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BitCoin - Anyone taken the bite

DistortAMG

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Just wondering if anyone here has brought any Bitcoin, which is a virtual currency for those who do not know. I wont get too much into the details in how it works, or how you can buy or mine them, the is the whole internet that will be much better placed to do that than me.

But it would not be too far of a stretch to say it is the modern day equivalent if the gold rush a century or so ago in the USA.

In 2016 you could buy a single bit coin for £350. Right now you can sell that bitcoin for just over £40,000 in cold hard cash, straight into your bank. It truely is staggering, with the price rising and rising.

It truely is staggering the rate that this virtual currency is exploding in value. It is predicted to potentially break the £100,000 a coin mark this year. You can pretty much but any decimal value of a bit coin so you do not have to fork out that much for a single coin. But you still get returns on investment relative to the growth.

I find it truely fascinating. But I certainly kick myself at night for not buying some when it was cheap, I had a few opportunities to purchase some in 2014 or so, which would have netted me a healthy 6 figure sum now. Ahh the art of hindsight.
 
I do not think it's a pyramid scheme as such. I have brought and sold bit coin and I have tripled and quadrupled my money. I have only brought relatively small amounts, but made healthy profits. Anyone with the money can buy and sell and make staggering profits. Thats fact. That is very different to a pyramid scheme. Anyone can make money on it and a hell of alot of people do and alot aswel.

I could put £10,000 in and within a few months I could take £13 to £14 grand out. There is only a finite amount of bit coin available and even with mining it will run out. So the value is only going to rise

I am trying to get hold of a PS5, no doubt the shortage of them is cause. Annoying indeed.

The problem with 'goverment currencies' is they stink of old world ways which is one of the reason why this is being backed and so popular. Not to mention countries can and do print trillions out of thin air, which is why the world is essentially built on debt. Bitcoin avoids all of this, puts power and money back to the every day man, takes it away from the privileged few. That is what I find so fascinating.
 
One of those old-world ways being the ability to keep it under your mattress and guard it yourself. Try doing that to your bitcoin if its commandeered by a hostile business or government.

Any digital-only currency is bad news for the masses, let alone one without the relatively-stable accompanying factors of interest rates and elected government policy.
 
It is interesting. I heard of it back in 2012 as a way to buy things from the dark web but it was too complicated so I never thought about it until I saw it was booming around 2017.

It was something like 18k back in 2017 IIRC and then went back down to the hundreds so I'm hoping it will dip again at some point. I can't see myself buying now at what is the highest it has ever been. Maybe it will keep going but it'll have to dip a bit for me to buy any... maybe if it went back to around 20-30k even
 
I've not purchased any Bitcoin but I do think it's worth keeping an eye on.

I'll echo what DistortAMG said that it's not a pyramid scheme. However there are plenty of crypto currencies that have been made to prop up pyramid schemes, which has understandabley made people quite wary.

I know a few people that invested heavily into other cryptos that never went anywhere. But I can see one eventually sticking and Bitcoin certainly has the name recognition.

Just think of it like investing in Gold or Silver. Except where as those have a very stable value cryptos aren't established and can be very volatile. It's a high risk, high reward option.
 
One of those old-world ways being the ability to keep it under your mattress and guard it yourself. Try doing that to your bitcoin if its commandeered by a hostile business or government.

Any digital-only currency is bad news for the masses, let alone one without the relatively-stable accompanying factors of interest rates and elected government policy.

I would say keeping your bitcoin wallet in multiple locations (benefits of digital) some online and some on memory sticks is far safer and as much as if not more reliable than keeping stashes of cash or gold under your bed. If your coins are on memory sticks, no government is going to take them. A government could take all your money in a normal bank too. So that argument point is mute. But but fact you can encrypt your bit coin wallet (infact that's a fundamental part of bitcoin) mean no government will be getting hold of your coins anytime soon. Far easier for them to take real cash, be it physically or from a bank electronically.

The current currency systems do not work. They are built on debt, to the point people make money off that debt. Fast forward to now and we have the overwhelming majority of the worlds money in a tiny percentage of the population. A big cause of that is debt and making money off it. Something that is a foundation of the old system. It does not work. Not anymore, it has spiraled to the point of absurd.

It hasnt been done before, so it is easy to say it wont work. But it has not been done. So you do not truely know. You are basing your assessment off the way the system works not and has worked for hundreds of years. But the world is changing and changing fast, to the point where newer things cannot be compared against old things as a judgement of if it will or will not work. As it does not work like that, if you think it does you need to open your mind and broaden your horizon a bit.

Throughout history anything that has been truly revolutionary has always been met with fierce criticism and similar echoes of why it cannot or will not work. That is not to say this will work in the long run. We simply do not now. But it has worked better than any other cryptocurrency for going on 12 years now, so out of them all it is the most consistent.
 
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What about the fact that "mining" it is chewing up carbon based energy resources at such a rate that there is no chance of society as a whole ever becoming "carbon neutral".
There is no actual mining, just overheated computers burning energy needlessly.
The greedy rich rubbing their hands with glee as the planet slowly burns to death.
I sincerely hope the whole thing eventually crashes to dust.
Buy gold or property for safe investment.
 
