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OT, Bitcoins what are your thoughts??? Is it a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme or Madoff scheme

I had hundreds of bitcoins back in 2011, when each coin was only worth a few bucks.. Wish I'd saved some; I'd be planning an early retirement right about now.
 
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It's not a ponzi, pyramid, etc.

It's interesting in the concept, but as you said, it's not backed by anything nor is it regulated well enough, IMO. For example, you can pool your computing resources to "mine" for coins, but the owner of the pool isn't legally obligated to share the bounty.

To me, it's fun to watch, but too far along and far too volatile to sink any real money into it. I do wish I had bought a few 7-8 years ago though.
 
king ward said:
How do you acquire bitcoins, and once you do, how do you use it to buy toothpaste?
Click to expand...


I didn't know this, but some stores are accepting Bitcoins through Bitpay..

https://bitpay.com


And I came across this

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4130436-bitcoin-bank-metropolitan-bank-holding-corp

A pure play on Bitcoins... NYSE traded bank is the only pure play way to trade Bitcoin.

Along with CBOE futures..

http://cfe.cboe.com/cfe-products/xb...n-futures&utm_medium=vanity-url&utm_source=na
 
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exnavyguy said:
It's not a ponzi, pyramid, etc.

It's interesting in the concept, but as you said, it's not backed by anything nor is it regulated well enough, IMO. For example, you can pool your computing resources to "mine" for coins, but the owner of the pool isn't legally obligated to share the bounty.

To me, it's fun to watch, but too far along and far too volatile to sink any real money into it. I do wish I had bought a few 7-8 years ago though.
Click to expand...


"For example, you can pool your computing resources to "mine" for coins,"

How do you do that? Google Bitcoins and share it on Facebook??

It seems something out of SciFi movie...
 
boombus1 said:
I had hundreds of bitcoins back in 2011, when each coin was only worth a few bucks.. Wish I'd saved some; I'd be planning an early retirement right about now.
Click to expand...

They were actual coins?

How did you get your hands on the physical Bitcoins???

I find this all fascinating like the internet bubble like Pets.com
 
world famous 3rd base hecklers said:
I didn't know this, but some stores are accepting Bitcoins through Bitpay..

https://bitpay.com


And I came across this

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4130436-bitcoin-bank-metropolitan-bank-holding-corp

A pure play on Bitcoins... NYSE traded bank is the only pure play way to trade Bitcoin.

Along with CBOE futures..

http://cfe.cboe.com/cfe-products/xb...n-futures&utm_medium=vanity-url&utm_source=na
Click to expand...
CME has a contract coming out next week as well. I can tell you this from direct experience: none of the big banks except Goldman are biting yet. Most are taking a wait and see approach.
 
world famous 3rd base hecklers said:
They were actual coins?

How did you get your hands on the physical Bitcoins???

I find this all fascinating like the internet bubble like Pets.com
Click to expand...
I had stock in Pet.com, actually still do. Funny thing is the company has been sold like three times since it went defunct and the stock moved from $.02 to .03/4 each time. I forget how much I have but I think it was 100 shared at around $22 a share. Yep, that's a loss.
 
Crypto currency that allows people to buy and sell goods anonymously. The market for it fluctuates wildly often. I’d say it’s worth investing a humble amount of money in it.
 
The Japanese gent that created this network must have a brilliant mind. It could be very risky from a speculative standpoint and from a cyber attack.. I just don't know all of the risks, gotchas, etc. associated with the technoIogy. And it's unregulated but apparently since the system is so widely distributed across international boundaries, no one government can come at it. I'm sure the Fed Reserve and the SEC are both going bananas over how to get their hands on this network.
 
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nlstanford said:
I would also add that most of the institutions, hedge funds and savvy investors looking to get into bitcoin aren't interested in buying. They've been looking for ways to short bitcoin. So before you load up, consider who is betting against your long position.
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Probably a better way is to jump on the train and set a deep stop loss.
 
It's fake currency created by a russian hacker back in the early 2000s. He stockpiled a bunch of the "coins" and released it into the wild. Now bitcoin mining isn't profitable because of the extra wear and tear on your PC and electricity costs. The value fluctuates far too much to make it worth much of anything, and it's difficult to sell for real money or goods. I'm not saying it CAN'T be profitable, but the average user won't find it profitable as there are server farms running massively powerful GPUs dedicated to mining, and if you don't have something similar with the electrical infrastructure to back it up, you're not earning more than you're spending on parts and increased power consumption.
 
Bitcoin is simply a currency that governments and banks can't regulate or mess with in anyway.

