Cryptocurrency
 

What is it? How does it work? Why would I invest? What's the guarantee of return?

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Just buy some ETFs like regular people.

Cryptocurrency is the death of reasonably priced computer parts. **** it.

The most expensive game of hot potato you might ever possibly play.

You buy some it costs you some money just to have it then it goes up and down until the bubble bursts or hackers get your coins.

"What's the guaranteed return?"

:facepalm:


"Investing" isn't for everyone.

The guaranteed rate of return is 26% a year.

your welcome.

*you're

There is another good thread about this. IMO, Cryptocurrency is a bubble, but a bubble that is about 3 years away from popping.

Unless you are mining it in a rented apartment, where your landlord pays the electric bill...theres no guaranteed return.

It's really REALLY risky.

Your 'safest' bet is probably to buy a little of the 4 big ones (BERL). Bitcoin, ethereum, ripple, litecoin. Weight toward bitcoin and ether. Buy a little every month and store it off line, on paper...in your safe deposit box.

Plan on holding it for years and it possibly going to zero. Don't invest more than you can afford to lose.

I believe in altcoin...the biggest problem with it is that the altcoin that 'wins' might not even exist right now.

Of all of them I like ether and litecoin, personally....from the little I understand them. I would avoid buying in too much to bitcoin at today's prices....but who knows...it could go higher

IIRC (and I probably don't, I know somewhere between little and ****ing nothing) the whole mining aspect of bitcoin is pretty much done. You either buy and hold or don't bother at this point...

Q

Being ignorant of something is a Q now?...

ROFL exactly

There it is. The official bubbling point.

I had three people ask me about bitcoin in one week. Shark = jumped.

It’s even on the front page.

Invent a time machine.

THIS THREAD JUST PROVES THAT BITCOIN IS OVER!

When the last people who never invest want to get in, it is all over!

THIS X 1,000! :clap:

Educate her, breh. We all have to start somewhere.

You and Beuhler helped me out a shit ton on investing and retirement plans.

This. ethereum is one that even Microsoft is making a bet into. That part will be interesting as people start to use Blockchain as a service to develop products around Healthcare and Financial Services.

There are some great White Papers by Sakatori Nakamoto that everyone should read before getting into this. They explain things very well.

It is now but....yeah...

Best bet to learn is by youtube videos. There are quite a bit of them out there. You'll scratch your head a lot but good info.

You say that but most vids are old.

You can't mine like you could 8 years ago...

Maybe for Bitcoin, but there are interesting ICOs happening all the time, not to mention the way that Blockchain is being used in industry. We are just scratching the surface...

Hit up teedubya. Rumor has it he likes to give his crypto away for nothing.

No...

I agree regarding bitcoin, but you can mine other coins effectively still...especially if you get free electric lol

Bitcoin has tangible value.

Other coins are speculation.

I think we should make that obvious here...

That's false..on both counts really

Bitcoins are not tangible..

All coins are speculative

There's several other coins with market caps in the billions

Like ethereum , ripple and litecoin

Another altcoin could very easily usurp bitcoin as the main coin...in fact many think bitcoin is over valued at 100 billion mc. Some really smart people think its true value could be 10x less currently and have published papers regarding this.

Remember Alta vista search engine? Google came much later...etc

Pretending bitcoin is safe is unwise...as is pretending it's not speculative.

In fact it is MUCH more safe to invest in multiple coins than 1 single coin (like the top 3-4 coins...ie BERL)

True.

I stand corrected.

This I'd completely disagree with.

It's as much speculation as the market is.

True...

Then you would be factually incorrect. Ethereum even right now, even at 300$ per coin has a market cap of 30 BILLION

https://ethereumprice.org

at 6000$ per coin, bitcoin has a cap of 100 BILLION


Ethereum has done the bulk of this in one year, and very easily could surpass bitcoin as the #1 coin for multiple reasons, not the least of which is smart contracts.

This all sounds like one bigass scam

Agreed.

And you could lose every single dollar tomorrow...

(And I'd argue you will, save bitcoin.)

again, youre wrong

you could and people have lost all of their bitcoin overnight. also bitcoin could easily devalue to 0. EASILY. (i dont think it will....but neither will ethereum or litecoin)

bitcoin is speculation also...

Im not sure what your point is.... that bitcoin is somehow different?..its not...its the highest market cap but there are others with a market cap in the billions as well.

