bitcoin

Can someone explain BITCOIN to me? This is really taken off, I just don't full understand how it works. All I know is I wish I would have gotten in sooner!

 

It's like junk bonds. Or a casino. Better yet, a combination of both.

 

right now 1 bitcoin is roughly $10K

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

 

I have a limited understanding but my thinking goes something like this....you buy something worthless and if enough people buy said worthless thing it's no longer worthless by some magic. Is that right?

 

Correct. I do not know of any place that takes bitcoins as a approved type of currency. So IMO pure speculation and obscure desire drives the price up.

 

It's where people hire a machine to spit out a hard to guess series of ones and zeros that they then pretend is money. Think late '90s startup stocks on steroids. Look how well that turned out.

 

HIGH Risk... and with no guarantee how to track it things could get ugly. The old saying, "high risk/high reward" or the anther saying, "if its too good to be true...it just might be!" I did have a buddy that got in a long time ago, had like 40 bitcoins worth a cool $340,000 today. yikes!

 

@smooosh - this is right up your alley....

 

electronic currency. Worth a lot and nothing at the same time.
Dark web shit. You wanna purchase illegal firearms online or hack into a business and hold it hostage for ransom, bit coins are you preferred form of currency.

 

filthy motorsports takes bitcoin !

https://www.filthymotorsports.com/Articles.asp?ID=268

 

Lol, a thread full of people who have no investment in Bitcoin. Whatever you think it is, or isn't, it's make it some folks a shit load of money right now.

Its a decentralized online currency. Complete with all the risks and rewards that come with that. Hackers, major value swings, exciting times!

Maybe not the best long term investment, but it's a wild ride at the moment.

 

As others have said it is electronic currency. It gets its value because people find value in it. There are places you can use it to buy things now but not a lot and who wants to spend something that can be worth $1,000 more tomorrow?

It was created during the last world wide economic downturn because our money has been manipulated by central banks all around the world. It is a decentralized currency (which means no one person or group runs it) that has proven in Venezuela that it can do what it was designed for. It has problems like issues with scaling and transaction time but that is why there are a bunch of competitors out there. We are in the beginning of mass adoption so while $10,000 is crazy this could just be the beginning. The Tech bubble people above are talking about took 3+ years before it all came crashing down. If you put your tv on one of the financial channels they are all talking about bitcoin now because wall street is going to start selling futures. If you watch the Big Bang Theory tomorrow on TV they are doing an episode on Bitcoin which will make a bunch of people aware of it that have no idea.

If you are thinking about getting involved make sure you do a bunch of research before you put any big money in. Anything you do put in make sure it is something that you are willing to lose because as MistrRoboto said it has major value swings. Just today it went from $9,000 to $11,500 back down to $8,500 and as of this post it is sitting at $10,300. If you bought at $11,500 you would be down right now but not as bad as you would be if you sold when it crashed to $8,500. It goes up and down but you can also make money on the swings if you time it right but that is hard to do especially as a new person. Most people freak out when it drops a couple hundred let alone a thousand dollars and the problem is they sell right before it goes back up.

If you ask @tomsinamerica he would tell you I told him at $4,000 that it was not a great time to buy because its bound to correct. I still know its bound to correct but I will no longer tell you when its good to buy or not because $4,000 would have been a great time to buy.

If you are going to buy the place most new people buy from is https://www.coinbase.com/join/591f41b5a4c41503ade619b1. They make it easy for a new person to buy one of the big 3 (Bitcoin, Ethereum or light coin). After you lean those you start getting into the hundreds of other coins that you buy and sell to try and get more bitcoin. That is a whole other side to crypto. If the big 3 are stocks the alt coins are penny stocks. Even bigger risk and even bigger reward.

If anyone has any questions feel free to contact me. I will do my best to help you.

 

I call this momentum investing - the upswing of the price is based on emotion and speculation. This builds momentum in the market and the market WILL correct; you can try to guess, but at the end of the day, it is just a guess.

NOTE - bitcoin brought BlockChain computing into the limelight of the average american. I've invested in companies that are building blockchain applications and embedding blockchain capabilities into their hardware. BLOCK CHAIN (not bit coin) is a solid game changing design for applications such as accounting and customer interaction software. This distributed accounting model makes it currently impossible to modify a financial record once posted (banks can literally follow the life of a dollar and all its transactions). Block Chain is being adopted by businesses to interact with their customers, including critical information such as health info and Personal Identification Information because it is so secure.

* Note - not providing investment advice, I don't like seeing grown men and woman cry.....

 

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4100663-gbtc-better-bitcoin

You can always go this route also. This makes it a bit easier for a beginner to get into Bitcoin.
Also. The IRS just got access to over 14,000 Bitcoin accounts.
http://fortune.com/2017/11/29/irs-coinbase/

So the gov will track you, find you and get their money now even with an unregulated crypto currency. So you could have to pay taxes on a transaction that you thought was off the grid and secure that you paid with with a non U.S. currency. Hmmm?!? Keep in mind that out of those 14,000 accounts there are really ten or so they are really after for illegal activity. The rest is just a smokescreen.
You are better off taking that $$ you have to invest and buying Amazon or wal mart and waiting ten years or more.

