Cryptocurrencies
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I don't have a lot to say about these, because I'm still in WTF territory.
But, since I suggested a thread - here it is - to discuss whether they're an enormous boat that's being missed or people might as well just be giving their money to Bernie Madoff - or anything else related to the topic.
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Ach. You never know whether it's a bubble or a scam until it all works through. However I'd always ask just what is you are buying? What is the physical thing you are buying in to?
But then I'm old school.
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Money isn't entirely physical these days anyways . Went to a treasury presentation on crypto, distributed ledgers and blockchain. All kind of interwoven as far as the presenter was concerned - a lecturer from akld uni. Def worth checking out, banks are working on ways to retain their place and deal with these new currencies. Biggest stumbling block atm is (some) institutions are making it hard to access/buy/use - that's in nz and some other places round the world. It's buzzy stuff and I guess by the time we know it's legit or a gip peeps would have made or lost fortunes!
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@catogrande Yeah - that's my starting point as well and a good reason why I haven't bought any and am highly unlikely to do so.
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I'd been folding@home for some time until I heard about crypto currencies and mining, so I started back in 2011ish. I stopped early 2013 when it was apparent it wasn't economical to mine coins on a rig at home when people were building dedicated gpu farms. I got a few coins (bitcoin) and thought nothing more of it for reasons I'll expand on below. Then it became readily apparent the "value" was going to go through the roof when people who had never heard of crypto were suddenly enquiring, media were running daily reports and a clear case of FOMO was developing. So I bought a few more and got out completely in December.
The mania was immense from South Korea. The amount of theft from exchanges is incredible. There are some people who have made an absolute fortune in the last year thanks to nefarious means.
There are arguments as to what coins are best in terms of solutions to the original intent (replacing fiat, taking control from central banks to prevent money printing ala GFC response etc.) or to address technical deficiencies in other coins - see forks.
Ultimately it's a pointless endeavour as no central bank will hand over control of sovereign cash to an entity it can't control. No government will accept an inability to determine fiscal and monetary policy. What is interesting to me is the underlying technology; blockchain. This has tremendous value in real world applications. Estonia being an excellent example.
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I have about 10% of my investment portfolio in cryptocurrency. That is slightly higher than I intended, but when I first bought in it was only about 2% (such has been the growth - though a month ago it was about 20%). Market is very bearish at the moment, but I am confident it will bounce back in a big way.
Everything is still attached to BTC, when it rises they all go up and vice versa. Ironically I don't have any BTC because I think it's madly overvalued and has no practical use case due to high fees and transfer times. LTC, ETH and XRP are the future I believe (esp ETH).
XRP is a bit of a gamble, hopefully it gets some traction with financial institutions and it takes off, but it's a long term holding game imo.
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I remember trying to get my head around it a few years back..but couldn't so stayed out of it.
Funnily enough the amount of old mates who I haven't heard from in years started facebooking me in the last couple months.
Hey Rembrandt how's things? Long time no speak, still (insert mutual connection/mutual aquaintance)?
..and then quickly followed by:
"So you're into computers and stuff right, what's the story with this cryptocurrency stuff, which should I get bitcoin/ethereal/ripple?"
Half tempted to tell them to put the house on ripple..but I'm not that evil.
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@rembrandt said in Cryptocurrencies:
I remember trying to get my head around it a few years back..but couldn't so stayed out of it.
Funnily enough the amount of old mates who I haven't heard from in years started facebooking me in the last couple months.
Hey Rembrandt how's things? Long time no speak, still (insert mutual connection/mutual aquaintance)?
..and then quickly followed by:
"So you're into computers and stuff right, what's the story with this cryptocurrency stuff, which should I get bitcoin/ethereal/ripple?"
Half tempted to tell them to put the house on ripple..but I'm not that evil.
House on XRP in November and sell on January 2 would now equal 10 houses
But yes, don't invest more than you are happy to lose entirely. And I mean entirely. -
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@rembrandt said in Cryptocurrencies:
@damo ha! shows how little I know.
Just because one is qualified to remove a computer virus after a dodgy pornsite visit does not necessarily mean he can give sound financial advice.
So get on the ripple train then? Asking for a friend
I bought a whole bunch at 25c planning to switch it to ETH, but before I did it just skyrocketed before Xmas, reaching an all tim high of about 3.30. (All in USD). wish I'd sold as it's now fluctuating between $1 and .80. I believe it may have a big future, but could also be a shitcoin. Unlike the other coins, it wants to be an establishment coin used by banks and money transfer companies (monogram, western union etc). If it gets picked up in a big way it could be worth $10 - $100.