I (maybe wrongly, I'm not sure) associate Bitcoin with online scams and the like, and therefore have never taken much notice of it. And it is not something I have ever wanted to get involved with. Seeing how its value has somehow rocketed does make it look like a smart investment for those who got in early though I guess.
 
My emails Junk inbox is always full of bitcoin spam. I just block and then delete the emails. Like any get rich quick scheme, if you do the maths, for one person to be successful, you need many people that are not. So the odds are against you.
 
My emails Junk inbox is always full of bitcoin spam. I just block and then delete the emails. Like any get rich quick scheme, if you do the maths, for one person to be successful, you need many people that are not. So the odds are against you.

But that doesn't add up. Bitcoin is simply a currency with a market value. Either it goes up in value for everyone or it goes down. What you do in the midst (buy, sell etc) of that is up to you.
 
Anyone with the money can buy and sell and make staggering profits. Thats fact.

I could put £10,000 in and within a few months I could take £13 to £14 grand out.

The revese is also true. Anyone buying and selling it can make staggering losses. Just depends when you buy and sell.

You could put in £10,000 and within a few months only have £3 or £4 grand left. Or nothing.

There is only a finite amount of bit coin available and even with mining it will run out. So the value is only going to rise

How much of it there is is irrelevant if no-one wants it; the value us dictated by the demand. The stability of increase in value is only recent and none can know how long that will last. It has a hugely volatile history and there is nothing to stop that returning, the very unregulated nature of bitcoin means no mechanism is in place to attempt to control swings in value that a government would make with a traditional currency. That makes it infinitely more risky place to store your wealth than a traditional currency.

To suggest to people that bitcoin investment is risk free and guaranteen profit is not only stupid but also dangerous. Some can and will be lucky. Others can and will be ruined.
 
I would say keeping your bitcoin wallet in multiple locations (benefits of digital) some online and some on memory sticks is far safer and as much as if not more reliable than keeping stashes of cash or gold under your bed. If your coins are on memory sticks, no government is going to take them. A government could take all your money in a normal bank too. So that argument point is mute. But but fact you can encrypt your bit coin wallet (infact that's a fundamental part of bitcoin) mean no government will be getting hold of your coins anytime soon. Far easier for them to take real cash, be it physically or from a bank electronically.

The current currency systems do not work. They are built on debt, to the point people make money off that debt. Fast forward to now and we have the overwhelming majority of the worlds money in a tiny percentage of the population. A big cause of that is debt and making money off it. Something that is a foundation of the old system. It does not work. Not anymore, it has spiraled to the point of absurd.

It hasnt been done before, so it is easy to say it wont work. But it has not been done. So you do not truely know. You are basing your assessment off the way the system works not and has worked for hundreds of years. But the world is changing and changing fast, to the point where newer things cannot be compared against old things as a judgement of if it will or will not work. As it does not work like that, if you think it does you need to open your mind and broaden your horizon a bit.

Throughout history anything that has been truly revolutionary has always been met with fierce criticism and similar echoes of why it cannot or will not work. That is not to say this will work in the long run. We simply do not now. But it has worked better than any other cryptocurrency for going on 12 years now, so out of them all it is the most consistent.

You are largely right; however, the modern-day basis of economic growth - debt - which you rightly point out shows no sign of being left behind under BItcoin. I consider crypto to be a potential tool for the escalation of that debt-based model, encouraging people to spend money they do not have. Any digital-only currency (or commodity), which is what they are trying to turn conventional currencies into, is a threat to the idea of saving up for something and buying it with your own money.
 
But that doesn't add up. Bitcoin is simply a currency with a market value. Either it goes up in value for everyone or it goes down. What you do in the midst (buy, sell etc) of that is up to you.

Prices only go up or down subject to demand. If people are buying, the price goes up, if people are selling, the price tumbles. Not everyone will buy or sell at the same time. So if you purchase too late, you will buy at a high price and the chances are that the price will go down. If you panic sell because everyone else is selling, then the chances are that the prices have already fallen and you are probably already made a loss, but you are selling at a loss to reduce your loses.

Money don't grow on trees and for someone to make a windfall, it will come at the loss of someone else expense, that how business works.
 
Prices do not only go up depending on demand...
There is a direct relation between supply, demand and price, but there are a number of factors that set a price, demand is merely one of them, governments can, and do fix price levels, through subsidy and tax levels.
Suppliers willingness to provide goods to the market at a certain price is a big factor, shortages and gluts all affect prices.
Price elasticity of demand isn't straightforward in the real world.
 
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Some friends of mine are heavily into it but I didn't bother for a long time (more fool me). When I first started using Revolut it felt much more accessible and less risky (from a security perspective) so I bought £1000 worth, that's now worth close to £2500, it does fluctuate, but that is the nature of it.

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion as to what it is and how it works everywhere but the information is out there.
 
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