 

Bitcoin may totally go down in flames but I do think that blockchain technology is here to stay. I don’t have much skin in the game but I did buy a few hundred dollars worth just in case the extreme bulls are correct and bitcoin goes to the moon. I do think the bubble will burst, the question is, how high will it have to get before it bursts? That’s a million dollar question (perhaps literally). I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is not okay with a high risk of losing their entire investment, this is pure gambling. While I am very late to this party (I have friends that bought in when it was $500, it’s now $15,000), I did manage to buy some at $11,000, just a few hundred bucks worth. I might lose, I might not........ but at least I feel like I am along for the ride lol

That said, if you want to play, here is a referral link to coinbase (marketplace where you actually buy bitcoin). Open an account using the link and both of us get $10

https://www.coinbase.com/join/593592a00b8e899741fd9dec

 

@Bigjohn so is coinbase a place to invest in bitcoin? Lets say I only want to invest $500 is it just like stocks buying and trading?

 

Coinbase is a marketplace. You are limited to buying bitcoin, ETH or litecoin. You can buy right then and there at current price. If you want to trade, buy other crypto currencies, set limit buy and sell orders in advance (like the stock market), you’d use GDAX. GDAX is the exchange and a sister company of coinbase, you will automatically have an account there once your coinbase account is active. Keep in mind, the “onboarding process” will require a ton of personal information (curtesy of the US government) but once you are in, you have a ton of privacy on transacting and trading

 

Yes kind of. Its the biggest US marketplace. While I know purists don't like this, think of Bitcoin as digital gold bars. They can be purchased and kept online in an exchange like Coinbase, moved to other wallets such as "Blockchain.info", or even printed onto a piece of paper and stored in a safe. It used to be a decent currency, but its more like an asset these days... so damn volatile and wild right now, its just not a good idea to be using it to say - buy gas. That 100 bucks in gas last year would now have cost you thousands. About 3 years ago I went to a local restaurant to kick off their acceptance of Bitcoin by buying my meal with it. That is like a 10k meal now

While its a bit intimidating at first, the process is easy. You sign up at coinbase.com, add your bank information, and just purchase whatever USD amount of BTC you want. There is a 1.25% transaction fee, it takes about a week, and they ACH withdraw from your bank after a few days. Transactions can't be cancelled. If you decide you want out, you can just sell it right back to Coinbase at the going rate + 1.25% transaction fee.

Whether you want to get crazy deep in it or not, your insane to not just put in $100 and have some fun.

-Jim

 

Jim is exactly right. One (good) thing to keep in mind, once you are onboarded through coinbase, you can trade on GDAX without transaction fees.

 

Should I just use GDAX instead of Bittrex? I dumped some money into Coinbase a few days ago at a 30/20/50 split between BTC/ETH/LTC.

 

I'm personally not up on it enough to recommend a specific exchange, but I would like to say - nice job with some diversification!

Coinbase is a great way to get USD into the system, but you are smart to use something else afterwards to trade crypto for crypto.

 

If you are just going to use those three coins then stay at coin base (GDAX). If you want to get into alt coins then you will go to bittrex.

Coinbase fees are 1.49% to 4.99%. You can buy right now without the money from your bank account in your coinbase account. You will not get your coins until the transaction clears.
GDAX fees are .25% if you market order or 0% if you limit order. You have to have the money in your account before you can buy. No credit cards are allow.

Bittrex has no way to on board USD so you will have to buy something from gdax and transfer the coins. Fees are .25% across the board. When you go to bring your coins back to GDAX to cash out the withdraw fee of Bittrex sucks. Its the highest of all the exchanges. If you have bitcoin on bittrex that you want to bring to gdax you are better off buying lite coin with it and then transferring with that. You will pay less in fees. Make sure the price in GDAX and the price in Bittrex is the same or in your favor. You can make some extra bitcoin during the transfer if you do it right.

 

I have both. Bittrex has a few cryptos that GDAX doesn’t but find that GDAX is faster, more efficient and doesn’t crash as often. Not to mention free. There is also Cryptopia that offers a lot of the low-end Cryptos not offered anywhere else but that’s really going deep into a rabbit hole

 

Take fees into account. A credit card buy on Coinbase needs a 5% rise in price for you to break even. If you bought right now at $15,580 the price would have to go to $16,359 for you to break even.

 

sorry for the spamming but one more thing. If you're just starting stick with one exchange and the big 3. Its a lot easier if you are going to trade and not just buy and hold to do it against the USD. other exchanges are against bitcoin so you have to figure if you want to accumulate bitcoin or USD. If its USD you have to watch the price of bitcoin and the price of your coin and see what it is. You could make more bitcoin but be losing USD without knowing it.

 

You are definitely best off linking a checking account, which is what I have done. It will make your life a lot easier. Moreover, you cannot turn your bitcoin into cash and withdraw without having your account connected so might as well do it right from the beginning. My personal thought is that if I have to use a credit card to buy bitcoin, I really should not be buying bitcoin.

 

Bitcoin was hacked!