely implement Confidential Transactions (hides transaction amounts, money flows become completely opaque) as well while preserving a transparent emission (unlike zerocash).
*Monero also has a dynamical block size limit, making it a good hedge in case this becomes a real problem in BTC.
*And last but not least, it has a completely different codebase than BTC (unlike DASH for example) making it a good hedge in case some problem with the BTC code would arise (Monero uses for example a completely different elleptic curve than BTC)

So my final question is simple:
have you heard about Monero and do you think it's a good hedge for BTC? What percentage would you advice to hold?
Personally I diversified 10% of my BTC in XMR because I feel that this could become a complementary coin to BTC.

Thanks for doing this AMA. I'm really looking forward to your answers!

[nyeko_12]

Hi Tuur!

What is your opinion regarding LN-network,BIP 100(increasing the blocksize first to 2mb -> 4mb --> 8 mb--> 32mb) & 101?
Do you think this block-size issue can be resolved by December(thinking of Combining the LN-network with BIP 100)?
What do you think of bitcoin future?

Thank you!

[chriswilmer]

Hi Tuur,

Full disclosure, this question is a shameless plug:

Have you (or are you) considering submitting any of your research to our new peer-reviewed journal Ledger? Also, it would be great to hear your thoughts on the role that academics can play in the evolution of Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies.

[hazir]

hello Tuur! greetings.

1)i'm working on building for the first time my investment portfolio, i have a 2.5% of my capital in bitcoins, and am planing to rising it to about 6%, what i'm wondering is this - if i get lucky and bitcoin rises many-fold as hoped, it will become a bigger and bigger percent of my investment , what are you thoughts on taking out profits and scaling out in this gradual scenario? what percent of profit taking would you consider wise at what point? (i will not take this as individual investment advice! just curious to hear your personal thoughts )
i guess that if i'm betting on a high profit in case of mainstream bitcoin adoption, i should cash out profits in according to the stage in adoption ,right?

2)what are your thoughts on the current price of a bitcoin (320$~), do you tend to think it's a symptom of the block halving?

3)what areas of short and long term investment do you find interesting currently?

4)what reading material and advice would you point a new investor to? i'm at the stage of trying to absorb as much information as possible and would be grateful for your input!

thank you! BTC BTC BTC

[Skin_in_the_game]

Hey Tuur,

I guess you will be more happy than others with the the question since you are first an investor.

I was re-reading Antifragile by iconoclast thinker Nassim Taleb recently. He writes

"Never ask anyone for their opinion [...] Just ask them what they have -or don't have- in their portfolio"

Having met or read about a few people in the bitcoin community, I have come to think it's a very relevant question and you can better weight their opinions having an idea of how many Bitcoins they hold (or do not hold.)

I'm now asking every participants the same question:

- Do you mind to tell us which percentage of your net worth and/or liquid assets you hold in Bitcoins ?

Also for you I have another question since you are kwown to be sceptic about the current monetary policy in most of the world:

- What do you think of gold in an environment where Bicoin would be rising ? At what point (market cap) Bitcoin starts to seriously compete with gold and grabs some of its marketshare as a store of value / hedge against monetary risk ? (I think now it works more as an investment with a high risk/reward profile akin to an option).

- What do you think of the result of the presidential election in Argentinia ?

[LiteCoinGuy]

Hi Tuur,

thanks for joining bitcoin.com. The links are great too. I will have to read alot today

1) How do you store your coins? Can you give new members some tips on that?

2) What are you working on at the moment?

3) You did alot talks about BTC in the past all over the world. Are you planing to attend on BTC conferences again and give some talks?

4) What is the most exiting thing that is happening right now in the bitcoin sphere?


Thanks
LiteCoinGuy

[JordanT]

Hi Tuur, I've been following you on Twitter for quite sometime and really enjoy reading your thoughts. I just read your report and already sent the link to some family members.

I'm getting into economics. So far I've read Economics in One Lesson, and What Has Government Done to Our Money. What other books do you recommend for learning the basics of Austrian economics?

What are your current thoughts on the bitcoin price and what do think will happen in the next ~12 months?

[edugarbizu]

Hey Tuur,
could you tell us more about Adamant Research?
- What is the business model?
- How it profits?
- What´s your role on it?
- Future plans?
Thanks

[bbelev]

Hi Tuur,

thanks for doing this AMA and for providing such valuable information and advice. You play a very important role in the bitcoin ecosystem, by looking at the cryptocurrency phenomenon from various perspectives, sending info and grounding other investors. Thanks

You recommend roughly 6% to be invested in altcoins. What are some 4-5 significant altcoins worth researching?

Also - do you think the next bitcoin bubble will start before or after the halving? What is the approximate range for the top of the bubble? No predictions just opinion

Thanks again,
Bobby

[dallas]

Hi Tuur,

Excellent report!

In the report you said, "There are four prominent risks associated with Bitcoin" and the fourth risk you list as, "a sustained attack by an organization with substantial financial resources (such as a government)."

