I bought 2.2 BTC back in 2012/2013 when they were around €60 apiece, and still had 1 BTC or so on the exchange (Bitcoin-24, the biggest in Europe at the time) when it was closed down by German and Polish authorities due to suspected money laundering. The owner of the exchange apparently tried to resolve things for a short time before going silent for the last few years despite his initial promises, seemingly f$$$ing off to Thailand and Cyprus and elsewhere with at least some of the profits and working on some other crypto projects - I seem to recall reading that there were about 18,000 BTC on the exchange at the time it went down, and I’ve spoken with a couple of people who lost a couple of hundred BTC. Still kicking myself from time to time…
Just out of curiosity, since you seem to be quite interested in crypto, are you familiar with the Bitcoin-24 story? I’m still a bit surprised that there wasn’t more publicity surrounding this exchange/guy.
In the old days yep. I think Binance and Coinbase are very solid though. It’s easier for many people to hold on exchange of online wallet than try to store themselves.
Nah, he’s still alive - last I know he was in Thailand, he’s been involved in a couple of crypto projects there including CoinFalcon and a more recent one. This was Bitcoin-24. I believe some of the legal stuff with the Polish banks is still ongoing, even 7-8 years later.
Is it really “many”, as opposed to “some”? My point is that this was the biggest one in Europe at the time and the problems it had didn’t really receive any media attention, as opposed to MtGox (which was apparently the only exchange bigger than Bitcoin-24 in terms of euro transactions), which received quite a lot.
Don’t Maicoin allow you to apply as a foreigner?
I joined that before all the rules changed though.
Never used it after that apart from moving what I had there to my wallet.
As of today, Bitcoin is almost fully used as a speculative investment and not as a currency. Very few companies allow Bitcoin to be used as a currency in exchange for goods. The IRS has deemed Bitcoin as property, meaning that you are supposed to pay taxes when you sell your Bitcoin or exchange it. An example would be if Tesla started to accept Bitcoin as payment. Let’s say you’re buying a Tesla for $80,000, and you are going to use $30,000 in cash and a Bitcoin valued today at $50,000 to purchase it. If you had bought that Bitcoin at $10,000, you now owe taxes on that $40,000 gain! This makes Bitcoin very unfriendly to use as a currency and one of a list of reasons it will not replace the dollar in the short term.
Exactly. Cryptos are an excellent/excellent idea, but they are NOT currencies.
They are investment vehicles. Currencies do not go up 10x in 1 year and then fall 90% another year.
Moreover, companies would not want to invest in these things when the volatility is so high. And if you introduce BTC, ETH, XRP into payment systems, then companies have to hedge their risk all over again. It’d be like European countries all going back to their own currencies and businesses seeing another cost to their bottom line (hedging costs).
So, again. Cryptos are great, awesome. I love their reason for being, but they are not currencies. They are just high-risk investments, and there is nothing wrong with that.
