To ask if anyone dabbles with bitcoin?

[MollyWantsACracker]

Disclaimer: I am totally clueless

I bought a few euro worth today, just for fun really

Anyone else?

Sorry. (A very literate autocorrect.)

Agusta

@cozietoesie Yes, you've got me bang to rights! Do you think it's too late for a first timer to speculate on Bitcoin now, as in today? It's not the right time for me personally (expensive home move looming) but I'd be interested to hear your view because you seem very well informed.

Oopd, have almost RTFT and I see that @Cozie is a Bitcoin sceptic and that @Firesuit has already mentioned the Mr Money Moustache article. I'll shut up now.

I guess for us regretful non Bitcoin holders, following the Bitcoin saga at this stage of the bubble is a bit like cyberstalking your ex's hot new girlfriend. The nasty part of you obviously hopes it will end in tears so you can feel vindicated, but really you should focus on learning the lessons and moving on with your own life...

With every respect, vivienne don’t you think people can do their own research? We’re all grownups here.

As a consequence of "the madness of crowds" fortunes are lost and lives are ruined. Anything sceptics can do to talk people down is a good thing.

Wanting discussion to be an echo-chamber is and odd point of view, unless you know it is a scam and want the price talked up in the hope of getting out ahead of everyone else. If you really believe in bitcoin, then you'd think sceptics aren't going to be able to talk the price down. (Having said that, sceptics failing does not mean bitcoin is sound. Madness is stronger than reason when it comes to directing crowds.)

It’ll go up, it’ll go down. As always, don’t put anything in that you aren’t willing to lose.

Agustarella - buying Bitcoin is a very dangerous game. Not only will you have to hope that it goes up in value, but that the exchange will then allow you to withdraw funds. You are playing in a highly manipulated market. All sorts of tricks that have been outlawed for decades on regulated markets are commonplace. The price is frequently pumped and dumped, and it's so obvious. The spoofing is even more obvious.

Don't be regretful, I can tell you for a fact that most people that have invested in Bitcoin will end up losing money. For every crypto millionaire (and these only count if they have managed to sell their Bitcoins for $, not paper millionaires), there are 1000 people that have put in 1000 each. It's even worse than zero sum thanks to the high levels of fraud.

If you want to gamble, go to your local bookmaker. You'll lose on average, but at least they won't steal all your money.

If you want to invest, find a good company that pays a steady dividend, and isn't vastly overpriced. It may be boring getting a few % annual returns, but you'll end up richer at the end.

With every respect, vivienne don’t you think people can do their own research? We’re all grownups here.

Unfortunately, it isn't as simple as that. Financial dealings are open to fraud and scams that is why we have regulation. But Bitcoin is unregulated. It will eventually end in tears. A lot of people see it coming but the scam continues.

Meant to add good post from Starflo. I agree absolutely.

@starfro Those are really good points, thanks! I hadn't thought of speculating in bitcoin (or real estate, metals, whatever...) as being equivalent to going down the bookies, despite "speculating" being a kind of euphemism for gambling. I can only conclude that this is because bookies are sleazy places full of scruffy loser men, whereas bitcoin is what the cool, clued-up digital nomad hipsters buy. I'm learning so much about my own unexamined prejudices and subconscious motivation on this thread, none of it flattering!

I did google bitcoin the other day and apparently it had lost 45% of its "value" since the start of the year, so my FOMO has subsided somewhat.

Yes I see Bitcoin has reached quite a low today and checked in to see if anybody had noticed. I think ROMO (relieve at missing out) is more the order of the day now than FOMO. I sympathise with those who have lost money. It's anyone's guess whether there will be a recovery or the bubble will be burst for ever.

It's 'recovering' slightly. Anyone's guess as to how, though. I seem to recall something being closed last week (Japan or Hong Kong?) due - among other things - to 'irregular trades'. What 'irregular trades' meant, I have no idea.

Yes it is recovering slightly over the last 15 minutes or so. You wonder how much price manipulation is going on. Bump the price a bit and then all the sheep start thinking oh it's going up must not miss out. Put their money in and then somebody swipes the lot. I really don't understand why people are taken in by this.

Because many people have grey, tedious lives. Bitcoin speculation - and with a few honourable exceptions it is speculation and not investment - seemed to be a fairly 'No Pain' way of getting out of that life and^ never needing to work again. The fact that someone^ would be paying never occurred to most speculators, I reckon.

It's a little like The Lottery. (In motivational terms.)

Viz the terms of the South Korean petition.

