Any interest in a general crypto currency thread? The old Bitcoin one dates back to 2013 and things have moved on a bit since then. I got interested in them earlier in the year and have invested a few grand now, have just been picking up some coins here and there when the prices dip. I'd previously dabbled in funds and shares but was looking for something a bit less dull and with a higher risk/reward ratio.
There are some interesting projects using blockchain technologies that sound like they have potential, I think the Bank of England and the EU are working on their own crypto-currencies and China has one nearly ready to launch. It will be interesting to see where things go over the next few years, one hot topic lately has been decentralised finance (de-fi) where all sorts of financial products can be offered using blockchain tech removing banks etc. from the process entirely. This seems like one of the major benefits to me, carrrying out transactions peer-to-peer without involving any third parties although all exchanges these days require you to provide ID so it's not exactly untraceable, and there is no-one that can help if you lose your private keys or get your coins stolen.
That's roughly my take on it. I've accidentally crashed the price on smaller markets by selling ~$10,000 worth of BTC (I was simply moving money from one country to another with a much more closed banking system and a relatively isolated bitcoin ecosystem). We see much bigger "corrections" every time someone pulls of a successful bitcoin heist or scam and dumps their coins too soon.
Cryptocurrencies are a bit like company shares but where anyone with a decent holding is a CEO. As soon as anyone sells off a decent amount the market panics and the price corrects, again. It's also theoretically possible to drop the market price by selling yourself a relatively small amount of BTC at a below market price and then buy the dip causing prices to go back up as confidence is restored. A dump and pump, if you will.
I'm definitely very interested in where the price of bitcoin eventually ends up when the the last block is mined and where the optimum price to sell at actually turns out to have been.
>>8096 >is it too late to make any real money from cryptocurrencies?
In general, unless you're planning to launch one in order to scam investors, pretty much. The best you're likely to do at this point is get lucky riding the manipulations, but they tend to happen most frequently at times when it's difficult to trade, which isn't a coincidence. The only people making real gains are the manipulators and long-term holders engaged in principal-preserving burn. The eternal HODLers have been making paper gains, but unless they're actually cashing out they're not really making anything.
https://www2.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2021/nr-occ-2021-2.html >The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) today published a letter clarifying national banks’ and federal savings associations’ authority to participate in independent node verification networks (INVN) and use stablecoins to conduct payment activities and other bank-permissible functions.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/visa-has-also-quietly-warmed-to-crypto-along-with-pay-pal-and-square-200953910.html >Visa’s crypto steps in the past year have likely gone less noticed because they are partnerships, as opposed to the outright solo initiatives from PayPal (which will add bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to PayPal and Venmo next year) and Square (which added bitcoin to its Cash App in 2018, and this year bought $50 million worth of bitcoin for the company’s balance sheet).
If I had put away a couple pounds a week in bitcoin each week since I had heard of it, I would be rich beyond my wildest dreams today.
Every time BTC has a peak, people say it's over.
20% of USD were printed in 2020 and the majority of it went straight to corporate shareholders.
The legacy banking system has its fundament built on centuries old infrastructure and suffers greatly from centralization and lack of transparency. Part of me thinks that crypto is some tulip-mania South Seas Company type scam, but part of me believes that this radically distributed approach to capital represents the next step in the evolution of finance.
The fact that finance boomers are getting into it now makes it seem like they know that the road to crypto is inevitable and are getting involved to retain their power before it is too late.
In conclusion, I will be putting beer money in associated meme coins from here on out as it seems like the return is better than buying lottery tickets.
Yep. People don't really understand how it's only a handful of people pulling the strings on BTC.
Obviously with 20/20 hindsight vision, the correct time to start investing was 2012 when most of us nerd types first heard of it (only we weren't cynical enough to believe that people would actually invest real cash into monopoly money that was mainly used to buy drugs from strangers on the internet).
