Author Topic: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?  (Read 54261 times)

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Online HalcyonTopic starter

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Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« on: November 30, 2017, 09:04:08 am »
Being a naturally conservative person, especially when it comes to money, I've been very sceptical of Crypto in the past but have recently moved over to the "believers" and indeed the "investors" camp, now that I can see the potential it has (if implemented correctly).

I don't own any Bitcoin, but I have just started investing in others (mostly Ripple, Ethereum and Litecoin).

I'd love to hear from those who have had a more experience than I do with Crypto, what lessons have you learnt so far? I mean, we'd all love to go back and invest in some Bitcoin a few years back, but that ship has sailed.
 

Online HalcyonTopic starter

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #1 on: November 30, 2017, 09:30:34 am »
But the old rules about big gains going hand in hand with big risks (and losses) still applies. It's a bubble and all bubbles burst.

Absolutely, however I think in the case of Ripple (currently priced at ~AUD$0.35), the risk of any significant losses are low but the potential gains (if Bitcoin is anything to go by) are enormous. I can only lose as much as I've put in, but I can gain orders of magnitude more. I'm not suggesting just go for the cheap coins, I think implementation is important, anyone can create a Cryptocurrency, whether it has any long-term viability is a different story.
« Last Edit: November 30, 2017, 09:36:56 am by Halcyon »
 

Offline tszaboo

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #2 on: November 30, 2017, 11:03:52 am »
Yes, most volatile currency ever, prone to hacking, prone to "exchange website screwed you over", not accepted in the shops, and it is just a big ponzi scheme in the first place. What could possibly go wrong.

And humanity wastes 83TWh every day year into this.

And humanity wastes 83GWh every day into this.
They should just make it illegal.
« Last Edit: November 30, 2017, 01:48:46 pm by NANDBlog »
 

Offline Circlotron

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #3 on: November 30, 2017, 11:25:31 am »
anyone can create a Cryptocurrency, whether it has any long-term viability is a different story.
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Online HalcyonTopic starter

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #4 on: November 30, 2017, 11:27:37 am »
Yes, most volatile currency ever, prone to hacking, prone to "exchange website screwed you over", not accepted in the shops, and it is just a big ponzi scheme in the first place. What could possibly go wrong.

And humanity wastes 83TWh every day into this.
They should just make it illegal.

Volatile, yes, but so are commodities and other aspects of the stock market. It's almost the same kind of game.

"Prone to hacking" I disagree with (with a caveat). I think a well designed Crypto with the proper backing of banks and some major companies (which some have already), it's no more prone to hacking than relying on a bank to tell you how much money you have in your account. Sure, bank savings are guaranteed by the government (up to a certain amount), but what's to say a specific type of Crypto won't be in the future? There is a reason why some pretty big banks in Australia (ANZ and Westpac being two of them) are looking into Crypto for their own use and I think that should be supported.

Not accepted in the shops, sure, not as much as cash, but I have colleagues paying their credit card bills off with crypto, that in itself is pretty damn good (if you can make a profit), considering how long Cryptocurrency has been around for.

As for Ponzi schemes and making it illegal, that's tin-foil hat thinking. Governments all over the world are recognising it as a legitimate currency (and tax you accordingly). In Australia, the government get two sucks of the sav; You're charged GST on the purchase price and then again in capital gains tax if you were to cash it back out.
« Last Edit: November 30, 2017, 11:34:01 am by Halcyon »
 

Offline timb

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Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #5 on: November 30, 2017, 11:55:24 am »
Yes, most volatile currency ever, prone to hacking, prone to "exchange website screwed you over", not accepted in the shops, and it is just a big ponzi scheme in the first place. What could possibly go wrong.

And humanity wastes 83TWh every day into this.
They should just make it illegal.

I love how the first real Bitcoin currency exchange (Mt. Gox) was actually a website originally dedicated to buying, selling and trading Magic the Gathering cards (hence the acronym, MtGOX, or Magic the Gathering Online Exchange). It was run by some dude out of his mom’s basement. He converted it from Magic to Bitcoin pretty early in Bitcoin’s public history. Within six months he was handling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of transactions.

