Siliconemelons
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
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yeah got a coinbase note that it dropped 12% - I was saying people "think" it's like a penny stock
Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies
- Thread starter Tripamang
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Brad
Trakanon Raider
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I reckon the reason many alt coins is stagnant is because people are selling it off to buy BTC, when BTC eventually peak and is on the way back down, money will then flow back into alt coins. It is the sling shot effect.
Cannot get off BTC until at least I have been in it for 12 months for capital gains tax.
Cannot get off BTC until at least I have been in it for 12 months for capital gains tax.
Gravel
Mr. Poopybutthole
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Break
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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That's only 10% right? If the choice is selling for $15k versus selling for $5k next year you're better off eating the tax.
Asshat wormie
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Ravishing
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How does this make any sense knowing the history of BTC.
If it was a serious "investment" we would have all bought in and held years ago.
The way I see it is you have a few guys in here continually thinking BTC is going to $0.
Fact is, it isn't.
Then you have other guys, like myself, looking to ride the waves.
Ride them correctly and you can make a few bucks, or even get lucky and make a ton.
Asshat wormie
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People mortgaged their houses and emptied their savings to buy at numerous peaks right before the drops. They treated it as a serious investment. Treating a thing that can drop 10-20% in a minute as a serious investment is dumb as fuck.
Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
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People do shit like that with lots of things. I don't think anyone in here has taken up that kinda position with BTC.
My serious investments are my 401k & real estate properties.
For some people BTC is serious, sure. I also knew a guy that threw away his entire retirement on a pennystock for some Russian company, which has since stopped trading, and others that put it all into failing businesses.
Arative
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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BrutulTM
Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
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That's what people do though. It's an emotional response. They see it skyrocketing and think "I have to get in on this" even though they have already missed it and then when it crashes they're like "Fuck this, I'm out." Exact opposite of what you're supposed to do but people do it all the time.
You can see it at a craps table. A few good rolls in a row and people start throwing money on the table because it's "hot" and then a couple sevens pop up right after the bets are placed and everyone walks away. Congratulations on locking in your losses. In gambling you have to walk away when you're ahead and stay in the game when you're down, but most people do the opposite which is why casinos are so profitable.
A guy I know had a bunch of bitcoin that he mined and I told him he should sell at least half of it at $18K. When it went to $19K he was talking shit about how much money he had "made" since I told him to sell. Of course he didn't sell then either and he's been pretty quiet since then. Bitcoin is gambling, not investing and should be treated as such. Looking back and saying "if I had done XXX I'd be rich now!" is technically true but complete horseshit because it's not possible to actually buy and sell at the right time all the time.
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GM stock-- a blue chip stock-- went from $94 to 75 cents in nine years time. Is that a 'serious investment'? The Dow lost 54% of its value from its pre-2009 peak to its low in 2009. Gee lets privatize social security.
Volatility doesn't matter nearly as much as the technicals. What matters to me:
Bitcoin is deflationary
Bitcoin is developed by competent engineers with the right goals
Bitcoin is not threatened by a new coin with significantly better technology
Bitcoin mining is sufficiently decentralized
When any of the above change, then I'll start thinking about exiting fully.
I bought my first BTC from Mt GOX when it was $3. I spent it all on VPN service. I didn't start considering it as an investment until it was over $100. I only put in $1000 of my money into it total and sold most of it over time because it is such a risky asset. Recently it's proven to be not nearly as risky as it once was, (esp with SegWit adoption and Bitmain dying) so now I hold on to what's left. I can not worry about it because I've already sold like 5x what I put in.
Bitcoin is a very high risk to high reward asset. If you spend a lot of your money on it, then you're gambling and stupid. If you spend a little of your money on it and balance it with other safer bets and keep track of development, then it's a legitimate investment.
Volatility doesn't matter nearly as much as the technicals. What matters to me:
Bitcoin is deflationary
Bitcoin is developed by competent engineers with the right goals
Bitcoin is not threatened by a new coin with significantly better technology
Bitcoin mining is sufficiently decentralized
When any of the above change, then I'll start thinking about exiting fully.
I bought my first BTC from Mt GOX when it was $3. I spent it all on VPN service. I didn't start considering it as an investment until it was over $100. I only put in $1000 of my money into it total and sold most of it over time because it is such a risky asset. Recently it's proven to be not nearly as risky as it once was, (esp with SegWit adoption and Bitmain dying) so now I hold on to what's left. I can not worry about it because I've already sold like 5x what I put in.
Bitcoin is a very high risk to high reward asset. If you spend a lot of your money on it, then you're gambling and stupid. If you spend a little of your money on it and balance it with other safer bets and keep track of development, then it's a legitimate investment.
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What are the right goals? Does this fit somewhere in with the right goals?
Why will bitcoin not be threatened by new coins? You don't know this for a fact. There's nothing that has to be unique about it except that it was first. Maybe that's enough, but you can't be sure.