"More than 212,700 have signed a petition calling for the government to refrain from regulating cryptocurrencies and taking away the "happy dream" of South Koreans."

These Bitcoin pumps are almost entirely manipulated, using wash trading and spoofing techniques. They are used to liquidate the margin shorts (yes some people make 50x trades on an already incredibly unstable market), but they also attract desperate longs who are "buying the dip". It's easy to do when you own both the exchange and the pseudo currency (Tether) that is used in place or real US dollars. These owners will happily admit to trading on their own exchanges. In real markets you have to use real money to do this, and hope the regulator doesn't notice. In these crypto markets if you're an owner you can print your own fake money to get the price to go up or down a few hundred $'s, enough to liquidate a few of your own customers, and no one cares "because it's crypto".

The general trend is down because no one is putting new money into the system. This won't be reversed quickly as confidence takes a long time to return and I think the price will continue downwards for some time.

Augustarella - Bitcoin is full of alt-right MRA Libertarian types, not cool hipsters. Just go onto Reddit/4chan and you'll see what they're like! You should never be buying something that is going up fast and accelerating. That's where the "smart money" is dumping the asset onto gullible members of the public.

....as confidence takes a long time to return.....

If at all. There may already be people who have lost out badly.

It is risible the way the Bitcoiners deride real money but in the end Bitcoin is virtually worthless until it's changed into real money. I think there's a lot of fraud going on with those cryptocoins.

Most of the ICOs are purely fraud. There's one at the moment claiming to do cold fusion and alchemy. Scammers typically make their frauds look stupid so that they attract the most gullible of people.

Some of the coins, like Bitcoin, weren't intended to be frauds, but the entire trading arena on which they are based is highly fraudulent. Bitcoin has many inherent problems that can't be fixed without creating an entire new infrastructure around it. The only reason people are invested in doing this rather than starting again is because they own bitcoins and want it to go up in price.

Bitcoin can manage about 2 transactions per second maximum, for the entire world. If only 1 billion, so 1/7th of the worlds population, wanted to use Bitcoin as their only currency, they'd be able to do a transaction every 5000 days. And do do this it would require the electricity capacity of a medium sized Western country.

The people trying desperately to get people to buy their Bitcoins at high prices in December tried to make out that this was the future and you'd be missing out if you didn't get in. You aren't missing out.

I have recently got my head around the "credit creation" theory of money that the Bank of England published a paper explaining in 2014. Am saving it for another thread, but it's interesting to apply the knowledge to bitcoin. If we were restarting the world from scratch, with bitcoin as our only currency, it could fulfil the role of gold. The thing is, in the modern world we have come off the gold standard, for very good economic reasons. Gold was useful to bootstrap the monetary system into existence, but it's now obsolete as money.

The idea that it's a good thing for the money supply to be fixed is wrong, and based on a naive understanding of money. (Not the the supply would be completely fixed if we created a system based on bitcoin, it would still be possible for the amount of money in circulation to be a multiple of the value of all bitcoins in existence.)

Khan academy has a series of videos on banking that shows you how money is created, and mentions gold being dropped from the system. He apparently received some negative feedback from people who didn't like him "dissing" gold, as there's one video explaining his opinion that real wealth (that government can reallocate to itself via tax system) is a better foundation for money than gold.

I’ll stick to gold I think - been buying since the 70s and it’s not let me down yet!
I did dabble in shares for a while but just found it too stressful so will avoid crypto currencies for same reason

never invest in what the dogs on the street are prepared to invest in. Get your money out now or say goodbye and learn a lesson. If it was this easy we'd all be rolling in it.

@ starfro Thank you very much for the info and good advice. I have bookmarked this page along with the Mr MM blogpost so that I can self-administer a virtual "punch in the face" should I be tempted to speculate on Bitcoin in the future. That's assuming crypto is still a thing if and when I get some spare cash to invest.

There is a lot of negativity in this thread. Whilst I agree that investing in bitcoins or alt coins is very high risk if you think that there will not be an electronic currency of some kind in the future that will be stable and valuable then you are wrong.

We are not even at the end of the beginning. The world is becoming smaller in many ways. Working for companies in different countries and small importing and exporting business are massively on the rise. Moving money internationally is still difficult and expensive and not without risk (particularly on terms of big transfers).

Essentially my view is that there is a market for something like bitcoin. As this need is not going away any time soon there will people looking to find a way to service this need. .

I was still very surprised to see a Bitcoin advert on the app. (If MN are advocating its use - and for 16 year olds (as the ad seemed to do) then...............