For those of you experiencing cryptocurrency FOMO or regret, some perspective: every single day, there are stocks which see increases in value of over 50%[0]. Don't kick yourself just because this opportunity was more visible to you than the others.
Honestly, I don't have confidence in Bitcoin as a viable tangible asset to the world. So even if it goes up 100x tomorrow, I'm still content with not having invested any of my energies or resources into it. It's too heavily speculative to be useful in the way proponents purport it's usefulness.
The blockchain as a protocol and concept I think is very interesting and potentially extremely valuable, but the specific coin and technology called Bitcoin - I really don't care for.
It's just more fun and rewarding to make money by investing in things where I have a strong conviction about their usefulness. The moment you add layers on top of Bitcoin to make it usable to a broad audience you destroy the initial value proposition of anonymity and vague notions of "democratizing finance" (see: Coinbase).
What is it about "blockchain" technology that you like?
I hear "I don't like Bitcoin but I like blockchain technology" a lot, but I suspect most people don't understand a blockchain without a cryptocurrency doesn't solve anything new.
Bitcoin is not anonymous your link doesn't say it is. It's easier to hide your identity than a credit card but it's more) not anonymous and there is a big focus on fixing this.
I have a ton of Bitcoin FOMO. I have two friends who are holding ~5000 coins each. They bought in the $15 range. I can't think of anything that's gone up 125x
When I was 16 I begged to the point of shouting at my father to buy AAPL. In fact I forced him to take all my life savings ($5000) and put a good chunk of his own in.
This was in 2005 before the stock split. So not quite 125x but can't complain (I also used to time it a bit back when it was an iPod company and not an iPhone company, it used to be very predictable).
Cigar buds are always out there. Some years I have no ideas so I simply don't invest in anything (haven't for the past 5). I'd just as soon buy Bitcoin as I would tulips or beanie babies -- in other words, I'm not skilled enough to invest in what I don't understand. I understood iPods. My other investments from that time period were Seagate (undervalued compared to peers), and Macromedia/Adobe.
Not even Satoshi himself can tell you the future of Bitcoin, it is entirely speculation.
5000 coins @ $15 cost the $75000 to buy. Think about it this way, even if you had known about bitcoin back then, would you have been willing to gamble what probably amounts to the average persons life savings into some barely heard of internet fad. Sure, it's easy to look back and see bitcoin as the sure bet, but when it was $15 it was small and nobody knew where it would go.
Yeah, but in 2010, bitcoin was a barely heard of crypto paper with no exchanges. To get in you would either have to mine it yourself (probably using command line tools with a bunch of manual steps) or find someone to buy from in person or on a mailing list. That's a lot of effort for something that at the time just looked like a cool 3rd year project.
For every person that picked bitcoin and made a gamble, there are 1000 people regretting that they invested in some other idea that just quietly didn't go anywhere. Investing that early is not much different to gambling. You probably have better odds of winning the lottery that picking the next bitcoin.
Bought my first Bitcoin at $15. My second at $30. 20 more at $100. Through a series of bad trades, I barely made a profit once it reached $250. I sold all of them, got some more at $750, then sold them at a loss at $250. I'm an horrible trader...
Key with most investments is not to panic sell when the price starts dropping. Diversify then just accept that some investments will go to zero, some will 2X, and maybe a couple will >10X, which is where you'll make your money in the long term.
Unless that ~$10M bitcoin is a pretty small fraction of the individual's net worth, it sure seems like a good idea to at least sell half and put it somewhere less risky...
yeah you probably could, but you would have the price slide on you if you liquidate that much, most people get off the train at price stops, let other people on.
It seems to me that getting rich by investing a little money in the right thing at the right time has its emotional appeal for many. There is a thing I do not understand about cryptocurrencies, though: Why should a private person hold any amount of a cryptocurrency for any other reason than speculation? If people use Bitcoin to pay online, it does not matter if 10$ buys 0.02BTC or 0.002BTC, as price tags show dollar amounts.
Many other commodities have at least some practical value even if their price tanks. But at a low price, a cryptocurrency makes online payment as easy as it would make it at a high price – as long as there exists a small enough currency unit. One thing that would make payment with cryptocurrencies problematic would be short-term price volatiity – but long-term shifts in value do not seem to matter for that purpose.
Does anyone privately hold an amount of cryptocurrency long-term for any other purpose than speculation? If so, what is their movivation?