Google the Silk Road. It was basically a deep-web Amazon where you could by drugs, guns, hit men, endangered animals, blood diamonds, human organs, etc. You name it, they sold it. Crypto-currency, in this case bitcoin, was created so that people could exchange illegal goods using untraceable currency. Just like our US dollar, it was only worth something because enough people believed it was worth something. That's how any currency works.

That was the start. The Silk Road was eventually shut down after a wild and incredibly entertaining bust involving a San Fransisco hipster nerd who created this site out of a coffee shop, the Russian mob, hired assassins, FBI. I'll be sad if they never make a movie about it.

Anyway, after the silk road, people realized that the crypto-currency could still have value because it's untraceable (untraceable to an individual at least) and incompetent and/or corrupt banks and governments can't touch it, let alone manipulate or regulate.

Part II below...
 
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There are only 21,000,000 bitcoin in existence and that's all there will ever be. Unlike our dollar which can be pumped into our economy overnight by the Federal Reserve.

This fixed amount has made it very volatile, and it's become more of a commodity like gold than an actual currency. The big banks are already copying the format that bitcoin is based on, which is called blockchain. Blockchain is a pretty complex system to understand, and I sure don't know how to explain it, but the basic idea is there is a public ledger that shows where every bitcoin is, and shows every bitcoin transaction. So while individual bitcoin owners aren't made public, the bitcoin whereabouts are accounted for on this public ledger.
 
The billion dollar question is what should the sidewalk investor do about it? Depends on who you ask. A crypto-currency professor at MIT thinks it's the next Tulip Crash of the 1600's and could be one of the biggest bubbles in history. One of the most successful hedge fund managers in China said don't be surprised when it hits $100k soon. So no one knows what will become of it.

The only way I think it could be the next huge investment is if more and more people start accepting it as actual currency to buy products. But right now it's so volatile people are afraid to trade anything but cash. Imagine going to the Mercedes dealership and paying 4 bitcoin for a new car. What if bitcoin crashes the next day? Mercedes just sold a $75k car for a currency that's now worth $1k. This type of unpredictability is why a lot of naysayers think this whole thing is just a bubble.

Unless you bought a lot when it was less than $100, you've already missed out. If you buy at $15,000 today and it goes to $18,000 tomorrow, that's a nice percentage increase, but you could easily make that with stocks. But unlike most stocks, you could buy at $15,000 today and then it becomes $150 tomorrow.

Sadly, the banks control the world by controlling its money. They will do everything in their power to either kill bitcoin and/or control their own version of it.
 
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Reading the comments here and it is clear that very few if anyone has taken the time to actually understand the blockchain, decentralization, and the endless possibilities that it entails. I will say that I believe Bitcoin is overvalued because of transactions fees (miner rewards) and scalability issues. However, if you understand how the entire market works. Bitcoin could easily see a 6 figure price tag. Many other underlying blockchain (non blockchain) projects use Bitcoin to buy/sell. Therefore when new money flows into the market, 95% of the time it is flowing through Bitcoin. As a result, Bitcoin's market cap continues to rise because in some ways Bitcoin is the faith of the market. There will be a time when it is no longer the leading decentralized currency but the underlying technology will revolutionize everything that we do with payment systems, smart technology, data storage, and more.
 
world famous 3rd base hecklers said:
I didn't know this, but some stores are accepting Bitcoins through Bitpay..

https://bitpay.com


And I came across this

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4130436-bitcoin-bank-metropolitan-bank-holding-corp

A pure play on Bitcoins... NYSE traded bank is the only pure play way to trade Bitcoin.

Along with CBOE futures..

http://cfe.cboe.com/cfe-products/xb...n-futures&utm_medium=vanity-url&utm_source=na
Click to expand...
I think that, once I understand the basic meaning of bitcoin, I mean once I can get a mental picture of it, I'll be good to make some determinations concerning it.
 
So it seems the value of bitcoin is 1) it can insulate you from volitility in your countries currency 2) its not tracable. Thats it. Because you have to use regulated currencies to buy them. Seems that in the longrun its only people who want to do illegal things(every country has its own opinion of whats legal, think outside the US box) and people who are speculators (hedge fund), same folks who got us in the housing crisis. Its a game of Russian Roulette.
And yes i do realize that our own currency is not backed by anything anymore. Currencies are basically supported by the health of the issueing countries economy. So for us that would be the American people.
 
