I think what's usually being overlooked by 'people in the West' is how crypto-currencies are being used by individuals in emerging markets to evade domestic currency controls. I've recently had the chance to get a glimpse into the crypto volumes generated by that sort of activity, let's just say they're staggeringly high.
Domestic currency controls seem to offer all sorts of arbitrage possibilities that can be exploited using crypto currencies, the cycle usually goes -> some weak currency -> somehow convert to crypto -> sell crypto for USD -> sell USD back for that same weak domestic currency with a markup.
In addition, compared to those currencies, crypto currencies offer both stability and interchangeability into stronger store of values (be that other currencies or stocks or what not). In this system crypto exchanges have become global banks of sorts that allow their clients to manage their now globally available funds.
Putting all other things and considerations etc. aside this is a pretty fascinating system fuelled by weak states and failing economies all around the world. I think as long as those states exist there will always be an incentive for such systems to exist.
> Domestic currency controls seem to offer all sorts of arbitrage possibilities that can be exploited using crypto currencies, the cycle usually goes -> some weak currency -> somehow convert to crypto -> sell crypto for USD -> sell USD back for that same weak domestic currency with a markup.
That isnt evading currency controls, that is arbitraging domestic currency controls.
Evading currency controls looks like this: earn rubley-pesos, convert to crypto, convert to USD, stuff under matress.
These so called weak states and failing economies all around the world have had secondary markets (mostly in USD - see the blue dollar in argentina as just one example) since before the birth of satoshi, let alone the birth of cryptocurrency. Its not some great new trick invented by bitcoin.
It probably makes it a lot easier for people with ridiculous amounts of money and strong capital controls to transfer assets abroad.
Like, the Chinese government cracked down hard on Bitcoin, and while the energy stuff was definitely a factor, I'd be really surprised if cracking down on ways to to take money out of the Chinese economy wasn't also a factor.
What actual digital currency markets have existed in Argentina or any other weak state prior to Bitcoin?
All of these dark markets where cash only markets before, precisely because prior to Bitcoin you always needed a reliable state sponsored intermediary for online transactions.
India is an emerging market, it has a better digital transaction system implemented(UPI) than most of the western counterparts with low to zero transaction fees. a vendor on the roadside without a roof over his head or access to a cellphone can sell services or do digital transactions. Visa and MasterCard duopoly is almost at the verge of being replaced and all this has nothing to do with Blockchain or crypto currencies.
How do people in countries with currency controls actually buy crypto? Debit cards? A friend of mine in a developing country with currency controls was trying to buy crypto, and I recall her getting scammed by some dude who took her cash and never delivered the crypto.
That's how it works, your friend was just unlucky enough to get scammed. But even if she hadn't gotten scammed, how did the person she bought the crypto from get their crypto to begin with?
At the in-country upstream end, is a crypto farm running mining hardware, lossly turning local currency with the power company into crypto coins (croins), which can then be traded for local or foreign currency.
people keep saying this in every thread. I don't understand how that works. Is it that people in the "weak" states are using BTC for commerce or are they exchanging BTC to USD and then using it. How does it work? I doubt there are exchanges which will do the BTC -> USD conversion. So what are these people using to do this? Coinbase?
Yes and it always curiously ignores that mobile banking is the actual technology that has actually massively helped the unbanked.
I suspect if Bitcoin is helping people in these countries evade currency controls it’s helping the rich not the poor and rather enabling capital flight than adding stability.
For example in Russia the chinese vendors would sell their stuff for cash rubles, convert them into crypto, send crypto to china, order a container of new stuff, ship it to Russia, repeat.
basically they save on taxes, conversion fees, cross border transfer fees, etc. on the cash portion of their revenues. it’s probably harder to do the same with card payments as the tax agencies are in control of electronic payments.
in the end there has to be a reason to use crypto in some economic activity. in the example above it’s cost management.
This chain has big questions. Where does that conversion happen? Weak currency to crypto? Who sell crypto? For a weak currency? And then okay exchanging for USD is possible, paypal etc. etc. How do you get that USD to location you are, presumably under controls... And now sell it?
Maybe that’s what we should actually be aiming for: fixing those societies/economies at least so much in the direction of the “good ones” (where you can trust banks to take care of your money, can trust market players, trust the courts etc.) that crypto becomes uninteresting.
