Loopy Pro: Create music, your way.
What is Loopy Pro? — Loopy Pro is a powerful, flexible, and intuitive live looper, sampler, clip launcher and DAW for iPhone and iPad. At its core, it allows you to record and layer sounds in real-time to create complex musical arrangements. But it doesn’t stop there—Loopy Pro offers advanced tools to customize your workflow, build dynamic performance setups, and create a seamless connection between instruments, effects, and external gear.
Use it for live looping, sequencing, arranging, mixing, and much more. Whether you're a live performer, a producer, or just experimenting with sound, Loopy Pro helps you take control of your creative process.
Download on the App StoreLoopy Pro is your all-in-one musical toolkit. Try it for free today.
Off-Topic discussion about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.
Just to give Ian @u0421793 some respite from his thread about NFTs being polluted with off-topic discussion of Bitcoin, let's move that part of the conversation here.
Bitcoin has just dropped $10,000 in the last week - is the 2021 bull run over, or is it just a temporary dip? More heated debate and gentlemanly disagreement to follow.
Comments
Temporary for sure. Either way gains this year have been phenomenal, can’t complain about a little correction.
Anyone for Tulips?
You can keep your dogecoins, NFTs and bitcoins...
I heard region-free 'iOS music app codes' are the hot currency these days.
..in fact, I heard the next [INSERT TRENDING DEVELOPER HERE] app will only be available as a single-use redeemable app code. So valuable, in fact, it will be endlessly traded and never redeemed.
@richardyot very good idea to split it 👍
it's about 26% dip from ATH for now... othing special, previous two dips in jan and feb were around 30% - this time i'm expecting this one will make one more leg down to area around 40.5k until it retraces back up..
In 2017 bitcoin has i think 4 >30% dips... nothing horrible :-)
It was too overheated, first 3 months of this year were incredible and last 6 months ended in green numbers - never in history of bitcoin 7 consequent months were green so i'm actually glad for is dip and i hope this month ends in red numbers - it's needed for sustainable growth ...
Thanks, appreciated.
Here interesting comparision between dips in 2017 bull run and current 2021 bull run.
And this is even more interesting, 2012, 2017 and 2021 bull runs compared in relative to each one + predicted targets based on famous Stock2Flow model ... i'm very curious if model will hold for this bull run, it's author is very conviceted it will do. Funny fact is real price was in jan-april this year ABOVE price predicted by model, with this correction we just returned exactly to presicted value :-)
This one is interesting story :-) Tulip buble is actually almost hoax :-) Or at least it was not that horrible like people think. Real history is often boring...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/
@dendy We'll see, but that all looks very theoretical and a little too neat for me. I think reality is messy and rarely fits neatly into this kind of theory. I understand that it's based on the idea of halving, but I'm sceptical of that as well
Initially, Bitcoin (and all the other shitcoins that followed) were intended to be used in a fractional manner, so that you could for example buy a coffee (if you’re the sort of person who pays such a high amount for a coffee rather than waiting until you can make your own nicer coffee yourself[1] at a reasonable cost) then you could effect a transaction of such a fractional amount of bitcoin.
However, because of that highly volatile upping and downing in comparison with £ (or whatever your land masses paper currency is) you’re actually probably better off waiting 10 minutes before actually paying for your coffee. It might be worth more — or less — when you actually pay for it than it was when you ordered it, so you’d want to wait a bit, to see, then wait a bit more, etc.
In that respect, Bitcoin has become a bank, not a currency. Everyone wants to hodl it, not spend it.
Also, the transaction fees will completely outweigh the coffee you’re buying.
So in those two respects, it’s not doing the job it set out to be – that of a digital currency. The incentive is to not spend.
[1] I use a dripper and paper filter
And not just because of the processing times and transaction costs. Bitcoin is deflationary by design, and with a deflationary currency the incentive is always not to spend, since your money will be worth more tomorrow than it is today.
This is one of the fundamental differences between the Keynesian view of the economy and the Austrian one. One of Keynes' key insights was that what is good for the individual is not necessarily good on aggregate, the paradox of thrift being a good example: while it is good for an individual to save, if everyone in the entire economy saves then you end up in a recessionary cycle.
I’m fairly sure these problems can be sorted out though. I mean, the original desire was to have a digital currency. If what we have now still can’t be used effectively as a digital currency, then the hindrances and frictions can be attended to. Transaction costs can be lowered by using a coin that doesn’t have such high costs (thus keeping Bitcoin as the theoretical ‘bank’ and moving amounts in and out of it into a better coin for spending).
Historically the desire has always been there for this, but the means to deploy it have to be treated with care. Before Bitcoin I suppose the most prominent digital currency was Linden Dollars, from Linden Labs, of Second Life. Now that’s not as mainstream as it was once hoped to be, but it did do a lot of things that Bitcoin finds hard. However, it was treated tentatively to shield users (and Linden Labs) from fraud. The terms specifically say that it is an entertainment product and can be withdrawn at any time for no reason.
