What do you think of Bitcoin?

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I am very pleased to come across this informative post about bitcoin.

In my opinion, Bitcoin is a good way to make money. As I couldn't afford investing in cryptocurrency, I decided to try mining. Having surfed the Internet, I was lucky to find a good source that provided me with all necessary information on how to mine Bitcoin

Last edited by B19 on 14 Nov 2019, 3:05 am, edited 1 time in total.: spammer

The way I see it, once any "get-rich-quick" scheme becomes known to the general public, it's already too late to get rich from it. You have to spend a fortune to get decent enough hardware to mine for Bitcoins at a worthwhile rate. Is it worth the money to try it now? Maybe for a lucky few. I'm not putting my money on the line for this though.

My sister invested $28,000 and was bragging that she had made $400 in interest overnight. She lost all of her money within a week in the Mt Gox hack.

I think its hair brained get rich quick thing.....you would be much better off investing your savings into a index fund with no to low fees that tracks the market.I think bitcoin is not a investment its just a form of gambling much akin to a vegas casino or lottery.I thinks okay to put your play money into it but not your retirement.Goverments could declare it illegal and what then?Although if you have a whole lot of money in bitcoin or cryptos you could move to Puerto Rico and pay zero tax possibly.Also i think its shady because its used in a lot of nefarious activity.Although i think cryptos could be next big thing but for now its just like the Tulips in the Netherlands hundreds of a years ago in a much more high tech form.

Bitcoin being imaginary is too risky to put ones wealth into. One has no real physical coinage so what happens when the internet goes slow? One is stuck. What happens if one is hacked into? Too risky.

ya good point....i would go if gold or silver if u wanted commodity money but i would not go with gold or sliver either.

Out of those silver will give one best returns, but I do not have any gold or silver as far as I am aware and to be honest, I do not really value them as I tend to be a practical person who values practical things. Money be it cash or any other means is a way to get them. A tool.

The security of that tool needs looking after just in the same way that ones house or car needs looking after (Or anything else such as a bicycle or a wheelbarrow).
Now if one was rich enough to buy a house, one would think twice if the house is first not tangable (In other words, a house where one does not own the land (Leasehold) and the house has not even been built yet and one has to buy it with no guarantee other then faith that the house will be yours to later sell on to exchange for something else and if built, the house is in an area that has a reputation of houses being broken into....)
Now investing in a house to later sell on as a means of retaining ones wealth for the future, the house had better be one that has already been built where one owns the land, and preferably in an area where breakins are rare. That way one can be assured that one has at least something left of value when one comes to sell it on.
To me bitcoin is a bit like the non tangable house where one parts with a proportion of ones wealth but one does not have anything tangable, and there are risks of even the non tangable wealth that one has can be stolen, and not recovered, so to me it is just too risky.
Yes, bitcoin has greatly increased some peoples wealth. I know of one Korean lady who invested back when bitcoin started and she had a few single coins of bitcoin and she sold them several years ago and made herself a fortune. When she initially made her investment, those bitcoins held virtually no exchange value, but today I am told that one buys not coins, but fractions of coins worth of value as many more people have invested.

But it is a bit like the difference between a computer game or doing physical work. Doing physical work for reward gives you a money form which can later be exchanged to get other things. The cash used is physical. It is actually only in the last 30 to 40 years that most people's jobs are paid directly into a bank account. Before then one had a pay packet, and one had physical money so one could exchange the value of ones hard work to get other things.
But lets say one spent ones time on an internet based computer game and racked up points. These points only hold value while in the game, and at any time in the future the game can be disscontinued and turned off and new internet based games appear and replace it. All ones time spent playing it accumilataing points is lost.
(If one plays games one should do it for the fun of it. Not think of spending ones time just to rack up gaming points, unless that is fun at the time! But one should be aware that at any time in the future rhe game can be turned off and onehas nothing to account for all ones hours of playing. Now bitcoin is rather like that. If in the future there is a war, the first point of attack will be the power grid system which will shut off communication and the internet. Often "Natural" disasters can do the same. At the very time one can be desperate to redeem ones bitcoin value, access is not available so this needs to be considered.