I mean, there was a functioning black market in post-WWII Germany – that doesn’t mean it was actually “good”. It was simply necessary until society got back in order.
> 90% of transaction volume on the Bitcoin blockchain is not tied to economically meaningful activities but is the byproduct of the Bitcoin protocol design as well as the preference of many participants for anonymity.
>In other words, 90% of Bitcoin's carbon footprint is used in a partially successful attempt to compensate for its deficient anonymity.
Miners are mainly rewarded by the new bitcoins that are created in each new block. The energy usage does not come from processing transactions; it is largely independent, it is not uncommon that miners even mine blocks that contain no transactions. If you stop 90% of transactions you will definitely not see the hashrate drop by 90%.
It shocks me that so few people seem to understand this; we keep having articles saying that bitcoin transactions are a waste of energy, and everyone ignoring that the block reward halves every few years until it drops to zero, so it not built with the incentives to use this much energy forever. In fact there is the opposite concern: with widespread usage of systems like Lightning Network and no block reward, there may not be enough incentive for people to mine enough to secure the network.
I believe the argument is explained in the linked post by about slide 7. You simply didn't read enough. The author is not arguing that transaction volume and "work" are directly related, but rather that for the entire system to function meaningfully, mining "work" is required to secure the chain and in order for the miners to be meaningfully rewarded, a speculative market of transactions is required (the author does not agree with you that miner's are meaningfully rewarded by Bitcoins, he argues they require fiat, again see slides 1-7). So by his argument if you stopped 90% of transactions you will see a commensurate drop in mining, because the miners won't do it without reward.
This is part of a larger argument that these requirements drive the system towards centralization, thereby defeating all the work to decentralize. These are not my arguments, but they seemed to be reasonably well presented by someone who understands the mechanics of proof of work.
You're final argument that other chains may rob Bitcoin of incentives to mine may well be additional vulnerabilities of the network, I don't know.
>we keep having articles saying that bitcoin transactions are a waste of energy, and everyone ignoring that the block reward halves every few years until it drops to zero, so it not built with the incentives to use this much energy forever.
Bitcoin transactions aren't a waste of energy, a high bitcoin valuation is an incentive to "waste" energy (commit resources to mining).
The block rewards will drop over time, but they're denominated in BTC, so it's hard to predict what the incentive to mine will be.
It will be a long time before block rewards reach zero.
But not such a long time before block rewards are dominated by transaction fees, a few decades at most (in two decades, the block subsidy will be 32x smaller).
> and everyone ignoring that the block reward halves every few years until it drops to zero
It's not the reward that drops to zero, but only the block subsidy. Thus the reward will largely (eventually entirely) consist of transaction fees. Which means your first observation
> The energy usage does not come from processing transactions; it is largely independent
So which part of those 2 statements you quoted is false? Sure, the energy of usage of Bitcoin is not directly used to process transactions, but it still part of the Bitcoin system.
It is strange language to say 'carbon footprint is used' but I see no interpretation where the statement is correct. The 'carbon footprint' is actually 'used' to secure the network, motivated by how the process generates more bitcoin. The size of the carbon footprint is not caused by, nor dependent on, that 90% of transaction volume. It doesn't make sense even when I try to find the most forgiving interpretation. There's an implication that the data means the transactions are enormously wasteful but it doesnt logically follow.
The block reward dropping doesn't mean that the value of the block reward drops though, does it? If the value of bitcoin goes up then the value of the block reward can increase even though the amount of bitcoin in the reward decreases.
It sounds like just a nitpick to me.
The networks exists to process transactions. It's only fair to count its total energy consumptions to see how efficient it is. That it does a lot empty work without processing anything is a by product of a bad design.
If it's mainly about minting new coins and once it's done the energy usage goes down then we could just skip the step, you know?
There are some intelligent criticisms here along with some fundamental misunderstandings.
The biggest misunderstanding that crypto critics and even many advocates have is that Bitcoin is a currency that people will buy stuff with. If Bitcoin has any use, it is as a final settlement layer. The Lightning network that is layered on top of Bitcoin is what is actually useful for buying stuff. Much of this article is based on this misunderstanding.