It stayed very stagnant price wise for so long but it's been 2017 that it's really shot up.
Just hard to wrap my head around the BIG picture of it all. Guess you can throw $5-10k at it if you have some play money to take a wild play on it but just doesn't seem wise to me....it seems you either have the bubble crowd or the "it'll be 100k a coin crowd" and not much in between
 
Just today it's up $343 at like 15.4k but also was down over 2k in the 13's today....definitely volatile!!
 
kingjames5724 said:
Reading the comments here and it is clear that very few if anyone has taken the time to actually understand the blockchain, decentralization, and the endless possibilities that it entails. I will say that I believe Bitcoin is overvalued because of transactions fees (miner rewards) and scalability issues. However, if you understand how the entire market works. Bitcoin could easily see a 6 figure price tag. Many other underlying blockchain (non blockchain) projects use Bitcoin to buy/sell. Therefore when new money flows into the market, 95% of the time it is flowing through Bitcoin. As a result, Bitcoin's market cap continues to rise because in some ways Bitcoin is the faith of the market. There will be a time when it is no longer the leading decentralized currency but the underlying technology will revolutionize everything that we do with payment systems, smart technology, data storage, and more.
Click to expand...

Blockchain as a concept and the technology isn’t going anywhere and will only evolve and improve. The question will be, where does the value go within the various cryptocurrencies. In just the last few years a bunch of different cryptocurrencies have emerged, purporting to have different advantages and purposes, low processing fees, stability, etc. backed either publicly or clandestinely by different traditional and financial entities and corporations. And there are already fights occurring over which vendors will and will not accept certain cryptocurrencies moving forward, with some organizations already refusing to accept bitcoin and moving to other digital currencies.

I think bitcoin is pretty sound, because it’s already gone through ups and downs, but has established its market and purpose. The challenge for investors will be to figure out the potential short and long term values of all the alternatives.
 
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I recently bought $250 of Ethereum and $250 of Litecoin for the hell of it. If it does something, cool. If it tanks, it's not a big loss.
 
world famous 3rd base hecklers said:
I think you can play the Bitcoins by owning stocks like V, MA, SQ MCB, CME & CBOE with less risk...

I think it's a Fonzi Scheme...
Click to expand...

Hahaha...ok
fonzie-scheme.jpg
 
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LAST MANGO said:
There are only 21,000,000 bitcoin in existence and that's all there will ever be. Unlike our dollar which can be pumped into our economy overnight by the Federal Reserve.

This fixed amount has made it very volatile, and it's become more of a commodity like gold than an actual currency. The big banks are already copying the format that bitcoin is based on, which is called blockchain. Blockchain is a pretty complex system to understand, and I sure don't know how to explain it, but the basic idea is there is a public ledger that shows where every bitcoin is, and shows every bitcoin transaction. So while individual bitcoin owners aren't made public, the bitcoin whereabouts are accounted for on this public ledger.
Click to expand...
This. And just like stocks, when you purchase bitcoins you are purchasing an amount of bitcoins based on the dollars you put down. You can buy/sell. Since there is a set amount of bitcoins, it trades more like a commodity (albeit unregulated to an extent). As bitcoin and other crypto currencies gain in popularity and usage, they become more valuable (increase value). The hedge is - will they remain popular and expand in usage? The million dollar (literally) question. What makes bitcoin more attractive than other crypto currencies is 1. It is best known and 2. The set number of bitcoins (won't be any more). Other crypto currirnces can be attentive too but extrememly volatile for the same reasons - 1. Not as well known and 2. Many don't have the finite number of coins like bitcoins so are expandable, which makes them suspectible to wide swings in pricing.

While going short/long on stocks is volatile too, I much prefer that avenue than crypto curriences except bitcoin. However, all are extrememly volatile and can take your money quicker than Vegas (or my daily fantasy football contests today -LOL)

Disclaimer: I am not giving financial advise and I am not a financial planner. Just an average Joe giving an opinion on something that interest me.
 
If you decide to get into this... do NOT look at it as an investment.
There's no common ground here on how it's going to behave during massive volatility.

The rise can almost be completely attributed to people looking to get rich and dumping savings and other forms of investments into it.

That's all great and grand until it falls.

The guess is that a lot of the money being put in right now is of 'skittish investors'. That means that as soon as their unrealized pnl appears about to take a massive hit... they will attempt to pull everything out again salvaging what they have.

When the fall happens (and it's almost a guarantee to happen)... here is what's going to happen.

There's going to be a rush for people to convert to cash and overburden the current bitcoin exchanges available.

The harder it gets to exchange bitcoin to cash, the faster you will see the price tumble.

Some of these exchanges will start to fail because they are unregulated and not prepared for a crisis. Less exchanges = less opportunity to move to cash.

It could snowball even worse if hackers decided to really put a nail in the coffin and start doing DOS attacks on the exchanges that are left.

Establishing futures on the bitcoin was the last piece of the 'bubble puzzle'.

It could continue to rise even more the next 3-9 months. But the higher it gets, the faster you will see it come tumbling down. There's no dividends, no coupons for this 'investment vehicle'. It's being driven purely by greed and the media.

If you have 5-10k to waste, why not.

But if you are putting actual savings into this thing... be prepared for the worst.
 
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