My advice is to invest in bitcoin and other similar kryptocurrencies knowing that if it goes it goes. In other words, it is like putting money in the lottery where there is a chance of winning, but one has an expectation to lose to avoid dissapointment... And if one does win one will be delighted, but if one looses one thinks "Meh!" and walks away. I would not invest ones life savings into it. (If one has life savings. I do not have life savings myself as I am not really in a position to do that, but you get the idea).

Last edited by Mountain Goat on 06 Jun 2021, 5:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

okay i see.....i think gold and silver returns are barely above inflation or something like that.

Sorry. I altered what I put as my brain was exploring my thoughts.

Gold has a constant value. It is a standard. Gold does not go up or down in the value of its purchasing power. When one sees gold prices go up, ones currency is going down, so if one sees gold prices going sky high, then ones currancy is collapsing and is in a bad way. If gold prices are falling ones currency is doing well.

Silver is different. If currency is collapsing, silver is something that has the potential to give profitable returns. During financial collapses, silver prices rise significently to almost be as valueable as gold on some occasions, but when currency is doing well, silver prices fall. If one invests in silver knowing a collapse is coming, and one is quick enough to catch the low prices before silver prices zoom upwards, and then one quickly sells after a collapse and the currency have stabilized (Or a new currency has began to take over) so one has sold while the prices of silver are high, one can stand to make an absolute fortune.
Gold just keeps its steady value so if one can buy a light aircraft for a bar of gold, and the light aircraft has not changed design, so it is the same product it was before, one can go and buy another aircraft 20 years later with a single bar of gold. This is the theory behind the gold standard. If one tries that in cash and it costs (How much to light aircraft cost? No idea!) lets say £50,000, and 20 years later one pays cash as well and it may be £75,000 as ones currency has fallen in value.
The rate, or rather the speed of which a currency that is not linked into the gold standard collapses is called "Inflation". (Currencies that are linked to the gold standard do not really have inflation. The UK was linked to the gold standard in the past, and in 400 years there was no inflation. It was when we came off the gold standard that inflation began. Prior to this, printed on the banknotes was "I promise to pay the bearer of this note the sum of... (Whatever its value was) in gold.).

A total monetary collapse can be temporarily delayed by printing money (Today they call it fancy names like "Quantitive easing"). Printing money delays a financial collapse but it is a bit like when I am heading into a shutdown at an inconvenient moment. I can delay the shutdown for a short while, but if I do try to delay it, oh boy! When it hits it hits hard and it takes ages to recover from, where if I just shut down without delay, I would be on the floor, have a shutdown, and be totally recovered in about fifteen minutes... If I delay it I am in a weakened state for most of the day and the shutdown recovery when I can get back up off the floor takes ages and I am vunerable to repeat shutdowns from the slightest thing while in this state.
Now printing money in a financial collapse is just like that. At first one gets negative inflation and people go mad buying houses as who would say no to negative inflation? Banks are paying you interest to have a mortgage instead of it being the other way around!
But what comes next? Total long lasting financial collapse with mass hyper inflation. Banks forclose on mortgages as they want their assets back to prevent themselves from further loss.
The days when people bring wheelbarrows full of banknotes to buy a loaf of bread are not unknown. If the collapse had not been delayed with quantitive easing, it would have happened. People would have lost out but recovery would be quick and the depth of the collapse would not be so deep.

I hope this makes sense? I am no expert, but I have ben on an educational binge and looked into money and how it works as a few years ago I wanted to know as it was to me one of those mysteries in life that I wanted to understand.


To conclude in regards to bitcoin.