I'm wondering what are your thoughts on the idea of government not just attacking it, but actually outright banning it. I tend to agree that attacking is probably not a big concern, but governments can take it a step further because they have the power of law. Now ultimately I don't think it will matter, just as laws haven't stopped Bittorrent and file sharing, but do you think it could scare enough people off that mainstream adoption would take considerably longer?

Thanks!

Dallas

[Tuur Demeester]

Hey Tuur,

Very impressive report! I know you recommend a buy and hold strategy, but still, how do you see the price of bitcoin fairing over the next twelve months?

Hey Scott, I'm glad you liked the report!

I think that in 2016 we are going to see a rally in Bitcoin during which the $1,000 level may be challenged (I give this a 60% chance*) or exceeded (I give that a 40% chance), for the following reasons:

- Increased volatility and insecurity in traditional markets (stocks, bonds, fiat money), making fungible safe haven assets more attractive

- Bitcoin fundamentals are stronger than ever, and its reputation in the public eye has grown from a scammy toy for geeks and hackers, to a technological innovation which deserves its own category next to electric cars and 3D printing. I expect that in the next 12 months new sidechain protocols will illustrate that Bitcoin is shaping up to become the ground zero for the internet of property.

- The speculative lure of an asset that is in a secular bull market, that corrected by 90% after a massive rally, and that is now back in a bull market according to several technical indicators.

- The block reward halving of summer 2016, which will cut the Bitcoin money supply down from about 10% to about 50% per annum.

- Also, I expect the scalability (block size) debate to be resolved in the next 6 months (see our report 'Sizing Up the Block Size Debate'), and that can lead to a relief rally.


There is one thing that I'm keeping in mind for myself, and that is that every phase in Bitcoin is different from the ones before. This year will not be the same as any of the previous years in Bitcoin. If anything, I'm preparing myself to be surprised.


*In other words, I give it a 40% chance that Bitcoin in 2016 will stay below $900, and see a 20% probability that the $1,000 level will be reached and that bitcoin then declines again from there.

[dnaleor]

Hi!

I expect that in the next 12 months new sidechain protocols will illustrate that Bitcoin is the shaping up to become the ground zero for the internet of property.

Did you research how the sidechains will be secured?

IIRC, Liquid is basically secured by multisig, that isn't really decentralized.
It can also be secured by merge mining, but what would be the incentive for miners to merge mine a sidechain? The transaction fees?

If it will be transaction fees, I'm guessing that some sidechains will be expensive to do transactions on because running a node isn't trivial.
What's more, running a (theoretical) CT-sidechain node for example could even pose regulatory risk for miners/mining farms, making it very expensive to do CT-transactions because no big miner/mining pool would want to take the risk of doing "money laundering".



I think security of the bitcoin blockchain is often overlooked. The primary purpose of bitcoins is securing the chain. It's the incentive that keeps the hashing power online.
And this could, long term, become a problem for bitcoin. Did you see the presentation on "mining gaps" @ scaling bitcoin (transcript here)?

This is how I see the situation play out:
The fact that the block reward is halved roughly every 4 years makes the security less stable because miners have an incentive to temporarily ignore a new found block and instead continue mining on the previous block so they can collect more fees.
If the coinbase reward becomes insignificant, a lot of weird things can happen: no (big) miner would have an incentive to mine on a block of a small miner because the chances that the big miner can "steal" the transaction fees from the new found block is very big. When the cost for an orphaned block becomes zero (the coinbase reward), the security of the chain becomes weak.

[Tuur Demeester]

Hi Tuur!

I want to ask you something regarding your recent tweet on sidechains and privacy -> https://twitter.com/TuurDemeester/statu ... 0463382528

In that tweet, you state that you expect "blockstream's Liquid sidechain to prove that Bitcoin is a privacy friendly ecosystem".

I tend to think that BTC as a default transparent ledger will not be able to provide absolute privacy. It's possible to obfuscate your identity a little bit, but when you spend your coins again, your privacy is lowered because the receiving end knows you and thus can know details about your balance.

There is also a fungibility issue: because transactions are public, all sorts of regulation can be applied to them by centralized wallet services, payment processors and exchanges. Bitcoin isn't censorship resistant.

If you want fungibility, you need to mix your coins by default. You'll get default privacy as a bonus. In other words, a privacy oriented solution should be mandatory at the protocol level to achieve perfect fungibility. Can you elaborate on your views on the privacy issues with BTC and on the economic importance of fungibility?

Hi dEBRUYNE,

My tweet definitely lacked nuance, thanks for giving me the chance to elaborate!

Coin mixing on the Bitcoin blockchain for privacy reasons ('coinjoin'), as I understand it, is not easy to execute well, it takes quite a bit of time, requires trust in third parties, and may in the future become increasingly expensive. That, however, does not mean that bitcoins cannot be stored, sent, and received in a privacy friendly manner.

