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What Do You Think Of Bitcoin?

FromEquestria2LA

Well-Known Member
I am unsure where this goes, as it's a cryptocurrency (or a 'virtual currency'), but since it exists online for the most part, I'll put it here.
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What do you all think of Bitcoin? It's an interesting currency; it's hard to believe it's valued at so much right now!
 
What do you all think of Bitcoin? It's an interesting currency; it's hard to believe it's valued at so much right now!

Yep, lot of hoopla over bitcoin.

However it's compounded by the US stock market being overvalued. I suppose the real "acid-test" of bitcoin would come in the event of a market crash or severe correction where commodities are likely to soar. And whether or not bitcoin would rise accordingly.

Some argue that bitcoin amounts to a commodity, and some don't.

Right now just about any speculative investment scares me given the prevalence of an overbought market and cyclical nature of markets and economies in general. This has been a mighty long run for the bulls. But it can't last forever. And only a fool bets on forever unless they live that long. :eek:

What would interest me would be to poll those heavily investing in bitcoin just to hear whether their reasoning is based on a robust US economy or a stock market ready to bubble in 2018?
 
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I've been trading cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin for a while now. Bitcoin was designed for several reasons, but one being the insane inflationary nature of the fiat currency we use right now. Currently the banks can keep printing as much cash as they like, which devalues each £ or $ in circulation (which is why houses, food and other things go up in price and are now beyond what most young people can afford). This means your savings continuously lose their value. Fiat currency is also backed by debt, with more debt in the system than can ever be paid back due to fractional reserve banking practices. It is a house of cards that can topple over at any moment (the only reason is hasn't already is that there are enough vested interests keeping it afloat). But an alternative form of money is needed that is harder to inflate, harder to forge, easier to track and can be used on a global scale. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether are designed to fulfil those requirements.

There is a limited number of bitcoins that can ever be mined into existence, and with every blockchain that is mined, the next one becomes increasingly more difficult to create. So there is no easy method to simply print more bitcoins if an organisation decides to. The public ledger also allows every transaction to be tracked by anyone who wants to access that information.

With that said, there are currently hundreds of copy-cat cryptocurrencies in circulation that are nothing more than speculative instruments. Which is fine, if they are marketed that way. However, a lot of people are happy to gamble on them to make quick money, even if they never survive as a legitimate currency in the long run.

In addition, there are currencies such as Ether that are backed by a huge bundle of technologies that go above and beyond pure currency. It is worth checking out 'Ethereum internet', as one example. The distributed system of cryptocurrencies via blockchains are being applied to non-currency projects.

If there were to be another 2008 crash, I would have far more faith in bitcoin and ether retaining value than I would dollars or sterling. There is far too much debt in the fiat system now and other than every creditor agreeing to wipe any debt from their books, I can't see how the situation can ever be resolved.
 
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Yep, lot of hoopla over bitcoin.

However it's compounded by the US stock market being overvalued. I suppose the real "acid-test" of bitcoin would come in the event of a market crash or severe correction where commodities are likely to soar. And whether or not bitcoin would rise accordingly.

Some argue that bitcoin amounts to a commodity, and some don't.

Right now just about any speculative investment scares me given the prevalence of an overbought market and cyclical nature of markets and economies in general. This has been a mighty long run for the bulls. But it can't last forever. And only a fool bets on forever unless they live that long. :eek:

What would interest me would be to poll those heavily investing in bitcoin just to hear whether their reasoning is based on a robust US economy or a stock market ready to bubble in 2018?

I'm waiting for the price of tulips to come back.
 
There is far too much debt in the fiat system now and other than every creditor agreeing to wipe any debt from their books, I can't see how the situation can ever be resolved.

Does it need to be resolved? Surely the debt can be eternal? And relative to other currencies... with concomitant devaluations as part of it.. (argentina twice,zimbabwe etc)

Will governments legislate if bitcoin reaches a certain size?

Although julian assange is happy as he was more or less forced to only own bitcoin...
 
Well I can't believe Bitcoin cost around £500 per 1 Bitcoin only a couple of years ago and it's current price is £11663 at the time of writing, if you went back further it cost peanuts. There was a time when it halved it's value around 3 years ago, but if people who lost money in the short term continued to be patient they still made a fortune. It's a gamble buying it though, a Bitcoin could be worth £100,000 in a couple of years or it could be worth £500 again.

The big downside is you must be very careful with Bitcoin as there's far too many scams around where people are parted from their money and since it's like using "cash" there is often no come back.

The other downside is Bitcoin and other crypto currencies are a great way for criminals to launder money since it's difficult to trace, authorities have clamped down somewhat making people use ID to purchase them in most cases, but it still happens and it's also the currency of choice for illegal transactions online (E.g. buying illegal drugs, stolen credit cards, counterfeit money, dodgy ID Etc. on the dark web, and even to purchase hosting for illegal websites) and this unfortunately means that a higher proportional of criminals have been made rich by the huge increase in Bitcoin value which is very bad news. It's also a sore point that it's very difficult to buy or sell bitcoin without photo ID because in the UK the only photo ID is a driving licence or passport, millions of people in the UK don't drive and don't travel abroad and are unable to buy or sell them except in higher risk places where there's more chance of being scammed.

