To think a lot of folk are going to get their fingers burnt by Bitcoin

[Viviennemary]

I can't see this Bitcoin phenomena going on for much longer. I don't really understand it but isn't it a bit like the South Sea Bubble which has to burst eventually. Because it isn't actually based on anything tangible from what I can see.

I think the technology has potential but as a currency now it fails.

1 you can't use it for trade in many circumstances
2 the value is volatile
3 security is volatile
4 people won't spend it while it's a speculation tool

There is literally nothing increasing its value from yesterday except hysteria. A soft drink company just renamed itself to sound crypto-ish and increased in value 300% in one day. If that's not hysteria I don't know what is.

It's not a "con" because you can spend bitcoin. Its more like futures trading than anything though as someone else said - the kind of trading that is more like gambling, but has been going on since long before the internet existed. It's not a con, it's a big gamble and not something to do with money you can't afford to lose - like playing with high risk, high potential return shares.

Kurri- I agree. I started reading about bitcoins then ended up.on some thing about quantum computers and thought I was reading in Swahili- it's all totally lost on me !

.....worth £10,000....
What I should have said is "....claimed to be worth £10,000...."

The house analogy is so true. I find it odd when people say that their house on been on the market for ages and is worth £500,000 (for example)

Clearly it isn't worth that much if you can't sell it.

We have spent bitcoin - we were given a couple of bitcoins in return for several hours tech support for a new business, when they were worth a couple of hundred dollars. We've spent fractions of coins on stuff worth a couple of thousand dollars and still have 1.5 coins left. If they crash they crash, we've still done better than if we'd been paid in beer and home grown veg, or actual dollars...

They are worth what people pay, that's why the value goes up and down. They aren't claimed to be worth X - the value is what they are selling for at any given moment.

Not understanding something doesn't make it imaginary, that's a rather odd way of thinking!

They are very high risk because the value can crash, and I wouldn't invest in them now unless I had money I didn't need, but that's unfortunately the reason only the rich can afford to get dramatically richer, because they can afford the risk...

It's like any investment, you pay money for a "thing" and hope the value goes up. Bitcoins are no different to investing in shares, or property, or gold, or horse-racing.

Shares have value because the business make profits, and those profits belong to the share owners. On average over a long period of time, the return from shares is the same as the underlying profits the businesses make.

Bitcoin has no underlying profits. When one day bitcoin is worthless, if someone were in a position to trace all the money put into bitcoin and subtract from that all the money taken out, they would find that there was no aggregate profit. There can't be, there's nowhere for the money to come from. Every pound made by one person will have been a pound lost by someone else.

We invested minimal. Before it became popular

We can cash out daily between £30-£120 a day

Yes,a day

I don't think many people on this thread understand crypto currencies and are here just to slate it for that reason.....

The most relevant thing in that list to compare bitcoin with is gold. Gold does not really go up in value, in the long-term it roughly keeps up with inflation. But a difference between bitcoin and gold is that almost every day of the week someone is inventing a new crypto-currency, that is often better than bitcoin in one respect of another. New metals are not being invented/discovered every day, and even if one was, there would be no particular reason to think it would be more valuable than gold

I don't think many people on this thread understand crypto currencies and are here just to slate it for that reason.....

I don't think there is a correlation between understanding it and believing in it. There are people who understand thoroughly how it works, but (I believe) are wrong about its future. And there people who haven't a clue who are remortgaging their house to buy as much as they can. Probably.

You don't have to understand bitcoin to predict it's future. You just have to ask yourself what would kill it, and how likely those things are too happen.

to happen.

Actually, understanding it probably helps scepticism. If you understand it then you know it's not a question of whether we have bitcoin versus nothing, but more likely a question of whether we end up with bitcoin or something better.

If you don't understand it, you probably think it's more special than it is.

I went to invest in bitcoin, but had some random person from Japan ring me to sell me the currency and wanted a copy of my ID etc. Made me twitchy so I backed away!

I know people who made tons of money from it - they’ve cashed in now so wouldnt care if it crashed. I know some others who have loads re-invested, but they are prepared to lose the lot so not worried either. I agree, what goes up must come down but it’s anyones guess when.

Every pound made by one person will have been a pound lost by someone else

A bit like the stock exchange?

Or currency?

What’s that famous saying “when even the shoe shine boys are giving you tips, it’s time to sell”

Well I was in a nightclub at 2.30am listening to drunken Essex boys discussing bitcoin and how much money they were going to make.

So i’d say it’s time to sell

There's alternatives to 'bitcoin'

FFS, of course you can sell it. You just need to make sure you buy it from an exchange suitable for your needs - e.g. if you will want to sell large quantities, don’t use somewhere like Coinbase which limits the amount you can sell each week, use somewhere like localbitcoins, bung it on a Nano Ledger until you want to sell and then transfer back to localbitcoins to sell.

The current complaint by traders is that the fees for moving Bitcoin around have skyrocketed. What used to cost pennies a few months ago is now often in the double digits (£equivalent) so moving small amounts isn’t worth it.

It isn’t a con. It’s a high risk speculative gamble which could blow up. Or maybe it won’t.

You can sell them for more than £10k per coin right now (Bitcoin showing current price as £10,695)

Coinbase showing current price, not Bitcoin...

Yes I got it wrong. There are 21m to be mined maximum. But what's it based on. I could start a website and say 1m Vivienne's coins for sale at a pound each. And everybody buy 1 and put them in your virtual wallet. Then I've made a million pounds. It's crazy. It's not quite like shares because there is nothing there. It's like investing in a goldmine that exists only in cyberspace.

But what would the purpose of your coins be? You would just join the hundreds and hundreds of worthless crypto currencies out there that bear no resemblance to the big players.

There’s quite a good long running thread here:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3013943-To-ask-if-anyone-dabbles-with-bitcoin

(And if anyone actually is concerned about the current fees, make sure you are using a platform that supports SegWit and doesn’t leave you stuck with a legacy address- e.g. don’t use Coinbase until it impelements SegWit support)

A bit like the stock exchange?

No, that was my whole point, how did you not get that? If at some future date the world is run by solar-powered robots and capitalism as we know it is obsolete, if someone could add up all the money put in and all the money taken out of shares, the money taken out will be many, many multiples of what was put in. Because the money put in earned profits. While some people may lose money in shares, there is no fundamental theoretical reason why every person who ever invested couldn't have got more out than they put in. The same is not true of bitcoin.

TBH I'm just repeating what I said in my original post, if you didn't get it the first time, this probably isn't going to help. I don't know how to make it any simpler.

(But, yes, bitcoin is like currency, if not shares. Currency trading is, in aggregate, not a way of making money either. Currency, whether held or traded, traditional or crypto, is not an "investment". )

Well, all the currencies I can think of are not investments. Theoretically a big investment company could issue an asset-backed cryptocurrency where a coin was exchangeable into shares in say a world index-tracker fund. Then you would have a "currency" that was also an investment, where coins were more or less guaranteed to increase in value over time. The coins would be shares that could be used as currency, because transactions wouldn't have to give via a broker and a stock-exchange.

One of the proposed cryptocurrencies I've come across in recent weeks would have given the owner shares in farmland, I think. Not sure if it included the profits on the land, but if so it would be an investment.

A credible asset-backed cryptocurrency is the most likely thing to kill bitcoin, I reckon. There is a possibility that regulators may kill it before that does, but I think that's less likely to be the way it dies.

Bitcoin won’t ever be completely killed. It’ll just move back to the world of geeks and the dark net.

I think we’ve got another good 12 months with a very large risk of another crash at the beginning/middle of January.