I am not against the concept, but due to the potential risks, I would if I had a well paid job invest what I would call "Spare change" into it. Money that if it went it would not be a big deal.
I am not saying not to invest if one desires, but invest as if it was buyig into stocks and shares where one hopes it will do well and earn one a reward, but there is a risk that things could collapse or companies could go bust and one has lost ones investment. If one thinks of it like this, one will be investing in bitcoin sensibly and will hopefully get a reward, and be able to use it to buy things one may need as it is a currency after all!

I dont think a collapse of the dollar will happen anytime soon but i think if it happens it will be long time from now.......i highly doubt gold and silver will help u.....besides owning gold could become illegal again if that happened.

Bitcoin has developed into a "currency" whose main users are a) currency speculators, b) a handful of cryptocurrency nerds and c) a lovely collection of drug lords, paedophile rings, arms smugglers and terrorists. It has zero use for most ordinary people, yet its polluting effect on the world is growing exponentially by design. Last I checked, Bitcoin had a similar carbon footprint to Argentina, which is not an especially small or poor country. The blockchain community's general attitude to that seems to be "Not our problem, mate." So... I don't love it.

Two issues are contributing to the ridiculously high energy usage. One is that every single Bitcoin transaction contains an encrypted record of every previous transaction ever made. This takes more and more energy to compute as the number of transactions increases over time. (There are mechanisms for merging the history of transactions that happen around the same time.)

Also, every new bitcoin is created by intensive computation, known as "mining." If I've understood it right, there's two parts to that. One involves double-checking a load of blockchain transactions to make sure they're not fraudulent. The other is using this data to generate a unique 64-digit hexadecimal "hash" number.

Generating the hash is an exercise in brute-force computation, trying out trillions of different possibilities*. And it's competitive. Only one bitcoin miner can claim the hash for a particular chunk of data, but there may be dozens or hundreds of miners competing for the same block. So they are all motivated to have incredibly powerful computers overclocked 24/7 working at the same problems as each other in the hope of being first to crack at least some of the hashes. To make matters worse, Bitcoin has reponded to the growing numbers of Bitcoin miners by making the hashes even harder to calculate.

This is called the "Proof of Work" model of blockchain, and it is frankly an insane way of going about business. All the above factors are driving up the energy cost exponentially. And that's while it's still a fringe thing, not a mainstream currency! Apparently, some other blockchain companies have been working on a competing model called "Proof of Stake" which they say does away with at least some of these problems. [/rant]

*I wonder if quantum computers might yet kick the bottom out of the Bitcoin market, as in theory they should be much faster at solving problems like this?

Well I have a good friend who has some money in bitcoin and got locked out of her wallet.I hope she manages to get access to her wallet again.I have been trying to get her to just put the money in the stock market instead.I feel sorry for her losing so much money.I heard that happened to a guy who had millions upon millions in crypto and he has only one try left till he gets locked out for good.

I hope I am never forced to use it, too. It's too volatile. Someone can hack into your Bitcoin wallet and make off with all your money, leaving you with nothing to pay your bills with. Once you do a transaction, you cannot get a refund if you make a mistake. Most stores I know do not accept Bitcoin payments and public benefits do not get paid in Bitcoin, either. Until these downfalls of Bitcoin are fixed, I will not put any money into it. I wouldn't take a chance if there is any chance I could get locked out from my money permanently. I'll stick with dollars thanks. At least these have a constant value and compete against the euro. Also, it takes a lot of energy to make 1 bitcoin and it's not very environmentally friendly.

Does Bitcoin work much like the stock market?

not really......stock market is more legitament as investment than Bitcoin and crypto.Good investing in stock market is not a get rick quick thing like Bitcoin.Stocks are just pieces of ownership in a corporation that the public can buy and sell on exchanges.Some corporations even pay you to own their stock but I dont think people get paid to own bitcoin in cash or anything like that like it does in some stocks.I dont really undertsand Bitcoin but i know its based on the blockchain.Investing in the stock market is really useful for the public but I would not say the same of bitcoin.