Think about that for a minute, people were literally saying, “Wait, you’re just a neck beard in a basement? ... Here’s a certified check for $10,000, please send me Bitcoins, kthx!”

If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about Bitcoin’s hardcore fan base, maybe this will:

There was also the guy who died mining Bitcoins early on, after he filled his tiny, non-air conditioned bedroom up with GPUs and power supplies, in the middle of the summer, during a heatwave. Then died from heatstroke in his sleep.

The worst part of Bitcoin is that it’s popular for the wrong reasons.  I think that having a decentralized crypto currency isn’t actually a bad idea for some scenarios, however to really be useful it needs to A) Have value by itself and B) Not require the “coins” to be “mined”.

Any crypto currency could satisfy point A, however (realistically) in order to do so, you’d have to get people to use it to pay for goods and services. That’s a hard sell considering the fact that “dirty capitalists fiat money” is already so well entrenched. That’s mainly because it works well enough, is anonymous and untraceable when used as cash, convenient when used as credit or debit and can be used as an investment vehicle when placed in stocks or bonds.

The fact that Bitcoin requires exchanges where you can transfer from Bitcoin to real money and back is proof that it’s not a real currency, but instead nothing more than day trading for people who think Atlas Shrugged is erotic literature.

That’s just my two cents, err, 0.000000021B.
« Last Edit: November 30, 2017, 12:34:56 pm by timb »
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Online sleemanj

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #6 on: November 30, 2017, 12:15:52 pm »
How could anybody price goods in a currency like bitcoin , the best you can do is pick some "exchange" and take it's current orderbook and apply some fudge factor and cross your fingers, with the curent volatility your prices would be changing significantly on a daily, hourly basis even.

Bitcoin (etc) can only be an actual usable currency when it's "value" is stable.  If it's not a currency, what is it's actual value built on, IMHO mostly baseless hype and the rest is in it's value as a currency laundering and blackmarket payments system, I'm not sure how I feel about supporting that.

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Online Ice-Tea

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #7 on: November 30, 2017, 12:26:52 pm »
Always think it's funny how people argue the value of crypto is based on 'nothing'. This is true, off course, but it's no different from any other currency. The days that currency was fully backed by gold is long gone. Not to mention that gold is exactly the same. Why is it so expensive? Because it is rare and people want it. Like crypto.

That said: when it's a bit chilly in my office, I turn on an ethereum miner. Works like a charm. True story.
 
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Offline EEVblog

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #8 on: November 30, 2017, 12:26:59 pm »
I'd love to hear from those who have had a more experience than I do with Crypto, what lessons have you learnt so far?

1) Buy and HOLD.
2) Don't panic and sell on the dips, just use it as an opportunity to buy more.
3) Serious money can be made day/week/month trading the fluctuations. Buy on dips, sell on high, don't panic if it keeps dipping, but more.
4) If doing 3) then you stand to gain more percentage swings with the altcoins.
 

Offline timb

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Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #9 on: November 30, 2017, 12:47:52 pm »
I'd love to hear from those who have had a more experience than I do with Crypto, what lessons have you learnt so far?

1) Buy and HOLD.
2) Don't panic and sell on the dips, just use it as an opportunity to buy more.
3) Serious money can be made day/week/month trading the fluctuations. Buy on dips, sell on high, don't panic if it keeps dipping, but more.
4) If doing 3) then you stand to gain more percentage swings with the altcoins.

It’s a shame there wasn’t already a well established place where people could do this sort of thing before crypto currency came around.

Imagine some sort of market where people could use real money to invest in things. Like the stock of a company, or various commodities. This market could also act a speculative vehicle of sorts for the currency in question.

Too bad there isn’t such a thing. [emoji20]
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Offline Cerebus

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #10 on: November 30, 2017, 01:03:22 pm »
And humanity wastes 83TWh every day into this.

I find that figure highly suspect.  :bullshit:

The UK, on average, consumes 0.83 TWh of electricity every day. The whole world's daily energy consumption (all sources, not just electricity) is about 400 TWh/day. Are cryptocurrencies really consuming the electricity that about 100 medium sized countries do? Or using over 1/5 of the whole world's energy supply? I think not.
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Offline tszaboo

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #11 on: November 30, 2017, 01:10:06 pm »
And humanity wastes 83TWh every day into this.