30 billion dollars of ethereum isnt just going away tomorrow...and I would argue you would be better off investing in ethereum at 300 than bitcoin at $6000....

so yes, you could lose every single dollar...but you could easily do that with bitcoin too. the real question is how much can you MAKE? and what is the safest way to make money with coins. The safest way is diversifying into the better coins....the more risky way is putting all of your eggs into the bitcoin basket that COULD disappear too, contrary to your advice.

frankly , all coins are extremely risky...to sit there and act like bitcoin is a safe investment is bullshit. Anyone investing in coins obviously needs to have some risk tolerance...so the question really becomes risk vs gain. Other coins might be a better reward for not much less in risk.......I actually have money in coins and other really risky things...but only about 1-2% of my portfolio...because I am not that risky of a person.

I think another thing you are not looking at is valuation....even if we accept that bitcoin is the most stable and least risky of all of the coins, the price is still very high...Ethereum being the second most popular coin with a 30 billion dollar market cap....you can at this moment buy 20 ether coins for the price of 1 bitcoin.....or say 100 ether vs 5 bitcoin. Which will grow more/faster? I am going to guess ether at these prices..(IOW I probably would not rathe BTC as 'buy' at these prices)..but as I said before your best /safest bet would be to buy 50 ether and 2.5 bitcoin....print them out and put them away in a safe deposit box.


For the record, I am putting my money where my mouth is. I recently bought some ether tokens to hold long term.....which are even more risky than actual ether.

check out 'world crypto network' 'tone vays', 'crypto nick', 'the chart guys'

These guys post daily. There's a lotta good info out there dude.

No thanks.

There's a difference between investing and/or retirement planning.

This is neither and people need to do their own research on this. Determine your risk tolerance and how much money you are willing to lose in something like this. There is absolutely money to be made but it's not a long term investing strategy. So if you're asking yourself "what's the guaranteed return?," I can already tell you that you should not be putting ANY money into this. That's my advice for the OP.

I think you guys are all mostly correct. It's a gamble. My crypto investments are my poker money. 10% tops. BUT they make the biggest moves of anything.

I prefer to go long in bitcoin and smaller investments in other coins.

You can't compare these investments to retirement savings. Just another diversification.

My boyfriend said he wanted to try it. His best friend made it sound like a return, while up and down, was nearly a guarantee. Personally, I am skeptical and thought it sounded like a scam. I figured that people on here would know about it.

Also, it was like 11:30 at night, I was tired, and (for whomever pointed out that this was a Q) I didn't realize bitcoin and cryptocurrency were the same thing. Also, the tired thing probably also contributed to the lack of thoughtfulness in questions asked. :)

Thanks for the conversation, even if I did forget that I posted this thread and it was a Q. You all are supah shwell.

Things you should keep in mind...

1) Its definitely not a guarantee, its quite risky actually..and if you are talking about other coins other than Bitcoin and maybe 2-3 others (B, E, R, L) the risk is even greater. (as is the possible reward, though...in fairness)

2) In 1, I am speaking only of inherent valuation risk. There are other risks involved with crypto, like: Where do you store it? If youre storing it online....it won't be federally insured most likely..so if someone steals it..you are screwed. If you are storing it off line, you can lose the key..or someone can take it if its on paper. If youre keeoing it in a digital wallet on a computer, your computer can crash etc etc..and if you lose the wallet information, youre screwed.

and thats just for storage....its something to consider anyway

3) exchanging....You will need to A) purchase bitcoin...then B) exchange bitcoin for other coins.....and then C) exchange other coins back into bitcoin....and then D) exchange your bitcoins back into dollars ...if you want to try to make money and then get $USD back. doing all of these exchanges presents some other risks and costs.....that we can discuss....but this can all be a hassle to move money in and out of exchanges.....

and....leaving money on an exchange is pretty risky too....exchanges have gone bust, been hacked, and been embezzled....and you will lose your money if something like this happens at the exchange you use.

just things to consider.....

An Ethereum Startup Just Vanished After People Invested $374K



A startup on the Ethereum platform vanished from the internet on Sunday after raising $374,000 USD from investors in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) fundraiser.

Confido is a startup that pitched itself as a blockchain-based app for making payments and tracking shipments. It sold digital tokens to investors over the Ethereum blockchain in an ICO that ran from November 6 to 8. During the token sale, Confido sold people bespoke digital tokens that represent their investment in exchange for ether, Ethereum’s digital currency.

