Posted: 5/12/2017 10:38:53 AM EDT
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I just realized I bought about $250 worth of Bitcoin a year or so ago for fun, just to see how it worked, and forgot about it. I just checked today and it's worth $631
I don't know much about Bitcoin. My expertise is in stock market crashes. Should I sell? |
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Sure, have fun. You made a bit of money, so locking in profit is reasonable.
As for speculation regarding the future of Bitcoin, one of the things about it that really chews on government asses is the lack of regulatory oversight. What that means is, due to its architecture, governments can't see and TAX transactions. They really don't like that. So should we expect, at some point, government-supported cryptocurrencies (or digital currencies, or mobile money) that allow rapid low-cost transfers of value but leave behind some of the attributes of Bitcoin they don't like? I think so ... Oh, look, good timing: What's this the UK's Royal Mint is doing? Gold-backed? Developers can fork the codebase into something new any time they want. How many cryptocurrencies are out there now? Governments piling in and putting forward their own digital currencies as alternatives (and BROADLY accepted payment mechanism) is inevitable. What happens to Bitcoin at that point? Something to think about. |
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recoup your initial investment and roll the rest into Ethereum. There were a couple of BTC shills in here last year trashing me for recommending ETH back when it was only a few $$ -- calling it a "shitcoin" (no kidding). LOL Where are they now? Bueller?? |
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Have we missed the Ether boat? The next round of companies joining the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance are going to be announced before the end of the month. Ethereum also just launched its Ethereum Name Service, which allows you to map an ETH address to a .eth domain name -- really cool stuff. So, if you wanted to send me some ETH, you could just send it to HeadInSand.eth (for example). Lots of other cool things in the pipeline as well. Ethereum is a next-generation blockchain. P.S. In before the it's a "shitcoin" shills. LOL /deeeerrrrpppp!! |
SELL!!! one word....
 The Graduate: Plastics |
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^^^ Best advice so far. There were a couple of BTC shills in here last year trashing me for recommending ETH back when it was only a few $ -- calling it a "shitcoin" (no kidding). LOL Where are they now? Bueller?? oh god I need to invent a time machine and tell my 2015 self about this |
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So there's mining.
And there's direct purchase/speculation in the various products (e.g., Bitcoin). And there's investment into companies making strong moves in this space or into blockchain tech itself. The days of mining are waning, unless you have cheap power, mining farms at low hardware cost, or some number-theory breakthrough and custom mining code (I don't see ASICIBOOST as a hack so much as an example of code optimization). Seems like most everyone here is in the second category, and not the third. Anybody lining up companies for their moonshot? |
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:checks ETH chart: oh god I need to invent a time machine and tell my 2015 self about this Quoted:
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^^^ Best advice so far. There were a couple of BTC shills in here last year trashing me for recommending ETH back when it was only a few $ -- calling it a "shitcoin" (no kidding). LOL Where are they now? Bueller?? oh god I need to invent a time machine and tell my 2015 self about this |
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Are there any conventional brokerage firms that you can go through to purchase cryptocurrency instead of using one of the 50 newish sites that limit trades and make you jump through a ton of hoops?