In my view, Bitcoin is the basic layer of a protocol stack that will turn into the "internet of property". The Bitcoin blockchain has very limited functionality, mainly focused on security, and privacy protection is not part of that. Privacy for Bitcoin is a function that will be provided by additional protocol layers, such as sidechains. For some ideas about that, see for example this introductory article about confidential transactions.

Fungibility is important in the world of money, but in my opinion does not require perfection. A tainted silver coin may be worth a little less than a mint one, but it doesn't do significant harm to physical silver as a safe haven asset. Similarly, a set of bitcoins that are blacklisted, for example by a government entity, will not significantly damage Bitcoin as a safe haven asset. The 'tainted' bitcoins will simply trade at a discount, or will move to be used in an area in the world where people care less about this particular blacklist.

- -

I've added some more thoughts about the Liquid sidechain here below.

Core dev & Blockstream team member Pieter Wuille sent me an email about my tweet, in which he made the points that:
- Liquid is not Bitcoin, but rather a separate, private blockchain.
- Liquid is by design much more centralized than Bitcoin. No miners, instead an exclusive federation of private participants. (this centralization is no problem, because the only money handled in Liquid is that of the participants themselves)
- Because of this design, Liquid supports higher transaction speeds.
- Liquid transactions can be verfied by the public at large.
- Liquid does not directly influences the privacy or scalability of Bitcoin.

My response to Pieter (translated from Dutch):

In my understanding, Liquid is a "private clearing house" for Bitcoin. Somewhat like the London Bullion Market (LBMA), a clearing house for physical gold to which only an exclusive club of participants have access. An important difference seems to be that the public at large can verify whether Liquid tokens are actually fully covered by the previously agreed upon underlying bitcoins (not the case with the LBMA, which only has internal audits).

With that analogy in mind, it indeed appears to me that Liquid does not represent a direct scalability incrase, in the sense that this sidechain does not allow the public at large to participate, and therefore it is not possible to move huge amounts of transactions to Liquid.

However I do see an impact on Bitcoin scalability in the general sense of the word:
- By facilitating bitcoin-backed remittance and IOU transactions, the platform and utility of Bitcoin is expanded.
- By launching a successful sidechain, the road cleared for investments in new sidechains, and thereby for a further expansion of the sidechain-on-bitcoin ecosystem.

[Tuur Demeester]

Hi Tuur,

Thanks for doing this AMA!

Can you tell me in your opinion what you feel is the biggest challenge that Bitcoin faces right now toward gaining more user adoption?

Hi BitcoinXio,

If you look at the history of private currencies (privately minted gold and silver coins, e-gold, the liberty dollar) and the history of controversial information sharing ledgers (napster, kazaa, edonkey), their number one challenger was invariably the government.

And so that is what I see as the biggest challenge that Bitcoin faces towards gaining more user adoption: if a government makes it illegal, then that will scare a substantial amount of people in that country away from Bitcoin.

I'm not worried that governments will threaten the existence of Bitcoin (because it's a robust P2P technology like bittorrent), though they may slow down its adoption.

In the long run I see governments, especially when their own revenues suffer because of high inflation and higher interest rates, embracing Bitcoin as an efficient way to collect taxes.

Another way for me to think about your question is: what was the biggest challenge that petroleum faced in 1850 toward gaining more user adoption? Or the internet in 1990?

[dEBRUYNE]

Hi Tuur!

I want to ask you something regarding your recent tweet on sidechains and privacy -> https://twitter.com/TuurDemeester/statu ... 0463382528

In that tweet, you state that you expect "blockstream's Liquid sidechain to prove that Bitcoin is a privacy friendly ecosystem".

I tend to think that BTC as a default transparent ledger will not be able to provide absolute privacy. It's possible to obfuscate your identity a little bit, but when you spend your coins again, your privacy is lowered because the receiving end knows you and thus can know details about your balance.

There is also a fungibility issue: because transactions are public, all sorts of regulation can be applied to them by centralized wallet services, payment processors and exchanges. Bitcoin isn't censorship resistant.

If you want fungibility, you need to mix your coins by default. You'll get default privacy as a bonus. In other words, a privacy oriented solution should be mandatory at the protocol level to achieve perfect fungibility. Can you elaborate on your views on the privacy issues with BTC and on the economic importance of fungibility?

Hi dEBRUYNE,

My tweet definitely lacked nuance, thanks for giving me the chance to elaborate!

Coin mixing on the Bitcoin blockchain for privacy reasons ('coinjoin'), as I understand it, is not easy to execute well, it takes quite a bit of time, requires trust in third parties, and may in the future become increasingly expensive. That, however, does not mean that bitcoins cannot be stored, sent, and received in a privacy friendly manner.

In my view, Bitcoin is the basic layer of a protocol stack that will turn into the "internet of property". The Bitcoin blockchain has very limited functionality, mainly focused on security, and privacy protection is not part of that. Privacy for Bitcoin is a function that will be provided by additional protocol layers, such as sidechains. For some ideas about that, see for example this introductory article about confidential transactions.