Also, an Oyster card (which followed Hong Kong’s Octopus card and Korea’s Upass) are stored-value cards, so theoretically they hold a ‘coin’, which has limited spendability. That model has no transactional penalty, and is ideal for buying an expensive out-of-the-house coffee, and was even designed to allow that (shame it was not properly implemented, all the newsagents on the tube stations would have been able to transact using an oyster reader).
Of course now all that is legacy, Apple Pay and Android Pay have supplanted them here in London. I have not carried any cash for the past, let’s think, about 6 years, maybe even a lot more than that, and certainly not since Android Pay and then Apple Pay and I don’t remember having any cash on my person since I got an Apple Watch. All my transport (non-bicycle, that is) is through my Apple Watch now, as is all my shopping. This is definitely digital cash, done properly. It’s just not presented as digital currency, but of course it is.
PayPal meanwhile has managed to float by without anyone realising that it too operates more or less like a bank, although with shorter time cycles. If PayPal as a concept and Bitcoin as a concept were to get together, it could be one way to get an international or world digital currency that doesn’t have the downsides of Bitcoin and isn’t a target for speculative investment. I don’t know, I think it’ll all work out, but at the moment Bitcoin and the like are being gamed rather than spent.
But then the question inevitably arises: what benefits does cryptocurrency offer? The existing electronic payment system is already exponentially more efficient than Bitcoin (not surprising, since Bitcoin is inefficient by design).
It goes beyond the idea of a digital currency: the dream of Bitcoiners is to replace state-backed money with a form of market-based money. The nation state is seen as illegitimate for a variety of reasons (state-backed fiat being inflationary, the notion that central bankers are conspiring to enslave humanity etc) and all the technology is based around these ideas, so the technology can only make sense if you agree with the notions behind it, ie the ideological underpinnings.
And then there's a whole host of unresolved questions: for example if you have a fixed money supply, for example only 23 million Bitcoin are ever issued, what happens if the population grows by say 10%? Does everyone have to take a pay cut and give up some of their assets to account for that, or is inequality simply baked into the system? (I think we know the answer).
Well, Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency, so when there’s no more to be mined (which will be about 2150, so still some time from now) there’ll also be Etherium side by side with it, and many others. But Bitcoin itself has no other use other than as money. Most of the others overlap into other utility areas and are kind of secondarily also a money.
The notion of a fixed amount of Bitcoin originally paralleled the idea of a fixed amount of gold that exists to be mined. When there’s no more gold to be generated, the existing amount simply acquires scarcity. Whether scarcity itself is a valuable thing, I’m not ideologically inclined to agree with. A thing being scarce doesn’t make it valuable, except it does. But it shouldn’t. If there’s only 10l of water among a group of survivors somewhere, then I suppose the richest ones can buy it all. But what with? Money? If you’re part of a group of survivors somewhere (plane crash, spacecraft marooned, apocalypse happened, pandemic lockdown, desert island etc) then that throws into question the value of money - a useless metal or plastic or paper or leaves. But, gold has industrial value as it has a very low electrical resistance and doesn’t suffer the same surface patina of copper, which is also valuable for industrial reasons. Digital money is purely a representation of scarcity. If you’re down to the last 10l of water, water itself isn’t any more valuable than any other water – the planet has loads of water. It’s only valuable because you aren’t near any more than that limited amount.
The whole collecting mentality isn’t something I align with much. Eg, I really would like to offload my valuable vintage ARP 2600 and get a nice modern equivalent (like the vapourware Korg 2600 M) (or more likely a Behringer Cat, which is about as flexible as an ARP 2600 and people should just get that instead instead of living in the past). If a person invests money, they’re basically saying to the investing body “I have money which I promise not to use, here it is, you look after it“ and the investing body says “Thanks, we’ll sit on it for a long time then give it back to you along with some more money which you won’t ever use, because you’ll probably invest that as well because that’s the kind of person you are”. That’s what proof of stake is all about. Proof of work is horrendously energy-distracting. Proof of stake plays games with people’s freedom to spend, giving them a big (but useless) number in return. Maybe I’m just not mentally aligned with this sort of thing.
Taleb, ex-Bitcoin advocate:
Current narrative arount bitcoin is store of value, not currency. Digital gold. Gold 2.0 with less harmfull enviromentsl impact than gold, no miners abuse, no destroyed coutries by war machine, dramatically less costs for transfering, no risk of confiscation, absolute finite supply.
Here interesting discusion about bitcoin vs. gold
Regarding transaction fees (and speed), Bitcoin is more like inter-bank clearing system (like SWIFT) with second layers for micropayments - for example like "Lightning network" which in some way alternative ro VISA or PayPal in traditional banking.