I just want to call an investment guy and say buy me $10,000 worth of X crypto. |
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Are there any conventional brokerage firms that you can go through to purchase cryptocurrency instead of using one of the 50 newish sites that limit trades and make you jump through a ton of hoops? I just want to call an investment guy and say buy me $10,000 worth of X crypto. |
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Are there any conventional brokerage firms that you can go through to purchase cryptocurrency instead of using one of the 50 newish sites that limit trades and make you jump through a ton of hoops? I just want to call an investment guy and say buy me $10,000 worth of X crypto. |
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Seems like most everyone here is in the second category, and not the third. Anybody lining up companies for their moonshot? There are all kinds of cool products and platforms being built on top of Ethereum. For those who think they may be late, it's unlikely. ETH's market cap is currently only 1/3rd of Bitcoin's and Ethereum has far more capability. See here for more about the numbers regarding market caps, etc.: https://rolandkofler.github.io/flipper/ |
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Yes, Ethereum. Enterprise Ethereum Alliance -- see here for more info: http://entethalliance.org/ There are all kinds of cool products and platforms being built on top of Ethereum. For those who think they may be late, it's unlikely. ETH's market cap is currently only 1/3rd of Bitcoin's and Ethereum has far more capability. See here for more about the numbers regarding market caps, etc.: https://rolandkofler.github.io/flipper/ I meant publicly traded companies. For example, IBM went big into the open-source hyperledger project. If you think blockchain is going to be a seriously disruptive technology, and that hyperledger and its surrounding ecosystem get a lot right and are going to fly, you might also expect that to impact IBM's bottom line. At a level that makes investing in IBM worthwhile ... ? That's the crystal ball part. I'm not recommending investment in IBM. Or advising against it. It was just an example. |
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For that amount of money and that gain I would not sell. The "point" of speculating on Bitcoin and Ethereum is for the moon shot grand slam, not for singles and doubles.
If you had bought $250 worth 7 years ago and it's now worth millions, then yeah I'd probably lock in some gains but as long as your holdings aren't large enough to keep you up at night then I'd just stay pat. You bought the lottery ticket, now hang on for the ride. We are no where near the point of long term success or failure. You've got to look at investing cryptocurrency as a 10+ year adventure. It'll either be a complete bust or you are going to see some serious shit. I don't really see how there can be a middle ground. |
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Sell half, recoup your original outlay. If it spikes more sell the rest. If it tanks put it back in and increase your overall stake I just did this with the $200 in etherium I bought at $40 each a few months ago |
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You bought the lottery ticket, now hang on for the ride. We are no where near the point of long term success or failure. You've got to look at investing cryptocurrency as a 10+ year adventure. It'll either be a complete bust or you are going to see some serious shit. I don't really see how there can be a middle ground. Just ride the waves, because IMO this is just like the advent of the internet back in the early-to-mid 90's. Remember when stupid Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric had no idea what the @ meant for email?  1994: "Today Show": "What is the Internet, Anyway?" Yeah, I'd say we're just now at the same stage as far as digital / cryptocurrencies are concerned. If you really want to start understanding this stuff and the potential, you're gonna have to spend some time doing your own due diligence. You can start here:  How the blockchain will radically transform the economy | Bettina Warburg Be wary of anyone that tries to evangelize Bitcoin as the "one and only" true coin, yada yada yada. There's a LOT of money tied up and betting on what is now quickly becoming antiquated technology that is proving incapable of scaling and accommodating current and future demands. There is a reason we no longer crank start out cars -- because it turns out the Ford Model T wasn't the one car to rule them all and technology never stops progressing. If you want to make money in crypto, you need to be able to look through the bullshit manipulative lies and FUD and truly assess the legitimacy of the underlying tech that you are considering investing in. Good luck. |
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Agree 100% on all points. Just ride the waves, because IMO this is just like the advent of the internet back in the early-to-mid 90's. Remember when stupid Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric had no idea what the @ meant for email?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg
Yeah, I'd say we're just now at the same stage as far as digital / cryptocurrencies are concerned. If you really want to start understanding this stuff and the potential, you're gonna have to spend some time doing your own due diligence. You can start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RplnSVTzvnU
Be wary of anyone that tries to evangelize Bitcoin as the "one and only" true coin, yada yada yada. There's a LOT of money tied up and betting on what is now quickly becoming antiquated technology that is proving incapable of scaling and accommodating current and future demands. There is a reason we no longer crank start out cars -- because it turns out the Ford Model T wasn't the one car to rule them all and technology never stops progressing. If you want to make money in crypto, you need to be able to look through the bullshit manipulative lies and FUD and truly assess the legitimacy of the underlying tech that you are considering investing in. Good luck. |
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https://www.coinbase.com is what you want. They are regulated and insured. Use with confidence. I want to be able to call a broker buy and sell like I'm trading stock in microsoft or ford, tell him to buy $20,000 and it is done in a minute, tell him to sell $50,000 and it is in my bank account immediately. Is there any firm that offers this? If not it seems like a good business opportunity. |
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https://www.coinbase.com is what you want. They are regulated and insured. Use with confidence. |
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<sn> but figured "Nah, I'll just buy silver @ $22 an ounce..." Continuing the family tradition of buying high and selling low...  