Even if I'd only thrown £50 / month in since say 2017 I'd have made a fairly big return by now although in early 2019 I would probably have cashed it all out anyway as I was basically on the bones of my arse for a few months.
The other big problem, as I and others have already mentioned, is when exactly to cash out. BTC will either be worth somewhere over $100k/coin or absolutely nothing by the end - the question being "when you do pull out", and as a lot of people who've pulled out too late can tell you it can really fuck your life up.
Incidentally I have a mate who bought two coins when either coinbase or bitstamp first opened for a couple of hundred each and says he's basically going to sit on them until they're either worthless or they can pay off his mortgage. More power to him for taking a punt and not being a druggy cunt like me.
I assume the lad in question has a stable income elsewhere and treats the Bitcoin as an entirely separate gamble, like a lottery ticket in your backpocket.
I also have a stable income but I would still be terrified to have that sort of money riding on a gamble. At least if I lose all of my money I can blame the bloke handling my investments, it would hurt a lot more if it was my fault.
Yeah but investing in a commodity like this in a monthly fashion is bit like working with compound interest. If you take your original investment out every, say, six months then even with the fairly large gains we've seen with BTC lately, that doesn't leave you with a lot invested to appreciate over the next three months.
I might simply be a bit dim but I can't see how to invest a fixed monthly amount, retrieve that amount on a semi regular basis, and still have enough in the pot to make it worth your trouble. This model would only work if BTC were in continuous growth (as over time the profit left over would steadily increase) but we've all been around the block enough times to know that BTC can devalue massively for years at a time. It took three years for the people who bought in at $19k+ in December 2017 to even break even, for example.
You're not - at all - the whole thing is a pyramid scheme, so unless you're going to buy in, and then spend half your life promoting it all over the internet to the next layer of unwitting saps, it won't grow and you won't be able to regularly make money on it. Your point about those who bought in at the end of 2017 is very pertinent.
>>8113 You don't withdraw based on time, but on rises. You can bank the profit those rises make possible (and can take out smaller percentages once you've extracted your stake). Yes it requires frequent and significant growth, but that's something Bitcoin has had - there hasn't been two consecutive years without big rises. Of course you'd be limiting your gains. Maybe you can't pay off your mortgage but instead can buy a nice car. It's a middle ground where you're trading risk for guaranteed reward. It may well be too late to start doing this now.
Contrary to >>8114's view lots of us Bitcoin owners are keenly aware that Bitcoin is outdated tech and is mired in bad governance. It cannot coast on its first-mover advantage forever but for as long as it does, we're happy to reap the rewards. The likes of >>8114 said institutional investors would never come but here they are. Think of it as a pyramid scheme if you really must. The thing is, you passed up the opportunity to sit near the top.
>>8115 > The thing is, you passed up the opportunity to sit near the top.
This is true but seeing it now is purely hindsight. People who bought £100 of BTC back in 2011 and just sat on it are laughing all the way to the bank, but so are the people who bought shares in Apple when Jobs went back to what everyone thought was an irreparably sinking ship, or bought shares in Microsoft when it was just two nerds ripping off DEC's CP/M and licensing it to shifty makers of IBM PC compatibles.
It's worth remembering that for every Amazon type success story there were dozens of companies that simply didn't survive the dot com boom of the late 90s.
It might sound like sour grapes that I wasn't one of the "visionaries" but honestly I'm chuffed for my mate who's going to eventually pay off his mortgage with two fucking bitcoins and find the idea that I might one day be able to pay for a trip to Mars with less bitcoin than I spent on drugs in a single year entirely hilarious.
Btw, unless you're secretly one of the Winklevoss twins shitposting on ARE BRITFA for laffs then you're nowhere as near the top of the pyramid as you seem to think you are. Beware the whims of the Great Magnet, lad.
It's the same thing that happened at the end of 2017. A sudden surge in price gets the mainstream media reporting on it and before you can say "satoshi" you've got total smeg for brains borrowing their nan's life savings or remortgaging the house to put it all into bitcoin because someone's convinced them it's going to double next week the same as it did last week.
