I'm going to use terminology in this posting that you may not understand but feel free to add a reply to the thread and I'll answer as best I can. In the past year and a half we've seen BitCoin go from 1k to over 20k and back down to 6kish. Talk about a wild ride. Fortunes have been made (not by me), fortunes have been lost (and entire life savings in some cases), people have gone to jail. There is fraud and ponzi schemes in the Initial Coin Offering (ICO's) everywhere. There has even been an uptick about BTC on our own forum as well. Most of us here on the forum are going to fall into one or maybe two of a few camps: Camp Are you F#!kn NutZ it's a government plan to steal your money. Camp You do remember Tulips right (AKA a fool and his money) Camp Whatcha Talking about Willis Camp Lotto Camp MLM please join make my hodlings worth more Camp FOMO Camp Moonshot Camp Anarchist Camp Seriously? Not joining this nonsense. and I hope to god that none of you are in Camp I should eat a bullet. (My grandkids will still be paying my debts) Full disclosure I'm in Camp Anarchist and in Camp Lotto. Anarchist because I like things and knowledge government would rather not have access to and Lotto because if it does go up even if I have to pay crap tons of taxes .. I'll be happy to pay it. Lessons Learned: Ok, for lessons learned (some the hard way, some vicariously) Never keep any crypto on any exchange longer than necessary and then get it off to your own cold wallet. Exchange fees for trading and/or withdrawing funds can cost you money. Trading and/or Withdraw rules (ex. transaction size must be full coins or large percentage of coins) can cost you even more money as you have fractions of coins stuck on exchanges that you can never get out. don't lose your private key or whatever coins you had are gone 4evar. using crypto to purchase goods/services can carry an additional charge depending on if the merchant uses a service to convert your crypto to fiat if they don't accept crypto directly .. ie 4.9 percent of the total transaction that you'll pay for the convenience. network has a fee to ensure the timely inclusion of your transaction can vary widely especially when the network is congested. Just like handing some one a big stack of cash, once you hand off the request to the network .. your coins are gone. No calling up AMEX and disputing the charge .. it's a one way street. There are a shit ton of dishonest vendors out there willing to accept your crypto and not fulfill your order. Crypto on an exchange is a huge target for thieves (including government ones) be prepared to lose your coins … often. Mining BitCoin on your home computer is no longer viable, specialized equipment in this day and age is required. The best way to acquire crypto is through face to face transactions with a local crypto enthusiast or user group. But as with anything, I'd not be making a huge single purchase. Another way is to offer goods and services yourself and accept crypto as another form of payment. Lots of sites offer the ability to pay with crypto to buy electronics, precious metals, web hosting, adult entertainment, homemade crafts, travel, regular consumer goods .. just about anything. Why it's still a bad idea to get into crypto: Crypto space is full of bad actors wanting to separate you from your fiat. Right now I've got a crypto investor that want me to partner with him in his business. He's been bugging me for weeks to come on board. 10 - 20 percent monthly returns. bwahahaahaha. Not going to happen .. well not at least with my money. Mining hardware is super expensive and with ever rising difficulty, electricity costs and consumption, the ROI is negative unless you can get free power and the hardware is stolen. You may wind up being a criminal by sending someone in iran crypto for a Turkish hookah because you didn't know where the final recipient resided. and Violated our trade rules. Future legal precedence my declare all crypto illegal and now .. as a hodler of crypto .. you could go to jail .. or worse. it could go to zero in a blink of an eye. Unlike the stock market .. there is no circuit breaker after a 10 percent drop trading stops. It could beat the express elevator down as someone cut the cable. If you can not afford to lose everything invested into crypto in a matter of minutes .. you shouldn't play You know those camps I listed at the beginning of this thread? All of them are valid camps. The government could use the block chain to come after you .. get your coins .. and then just sell them for their own funding. It is a bit of a tulip mania depending on where your ROI line is, getting in now is either a great time or too late. It's got a lot of buzzwords and is confusing as hell. Crypto could run up again making more people more money. There are pump and dumpers that are hoping you will get in so they can recoup their losses and then sell causing your holding to drop like a rock. There are people still trying to get in in case it takes off and they don't want to miss the train. There are seriously a lot of folks hoping this replaces a national currency and prices go to the stratosphere. and then there are those that just like things the government doesn't. And more folk that can say .. this is worthless and I'm not gonna play. Only time will tell what the best camps were to be in but as long as you don't bet the farm or think of crypto as a must have in your preps you won't wind up the eating lead as an option camp. Just remember, don't put into crypto that which you can not afford to lose or you'll have lost already. It is just an idea, in a white paper, that some people find interesting, and decided to test it out, to see where it goes. So far it's been great, and it's been terrible. I expect more of the same.
The tulip reference is to dutch tulip mania where people were people got so crazy for tulips they were willing to trade an entire house or even an estate for a few tulips. And then about the time it got that crazy the price of a tulip dropped back down to normal.
Bitcoin is, to me anyhow, worse than fiat currencies. At least you get to count a stack of pretty paper... I guess I'm in Camp I've got better things to spend money on
I'm not the wisest investor . But I started to invest in the Bitcoin craze when it was on the uptick . I had a little extra cash laying around then . Should have done it , and then cashed out when it got up there in the " I need to cash out while I still can range " . I could have been rich , If I'd have just known then , what I know now .
Close enough ...and just to be clear, I'm not going to knock your strategy. It's just not my cup of tea.
Been a "tulip bulber" since the beginning, though I could have gotten in cheap and if I had would now be comfortably rich. Coulda, woulda, shoulda but that ship has long since sailed.
Me and my friends started hearing about BTC in 2009. We ran LAN parties with a bunch of nerds in Los Angeles and had tournaments. I started mining BTC in 2012 and quickly realized that it was a large investment into hardware. I lost around 22 BTC when the EX destroyed one of the computers that it was on out of spite but still have some. The reason I like BTC is that it is the only real money for free people. Gold and silver can be confiscated (stolen) and paper just keeps getting printed into oblivion. If the people of the world understood how money worked, nobody would use anything but BTC. At the $17700 mark I threw some more money in. Under $20k per BTC is an insanely cheap price and all the people in the know are going nuts right now. Any savvy investor is putting what ever they can scrape together right now into Bitcoin because it is NOT an investment. It is money. 1 BTC does not equal the current price. 1 BTC = 1 BTC. People need to wake up, grow up, and change their perspective. You want monetary freedom? BTC is your only chance. There is nothing else. How many wars were fought and the gold/silver and treasure plundered? How are you going to plunder BTC? BTC is the currency of peace, love, and freedom. https://twitter.com/maxkeiser/status/1538540616107192322
Spoken like a true hodler. But all ponzi's eventually run out of new entrants and it looks like that is the case now. BC is well below the last top back in 2021, that's not supposed to happen. Certainly not in the early stages of a "bull run". Hodlers keep recycling the old tropes, BC does well in times of war? BC does well in times of inflation? BC is money? So why doesn't anyone buy anything with it? Aside from drugs on the dark web that is. Saylor's claiming it's a commodity? But commodities have functions in the real world, even Gold functions as a commodity in jewelry and IT. I'm over all the BC marketing, it is and always was, BS. And as the poster above showed, one accident with your computer or flash drive and it's lost forever. Or you could leave it on an exchange, like the FTX cryptocurrency exchange