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What do you consider to be the best investments currently? Ethereum is attracting a massive number of developers who are building products on top of the Ethereum platform. I equate it to the iOS or Android app stores. Remember how they exploded? All of the products being built on top of Ethereum also have their own individually traded tokens. For example: - Digix (DGD) -- they are digitizing gold on the block chain - Augur (REP) -- they are building a decentralized prediction market where you can make bets on anything you can think of - Maker (MKR) -- they are building a synthetic stable coin that will be used for a whole host of financial instruments - and many more... You can think of ETH as the index (like the DOW or S&P) and the individual tokens built on top of Ethereum as stocks (AMD, NVDA, AMZN, etc.). Factom is a project that is more narrowly focused on corporate file storage (I believe). However, they have received a pretty large backing by Microsoft, so there seems to be some decent potential there. Bitcoin is on the list mainly because it's still benefiting from first-mover advantage. As I said above though, its technical fundamentals are fading quickly as it's proving nearly impossible to improve the protocol due to a political civil war that has erupted over the best way to address its scaling issues. |
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<sn> but figured "Nah, I'll just buy silver @ $22 an ounce..." Continuing the family tradition of buying high and selling low... 
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That still requires you to have a wallet and the dangers that go with it and has limits that what you can cash out per day. I want to be able to call a broker buy and sell like I'm trading stock in microsoft or ford, tell him to buy $20,000 and it is done in a minute, tell him to sell $50,000 and it is in my bank account immediately. Is there any firm that offers this? If not it seems like a good business opportunity. Quoted:
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https://www.coinbase.com is what you want. They are regulated and insured. Use with confidence. I want to be able to call a broker buy and sell like I'm trading stock in microsoft or ford, tell him to buy $20,000 and it is done in a minute, tell him to sell $50,000 and it is in my bank account immediately. Is there any firm that offers this? If not it seems like a good business opportunity. You could check out Cumberland Mining (even though they list Bitcoin on their main page, they now support other currencies like ETH, etc.). This is crypto we're talking about, it's pretty much all on you to manage these things. By they time we have the kind of service you are requesting, it will be mainstream and the potential gains will be much smaller then. |
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Bitcoin is on the list mainly because it's still benefiting from first-mover advantage. As I said above though, its technical fundamentals are fading quickly as it's proving nearly impossible to improve the protocol due to a political civil war that has erupted over the best way to address its scaling issues. My only comment is on the part above. The scaling "discussion" is bring forward into focus the problem with the loosy-goosy governance of purely open source projects. Don't like it? Fork. Bitcoin's architectural decisions made early on give unbalanced representation to the various groups interested in the technology. For example, the huge Chinese miners making de facto decisions because of their leverage point with signaling. So as these issues emerge, very earnest conversations are taking place among people who have been in or downright driving this tech for years. Software engineering methodologies all have pros and cons. We're seeing some of the cons on bitcoin-dev, where a lot of the people come from the "the code is the documentation, and the implementation is the standard" camp. They're currently in an intensive learning phase as to that approach's limitations. NONE of that shit is going to fly in the eyes of regulators. Really, someone's 401K just got KILLED because it was on the wrong side of a fork related to-- Wait, what? A "fork"? "blocksize"? I WANT MY MONEY. There will be standards with which implementations of these techs will comply, if they want to truly play with the big boys. And make no bones about it -- the big players are all over various parts of this one. Everything I wrote applies to Ethereum et al. Bitcoin just happens to be further along the development track. |