Fungibility is important in the world of money, but in my opinion does not require perfection. A tainted silver coin may be worth a little less than a mint one, but it doesn't do significant harm to physical silver as a safe haven asset. Similarly, a set of bitcoins that are blacklisted, for example by a government entity, will not significantly damage Bitcoin as a safe haven asset. The 'tainted' bitcoins will simply trade at a discount, or will move to be used in an area in the world where people care less about this particular blacklist.

- -

I've added some more thoughts about the Liquid sidechain here below.

Core dev & Blockstream team member Pieter Wuille sent me an email about my tweet, in which he made the points that:
- Liquid is not Bitcoin, but rather a separate, private blockchain.
- Liquid is by design much more centralized than Bitcoin. No miners, instead an exclusive federation of private participants. (this centralization is no problem, because the only money handled in Liquid is that of the participants themselves)
- Because of this design, Liquid supports higher transaction speeds.
- Liquid transactions can be verfied by the public at large.
- Liquid does not directly influences the privacy or scalability of Bitcoin.

My response to Pieter (translated from Dutch):

In my understanding, Liquid is a "private clearing house" for Bitcoin. Somewhat like the London Bullion Market (LBMA), a clearing house for physical gold to which only an exclusive club of participants have access. An important difference seems to be that the public at large can verify whether Liquid tokens are actually fully covered by the previously agreed upon underlying bitcoins (not the case with the LBMA, which only has internal audits).

With that analogy in mind, it indeed appears to me that Liquid does not represent a direct scalability incrase, in the sense that this sidechain does not allow the public at large to participate, and therefore it is not possible to move huge amounts of transactions to Liquid.

However I do see an impact on Bitcoin scalability in the general sense of the word:
- By facilitating bitcoin-backed remittance and IOU transactions, the platform and utility of Bitcoin is expanded.
- By launching a successful sidechain, the road cleared for investments in new sidechains, and thereby for a further expansion of the sidechain-on-bitcoin ecosystem.

Hi, first of all, thanks for elaborting and writing such an extensive comment!

I have one remark though regarding confidential transactions, namely:

It seems possible that confidential transaction would become blacklisted, making transparent transactions mandatory in certain jurisdictions. That's why in my opinion, you need to mix your coins by default. Otherwise governments will be able to enforce full transparency.

[Tuur Demeester]

Hey Tuur!
I entered bitcoin at the end of 2012 and been following your talks and writings. I very much enjoy the Austrian Economics you bring to your reasoning on BTC. You are also an investment adviser, so let me ask some questions on that topic

Hi crypto_investor!

Glad to hear you've been enjoying my presentations & writings

What do you consider to be a good % of exposure one should have towards BTC in their portfolio?
I know this is probably dependent on the personal situation of the investor, but maybe you can give general advice.

See page 15 and 16 of our free report about that: "How to position for the next rally in Bitcoin"

In summary, my thoughts:

- Bitcoin as an insurance: 1-2% of financial assets
- Bitcoin in a speculative portfolio: 2-5% allocation
- Bitcoin as a bet on early retirement: 5-10% of financial assets

(be sure to read all the caveats in the report)

Personally I have a big % of my net worth in BTC, but that is due to the exponential growth of the BTC value

I always steered clear of altcoins. I never really saw the innovation. I did had a small speculative position in LTC. Sold a lot during the LTC bubble (most of them > 0.04 BTC). I sold the remaining part of my stash once the rumors on the scrypt ASIC started to surface. Reason: LTC's USP was a more decentralized mining algorithm. Everybody with a GPU could mine, so that created a community. But since the scrypt ASICs, there is fundemantally no difference between BTC and LTC in my opinion.
What is your opinion on investing in LTC? Are there any altcoins you are following?

I have liked Litecoin since I first learned about it, because it offers similar utility as the Bitcoin network, and therefore can be seen as a 'backup network' for Bitcoin. A 'silver' for Bitcoin's 'gold', as is often said.

Other arguments for having at least a little LTC exposure, in my mind:
- it's the number 2 in market cap: $150 million as of today
- the most liquid altcoin (highest volumes on exchanges)
- has a unique price relationship to Bitcoin, making it an interesting currency for trading

Below is a reflection of my personal Litecoin-Bitcoin trades of the last two years. It's based on my trading history on several exchanges.

Note that my actual profit may be a bit lower due to some unaccounted trading fees. Piecing everything together was pretty grueling, if anyone has tools to make this easier I want to hear about them!



Chart explanation:
Blue is the amount of litecoins I owned in these two years, purchased using bitcoin. In orange you see the amount of bitcoins invested (as it goes down) or rebought (as it goes up).

As for timeline, there is none. It's just a succession of all my trades. To give an idea, you can follow the peaks and troughs above: my litecoin position peaked first on October 19, 2013 (first blue peak), and then I started selling into the rally. My selling ended on Nov 1st 2013. Then I started buying back over the next four months, and started selling on March 27, 2014. By April 24, my litecoin position was reduced to almost zero. Then I started on my last buying spree, which ended on July 6, 2015. On July 9 I cleared out half my position in one day, and then by the end of July 10 I had sold 75% of the litecoin position I had on July 6.