I wonder how long the people who bought in at $40k+ are going to have to wait around to get their money back this time.
>>8191 Hit over 40k last week, and in a move that literally nobody saw coming it went down to 30k on Sunday. Totally unpredictable and not in any way the result of manipulation.
The whole thing is a Ponzi. The claimed "institutional money" isn't actually money but their investors' existing crypto holdings.
I pulled my pocket money out when it reached 32 on the way down because I was reading about the Tether scam and I'm quite happy to wait until how things are looking after the 16th before I resume gambling with magic internet money.
That's basically true, and even more true of altcoins (where there was extensive pre-mining and the inventor isn't a head in a jar).
> The claimed "institutional money" isn't actually money but their investors' existing crypto holdings.
I'm not sure how this works, though. Are you suggesting that people pulled holdings out of other cryptocurrencies, pumped up the bitcoin price, waited for people to buy in, and then sold off some of their holdings for profit and/or to re-invest into other cryptos?
Wouldn't that kind of thing be pretty easy to notice just by looking at graphs of the trading volumes of the various cryptocurrencies on the various big exchanges and doing some kind of gap analysis?
>>8194 >Are you suggesting that people pulled holdings out of other cryptocurrencies, pumped up the bitcoin price, waited for people to buy in, and then sold off some of their holdings for profit and/or to re-invest into other cryptos?
No, those are two separate things. The hedge funds "investing" in it aren't putting money in, they're just acting as custodians for their customers who already hold BTC etc.
The Tether thing is scandalous. It's supposed to be backed entirely in dollars, with the idea being that 1 USDT = 1 USD. The trouble is they now say that they have dollars "or equivalent", which opens up the possibility (which many suspect) that newly-minted USDT aren't being paid for in USD but in existing crypto - in other words, it's not reflective of new money and assets coming into the market, but existing money already in the market, undermining the whole "sound money" thing cryptobros like to bang on about.
>>8197 I can only assume he's trying to get some money from the exposure again. Seriously, this guy turns up every time buttcoin his some kind of peak.
I mean, I think he's just still desperate to get people to listen to him and help him dig through a landfill. I don't blame him, in a way, knowing I had 200 million quid buried somewhere in my district, I'd probably be running around offering people 50 million to lend me a JCB, too.
Am I the only one who thinks he's a bit naive to think that his HDD is in any way serviceable any more? First off it ends up in a drawer because he spilled a drink on his laptop, then he chucks it out, presumably it goes in the big chompy-crushy bin lorry with all the other waste. Whatever arrived at the landfill site has now been sat there for seven or eight years suffering wind, rain, and other shite being thrown thrown on top of it.
I've had hard drives completely stop working from a 12" drop onto a tiled floor, I have no idea how he thinks his is going to be in any way recoverable after the near decade of torturous abuse it's received.
I think if you had a BTC wallet with 7.5k coins on it, you'd have tried a couple more data recovery techniques than you did at the time. I'm not saying his HDD is definitely preserved, but it's not inconceivable that a wallet would survive on even a shattered platter.
>>8203 > but it's not inconceivable that a wallet would survive on even a shattered platter.
It's not, but it's within the realms of the very unlikely. Assuming that the superblock/MFT is almost definitely corrupted and given that wallet.dat is just a btree type Berkeley DB file, the only way to search for the data you want (the keys) is if you remember the blockchain address you had the coins in and to brute-force search for that pattern as the key in a KV pair - across the entire disk (or whatever parts are readable). In other you'd better hope that the file was small enough to be stored in sequential sectors or you're going to be SOL and you'd better hope against hope that the disk wasn't protected via Bitlocker or LUKS as if even one byte is corrupted you'll be unable to read all the other logically sequential bytes thanks to the wonders of Cipher Block Chaining.