A correct criticism is that Bitcoin can be controlled by pooling mining. But a more nuanced take would be to say that it is a system that works due to aligning the economic interest of the miners providing the decentralized security with the users. The real problem with government fiat currency is less the centralization but more that the centralized actor is incentivized to monkey around with it, and particularly to devalue everyone else's money by printing as much new currency as they can without creating rampant inflation. With Bitcoin, miners could attempt to control the currency, but then it would lose all its value, so they choose not to. It's certainly still a risk to the system, particularly when one nation state like China previously did most of the mining.
On random I checked the Domino middleman store and of course the store locator showed the stores but was grayed out...
This is the story with crypto e-commerce over and over again. Seemingly grand claims which fall apart on closer inspection - barely functional stores at best.
Show me the money! That is show me a bustling e-commerce operation that is using crypto for non-crypto items/services. Preferably legitimate goods/services too.
I am leaving out the technical problems of actually using LN.
PS I bought my old laptop for BTC in 2013 and it seemed so much easier back then.
Lightning is way too bleeding edge to describe it as "useful for buying stuff". It also depends on some pretty complex P2P routing layer to supposedly enable arbitrary transactions out of bidirectional channels - AFAICT, that's basically vaporware that has yet to be developed. Let's get back to this when it's actually working as intended.
(One flaw in the article is that it talks about "permissioned blockchains" as if that was a meaningful concept. A permissioned blockchain is just a database. In fact, put a database's physical storage in git version control - which uses Merkle trees under the hood to provide immutable history tracking - and you've got something even physically indistinguishable from "permissioned" blockchain tech!)
Lightning is actually in use in El Salvador now for remittances and buying stuff. I don’t disagree that it should mature more but it’s already infinitely more practical than the majority of crypto related things.
> The Lightning network that is layered on top of Bitcoin is what is actually useful for buying stuff. Much of this article is based on this misunderstanding.
It's not obvious to me what this changes with respect to the article, can you be more specific, especially since it's a long article? E.g. I think the point about the energy consumption, the lack of decentralization still stand.
> With Bitcoin, miners could attempt to control the currency, but then it would lose all its value, so they choose not to.
Why do you think that's the case? The author quotes research pointing out that the majority of BTC activity actually comes from speculation which might have little to do with security guarantees the Bitcoin network is supposed to provide, so having them break will not necessarily impact its USD/BTC rate.
I think there's a whole spectrum of control major miners could exert without much backlash in terms of value BTC would lose. E.g. if major miners agreed to prevent any transaction from a certain address from being mined ever, they can just ignore their transactions in their pool, and revert any block from other miners that would have these transactions. I don't see BTC losing value if this is done sparsely.
What a gripping read. Probably the most curious part is that this is the EE380 course but the topics that need to be probed are largely the domain of economics, philosophy and law. And since crypto is new, these are arguably at the cutting edge of those fields. Nobody has ever had to deal with actual immutability of a trade good before. There is work here to synthesise cryptocoins into the existing frameworks.
It may not be the most exciting area to work in, but these are new.
There is a misconception that Bitcoin electricity usage is increasing exponentially and uncontrollable. In fact, it is limited by Bitcoin price times Bitcoin issuance rate. For example, at current BTC price, electricity usage has an upper limit of $37m per day. If miners spend more than that, their operation becomes unprofitable. In fact, they spend less, because there are also other expenses.
From April 2024, the new upper limit will be $18mln/day, if the price remains stable. If Bitcoin price rises in line with it's decreasing issue rate, in 12 years we'll have Bitcoin at $328,000, but the electricity costs will stay same as today.
$37m per day is about $1.1B a month. If we divide this by world's population of 8 billion people, we arrive at a figure of 14 cents per month.
14 cents is what you are paying to Visa for your morning croissant in transaction fees. On top of this, you pay a lot of taxes to the government to maintain and secure the money system.
Now what are we getting for 14 cents a month? We are getting money that is unforgeable, uninflatable, irreversible, uncensorable, electronic, capable of millions of transactions per second, available to anyone worldwide 24/7/365. We are getting a piece of freedom in a world that is becoming more and more centralized and controlled from above.
> electricity usage has an upper limit of $37m per day
I don't see how you compute such an upper limit given that it depends on the transactions fees. You're talking about the profitability if miners don't mine any transaction, and maybe this used to be a reasonable approximation, but as the block reward halves it will become less and less accurate. The profitability limit can be just as arbitrarily high as the transaction fees.
