Bitcoins

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Atelo
Posts: 7656
Joined: Thu Dec 29, 2005 6:47 pm

Bitcoins

Post by Atelo »

Has anyone gotten lucky and bought into Bitcoins early?
I got some at $6500 USD and made about $600 profit so far. I hesitated to buy them at 1000, thinking they were too much... then hesitated at 3000, then 5000...

Got an old friend from college who bought 100 coins at $75 each four years ago and he's now a millionaire.

They're expected to hit $20,000 by Christmas possibly.
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Dartagn
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Location: San Diego, CA
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Re: Bitcoins

Post by Dartagn »

Never had the firepower for Bitcoin back in the day. By the time I seriously considered it, big machines were already required to get actual BTC.

That said, hype aside I have yet to be convinced that this isn't a bubble, and that the protocol is secure enough for long-term use.

But, to everyone that got in early and can now cash out big, congrats.

I have seen more than a few long reddit threads about actually cashing out, namely that if you do taxes plus limits on withdrawing mean that no one is really capable of being a millionaire just yet. Is it possible for your friend to realize his worth today (or like, in a month) if he were to try?
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Atelo
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Joined: Thu Dec 29, 2005 6:47 pm

Re: Bitcoins

Post by Atelo »

It's definitely in a bubble at the moment. It has had another such bubble way back when it peaked at $1000 then drifted down to $300 for a couple of years, however Bitcoin is not a normal bubble. It can't ever go bankrupt like dot-com companies in the early 2000's. It will always be here, and anyone can become a node, and anyone can mine it. As such, even if the price crashes after the bubble pops, it's not going to close its doors and wipe out your funds like a stock. It will be there, available for people to buy back into. It will recover, and start climbing again.

It's also a global phenomenon with millions of people buying into it, far more people than your usual public company... and these buyers believe bitcoin is the future of currency. They *believe in it*. I think that will help ensure there are always buyers.

The guy in Canada with 100 bitcoins has already withdrawn 5 coins each for his two sons and put them into a trust fund. He has also withdrawn 2 more coins to pay off his bills and is sitting on the remaining 88 coins. If he cashes in, he has to pay tax, and obviously cashing in on them all at once means he'll pay the highest tax rates of 50% or something, but at current prices, he'd still walk away with 1 million.

Remember the number put on a person's wealth is often in stocks. Bill Gates doesn't actually have 80 billion, that's just if he sells his shares in all his various companies.

Recently a fork of Bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash orchestrated a coordinated attack on Bitcoin itself attempting to kill it off and make BCH the new Bitcoin. It failed. It has given me more confidence to invest more, but I'm going to wait until the Futures market opens to see how that affects it too.




If you're interested to know how Bitcoin Cash attacked Bitcoin TLDR:
The company is called Bitmain. They make the world's most powerful miners and own 20% of Bitcoin's hashing power and forked Bitcoin Cash (BCH). They first spammed the network with small no-fee and tiny-fee transactions while prioritizing high-fee transactions with their own hashing network (20%). This had the effect of making the network appear congested and resulted in doubling the fees to get your transactions approved.

This was all in a buildup to the next step. The difficulty of the network increases every so often, and a scheduled increase by 22% was about to happen (the biggest yet). As soon as it hit, Bitmain pumped the price of Bitcoin and dumped much of their inventory, then they took their hashing network to BCH. The price of BTC plunged while BCH skyrocketed. Transaction times went through the roof from 30 minutes to hours and even days (max 48 hours). Another 30% of miners went with them to BCH fearing the worst, resulting in a 50% hashrate drop on BTC.

The time to get to the next network difficulty change (a decrease of 25% now) was doubled from 10 to 20 days.

It dropped 30% and bounced back within a few days.

In my opinion a coordinated attack on the technology, transaction fees, hashing power, and boycott of the network all failed to sink Bitcoin. This makes me think it's a much stronger bubble than people think.
As of writing, the price has fallen today from $17,000 to $14,500. My profit peaked at $1350 and is now at $850 if I were to cash in.
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