Personally, I think that this quote is very relevant on the topic:

There is also a fungibility issue: because transactions are public, all sorts of regulation can be applied to them by centralized wallet services, payment processors and exchanges. Bitcoin isn't censorship resistant.
If you want fungibility, you need to mix your coins by default. You'll get default privacy as a bonus. In other words, a privacy oriented solution should be mandatory at the protocol level to achieve perfect fungibility.

I think that privacy friendly sidechains will go a long way to solve fungibility issues in Bitcoin.

If you ask me, Monero is a very good altcoin to hedge a bit. Why you may ask?

*Monero solves the fungibility issue. This coin has stealth addresses (hides the receiving address, balances are unlinkable), ring signatures (hides the history of the coins making them untraceable) and will likely implement Confidential Transactions (hides transaction amounts, money flows become completely opaque) as well while preserving a transparent emission (unlike zerocash).
*Monero also has a dynamical block size limit, making it a good hedge in case this becomes a real problem in BTC.
*And last but not least, it has a completely different codebase than BTC (unlike DASH for example) making it a good hedge in case some problem with the BTC code would arise (Monero uses for example a completely different elleptic curve than BTC)

So my final question is simple:
have you heard about Monero and do you think it's a good hedge for BTC? What percentage would you advice to hold?
Personally I diversified 10% of my BTC in XMR because I feel that this could become a complementary coin to BTC.

Yes I have certainly heard about Monero, it's one of the altcoins I am researching for our newsletter. Roeland Creve has been generous in providing me with info about it.

I am very excited about the different technological innovations we've seen in the altcoin space. One of the questions I keep asking myself is which ones will be incorporated in sidechains, and which ones will function best in standalone alt-blockchains.

[Tuur Demeester]

Hey Tuur!
I entered bitcoin at the end of 2012 and been following your talks and writings. I very much enjoy the Austrian Economics you bring to your reasoning on BTC. You are also an investment adviser, so let me ask some questions on that topic

Hi crypto_investor!

Glad to hear you've been enjoying my presentations & writings

What do you consider to be a good % of exposure one should have towards BTC in their portfolio?
I know this is probably dependent on the personal situation of the investor, but maybe you can give general advice.

See page 15 and 16 of our free report about that: "How to position for the next rally in Bitcoin"

In summary, my thoughts:

- Bitcoin as an insurance: 1-2% of financial assets
- Bitcoin in a speculative portfolio: 2-5% allocation
- Bitcoin as a bet on early retirement: 5-10% of financial assets
(about the latter, be sure to read all the caveats in the report)

Personally I have a big % of my net worth in BTC, but that is due to the exponential growth of the BTC value

I always steered clear of altcoins. I never really saw the innovation. I did had a small speculative position in LTC. Sold a lot during the LTC bubble (most of them > 0.04 BTC). I sold the remaining part of my stash once the rumors on the scrypt ASIC started to surface. Reason: LTC's USP was a more decentralized mining algorithm. Everybody with a GPU could mine, so that created a community. But since the scrypt ASICs, there is fundemantally no difference between BTC and LTC in my opinion.
What is your opinion on investing in LTC? Are there any altcoins you are following?

I have liked Litecoin since I first learned about it, because it offers similar utility as the Bitcoin network, and therefore can be seen as a 'backup network' for Bitcoin. A 'silver' for Bitcoin's 'gold', as is often said.

Other arguments for having at least a little LTC exposure, in my mind:
- it's the number 2 in market cap: $150 million as of today
- the most liquid altcoin (highest volumes on exchanges)
- has a unique price relationship to Bitcoin, making it an interesting currency for trading

Below is a reflection of my personal Litecoin-Bitcoin trades of the last two years. It's based on my trading history on several exchanges.



Note that my actual profit may be a bit lower due to some unaccounted trading fees. Piecing everything together was pretty grueling, if anyone has tools to make this easier I want to hear about them!

Personally, I think that this quote is very relevant on the topic:

I think that privacy friendly sidechains will go a long way to solve fungibility issues in Bitcoin.

If you ask me, Monero is a very good altcoin to hedge a bit. Why you may ask?

*Monero solves the fungibility issue. This coin has stealth addresses (hides the receiving address, balances are unlinkable), ring signatures (hides the history of the coins making them untraceable) and will likely implement Confidential Transactions (hides transaction amounts, money flows become completely opaque) as well while preserving a transparent emission (unlike zerocash).
*Monero also has a dynamical block size limit, making it a good hedge in case this becomes a real problem in BTC.
*And last but not least, it has a completely different codebase than BTC (unlike DASH for example) making it a good hedge in case some problem with the BTC code would arise (Monero uses for example a completely different elleptic curve than BTC)

So my final question is simple:
have you heard about Monero and do you think it's a good hedge for BTC? What percentage would you advice to hold?
Personally I diversified 10% of my BTC in XMR because I feel that this could become a complementary coin to BTC.

