Bitcoin craze

[Baruch]

You can buy it in fractions. This comment alone of yours illustrates your lack of knowledge of the subject.

Britannica knows everything, so bow down and worship the Britannica.  But Britannica is a set of books, it understands nothing.  So ... knowledge is of questionable value.  Better to understand one thing, than know ten things, but understand nothing.

Yes, that is one very big feature (I have studied a book on the technical details of Etherium).  Also I just read the NSA essay on cryptocurrency ... from 1997.  You would be surprised what I know.  But none of that matters, I understand there is no free lunch.

[Baruch]

"Greece's Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by Russian national Aleksandr Vinnik, the purported mastermind of what US authorities have described as a $4 billion bitcoin money laundering operation, to avoid extradition to the US, where he has been indicted â€" along with his former company, mysterious digital currency exchange BTC-e â€" on nearly two dozen felony counts, including fraud and money laundering."

Russia is also trying to extradite him ... because he is accused of fraud/theft there too ... or is it to prevent him from testifying?  This guy is also accused of the Mt Gox heist.  Need I mention Silk Road and other prior scandals?  And the guy backing Etherium is a 23 year old prodigy, who is Russian-Canadian living in with a gnome girlfriend in Switzerland.  Just don't touch the Dark Net, if you know what is good for you.

[trdsf]

If it lasts, I'm in, great; if it collapses, it will have cost me effectively nothing.  The faucet I usually use has slowed its payouts, but that's to be expected considering the jump Bitcoin's taken.  Even so, it's money for nothing, effectively.  I wouldn't count on it to underpin my future, but I'm not going to walk away from it just because it's volatile.  It's all a matter of your expectations of it.

[Cavebear]

FYI, I just looked at my cryptocurrency wallet. Between my litecoin and EOS, my money has more than quadrupled.

you will say I'm the fool, but you can call me whatever you want, you peasants.

Remember the Dutch Tulip Craze...  The faster the UP the suddener the DOWN.  I moved 1/3 of my investments to government securities yesterday.  And I will be moving my US domestic stocks to safe places after the temporary stock upburst of the Republican tax bill soon. 

I'll hold on to my foreign stocks a bit longer.

[Baruch]

Hard to dodge the Dodge Ball.  The rulers seem to be wanting to crapify anything that ordinary people can invest in.  But not Bahama islands and nuclear bunkers, most of us can't participate in those markets.

[Mr.Obvious]

[Baruch]

Sell high, buy low.  In today's electronic market, that means you have to be on top of things, minute by minute, like a day trader from 2007.

[Shiranu]

One more reason to be skeptical (or two, actually)...

Mother Jones reports that the energy costs of running Bitcoin servers has skyrocketed, and this is primarily fueled my fossil fuels. The current estimate is that bit coin servers are currently using about as much energy as Morocco, or more than 19 E.U. States... and that number is going to rise.

Additionally multiple sources says rogue states like North Korea are using cryptocurrencies to bypass freezes on their accounts and bans on their businesses.

I can find the links when I get home, though both are very easy to Google, but that is frankly something I don't have any desire to be involved with, regardless of "how good of deal" it is, and that the bubble could "never burst"...

[Baruch]

A BitCoin transaction at a store, takes 5000 times as much energy as an ordinary credit card.  The largest BitCoin mining operation is in China (70% of all BitCoin mining is now being done in China), in Inner Mongolia (at their famous unoccupied ghost city of Ordos).  BitCoin mining is one scam, trading them like stock is another.  Using them for transactions is "meh" unless you are an environmentalist.  Back in the day ... with a mechanical cash register, it took zero electricity to make a purchase.  You can make electronic purchases with ApplePay ... in more ordinary ways.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/why-the-biggest-bitcoin-mines-are-in-china

[Cavebear]

A wise person once said "Stupid people fall for the dumbest things.  That how you know they are stupid; and so do smart stupid people".  And "If it's too good to be true; it isn't".  And "Those who don't know financial history repeat it".

Wish I knew who that was. 

Do I wish I had gotten into Bitcoins at the bottom?  Sure, so I could sell them now.  And I wish I had bought into Microsoft and Facebook at the bottom.  But for every Bitcoin, Microsoft, and Apple, there are 10,000 stocks that went belly up.  I had a co-worker who invested everything in Sprint.  He lost everything, too.

I'm happy with the broad Vanguard index funds that went up an average of 12% for several years. 

