Cryptocurrency Investing
 

Hi All ;

My Sweet has decided she wants to try this, I know bupkis about it any thing I should be concerned about ? .

TIA,

I keep on looking at cryptocurrencies periodically. It is probably just me. I cannot make any real sense of it. I started out thinking of it as a pyramid scheme. Then a ponzi scheme. Now I do not know what to call them. A religious type cult type thing where you have to believe?

All I do know is there is an estimated five times the amount of money flowing into the stock market and crypto as usual.I can understand this with safe vehicles paying almost nothing.

Unforunatly I also believe margin accounts have exposed a lot of people with this free and easy debt loading available. They are borowing the initial margin amounts even.

At the same time I cannot state your sweety may not make some money.I have no ideal of how to estimate the risk factor. What I do suspect and is of some concern.Is they are making too many things like working for a living appear to be a joke. At this time.

You get something that appeals to peoples greed enough and it always flies. Till it crashes. If your sweety cannot spend the money she has now in her probable remaining lifetime. Why engage risk that you no longer have the time to recover from? If it does not work out?

Finding something safe to protect or retain the value of what money you have is hard enough.If we as a couple had enough years left we would be changing a lot of things. For what we feel is to come.

We just do not have the amount of needed time left. Most older people are too well grounded to accept paying 60K a share for basically a number a computor generates. If we are wrong will create an unbelievable situation in time.

For example the high stock market prices right now are a result. Not of real economic performance. Just too many dollars out there chasing the available stocks.

The banks here are even backed up dealing with establishing new investment accounts currently. For their direct investing subsiduaries.

The specific thing that concerns me is that there is no middle ground with cryptocurrencies. You are either a believer or not.

Personally would invest in index funds like from Vanguard if you want to invest. The broad market is always going to go up over time. Just depends what your horizon is. You only hear from the people that made money not lost.

I have invested in Crypto. I have a little under $4k invested in Crypto and so far I am up well over 300% over all. I invested in BTC, ETH and DOGE, most of it is in BTC.

Best I can suggest is do not bet more than you are willing to see go up in smoke. I do not do the day trade, or buy/sell. I bought some and I sit on it. I have had my BTC since 2018. I take that back...Ms Mash wanted to sell a bit to recoup our principle ... sold off a bit but then I convinced her to reinvest so here we are.

I use Coinbase for buying and selling BTC and ETH, Robinhood for DOGE.

First of all, there's no such thing as bitcoin investing. It's always going to be speculation. I heap digital coinage with a bunch of other things that can't work, but persist. The way bumble bees don't have the aerodynamics for flight, but still manage to defy gravity.

The purpose of bitcoin is nefarious: to undermine central bank "monopolies" on currency production. Or maybe to undermine current payment systems like paypal or credit card. Or maybe to make a boatload of money for the initial creators. Pick one, each has its share of truth, and nothing about it is pretty.

There are a few things that it isn't. The first is a reliable currency. The idea underpinning e-coins is that solving a very complicated algorithm can be considered "value". The bitcoin algorithm can produce a large number of unique solutions. Because a great deal of computer power is required to develop each solution, and because each solution is a very long, unique number, it can be thought of in the same way we think of gold or silver...something which is very, very hard to obtain and to which we ascribe value (yes, ascribe, gold and silver have no more intrinsic worth than paper.)

The amount of computing power required to mine each bitcoin increases as more coins are mined. In fact, this activity now requires so much computer power that it consumes enormous amounts of electricity. The last estimate I saw was that 100 terrawatts of electricity is consumed annually in bitcoin mining, contributing more to global warming than several whole countries.

Finally, the number of bitcoin is mathematically limited to 21 million.If you think of this as money, its buying power increases over time, because demand grows and supply is constrained. So as a currency, it's deflationary by design. Not only deflationary, but exponentially more deflationary as the cost of mining increases. Deflation works well for savers: the longer you hold the currency, the more it will be worth. But only someone desperate or extremely stupid would actually spend bitcoin, because it will rapidly gain value as long as more rubes show up to participate. You can't think of this as money, because you really can't afford to spend it. The original creator, who has wisely remained anonymous, made billions. Why this wasn't immediately shut down as the Ponzi scheme that it is, I don't know.

So where do you keep a bitcoin? You store it in an account called a "wallet", which is kept anonymous and private by the use of advanced encryption technology. The other part of this is blockchain, which is a completely separate concept. Blockchain is a sort of data base which is used to maintain a public ledger used to record all wallets and coins. It has the unique characteristic that it can be public, because the wallets are protected by encryption. And it's shared, because a novel mechanism allows the database to be simultaneously maintained by any number of 'exchanges". Anyone with money or bitcoin can build an exchange, and the activity is funded by a form of foreign exchange...as people convert their native currencies too or from bitcoin, the exchange charges a fee or a spread.