Yes I have certainly heard about Monero, it's one of the altcoins I am researching for our newsletter. Roeland Creve has been generous in providing me with info about it.

I am very excited about the different technological innovations we've seen in the altcoin space, and I work to keep track of them. One of the questions I keep asking myself is which ones will be incorporated in sidechains, and which ones will function best in standalone alt-blockchains.

[binaryFate]

Hi Tuur and thanks for the AMA,

Would you have advised Bitcoin as you did, back in the day, if you had the cautionnary mindset you seem to have today with respect to fungibility issues?

The reason I'm asking is the cautionary stance you seem to take w.r.t. fungibility and the false (I'm affirmative here) assumption that sidechains might be a solution. Even without diving into the technical aspects, it is trivial that sidechains offering confidential aspects would not increase the overall fungibility of Bitcoin. (it's still visible if some coins went through the "anonymizer" sidechain, leaving anyone the possibility to take decisions based on that).

I am aware my question might be understood as slightly passive-agressive. If you feel so, please don't take it personally and consider it in a broader context: in your opinion, is it possible/often the case that early Bitcoin adopters adopt over time the very same type of tunnel vision (towards Bitcoin, and against anything else) they were happy to not have (towards fiat for instance) when they found out about Bitcoin?

[Tuur Demeester]

Hi Tuur!

What is your opinion regarding LN-network,BIP 100 (increasing the blocksize first to 2mb -> 4mb --> 8 mb--> 32mb) & 101?
Do you think this block-size issue can be resolved by December (thinking of Combining the LN-network with BIP 100)?
What do you think of bitcoin future?

Hi nyeko_12,

I don't have a detailed technical opinion on the different block-size alteration proposals, though I do think in general for the long run security and health of the Bitcoin network, a smaller block size is preferable over a larger block size.

The Bitcoin blockchain will never be and does not need to be a Visa-like network. I see the purpose of the main chain as a value anchor rather than a payment network. I see it as evolving towards a network of big gold vaults rather than a ledger everyone uses for paying a beer and tipping. The latter type transactions will happen on sidechains or via off-chain transactions (exchanges & online wallets), possibly facilitated by lightning network technology.

For an analysis of the block size debate (slightly outdated, although I think the main points still stand), see our report "Sizing up the Block Size Debate". The report concludes with "I anticipate that the block size limit increase will be implemented into the blockchain in spring 2016."

I think the future for Bitcoin is incredibly bright! I believe it is a seminal technology that will change the course of history for the better, in that it will make future generations wealthier, diminish the occurrence and impact of economic crises, and that it will substantially contribute to a decrease of physical violence in society.

[Tuur Demeester]

Hi Tuur,

Full disclosure, this question is a shameless plug:

Have you (or are you) considering submitting any of your research to our new peer-reviewed journal Ledger? Also, it would be great to hear your thoughts on the role that academics can play in the evolution of Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies.

Hi Chris,

I don't have any plans for doing academic research for the moment, so no. Ledger looks like a great place for publications though!

As for the potential role of academics in the evolution of Bitcoin & cryptocurrencies, I don't see a significant one.

Last year I attended the largest free market academic conference (APEE, in Las Vegas). I thought this would be a place where one can to learn about how the scientific thinkers in favor of free trade and private money have been working to at least incorporate the advent of cryptocurrencies into their theories. Yet I was very disappointed: whereas most people had heard about Bitcoin, hardly anyone was interested in it or seemed to know how it worked. The two presentations I attended that were somewhat focused on Bitcoin were from people that had only a rudimentary knowledge of the technology.

You should perhaps know that I'm a university dropout myself. During my years in the think tank world, I became convinced that in general, academia chases innovation rather than producing it. I may be biased because I attended mostly "soft" science classes in the very bureaucratic universities of Belgium, things might be different in private universities with more of a hard science bent.

Still, until I get convinced otherwise, my very crude and biased suggestion to people in academia is: get your degree (or not) and then work towards stepping down from academia in favor of entrepreneurship!

[1love]

Do you think people who hold their wealth in Gold/Silver should be threatened by "asteroid mining"?

https://twitter.com/AsteroidEnergy/stat ... 6581107712

[Tuur Demeester]

hello Tuur! greetings.

1)i'm working on building for the first time my investment portfolio, i have a 2.5% of my capital in bitcoins, and am planing to rising it to about 6%, what i'm wondering is this - if i get lucky and bitcoin rises many-fold as hoped, it will become a bigger and bigger percent of my investment , what are you thoughts on taking out profits and scaling out in this gradual scenario? what percent of profit taking would you consider wise at what point? (i will not take this as individual investment advice! just curious to hear your personal thoughts )
i guess that if i'm betting on a high profit in case of mainstream bitcoin adoption, i should cash out profits in according to the stage in adoption ,right?