I'm not greedy.  I'm bailing out.  Sure, the markets may go up for months.  But it isn't going to last.  I'm not trying to "time the market", just choosing to leave it for a while as it settles to a 20,000 Dow.  And I'm not a catastrophe-player buying gold either.  I'm just moving everything to CDs and Treasury Notes.  3% while the market fails is looking good.

[Baruch]

You are a conservative investor, who holds, doesn't churn, but also isn't completely passive either.  Vanguard isn't bad.

"I had a co-worker who invested everything in Sprint.  He lost everything, too." ... ouch, I wonder how my day-trader friend is doing now.

[Cavebear]

You are a conservative investor, who holds, doesn't churn, but also isn't completely passive either.  Vanguard isn't bad.

"I had a co-worker who invested everything in Sprint.  He lost everything, too." ... ouch, I wonder how my day-trader friend is doing now.

I have money in CDs, Savings Bonds, Vanguard index funds (in the 3x3 grid of Value, Growth, and Blend along the top, and Large Cap, Mid Cap, and Small Cap down the side), plus a few foreign exchange indexes. 

From 1990, when I first got ahead of my debts, I put half of every promotion into bank savings accounts.  And every time the stock market fell, I bought in.

Buy low and hold...

[SGOS]

A wise person once said "Stupid people fall for the dumbest things.  That how you know they are stupid; and so do smart stupid people".  And "If it's too good to be true; it isn't".  And "Those who don't know financial history repeat it".

Wish I knew who that was. 

Do I wish I had gotten into Bitcoins at the bottom?  Sure, so I could sell them now.  And I wish I had bought into Microsoft and Facebook at the bottom.  But for every Bitcoin, Microsoft, and Apple, there are 10,000 stocks that went belly up.  I had a co-worker who invested everything in Sprint.  He lost everything, too.

I'm happy with the broad Vanguard index funds that went up an average of 12% for several years. 

I'm not greedy.  I'm bailing out.  Sure, the markets may go up for months.  But it isn't going to last.  I'm not trying to "time the market", just choosing to leave it for a while as it settles to a 20,000 Dow.  And I'm not a catastrophe-player buying gold either.  I'm just moving everything to CDs and Treasury Notes.  3% while the market fails is looking good.

That's me too.  I have no imaginary fantasy about getting rich in the stock market.  I've played it years ago, but I have no interest in it now.  I have what I need, and am comfortable with that, and don't want to waste what little I do have.

[Cavebear]

That's me too.  I have no imaginary fantasy about getting rich in the stock market.  I've played it years ago, but I have no interest in it now.  I have what I need, and am comfortable with that, and don't want to waste what little I do have.

Well, to be honest, I DID get rich in the stock market.  I invested $200,00 slowly and it is now um, "more".  And its not "online". 

The odd thing is that it sort of snuck up on me while I wasn't looking.  That's why I moved it offline.  Harder to mess with.  Snail mail DOES have some advantages.

[SGOS]

Well, to be honest, I DID get rich in the stock market.  I invested $200,00 slowly and it is now um, "more".  And its not "online". 

The odd thing is that it sort of snuck up on me while I wasn't looking.  That's why I moved it offline.  Harder to mess with.  Snail mail DOES have some advantages.

Back in the early 70s, a time which I now consider "before inflation," I left a job at the University of Maine after three years.  They would not give me the money I had been required to put into their retirement plan.  It wasn't much, probably less than $1500 so I just forgot about it.  Many years later I got a mysterious letter from some outfit called TIAA CREF.  It looked like junk mail, and they said they needed to know my whereabouts.  Ordinarily, I would have thrown it in the garbage right away, but something about it caught my interest.  I cautiously called a phone number in the letter to find out what this was.  I'm not sure why.  Some guy on the phone said they were trying to locate me, and said something about a retirement plan.  I thought maybe he wanted to sell me one.   I asked, "Does this have something to do with me working at the University of Maine 20 years ago," and he replied, "Well, it might, I don't have that information in front of me right now.  You don't know who we are?"  I said I didn't, so he explained that I had this money that had been sitting in an account for years, and it could now be dispersed.  But I was still 10 years away from retirement.

I asked him how much was in the account, and he replied, "Well, there's $18,000 sitting in it right now, but you could leave it there or take part of it out in cash, or choose a monthly annuity payment."  This was somewhere after the time when the DOW had gone from 700 up to 2500, so I just left it there until I retired.  Now I get this little extra bump each month.  Not enough to live on by itself, but I chuckle every month when it shows up in my bank account.