I find that figure highly suspect.  :bullshit:

The UK, on average, consumes 0.83 TWh of electricity every day. The whole world's daily energy consumption (all sources, not just electricity) is about 400 TWh/day. Are cryptocurrencies really consuming the electricity that about 100 medium sized countries do? Or using over 1/5 of the whole world's energy supply? I think not.
Well, apparently, I cannot read tables. It is GWh per day.
But it is a crazy high value, even considering, that the entire thing can plummet on a moment's notice.
« Last Edit: November 30, 2017, 01:49:16 pm by NANDBlog »
 

Offline Cerebus

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #12 on: November 30, 2017, 01:16:00 pm »
How could anybody price goods in a currency like bitcoin , the best you can do is pick some "exchange" and take it's current orderbook and apply some fudge factor and cross your fingers, with the curent volatility your prices would be changing significantly on a daily, hourly basis even.

A long time ago I was involved with businesses that relied entirely on supplies that were traded in currencies that were not their native ones, and those supplies were not commodities you could buy futures in. They were just as affected by volatility of 'real' currencies as in the scenario you outline. Heck, there are people who make their money by trading (betting) on the volatility of 'real' currencies.

If anything, because the current cryptocurrencies rely on real inputs (computing hardware and energy) they in theory have more intrinsic value than fiat currencies do. Obviously in practice they behave much more like fiat currencies with high price volatility - pick your own example 'real' currency that fits the bill.
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Offline woody

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #13 on: November 30, 2017, 01:23:47 pm »
83TWh? It is not that bad. But still Bitcoin uses a lot of power:

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

This has to do with the Achilles heel of bitcoin, the blockchain. While a brilliant concept, adding transactions to the blockchain in decentralized computers everywhere (of which 'mining' is a necessary part) takes an enormous amount of power and time. This limits the maximum number of transactions per second to unrealistic values (~10/s), where any bank worth its salt can handle 10000's transactions per second.

I very much like the idea of Crypto as nobody's currency (no influence of states, central banks, etc) but I think that the current implementation of Bitcoin is not going to cut it in the long run.

Nice gamble if you were in time though.
 

Online Ice-Tea

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #14 on: November 30, 2017, 01:27:42 pm »

Offline Ampera

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #15 on: November 30, 2017, 02:45:29 pm »
I'd love to hear from those who have had a more experience than I do with Crypto, what lessons have you learnt so far?

1) Buy and HOLD.
2) Don't panic and sell on the dips, just use it as an opportunity to buy more.
3) Serious money can be made day/week/month trading the fluctuations. Buy on dips, sell on high, don't panic if it keeps dipping, but more.
4) If doing 3) then you stand to gain more percentage swings with the altcoins.

Sounds like a poor man's (in metaphor only) stock market where you don't actually invest into anything. Just ride the mystical Bitcoin wave.

Honestly, it's a cashgrab for everybody involved, just like the stock market. I've researcher it, but don't have the time nor funds to try to ride the magical wave. Perhaps we are headed towards a second dotcom bubble, but this time cryptocurrency based?

I personally don't harp myself on the illegal uses of Bitcoin, as with every useful thing, someone will want to break a law with it. I'd just be careful with whatever you do. There are places built to screw you over real hard with this stuff.
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Offline ebastler

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #16 on: November 30, 2017, 03:50:08 pm »
I don't own any Bitcoin, but I have just started investing in others (mostly Ripple, Ethereum and Litecoin).

I think the word you are looking for is "speculating", not "investing".  ::)
 
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Offline taydin

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #17 on: November 30, 2017, 04:16:07 pm »
I know from our local stock market. Whenever a stock is being trumpeted heavily in the media, people jump on the bandwagon, and soon thereafter, that stock crashes. Looks like the major investors of that stock do the trumpeting before they decide to sell off their entire holdings. And the purpose of the trumpeting is to get a last minute upwards movement on that stock.