Hi Hazir,

How and when to take profit in Bitcoin is a difficult subject to comment about. It depends on your age, time horizon, your conviction level, your individual financial situation, your legal situation (are capital gains taxed in your country?), and so forth.

If you have a rebalancing approach to investing, the answer is quite simple I think: at the end of the year, trim down your Bitcoin allocation (i.e. buy or sell) until it again represents the desired percentage in your portfolio (in your case that seems to be 6%).

If you are a passive investor, you 'buy and hold', only to trim off your Bitcoin holdings annually with what you'd otherwise expect to receive as dividends on stocks, or interest payments on bonds.

If you have a more active approach to investing, you might want to gradually sell into the rally (if you don't trust your ability of 'calling' the top), or you might want to sell on the way down, when the markets crash and then bounce back but not above the previous high.

Personally, although I do over time want to diminish my exposure to Bitcoin, have more of a buy and hold approach.

2)what are your thoughts on the current price of a bitcoin (320$~), do you tend to think it's a symptom of the block halving?

The block halving is yet to come (cutting the supply of new BTC in half from 3600 BTC / day to 1800 BTC / day, and I think prices will likely rise in anticipation of that event.

The level to watch, imo, is the $300 level. If the price falls below that, we could see another period of consolidation, with prices mostly between $200 and $300. If stays above $300, it will likely serve as the take off strip for a big rally.

3)what areas of short and long term investment do you find interesting currently?

Long term: undervalued stock markets (hard to find, but there are a few left in the world), Bitcoin, gold mining shares, tech stocks (after a serious correction), ...

Short term: long USD, some strategic short positions in stocks.

4)what reading material and advice would you point a new investor to? i'm at the stage of trying to absorb as much information as possible and would be grateful for your input!

It's hard to say because there are so many fruitful approaches to investing.

Some suggestions that I think have worked for me:
- Austrian School economics for a solid theoretical foundation (see here for example)
- Material that gets you in the mindset and decision making process of great investors (Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, RealVisionTV, etc.)
- Study the history of markets, in particular the history of booms and busts
- Focus on improving self knowledge (therapy, keeping a diary, etc) in order to better understand the emotional aspects of decision making
- Read current analysis of what is happening in the markets. As time progresses and you get to look back, you'll develop sort of a catalogue about which analyses produced correct predictions and which didn't.

Good luck!

[Tuur Demeester]

Hey Tuur,

I guess you will be more happy than others with the the question since you are first an investor.

I was re-reading Antifragile by iconoclast thinker Nassim Taleb recently. He writes

"Never ask anyone for their opinion [...] Just ask them what they have -or don't have- in their portfolio"

Having met or read about a few people in the bitcoin community, I have come to think it's a very relevant question and you can better weight their opinions having an idea of how many Bitcoins they hold (or do not hold.)

Since you are kwown to be sceptic about the current monetary policy in most of the world:

- What do you think of gold in an environment where Bicoin would be rising ? At what point (market cap) Bitcoin starts to seriously compete with gold and grabs some of its marketshare as a store of value / hedge against monetary risk ? (I think now it works more as an investment with a high risk/reward profile akin to an option).

In 2014, the world gold production was 2,860 metric tonnes. In troy ounces, and multiplied by the gold price: 9.1951e+7 * 1,072 = $ 98,571,472,000 worth of gold, or $98 billion.

For the next four years, the amount of new bitcoin being produced by miners will be about 657,000 per annum. For that to become worth 10% of the annual gold production, the value of 1 BTC would have to rise to $240,000 $13,700. (edit: thanks for [url=https://forum.bitcoin.com/ama-ask-me-anything/i-m-tuur-demeester-bitcoin-investor-economist-and-founder-of-adamant-research-ask-me-anything-t2911-30.html?sid=00159c859cb348205f7347c236ff9090#p9676]pointing out[/url] my miscalculation)

But that is not how psychology works I think.

I see societies overall as fairly inert, reluctant to embrace change. Seeing that physical gold is structurally undervalued (because of the fractional reserve nature of the paper market for gold) and that its history as a store of value is deeply ingrained in many cultures, I think it would take quite a lot before we see significant erosion of the gold price because of Bitcoin.

I think we'd first need to see the cycles in Bitcoin to seriously lengthen, to 5-10 years or so.

A black swan scenario that would play out badly for gold is if meteor or seafloor mining seriously take off and the world is flooded with cheap gold.

I think the bubble and the fraud is in fiat, and that when the 'crack up boom' happens (devaluation, hyperinflation), value will flow to both Bitcoin and gold. That's why I'm bullish on both.

What do you think of the result of the presidential election in Argentinia ?

I think it's an opportunity for the new regime (if it actually gets elected) to push through reforms a la Thatcher, with privatisations, lower government spending, and a stabilization of the currency. I think Argentina could become a better place to live and work (although that won't change overnight), and very investable, somewhere in the next 5 years.