> We are getting money that is unforgeable, uninflatable, irreversible, uncensorable
The article convincingly argues that it's not irreversible nor uncensorable given that it's centralized, and that any similar permissionless blockchain would tend towards such a centralization.
> capable of millions of transactions per second
Are you saying that the 14 cents a month would cover the transaction fees? That's not the case right now with way less transactions, I don't see how that will ever be the case if the number of transactions increase to this number.
transaction fees are currently very small percentage of miner's income, and probably will be so for another ~3 halvings. By that time, protocols would evolve so that you won't need a mainnet transaction at all to create a second layer wallet.
>> The article convincingly argues that it's not irreversible nor uncensorable
Not convincingly at all. Not a single tx has been reverted on BTC network in 13 years (well, except of couple of early bugs that caused network split), maybe you are confusing with some other network. No one is able to prevent a tx from going out, as we just witnessed - FBI wasn't able to revert a $3.6B theft transaction without getting hold of private keys.
>> Are you saying that the 14 cents a month would cover the transaction fees?
I paid a tx fee once, two years ago, to fund my Satoshi Wallet, and haven't paid another satoshi in tx fees for about a hundred of purchases since then. So I don't see why everyone can't do that. As to the initial funding of the wallet for everyone, I don't see why it can't be done off chain as well in the future.
The beauty is, even if everyone started using Bitcoin today, the electricity consumption would stay the same. And it is feasible, with the already functioning Lightning Network (second level network over Bitcoin network).
That assumes that everyone needs to spend more than they get in crypto for it to be worth their while. If I had $100, and I gave it to you, and you gave me back $80, that would be a bad deal for me, right? Except if that $100 is "dirty", and the $80 is "clean", that might be worth it to some.
I gave up on the technical merits and accepted that I invest for the same reason one would invest in a company. The hope that of selling to a greater fool - or maybe I would be the fool, who knows.
I believe there is merit in BTC but it's value is propped up by fake USDT unbacked $. I don't think there is liquidity for everyone to cash out at same time. Which is why exchanges always shutdown during periods of turbulence.
I respect that. I don't respect seemingly intelligent people bullshitting their participation farther beneath technical obscurantism. I mean, some of these people seem like hyper-intelligent savants, but then again, I guess Wall Treet suffers from the same type of self-delusion or outright fraud.
Just be honest. You're playing musical chairs hoping you'll have a seat when the music stops.
Of course. I think anyone that's done a bit of research knows that it's just a form of ponzi. But this is the clown world we seem to be living in for now.
Investing in a company though is basically doing a crowd sourced valuation on the future cash flows of the company.
It doesn't matter if you see it that way or not. Your buying and selling is still voting in a sense on the valuation of the future cash flows of the company.
Buying and selling BTC is like buying or selling gold. There is no future cash flow to value. It is purely pricing based off supply and demand.
Readit News
Domestic currency controls seem to offer all sorts of arbitrage possibilities that can be exploited using crypto currencies, the cycle usually goes -> some weak currency -> somehow convert to crypto -> sell crypto for USD -> sell USD back for that same weak domestic currency with a markup.
In addition, compared to those currencies, crypto currencies offer both stability and interchangeability into stronger store of values (be that other currencies or stocks or what not). In this system crypto exchanges have become global banks of sorts that allow their clients to manage their now globally available funds.
Putting all other things and considerations etc. aside this is a pretty fascinating system fuelled by weak states and failing economies all around the world. I think as long as those states exist there will always be an incentive for such systems to exist.
That isnt evading currency controls, that is arbitraging domestic currency controls.
Evading currency controls looks like this: earn rubley-pesos, convert to crypto, convert to USD, stuff under matress.
These so called weak states and failing economies all around the world have had secondary markets (mostly in USD - see the blue dollar in argentina as just one example) since before the birth of satoshi, let alone the birth of cryptocurrency. Its not some great new trick invented by bitcoin.
Like, the Chinese government cracked down hard on Bitcoin, and while the energy stuff was definitely a factor, I'd be really surprised if cracking down on ways to to take money out of the Chinese economy wasn't also a factor.
All of these dark markets where cash only markets before, precisely because prior to Bitcoin you always needed a reliable state sponsored intermediary for online transactions.
This is not a tick.
At the in-country upstream end, is a crypto farm running mining hardware, lossly turning local currency with the power company into crypto coins (croins), which can then be traded for local or foreign currency.