And that's the simple view of how it works. My own experience with it hasn't been good. I've followed it almost from the beginning, and at first I was sure that it would be shut down by regulators or would simply fail from lack of interest. When neither happened, I reasoned that latching on to exponential growth for a period of time could be profitable. So I set aside a sum of money to invest. At the time, the largest bitcoin exchange in the world was an organization called "Mt Gox". I started a wallet, and prepared to exchange some serious money for bitcoin. But before I could hit that button, Mt Gox went belly up. There was a lot of mystery surrounding the failure. Something like a billion dollars in bitcoin went missing (which is theoretically impossible), and remains missing to this day. I may have narrowly missed making multiple millions, but I also narrowly missed being defrauded. I was extremely lucky to have avoided that loss, and I consider it a life lesson.

What are the goals of the digital coin community? Still to replace, or rather to destroy, central banks. And as the recent Gamestop kerfuffle has revealed to anyone who cares to really understand, a new goal is to replace the securities clearing houses. I hope that never happens. If it does, then bitcoin will become the neutron star of the entire world financial system, drawing in every last dime of legitimate money before flaming out in a super nova. So as a goal for humanity, it's comparable to colonizing Mars:if you get there, your spectacular achievement will be rewarded by life in an airless desert, bombarded by space debris and cosmic rays, and finally dying alone in a cosmic dead end. But that's just my humble opinion.

My thoughts exactly. If I can't figure out the potential catalysts, headwinds, and tailwinds that can affect price action, it's just not for me.

Given most are at all time highs at the moment, it does not seem like the right time to dip your toes in but who knows. I trade on the markets regularly(stocks/options/futures) and I would say before dropping a penny in, make sure you have a thesis that you've researched and believe in as to why the crypto you are planning to buy will go up and have an exit plan on when you will take profits or cut losses. Otherwise there's a high chance you will buy high and panic sell low.

Useful Thoughts
 

....Because they mirror my own .

I never trusted bitcoin from the jump because it's an obvious pyramid scheme (I don't see they difference between ponzi and pyramid schemes) so this cryptocurrency thing seems the same to me .

I won't touch it but S.W.M.B.O. says she wants to do it so I asked because I'm sure she's going to put up some $ no matter what I say .

I've done pretty well in stocks, there's very little chance of $ vanishing there and it's pretty easy to figure out .

THANK YOU for the considered replies ! .

I never heard of how it turned out for the guy who forgot his password and stood to lose 200mil in crypto junk. My guess was that was just a bunch of whooie. If he could not access his account how could he prove he had them in the first place?

Do not "invest" if you do not understand it. There are also a lot of folks who spread misinformation for their own profit, be skeptical of anything you read claiming big returns. So unless you are willing to lose the money you put into it, I would discourage investment. If you want to have fun, go for it.

I created and ran multiple machine learning trader bots a few years back and did okay until the market flooded with casual traders. You are still trading against a ton of bots, I just never had enough time to update mine (if I had been earlier and made enough to make it worthwhile, I would have). I still have a good chunk of that in a wallet. Its funny to think back and realize I would casually trade millions of doge back and forth because it was practically worthless.

Huh? Its an encrypted vault. There is no back up, not other way of getting into the vault without the password. Roughly 20% of the 'mined' BTC has been irretrievably lost due to lost passwords.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/business/tens-of-billions-worth-of-bitcoin-have-been-locked-by-people-who-forgot-their-key.html#:~:text=the%20main%20story-,Tens%20of%20billions%20worth%20of%20Bitcoin%20have%20been,people%20who%20forgot%20their%20key.&text =Of%20the%20existing%2018.5%20million,the%20cryptocurrency%20data%20firm%20Chainalysis.

There is nothing more to the story, if he happens to find the password, that might make the news, should he not find it, the story does not change so there is nothing else to write.

But the returns are real. I am in for about $3500 and I am up $9500 in the period of a bit over a yr. I would not bet the farm and I am only in for what I am comfortable losing but the gains, should I cash in, are most definitely real. As of right now, my $100 in DOGE is worth $767.95 in less than 3 months.

Oh for sure there is money to be made, but "invest" is not how I would look at it. Way to volatile for that. Fwiw I am 27x my initial investment I made a few years back. It is also just as easy to lose these days, simply need to be comfortable with that risk.

Whew .

I'll tell her, who knows what she'll do .

Can you order a Pizza tonight and pay with your "coins" and tomorrow see a balance of $9480?