This process is called "sucker shaking" here  :-DD

I'm suspecting that the same holds true for bitcoin. It will soon crash, and crash hard ...
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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #18 on: November 30, 2017, 04:26:14 pm »
I got into cryptocurrency mining about 2 years ago. In that time, it has helped my electronics hobby pay for itself, and a month ago I put together a solar powered mining setup to help my best friend, getting me a little fame in the process.
Cryptocurrency has taught me to love math and at the same time be baffled by it.

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Offline Gribo

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #19 on: November 30, 2017, 04:38:41 pm »
At its root, it is a matter of trust, do you trust your government not to print money and erode its value? Take into account that you also have to trust the US federal government as the USD is the world's current reserve coin and for the last 10 years, they were printing money in an effort to erode its value on purpose.
Or, do you trust a decentralized coin, which cannot be made easily as it requires certain effort to create.
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Offline bd139

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #20 on: November 30, 2017, 04:51:52 pm »
At its root, it is a matter of trust, do you trust your government not to print money and erode its value? Take into account that you also have to trust the US federal government as the USD is the world's current reserve coin and for the last 10 years, they were printing money in an effort to erode its value on purpose.
Or, do you trust a decentralized coin, which cannot be made easily as it requires certain effort to create.

Indeed. This is all you need to know about currency. This applies to cryptocurrency too.

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Offline timb

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #21 on: November 30, 2017, 06:17:29 pm »
At its root, it is a matter of trust, do you trust your government not to print money and erode its value? Take into account that you also have to trust the US federal government as the USD is the world's current reserve coin and for the last 10 years, they were printing money in an effort to erode its value on purpose.
Or, do you trust a decentralized coin, which cannot be made easily as it requires certain effort to create.

Then why use a crypto currency whose value is directly tied to that “eroded capitalist scum fiat dollar”? That makes little sense to me.

Another question for the crypto currency experts: What happens when, eventually, processors (CPUs, GPUs, ASICs, whatever) speed up to the point that mining a coin requires no effort? Won’t that erode the value of the coins?
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Offline rstofer

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #22 on: November 30, 2017, 06:22:16 pm »
I know from our local stock market. Whenever a stock is being trumpeted heavily in the media, people jump on the bandwagon, and soon thereafter, that stock crashes. Looks like the major investors of that stock do the trumpeting before they decide to sell off their entire holdings. And the purpose of the trumpeting is to get a last minute upwards movement on that stock.

This process is called "sucker shaking" here  :-DD

I'm suspecting that the same holds true for bitcoin. It will soon crash, and crash hard ...

Around here it is called 'pump and dump'.

When you see ads in every paper screaming to 'buy gold', it's time to sell.  The advertisers are trying to see their gold to you.  When everything looks like 'gloom and doom' (2008), it's time to buy.

What is behind Bitcoin?  Behind most world currencies there is something of value.  Gold in some cases, 'full faith and credit' in others.  But there is something supporting the currency.  Bitcoin has nothing except a volatile exchange rate.

Anybody remember the Tulips?

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

Offline Gribo

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #23 on: November 30, 2017, 06:27:38 pm »
It is nominated in USD because, as stated above, USD is the current, most common trade currency in the world. In the past, it used to be the British pound, in the future, who knows? There are efforts made by some countries to establish a different reserve currency.

If CPU/GPU/ASICS catch up, the hashes can and do, grow more complex. Also, define no effort, there is no such thing as a free launch, and compare it with the cost of 'printing' a dollar (hint: There is no paper involved).
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Offline Cerebus

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Re: Cryptocurrency -- Is anyone on-board?
« Reply #24 on: November 30, 2017, 09:28:56 pm »
Behind most world currencies there is something of value.  Gold in some cases, 'full faith and credit' in others. 

To the best of my knowledge no countries' currency operates on a gold standard any more. The nearest any country comes is Lebanon, which has gold reserves equivalent to around 50% of the Lebanese money supply. Most major currency's home countries have at best 5% of gold reserves versus money supply, some much less. But all the aforementioned are nevertheless still fiat currencies, not on a gold standard of any sort.

'Faith' in a fiat currency can evaporate overnight; that's no more substantial than the faith people place in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. If anything 'negotiable' could be said to back most major currencies, it is in fact debt; at least the cryptocurrencies have a "proof of work done" which implies the expenditure of real physical, fungible resources.
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