I suspect if Bitcoin is helping people in these countries evade currency controls it’s helping the rich not the poor and rather enabling capital flight than adding stability.
basically they save on taxes, conversion fees, cross border transfer fees, etc. on the cash portion of their revenues. it’s probably harder to do the same with card payments as the tax agencies are in control of electronic payments.
in the end there has to be a reason to use crypto in some economic activity. in the example above it’s cost management.
It just seems extra steps.
(Not in the real world at the moment, or at least not very much.)
I mean, there was a functioning black market in post-WWII Germany – that doesn’t mean it was actually “good”. It was simply necessary until society got back in order.
https://twitter.com/markrussinovich/status/14921748339452313...
Deleted Comment
> 90% of transaction volume on the Bitcoin blockchain is not tied to economically meaningful activities but is the byproduct of the Bitcoin protocol design as well as the preference of many participants for anonymity.
>In other words, 90% of Bitcoin's carbon footprint is used in a partially successful attempt to compensate for its deficient anonymity.
Miners are mainly rewarded by the new bitcoins that are created in each new block. The energy usage does not come from processing transactions; it is largely independent, it is not uncommon that miners even mine blocks that contain no transactions. If you stop 90% of transactions you will definitely not see the hashrate drop by 90%.
It shocks me that so few people seem to understand this; we keep having articles saying that bitcoin transactions are a waste of energy, and everyone ignoring that the block reward halves every few years until it drops to zero, so it not built with the incentives to use this much energy forever. In fact there is the opposite concern: with widespread usage of systems like Lightning Network and no block reward, there may not be enough incentive for people to mine enough to secure the network.
This is part of a larger argument that these requirements drive the system towards centralization, thereby defeating all the work to decentralize. These are not my arguments, but they seemed to be reasonably well presented by someone who understands the mechanics of proof of work.
You're final argument that other chains may rob Bitcoin of incentives to mine may well be additional vulnerabilities of the network, I don't know.
Bitcoin transactions aren't a waste of energy, a high bitcoin valuation is an incentive to "waste" energy (commit resources to mining).
The block rewards will drop over time, but they're denominated in BTC, so it's hard to predict what the incentive to mine will be.
It will be a long time before block rewards reach zero.
It's not the reward that drops to zero, but only the block subsidy. Thus the reward will largely (eventually entirely) consist of transaction fees. Which means your first observation
> The energy usage does not come from processing transactions; it is largely independent
becomes increasingly wrong over time.
Deleted Comment
It's like asking about what types of books will be published in a 100 years from now, given we just invented the Gutenberg press.
In short, it will depend entirely upon the demand. This whole thing is about money, technology is secondary.
The biggest misunderstanding that crypto critics and even many advocates have is that Bitcoin is a currency that people will buy stuff with. If Bitcoin has any use, it is as a final settlement layer. The Lightning network that is layered on top of Bitcoin is what is actually useful for buying stuff. Much of this article is based on this misunderstanding.
A correct criticism is that Bitcoin can be controlled by pooling mining. But a more nuanced take would be to say that it is a system that works due to aligning the economic interest of the miners providing the decentralized security with the users. The real problem with government fiat currency is less the centralization but more that the centralized actor is incentivized to monkey around with it, and particularly to devalue everyone else's money by printing as much new currency as they can without creating rampant inflation. With Bitcoin, miners could attempt to control the currency, but then it would lose all its value, so they choose not to. It's certainly still a risk to the system, particularly when one nation state like China previously did most of the mining.
Second: every year I check the state of Lightning Network and it is not pretty:
I assume this is best that it can currently offer?
https://lightningnetworkstores.com/?tags=shipped%20goods
On random I checked the Domino middleman store and of course the store locator showed the stores but was grayed out...
This is the story with crypto e-commerce over and over again. Seemingly grand claims which fall apart on closer inspection - barely functional stores at best.
Show me the money! That is show me a bustling e-commerce operation that is using crypto for non-crypto items/services. Preferably legitimate goods/services too.
I am leaving out the technical problems of actually using LN.
PS I bought my old laptop for BTC in 2013 and it seemed so much easier back then.
(One flaw in the article is that it talks about "permissioned blockchains" as if that was a meaningful concept. A permissioned blockchain is just a database. In fact, put a database's physical storage in git version control - which uses Merkle trees under the hood to provide immutable history tracking - and you've got something even physically indistinguishable from "permissioned" blockchain tech!)
