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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2849 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 17, 2023

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A couple guys on Twitter have entered into a million dollar bet on whether the dollar will hyperinflate within 90 days.

I know this things are often useless, but Balaji is very wealthy

I’m not that smart but if he actually believed this he’d be borrowing as much as he could from a bank to buy BTC with right?

This is a bitcoin publicity stunt, but anyway, what should you do if you really believed it. If he loses he’s out 1M of today's money. If he wins, in 26k. This is for an extremely unlikely event, so 1:1 odds would already be great for the counterparty. This is 40:1.

The market can provide better odds than this. Buy some June 16 550 spy calls for, let me check, one cent. If the dollar devalues by 40, spy will be worth 15500. Spy might lose some value, margin of safety and all that, let’s say 3000, and let’s add another 4 cents of transaction fees, why not. Gives odds of 0.05 (times 40 due to hyperinflation) to 2500 in his favour, that’s 1:1250 . Don't settle for a toyota when you could be a billlionaire.

If the dollar devalues by 40, spy will be worth 15500

Will it? Wouldn't people take all their money out of the US? Gold, BTC, ammunition, roubles and renminbi are the play IMO.

Its debatable whether there are any securities one could buy that would pay out at positive net real value if the dollar devalued by 40x over 90 days. Far out of the money call options would definitely not pay out. This isn't about reading the fine print; there is no possible sequence of words in the options disclosure document that would prevent the government from canceling the transactions of "speculators betting against the wellbeing of the American People," for example

Is there a precedent for this? Technically, I was betting on america, spy to the moon, yee-hee.

There is precedent for exchanges cancelling trades after execution, and there is precedent for the US Government seizing speculative assets immediately before they predictably rise in value. You can extrapolate how exchanges and governments would react to even more extreme market events.

It's not much. LME got a lot of shit for that, accusations of being in bed with the losers, lawsuits still pending etc.

In 2008, some bet fifty to one against mortgages, that was less ambiguous, and they kept the money. Besides, you think they wouldn't let apes profit from a call, yet look on your bitcoin gains with benevolence? Closing that door is the first thing they'll do.

I don't get how people think the global reserve currency is going to blow up before Japan's not global reserve currency. Japan has the equivalent of $60 trillion in government debt and their Central Bank owns 40% of that debt as well as a significant share of of the stock market.

Isn't the stupider part that the bet fundamentally favors of the one betting against hyperinflation? If he wins he gets a whopping $1M USD. If he loses he only has to pay a measly $1M USD.

It's not quite as asymmetric as "I bet humanity won't go extinct in 90 days" but it's pretty asymmetric.

The whole point is to get it into people's minds that bitcoin is a hedge against financial collapse. The chance of total banking failure in the immediate future is very much not zero. Reading the linked thread did in fact get me thinking about buying more bitcoin. If the bet goes viral it could be positive expected value for Balaji even if he loses the bet.

It’s always someone with laser eyes in their avatar

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