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Also watch out for Bitcoin miners or other crypto currency miners that use your processor and/or GPU time to make someone else a considerable amount of money when installed on masses of PCs without the owners even realising it. Often these are installed like malware or bundled as an unwanted extra along with other downloaded software, for instance an official version of uTorrent, a very popular BitTorrent client came bundled with such a miner until masses of people complained and they later removed it. What is worse is they have now found a way to embed crypto currency miners on normal websites which simply run from your favourite browser without your permission when you visit the site, usually without notification. The downside of running such a miner on your PC is it can use up to 100% of your CPU and/or GPU time while making other applications run very slow, it also greatly heats up components where you will often hear your cooling fan speeds increase, but much worse if a PC has poor cooling it could potentially cause critical damage, especially with long term use and there is also the potential to reduce component life, and I haven't yet mentioned that your PC will use considerably more electricity at your expense (running a Bitcoin miner yourself is no longer worthwhile as it often costs more just in electricity than what you will make, that's why dodgy people will trick masses of users into running them on their PCs instead, all earning them money at once making the total considerable while costing them nothing in electricity or hardware costs). So far you will only find web based crypto currency miners on less than reputable websites as far as I know, a common one is websites to freely watch copyrighted TV / movies, another one to look out for is some public torrent sites. You could start seeing them on more websites in future however instead of, or as well as Ads, reputable sites however should always ask your permission first. I hope they incorporate better detection into anti-malware software as at least recently they didn't detect browser based miners, as far as I know these miners currently only thrash your CPU, not the GPU and the miner will stop as soon as you close the website (you can check your CPU usage in Task Manager by pressing the CTRL+ALT & DEL keys together).
 
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I kind of signed up to Bitcoin last week, but I doubt I'll ever do anything with it, I'm not clever enough for this trading lark.
 
That I should have boughtsome hundreds of it back when it started and was cheap :( :p

In a more serious post, I think it is crazy how it keeps raising its value everyday, a part of me thinks ot is kind of illegal because it is not a regulated form of pay/coin so as it could raise higher, also could just sunk and loose all its value. Then there's a part of me who doesn't think it's a big deal, since the huan being started to exchange resources there's being a necesity for better, different pay methods, it was barter first then chinese empire created paper money, then in the 1950's-60's a guy created the credit/debit card and now in the internet age someone created bitcoin.

Now, as it is an unregulated coin it could be used to make illegal transactions, drugs, robberies, etc. Some months ago I read about a guy who was kidnaped and the thiefs was asking the money in bitcoins making them irrastreable, almost likeghosts for police and investigators.
 
Hardly. It was $5,000 a month and a half ago lol. Its simply a correction.

LOL...that's all relative to what you bought it for. ;)

If you're a newcomer who recently bought into the jump in prices, you got hosed. Badly. :eek:

There are winners and losers...as with anything speculative.
 
LOL...that's all relative to what you bought it for. ;)

If you're a newcomer who recently bought into the jump in prices, you got hosed. Badly. :eek:

There are winners and losers...as with anything speculative.

A bubble crashing takes the majority of shareholders out. This isn't a bubble. It will be over $20,000 a coin again. Then $50,000.
 
A bubble crashing takes the majority of shareholders out. This isn't a bubble. It will be over $20,000 a coin again. Then $50,000.

That's an argument for the media. Semantics. Winners versus losers. Meh. You can find all kinds of interpretations and labels online about what happened. Take your pick.

Though with Bitcoin they're still arguing over what it even is- or isn't. Which personally concerns me most. With a lack of proper metrics to anticipate its movement in the market.

If you're still ahead of the game, it's all good. If you're not....well....
 
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That's an argument for the media. Semantics. Winners versus losers. Meh. You can find all kinds of interpretations and labels online about what happened. Take your pick.

When you have an entire market go up nearly 10,000 percent in one year, a correction of this size happens.

This is the sixth time that there has been a drop of between 30-40 percent in the Cryptoccurency market. It isn't unusual and is expected. People buying at the ATH were simply uneducated.
 
This is the sixth time that there has been a drop of between 30-40 percent in the Cryptocurrency market. It isn't unusual and is expected. People buying at the ATH were simply uneducated.

If you bought into the market very early and intend to ride it out over time, you can afford such optimism over something that is neither formally acknowledged as a commodity or a currency. Though which IMO skews the very notion of what is "unusual or expected", let alone to anticipate future returns based only on past results.

Seems a few "at the top of the pyramid" have different uptakes of Bitcoin, both favorable and unfavorable:

What 3 Billionaires Think About Bitcoin

Take your pick. It all depends on one's investment strategy and apart from the market itself. If one is in it for the long run, the jury is decidedly out. But if your intent is to "make a killing" at a certain point in time, you're probably SOL. Like most investment, it just comes down to the amount of risk you're willing to take.
 
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Look up Andreas Antonopoulos and treat yourself to his videos on Youtube and follow him on twitter. Most people who lose their shirts on Bitcoin are the ones treating it like a commodity and try to day trade or swing trade it.

This is personally one of my favorites:


I am not worried about the long term health of Bitcoin.
 

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