It's not obvious to me what this changes with respect to the article, can you be more specific, especially since it's a long article? E.g. I think the point about the energy consumption, the lack of decentralization still stand.
> With Bitcoin, miners could attempt to control the currency, but then it would lose all its value, so they choose not to.
Why do you think that's the case? The author quotes research pointing out that the majority of BTC activity actually comes from speculation which might have little to do with security guarantees the Bitcoin network is supposed to provide, so having them break will not necessarily impact its USD/BTC rate.
I think there's a whole spectrum of control major miners could exert without much backlash in terms of value BTC would lose. E.g. if major miners agreed to prevent any transaction from a certain address from being mined ever, they can just ignore their transactions in their pool, and revert any block from other miners that would have these transactions. I don't see BTC losing value if this is done sparsely.
Just as dollars used to use a gold standard, Lightning is using a Bitcoin standard.
So it’s an asset that can be used as a base layer for currency.
It may not be the most exciting area to work in, but these are new.
From April 2024, the new upper limit will be $18mln/day, if the price remains stable. If Bitcoin price rises in line with it's decreasing issue rate, in 12 years we'll have Bitcoin at $328,000, but the electricity costs will stay same as today.
$37m per day is about $1.1B a month. If we divide this by world's population of 8 billion people, we arrive at a figure of 14 cents per month.
14 cents is what you are paying to Visa for your morning croissant in transaction fees. On top of this, you pay a lot of taxes to the government to maintain and secure the money system.
Now what are we getting for 14 cents a month? We are getting money that is unforgeable, uninflatable, irreversible, uncensorable, electronic, capable of millions of transactions per second, available to anyone worldwide 24/7/365. We are getting a piece of freedom in a world that is becoming more and more centralized and controlled from above.
I don't see how you compute such an upper limit given that it depends on the transactions fees. You're talking about the profitability if miners don't mine any transaction, and maybe this used to be a reasonable approximation, but as the block reward halves it will become less and less accurate. The profitability limit can be just as arbitrarily high as the transaction fees.
> We are getting money that is unforgeable, uninflatable, irreversible, uncensorable
The article convincingly argues that it's not irreversible nor uncensorable given that it's centralized, and that any similar permissionless blockchain would tend towards such a centralization.
> capable of millions of transactions per second
Are you saying that the 14 cents a month would cover the transaction fees? That's not the case right now with way less transactions, I don't see how that will ever be the case if the number of transactions increase to this number.
>> The article convincingly argues that it's not irreversible nor uncensorable
Not convincingly at all. Not a single tx has been reverted on BTC network in 13 years (well, except of couple of early bugs that caused network split), maybe you are confusing with some other network. No one is able to prevent a tx from going out, as we just witnessed - FBI wasn't able to revert a $3.6B theft transaction without getting hold of private keys.
>> Are you saying that the 14 cents a month would cover the transaction fees?
I paid a tx fee once, two years ago, to fund my Satoshi Wallet, and haven't paid another satoshi in tx fees for about a hundred of purchases since then. So I don't see why everyone can't do that. As to the initial funding of the wallet for everyone, I don't see why it can't be done off chain as well in the future.
I’ll leave you to calculate the cost per month (it’s much higher than 14c).
That assumes that everyone needs to spend more than they get in crypto for it to be worth their while. If I had $100, and I gave it to you, and you gave me back $80, that would be a bad deal for me, right? Except if that $100 is "dirty", and the $80 is "clean", that might be worth it to some.
This is going to be a very dumb question but how does one catch up on the computer science academic literature ?
I believe there is merit in BTC but it's value is propped up by fake USDT unbacked $. I don't think there is liquidity for everyone to cash out at same time. Which is why exchanges always shutdown during periods of turbulence.
Just be honest. You're playing musical chairs hoping you'll have a seat when the music stops.
It doesn't matter if you see it that way or not. Your buying and selling is still voting in a sense on the valuation of the future cash flows of the company.
Buying and selling BTC is like buying or selling gold. There is no future cash flow to value. It is purely pricing based off supply and demand.
Also, I don't have the desire to study companies enough to understand what I'm getting into.
Index funds are appealing, but I keep reading that we're in a bubble but I also feel like assets will just keep appreciating forever, naive, I know.