But on Sunday, the company unceremoniously deleted its Twitter account and took down its website. A company representative posted a brief comment to the company’s now-private subforum on Reddit, citing legal problems that prevent the Confido team from continuing their work. The same message was also posted to Medium but quickly deleted.

“Right now, we are in a tight spot, as we are having legal trouble caused by a contract we signed,” the message stated (a cached version of the Medium post is viewable). “It is likely that we will be able to find a solution to rectify the situation. However, we cannot assure you with 100% certainty that we will get through this.” The message was apparently written by Confido’s founder, one Joost van Doorn, who seems to have no internet presence besides a now-removed LinkedIn profile.

Read More: Ethereum's Biggest Hacking Problem Is Human Greed

Even the Confido representative on Reddit doesn’t seem to know what’s going on, though, posting hours after the initial message, “Look I have absolutely no idea what has happened here. The removal of all of our social media platforms and website has come as a complete surprise to me.” Motherboard reached out to this representative over Reddit, but hasn’t received a response.

Confido tokens had a market cap of $10 million last week, before the company disappeared, but now the tokens are worthless. And investors are crying foul.

“I got scammed big time,” user cioloxl wrote in the Confido thread on popular cryptocurrency forum Bitcointalk. “This was a very valuable lesson for me, in both senses of the word.” Another user, masternode, was more measured, but no less angry. “This is a punch in every single investor's face,” they wrote.

At this point it’s unclear what will happen to the $374,000 that investors put into the Confido project. At the very least, TokenLot, the website that ran the ICO on behalf of Confido (TokenLot does this for many startups), sounds like it’s having a busy day. “We’re the only remnant online right now in terms of people contacting us asking for answers,” said Eli Lewitt, co-founder of TokenLot, over the phone. “These were very good scammers.”

While many cryptocurrencies are still trying to find a useful application in the real world, Ethereum has become a darling among financial types because ICOs allow startups to raise huge investments in lightning-fast funding rounds. But a dark spectre has loomed over the frenzy since the digital gold rush began: What happens if a bad actor is hiding out among the bunch, and simply disappears?

Well, we might be about to find out.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...ested-374k-ico

A $31 million hack freaked cryptocurrency traders out and sent bitcoin’s price plunging
Joon Ian Wong


News broke that nearly $31 million worth of Tether tokens had been hacked and stolen. Tether is a digital token that pitches itself as being a stable cryptocurrency that’s pegged to the dollar, so each Tether token is worth a US dollar.

But Tether developers froze the loot in place before the hackers could cash out. They did this by writing new software that blacklisted the address where the loot was held, and convinced all the exchanges who use Tether to run the new software. This means that the looted funds can’t be moved or liquidated. The move amounted to a hard fork of the Omni Layer protocol, which Tether is built on. For extra safety, Tether says it won’t honor redemptions of any tokens from the stolen funds.

The Tether incident threw the cryptocurrency world into a frenzy. For a long time, questions have circulated around the relationship between Tether and the Bitfinex exchange, and whether Tether’s claims—that it has the $400 million in US dollar reserves to back its tokens—are true.

One dogged critic of Bitfinex and Tether with a large following among traders is an individual who goes by @Bitfinexed on Twitter. Understanding @Bitfinexed’s theory (explained in detail at Alphaville) explains why the market briefly panicked on the Tether hack news. The argument goes like this: Tethers aren’t backed by dollar assets, therefore they can be issued freely. A large Tether supply is then used to buy up bitcoin on Bitfinex, driving up the price. This practice has created the current cryptocurrency boom, and presumably provided ample opportunities for insiders to profit.

If the alleged Tether-Bitfinex house of cards comes crashing down, it could take the cryptocurrency markets with it, since Bitfinex is the largest bitcoin exchange by some distance. Crypto traders have been traumatized by similar crashes before, that have flattened the bitcoin price for years. Most famously this occurred when Mt. Gox—the then dominant bitcoin exchange—collapsed in 2014. That collapse was pre-dated by fund withdrawal troubles, opaque statements from the exchange operator, hacks—and a rapidly rising bitcoin price.

Bitcoin’s price appears to have recovered—it’s almost back to where it was before the Tether news broke. But the tremors from this breach means traders will be closely watching for signs that @Bitfinexed has been right all along. The account’s possibly prophetic pronouncements has already earned it the moniker of “Bitcoin Moses” in the wake of the hack by one industry personage.

https://qz.com/1134752/bitcoin-price...-million-hack/