One main appeal of Bitcoin is that it always works if you have coins on hand at this moment. You can use it for time-sensitive transactions without wasting time to purchase some coins beforehand. Want to send $50 or $50 million to someone or some company in another country? Bitcoin does that in 10-60 minutes (1 to 6 confirmations). No PayPal blocking the transaction. No unexplainably declined CC authorization. No bank account suddenly seized by your totalitarian government. Being able to pay your B2B Chinese supplier for an urgent order on a Friday evening without having to wait for banks to process wires on Monday. The list of scenarios where Bitcoin is useful goes on and on.
There is some discussion in this thread that bitcoin is possibly a bubble because it does not really serve a purpose.
But maybe its more like investing in gold ? Gold does not have much purpose for the average person either. But the supply is limited and it serves as an alternative for investing in stocks or putting money in a bank account.
And it seems Bitcoin is here to stay.
Our current currencies also only have value because we trust them. Otherwise those are just as worthless.
Trust is probably the most important ingredient in finance.
So conversion of other currencies into bitcoin could also be seen as a conversion of trust. A case could also be made for more and more people loosing trust in governements.
ETH is scam and a marketing program. It's interesting that even the educated developer community of HN cannot see this and how effective flash marketing can be
It can be a little difficult to pin them down. As everything is surrounded in more flash sounded tech that doesn't deliver. It's like trying to say if Amway, the multi level marketing company is a scam or not.
First it's the pre sale of tokens. Very problematic way of raising money. Nearly all pre sales token campaigns follow the same story. Build flashy website and run a slick marketing campaign. Make grand world saving claims for this software you are going to build by really you aren't. Raise a lot of money (10M USD or more). Then after the sale fail to deliver of the claims and shameless move onto the next crowd sale.
There is also the past of etherium founder. VB tried to do another crowd funded scam before etherium that was a lot more blatant. VB also puts his name on many ICOs (initial coin offering) which all end in scams. The founders take the large amount money and then the product in vaporware.
Religions are scams and marketing programs, all be it with a bunch of other stuff slapped on to it. But it's all the same jingle, give us everything now and you'll get yours later.
I got in at under a dollar, then at $5, then at $15. At one point I was holding 20k worth with a cost basis of $12. I rode it up to $1136 on the second bubble. I am not sad or feel like I missed out on this wave. The price is simply unjustified. The Bitcoin ecosystem was a lot more stable a year ago. I have lost faith in Bitcoin's future, the market lost faith too, it is just the bag holders that are getting ready to dump after their lucrative pump.
Cryptocurrency isn't going anywhere. Being the first mover, Bitcoin has a significant advantage. People will pump and dump in he short term, but I think the price will continue to trend upward in the future, especially in relation to perpetually inflating fiat currencies.
I just spent a half hour or so figuring this out because I have several old laptops/computer laying around:
you will not make more than a few cents per month in bitcoin as a miner unless you have specialized equipment. Setting up your home computer to mine when you are not using it is literally worth zero bitcoin unless you have top of the line graphics cards, and even then it is worth very little.
Bitcoin can't be mined even with graphic cards any more. You need specialized hardware (ASICs). The current total hash rate of Bitcoin is over 10^18 hashes per second which is insanely high. However, it's still profitable and relatively easy to mine on other public blockchains with graphic cards because the hashing algorithm is ASIC resistant (like Ethereum).
You could make a couple hundred bucks a month with 6 graphic cards. Check out https://whattomine.com/
I've been poking around the last couple of days trying to figure out how likely one is to at least break even on a ~$1500 "investment" for the 6 GPUs and barebones components required to run them. My conclusion is: who the hell knows, but it'd probably be a lot easier to just put $1500 into Ether. It seems like mining is riskier without much potential extra reward.
What cryptocoins are the best (outside BTC), not just in ability to mine but also to actually sell/buy? I don't know what have good reputation (are not scam, too much gamble?)
Even if you have a top of the line graphics card you will be spending more on electricity and wear than you'll ever make back since you will likely not mine enough in any pool to qualify for part of the block reward.
The top GPUs are looking at thousands of mhash/s. Where the most common ASIC miner does 14,000,000 mhash/s.
No, you can mine Scrypt-based coins with Antminer L3+, X11-based coins with Baikal, which are both more profitable than mining BTC in terms of ROI ratio and return time.
Does depend where you get your figures from. Bitstamp, a popular European exchange is listing a daily high of $1989, and it's actually dropped back a little from that.
Just wondering what the liquidity is like for BTC. I'm not familiar with it at all but should 1000 BTCs try to convert to USDs, would there be enough bids to maintain the price within a certain acceptable level?
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/gainers