Is anyone else starting to become a bit excited?

GooglePlus wrote: »

40% is madness when you think about it.

Just under half of a profit made goes bye bye, it would make you sick to your stomach driving home, avoiding every pothole on the road.

The secret to investing in Ireland is to rack up massive losses first then you can write off future capital gains against that, you cant lose that way :pac:

charlesanto wrote: »

Really that high ?

Possibly not. I hadn't really taken in they were talking in PPP - Purchasing power parity, though given one excuse I have seen for Ireland having high public salaries is the high cost of living, I would have thought that would tend to deflate the figures, not exagerate.



https://www.europeandatajournalism.eu/eng/News/Data-news/Public-employees-comparisons-between-European-countries-are-deceptive

Taxation on capital for individuals is stupidly high (which is what would affect what we are discussing here).

Taxation on corporations (especially multinationals) is bottom low and taxation on workers if you include all related taxes and not just income tax is also rather low v.s. other European countries (but our tax brackets are hitting medium and medium/high earners disproportionally strongly). Here is a comparison and tax burden on labour in EU countries giving Ireland as the third lowest: https://www.institutmolinari.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2019/07/tax_burden_EU_2019.pdf

So I don’t think it is fair to say taxation is high in Ireland in general. The problem for us in this thread is that taxation for individual investors is punitive (many counties would have either much lower CGT, DIRT, and dividends taxation, or would have tax rules providing exemption/reduction of these taxes taxes for long term individual investors up to a certain amount).

cooperguy wrote: »

Only thing Id add to that is while Corporate tax rate is low, our income from it is incredibly high. Ireland's corporate tax as a percentage of income is one of the highest on the OECD.

Our individual taxes on investors are high. But our effective income tax rates are not, unless you're talking about the top few percent of earners

Yes 100% agree, this is a choice we are making as a country: dirt cheap corporate tax to attract FDI but relatively to our population and the size of our economy even those low rates are bringing in sizeable tax amount as we are attracting capital which would never have came to Ireland otherwise.

I would also add that there is actually a cohort of income tax payers in the 45k-75k income bracket which are not served very well by our tax system. A good chunck of their income is taxed at 40% which is very high for someone who is a medium/high earner (i.e. a better than the average person but not genuinely a top earner). This is because we only have 2 tax rates and the second rates is reached at a rather low income band (many countries would go from 20% to 40% a lot more gradually with more tax bands and possibly even go past 40% for extremely high income bands). I suspect a few posters here are in that kind of income bracket and thus rightly feel some tax pressure. But still as a whole labour taxation in Ireland is rather low (another reason is that employer PRSI type of contributions are rather low compared to EU average and while they are not paid directly by employees they are very much part of labour taxation and thus indirectly paid for by employees as higher rates for these would result in lower wages as employers are only concerned with their their total labour cost regardless how it is structured and would transfer the extra labour taxation cost to their employees though lower wages).

GooglePlus wrote: »

Looking through Reddit and a few other articles, I'm seeing predictions of bitcoin reaching anywhere from 125k into the millions region in the coming years.

I'ts not the sort of thing that sparks ridicule these days - but don't get carried away. I was very happy earlier this year when it was at $10k. I'll be ecstatic if it can close above that this year (and anything above that is bonus territory). That's not to say that I don't believe it can hit high numbers - I wouldn't be too surprised if it got there - but I just think its healthier to treat that possibility as bonus territory (all the while, understanding that bitcoin is formative - and can still fall on its face, potentially).
This is still early days for cryptocurrency (despite what some might think). It's formative. From the digital gold/uncorrelated asset use case, the stage is set for bitcoin - with the current 'money printer go bbrrrr' / Modern Monetary Theory scenario. However, deflation/stagflation/inflation - nobody really knows how this plays out in its entirety as we have not been here before (with these particular circumstances).

It's certainly gotten people to think 'what is money' - and that leads to a re-examination of bitcoin as hard money - which is good. There has been encouraging news in terms of an increase in crypto exchange account openings. Furthermore, we just passed the 3 million marker in terms of the number of bitcoin addresses holding 0.1 BTC or more for the first time.

GooglePlus wrote: »

Will this halving bring anything with it and could it really get that high or is it as likely for the arse to fall out of it?

The halving could well be a non event. On the one hand, some believe that 'it's priced in' on the basis that markets are efficient. Others believe the opposite. Some believe that there will be a short term drop in price. As the miners reward is cut in half, less efficient miners will come under pressure and they may be forced to sell bitcoin to cover costs. On the flipside, it could be that these guys got cleared out already on March 12 - following the market crash.

In the long run though, when it comes to the supply side, there will be much less bitcoin getting dumped onto the market by miners going forward - meaning a scarce asset will have become much scarcer still. That's positive - and likely to have a positive effect on price. However, more effort is required to establish stronger use case for bitcoin on the demand side.

If it has peaked your interest, then delve a bit deeper. Start with the whitepaper as someone suggested and figure out in your own mind if there's something tangible in it.

Lex Luthor wrote: »

great that BTC finally broke through that $7800 very strong resistance

Onwards and upwards to the next level of $8400

Got into Digibyte yesterday and had a nice 12% pump aswell, greens all round. Nice change from last month

The one thing I don't like about the price action of the past few weeks is the strong correlation with stock markets. Even with all the money printing and cash injections of central banks, I suspect stock market are due for a second leg of correction eventually. If BTC is to remain correlated this wouldn't be good news for crypto prices.

cnocbui wrote: »

If the market was conventionally rational, then your concern would be justified, but I have a sneaking suspicion there might not be another plummet in equities - which in the wisdom of the past there should be, but central banks have destroyed interest rates so there's equities, art, classic cars, whiskey, property (outside of Ireland) and stuff all else left.

Yeah for sure, agree central banks are going nuclear and this level of market intervention and price fixing by monetary authorities at a global scale hasn't been seen in a very long time, if ever. And definitely agree they are doing all they can to keep share prices up and push more savers to the stock market.

But I think the flip side of the (bit)coin is that:
- a massive shutdown of the global economy such as what we are currently experiencing is an equally peculiar event pushing prices the other direction
- market control and price fixing only works to a certain extend and for a certain time; eventually reality comes back to hit the system

So the scenario you mention definitely isn't one I am discarding and yes this game could keep going for a good while (although eventually it will have to end). But I think there are also arguments not to discard a a further drop.