So, at what point do you just admit that this whole thing is just one huge scam and you’ve wasted a ton of money? I have a friend who finally sold all his bitcoins abit over a year ago and I told him how he was lucky.
Bitcoin has moved in cycles for 10 years and cryptos are still under development. It’s not a huge scam (although there are many scammers ) but it is a very , no extremely , volatile marketplace. BTC, ETH, XRP, IOTA , NEO, LOC, AVA, LEND are not scams.
Currently I am down a lot but I am in it for the long haul (whether I like it or not now anyway ). I’m still buying small amounts at the moment and will continue to buy in especially if drops further. Selling at the top of a market cycle is lucky, no doubt about it.
Yes with Bitcoin history has repeated itself many times.
There’s definitely a lot of volatility and so far not really any underlying value (that I can see). That being said, if it ends up at $1 per coin, I’d consider buying a batch and see if it goes up again.
It will never end up at 1USD. Pick something a bit more realistic.if you really want to put a few bucks in.
In the end of the day, if you aren’t in you can’t win. You won’t lose but nothing ventured nothing gained .
There is underlying value in BTC. A transaction cannot be stopped or reversed and your funds do not need to be in a bank. Transactions can be actioned seamlessly across borders. Bitcoin has proven itself to be unhackable so far. Bitcoin is also very liquid and well distributed over a period of ten years. You can move vast sums of money for a cost of cents within 20 mins . All this has value. It’s the first generation crypto so it’s got some major faults as a payment currency (slow, low TPS) but it’s base design is pretty ingenious .
Who has been making money on this all this time?
You’re probably right. I’m a curmudgeon and at my age it’s hard to change my old-fashioned ways.
Well I’m right and I’m wrong. I’m wrong to start putting money (too much money) into this from end of 2017 and a lot of 2018. But c’est la vie.
But not un-stealable!
If you can sit through a Rogan podcast, Dr. Ben Goertzel talks about the future of blockchain tech. From what I understand it’s not a matter of ifs but hows going forward.
Slightly off-topic: is anyone actually trading real-life goods with Bitcoin? Are there functioning markets like eBay that support this? I mean ordinary commodities, not drugs etc. It seems to me the volatility will continue as long as the bulk of trading involves speculation.
Once there’s real, solid stuff being bought and sold, people will be able to agree on exactly what 1 bitcoin is worth.
Some stores do or did but I guess many quit after they realized you could lose a lot of money and that it takes forever to receive the payment.
" Bitcoin transaction times vary and can take anywhere from 10 minutes to over 1 day. The two things that determine Bitcoin transaction times are the amount of network activity and the transaction fees. The average Bitcoin transaction time is currently around 1 hour."
The average bitcoin txn time now is about 15 or 20 mins , it depends on congestion .
It’s not much use in terms of a regular means of payment , however there are other cryptos such as NANO which are practically instantaneous. It’s also feeless. You transfer 1 NANO you get exactly 1 NANO.
The problem is the volatility, so folks have also created stable coin cryptos such as DAI.
Some coins have inflation built in where they mine a set number of new coins per year e.g Ethereum.
Some have a hard limit such as Bitcoin. Bitcoin gas a limit of 21 million coins although not all mined yet, the difficukty is increasing and it will half ( major increase in difficulty ) in 2020.
NANO has a hard limit of 133 million, it’s premined and some of it was distributed for free at launch by ‘faucet’ to avoid being designated a security. It’s kind of interesting to see the different models and how it all works out.
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Surely that in itself means it’s doomed? Cash is instantaneous. A credit-card payment takes a minute at most. A 15-minute transaction is fine for online purchases (where something is being shipped to you) but it’s is inherently useless for any realtime transaction.
For NANO there’s a few major differences to credit card payments, no fees on retailers or consumer side is a big one.
Also, credit card payments aren’t really instantaneous they have to be reconciled and that can take days . Also you can have charge backs (pros and cons).
Of course there are apps that can do similar for small payments such as alipay. Still the govt is tracking all of that and the folks that own the apps kind of own you (they own your data anyway).
I don’t know how it will play out but NANO is pretty cool to play around with. It’s deecentralised, unhackable and transactions cannot be reversed. Your funds cannot easily be seized.
Bitcoin isn’t promoted now as a means of payment (there are many better crypto options including privacy, faster etc.) but a store of value like digital gold, that hasn’t been going so well either this year ~
hmmmm.
It seems to me it’s just turned into a speculator’s wet dream. I don’t see how the ‘store of value’ property of currency can be usefully separated from its other functions.
I’m going to look into this NANO thingy - that sounds more promising.
Has anyone read the bizarre Gerald Cotton story?
He died “from complications from Crohn’s disease while opening an orphanage” in India.
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I just edited an article about this the other day. Apparently, there might be a few more dodgy things with that exchange other than the founder being the only one having the crypto keys. The company is claiming that the money is all there but they can’t access it, but there are some questions about whether this is true.
It’s pretty crazy. Could be true though. His wife claims she can’t even get into his laptop.
fify