I don't want to sell my Bitcoin ever. It's like owning property on Manhattsn in 1920 - selling it would be life-size mistake back then. I want use my bitcoin as collaterall and borrow shitcoin € for covering my expenses against it .. additionaly i can use this shircoin for buying more BTC and when it appreciates in price, i can pay loan and get back collateral :-)
Basically nobody, except of few anarchistic idealists, is expectin Bitcoin to replace traditional currencies. They are ok for quick spending. Bitcoin is for storing value in long term.
A friend of mine and I, when we get together and the topic goes to crypto, which it does, often lament at how we each individually were going to get a lot of bitcoin back when it would have been affordable to get a handful of bitcoin and just forget about it. Once I was going to buy about seven bitcoin as that equated to the sort of amount I felt I was comfortable losing on something that might fizzle out to nothing (which at the time was a real consideration), then MtGox got hacked the week I was going to put some money in and get some (I can't remember how much seven bitcoin would've cost me but that was what I was comfortable risking - a few hundred quid, I think). My account got hacked, but as I had zero in it, it wasn't a problem apart from an exposed login/password. I was lucky I didn't lose anything but it frightened me away from the scene for a long while.
Of course if I had bought seven or so bitcoin back then, it'd be nice. My friend was also aware of bitcoin back then and he was also about to buy some but didn't (different reasons). We often imagine what it'd be like if we had. But then I remind him that if we did have such a sizeable amount of bitcoin, there'd be no way we'd actually cash it all in. We'd just hang on to it. We wouldn't spend it, we'd ride it further to see where it goes. In effect, that money is trapped, never to be used. We'd never sell it.
I'm so tempted to start an argument about NFT's in this thread.
All I know is, my son invested $400 in bitcoin years ago, now worth about $250,000.
Well I was tempted when I was talking about scarcity, as one of the stupidities behind them at the moment is the whole ‘rare’ thing, which is why the art world has been roped in, and why people are a bit puzzled at why seemingly effortless crap is valued so highly. But having said that, the other thread is basically on the mechanics and processes behind how a musician can get one done. Not about the rarity or scarcity or any of that art gallery bullshit. A purely how-to type of thread.
Here, though, it’s all about the politics of value. Is the work that you do during a day worth more than the work another person does, and how do we store that value and express the difference in value? I think in a funny sort of way, we’ve got racial / ethnic differences, we’ve got class / privilege differences, and age differences causing unfair inequalities in the world. I think there’s going to be an additional one - access to crypto (or perhaps acceptance of crypto, if access becomes as easy as I imagine it will be soon). The haves and have nots might be those that don’t want anything to do with crypto because they don’t believe in it ideologically, which will exclude them.
I say that with my 83p worth of bitcoin (0.00002291 BTC).
If you never use a crypto exchange and instead buy/sell/trade person-to-person, your use of crypto would effectively be the same as “money.” Of course (depending on where you live), you might also be violating the law since most countries treat cryptos as taxable securities, which require reporting to the so-called “tax authorities”.
The guy that paid $60 something Million for that NFT Art made the $60M in Bitcoin holdings
and turned the NFT Art into an Etherium investment opportunity using "distributed finance" contracts.
There was a joke about free software being a market based on washer women that washed each others clothes but it totally missed the fact that the act of washing wasn't the business... it was the movement of the clothes through the market which is retail.
Crypto Currency is a market of buying and selling and since there is money involved to play there's opportunity and risk.
as i said, you don't need to sell bitcoin to profit from it
example : https//www.blockfi.com
i'm pretty sure 2-3 years from niw also traditional banks will provide such services (both lending and borrowing)
Selling is just for weak hands/dumb money. Smart money are doing what i wrote above.
few millions in five years ;-)
you wrote "tax authorities", i read "fucking thiefs"
It is going to be interesting, that’s for sure. I mean, sitting here in London in the UK it’s easy to think I’m safe, I live in a safe and democratic state where everything’s stable, above board and can be trusted. Erm, yep.
But, look around at other nation states in the world, where there is turbulence, precarity and highly dynamic change. The stability and foundational aspect of a nation’s currency in various nations will be called into question by the people of those nations, and in times of insecurity, we’ll see entire populations move their wealth out of the currency of the nation and into something independent of that nation’s machinations. Historically this might have been gold, or the currency of a different nation, or in the case of krugerrands, a combination, but crypto is now a very very available option and makes sense for a lot of volatile situations.
watch the Peter Schiff on Brian Keating´s Podcast episode for some refreshing deflation of the whole topic ;-)
Personally I´ve had some friends dip into the bitcoin universe and it did not make them happier, just more anxious and after some years they were in a really bad mental shape.
ah, If only I put all that money I put into iOS apps from 2014-2017 into bitcoin instead