Bitcoin over time will diminish the effect of the election cycle, because when a country is on a private money standard, its government can't just print money to cover expenses. It is forced to somewhat live within its means.

[Tuur Demeester]

Hi Tuur,

Thanks for joining bitcoin.com. The links are great too. I will have to read alot today

Thanks for having me! It's been fun and interesting so far

1) How do you store your coins? Can you give new members some tips on that?

I don't disclose how I store my bitcoins personally, but in our report we recommend Xapo and Bitcoin Trezor. I hear the Open Bitcoin Privacy Project is soon coming out with new ratings of bitcoin storage solutions, so you may want to keep an eye out for that.

In general, here are some pointers for safe storage:
- Try to diversify your risk, don't store all your eggs in one basket
- Write down your storage and retrieval procedure, talk it through with an expert
- Build in fail safes (multi sig can be useful in this regard)
- Consider that your brain might represent a risk: most coins have not been stolen, but were lost due to a forgotten password.
- Keep in mind that there will likely be more exchanges and bitcoin wallets hacked in the future.
- Open source software, on average, tends to be more robust and reliable.

2) What are you working on at the moment?

Many things!
- getting the Adamant Newsletter (subscription based investment newsletter) on the physical rails, doing a lot of development and testing
- working on several new reports, exciting stuff!
- continuing to educate myself on investing and portfolio management

3) You did alot talks about BTC in the past all over the world. Are you planing to attend on BTC conferences again and give some talks?

Yeah, I'll be presenting at the Latin American Bitcoin Conference next week. I'm taking it a bit slow with presentations lately because of all the preparations for the newsletter.

4) What is the most exiting thing that is happening right now in the bitcoin sphere?

Sidechains.

[Tuur Demeester]

Hi Tuur, I've been following you on Twitter for quite sometime and really enjoy reading your thoughts. I just read your report and already sent the link to some family members.

I'm getting into economics. So far I've read Economics in One Lesson, and What Has Government Done to Our Money. What other books do you recommend for learning the basics of Austrian economics?

What are your current thoughts on the bitcoin price and what do think will happen in the next ~12 months?

Hi Jordan,

Great that you like our report, and thanks for sharing it!

Books I recommend for learning the basics of Austrian economics, let's see.

As far as books for beginners, I really enjoyed Gene Callahan's 'Economics for Real People'.

My approach to learning economics has been a little different than starting with primers. I'd try to find who I thought was the most learned person on the subject, and then I started reading his works. Sometimes it would be a paper, or a chapter in a book of his. The learning curve that way is pretty steep, but I like that it can help avoid 'oversimplification bias'.

Also, I have a heart for philosophy and honing my perspective on the world, and so I focused a lot on methodology, after which I moved on to basic economic concepts, and a study of economic history.

My journey into Austrian Economics looked like this:

I read Mises' Human Action (was actually the first thing I ever read of the Austrian school), and then also his 'Theory and History' and the wonderful 'Bureaucracy'. Then I used Rothbard's 'Man, Economy and State' as a reference work to use whenever I had trouble grasping a concept or an approach.

I studied several of Hayek's papers and started reading some of his books, but I found him lacking in clarity at times, and pretty exhausting to read.

All in all I didn't read that many books, because I didn't have money to buy them!

I did spend hundreds of hours listening to recorded lectures by Mark Thornton, Hans Hermann Hoppe, Robert P. Murphy, Murray Rothbard (he was an amazing lecturer!), David Gordon, Walter Block, Guido Hulsmann, Yuri Maltsev, Tom Woods, Tom Dilorenzo and Jeffrey Tucker.

I also had stacks of papers that I printed out on my little printer, revolving around the subject I was interested in at the time. Authors that come to mind are Philipp Bagus, Stephan Kinsella, Roderick T. Long, Rothbard, ...

What was amazing about living in Ghent, Belgium, is that we had professor Frank van Dun to learn from. His knowledge about philosophy of law is bar none (he pretty much discovered argumentation ethics in the early eighties) , and he is also incredibly well versed in Austrian Economics. We organized dozens of lectures with him, and he was always generous with giving us thoughtful feedback on whatever we were working on.

Ha, I got a bit carried away! Hope this helped

For my response to "how do you see the price of Bitcoin faring over the next twelve months?", see here: http://ow.ly/V6OF0

[Tuur Demeester]

Hey Tuur,
could you tell us more about Adamant Research?
- What is the business model?
- How it profits?
- What´s your role on it?
- Future plans?
Thanks

Hi edugarbizu,

Thanks for asking!

Adamant Research is a small research firm, founded by myself and my fiancé Becca Packard. I'm editor-in-chief, she is the managing editor. Our main product is the Adamant Newsletter, which is a subscription based investment newsletter.

Business model is simple: we provide investment research and ideas that pay themselves back, and our subscribers provide us with income that we use to further improve upon our research.

If you're interested in following what we do, and you want to know when we launch, sign up at adamantresearch.com.