Bitcoin mining is a competition. That's why energy use is so high. Only the cheapest electricity can mine profitably. What is the cheapest electricity? Surplus energy that would otherwise go unused. What produces surplus energy? Renewables, which cannot be dialed down to use less fuel (as they don't use fuel) and they need to overprovision in the case of low wind or sun. For this reason mining is almost entirely run on renewables, mostly hydro. (I think upwards of 80-90% from the last article I've seen about it) In fact my state used to be a mining center because we have so many hydro dams here. Not only that, but since the mining can be dialed up or down with absolute precision, these renewable plants can turn off their rigs when demand peaks and turn them on when demand is low, allowing them to mitigate costs to their operations by mining bitcoin.
High energy use for mining is a design feature because that is what secures the network. If you want to 51% attack bitcoin, you have to spend a whole lot of electricity to do it; you can't just mint enough chips or buy enough miners-- you also have to power them.
I didn't say Bitcoin would never be threatened by a new coin, I said I would consider selling when think it is, but I don't think it is currently. I keep an eye out for new projects and follow any that look promising, like Radix. I also hold a few alts, like Monero which I like quite a bit.
Adding complexity to a coin just increases the attack surface however, so for this reason I'm dubious of any new projects that claim to do so much more than bitcoin. I like the conservative philosophy BTC devs have of keeping things simple and robust. They do have plans for more additions though.
High energy use for mining is a design feature because that is what secures the network. If you want to 51% attack bitcoin, you have to spend a whole lot of electricity to do it; you can't just mint enough chips or buy enough miners-- you also have to power them.
I didn't say Bitcoin would never be threatened by a new coin, I said I would consider selling when think it is, but I don't think it is currently. I keep an eye out for new projects and follow any that look promising, like Radix. I also hold a few alts, like Monero which I like quite a bit.
Adding complexity to a coin just increases the attack surface however, so for this reason I'm dubious of any new projects that claim to do so much more than bitcoin. I like the conservative philosophy BTC devs have of keeping things simple and robust. They do have plans for more additions though.
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BrutulTM
Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
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People love to talk about the technology behind bitcoin as if that's relevant to its value somehow. You're not buying the tech, you're buying a currency that no one uses and only has value because other people are willing to buy it in hopes that it might become useful at some point. Until that happens (and it never will unless the price stabilizes), you're "investing" about as much as you are when you put money on a number on the roulette wheel. You could make money, but you're not buying something with intrinsic value like you are when you buy stock, real estate, commodities, etc. It's possible for those things' value to go to zero as well, but less likely than just a bunch of numbers in a computer.
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Ravishing
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Electricity consumption shouldn't be seen as a negative.
It helps stabilize the coin.
Torrid outlines some good points.
Add up the electricity that goes into the network of computers running EVERYTHING else and then let me know how bad BTC is.
It will be very hard to threaten BTC for 1 simple fact.
Any coin that can "print" money on-demand should be looked at extremely cautiously.
BTC has "naturally" grown from mining operations and doesn't have people behind the scenes pulling levers.
New coins try competing in the space by printing instant-coins and that's a big No from me.
Facebook coin is the same, you're putting your monetary faith in the hands of ~10 large companies. No thanks.
Only coin I could see competing is if a Government decided to convert their Dollars to Digital currency and the Digital currency was backed by the fiat currency. So let me trade in $100 for the digital equivalent. It's still being manipulated by politicians and treasurers, but at least it's somewhat comparable to how we already generate & manage money.
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Fiat 'has value' because a head of state decrees it so. The same head of state can also reduce the value by printing more of it; or in the case of India recently, just proclaim that paper money is now useless. Bank notes used to be backed by gold, but not for some time now. When the Fed 'quantitatively eases' money out of thin air, they are robbing savings accounts to give free money to banks. I've yet to find one bitcoin advocate that wants to change the 21 million coin limit.
Futurists are interesting to listen to. One thing they like to talk about is a 'post scarcity' civilization, where automation and technology provide for everybody's needs and we're mining asteroids for near endless metals. Some asteroids are rich in metals that are rare in the Earth's crust. Bitcoin's key innovation is digital scarcity. Your heirs may end up wishing that you left them some artificially scarce digital assets like bitcoin (or what might replace it) and some comic books instead of gold. SpaceX is on track to produce 1 raptor engine every 12 hours by end of year. Gold won't be a scarce resource forever
Futurists are interesting to listen to. One thing they like to talk about is a 'post scarcity' civilization, where automation and technology provide for everybody's needs and we're mining asteroids for near endless metals. Some asteroids are rich in metals that are rare in the Earth's crust. Bitcoin's key innovation is digital scarcity. Your heirs may end up wishing that you left them some artificially scarce digital assets like bitcoin (or what might replace it) and some comic books instead of gold. SpaceX is on track to produce 1 raptor engine every 12 hours by end of year. Gold won't be a scarce resource forever