ETH is a safer bet, but probably doesn't have the same potential upside.
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@antipodean I've always thought the trading of Bitcoin lessens its ability to be a currency replacement, although I'm sure some crypto fanbois can explain to me why it doesn't.
The theft also counts against it considering one of the selling points used to be that crypto's were nearly un-stealable.
Planet Money had a podcast with a guy trying to find his Bitcoins, I wonder how many other people have just lot theirs to the ether because they lost their wallets/hard drives etc.
Great article, the 'other' uses of blockchain are interesting.
Nice work cashing in when you did!
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Started back in November when a mate of mine doubled his bonus on Bitcoin (BTC) and introduced me to arbitrage: Buy here at a price, sell there at a higher price, make a couple of hundred. Cleaned up $1200 in a fortnight that way, without risking more than $2K at a time.
How I long for those days
The goal for me was just a bit of extra income to stick into the mortgage. Having an offset at 4% is worth jack shit ($40 a month if you keep $10K in there) so this was a bit of a third income stream for the household. If I could make $200 a month, then awesome.
I've played with various coin since then, and sunk a bit more capital into it looking to hold on some promising smaller coin. At points I was up 20% overall but a couple of bad decisions on my part, followed by this market slump, have reduced me to about 30% of the initial (small) investment). I've researched the coin I've got, and they seem to have good use cases, so I'll HODL
until they come good. Plus I'm not going to sell in a crash - I'm not actually down until I sell out, right? Coin I've got:
Bitcoin (BTC) - got 0.1 of these just because of the fluctuations which it will overcome based on previous years.
Ripple (XRP) - got a couple of hundred of these. Described above by others. Looks interesting.
Power Ledger (POWR) - this was an ICO from a company in Australia doing blockchain energy trading. Very interesting and they have international partners and government backing.
Tron (TRX) - this one is probably the speccy - they're looking to create a new platform for putting consumer money into the hands of creators, and (like a lot of these things) taking out the middleman.Ultimately if you put your life savings into it, you risk every bit. And I'm not quite that dumb.
My goal at this point is to get back to parity, and start shifting money into the home loan to help shift that down a bit.
I think there are interesting applications of blockchain (see POWR above) and the decentralisation is why the banks hate it - instant payments were stopped here on quite a few exchanges over Christmas as the banks refused to play ball.
This article was interesting: https://hackernoon.com/popular-use-cases-of-blockchain-technology-you-need-to-know-df4e1905d373
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@nepia said in Cryptocurrencies:
Planet Money had a podcast with a guy trying to find his Bitcoins, I wonder how many other people have just lot theirs to the ether because they lost their wallets/hard drives etc.
There is a story about a guy who inadvertently threw away a hard drive with 7500 bitcoins. At their height, that would have been worth ~$150 million.
Great article, the 'other' uses of blockchain are interesting.
I'm really interested in the benefits it can provide which is fundamentally an incorruptible distributed database holding records of anything considered valuable. I'm pushing to have the digital transformation agency adopt and mandate its use for government services. having built the portal that DHS and ATO use, blockchain is an infinitely more scalable and neater solution. Add to the frequent outages the ATO has had, cabinets full of top secret documents being sold to second hand furniture stores etc. this should be a no-brainer.
Nice work cashing in when you did!
More luck than anything. I actually thought it would keep going up for another month or two but lost my nerve.
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@antipodean said in Cryptocurrencies:
More luck than anything. I actually thought it would keep going up for another month or two but lost my nerve.
Guy at work bought 200 NEO after a recommendation from a friend - sold 150 of them for 5x in January. Made about $20k
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I think there is money to be made in daytrading small amounts of your holdings. If you learn up some trading indicators and use 3-4 of non -interelated one's (as far as that is possible) then selling high and buying low in a day is possible. Takes balls (and PATIENCE) though.
80% of my holdings are in a cold wallet that I never touch.
The hour by hour swings are unbelievable compared to anything else I invest in.
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@damo said in Cryptocurrencies:
Takes balls (and PATIENCE) though.
Yep - and time. I've done stupid shit in haste, rather than holding my nerve and selling at what I think is a good price.
FOMO and FUD. They're real, and they're deadly.
Now I've just got an app with alerts for particular prices set up on it.
I'm still toying with putting another $1K in though - could pick up a stack more of the coin I've got, to help cover those losses once they start to come good.
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@nta said in Cryptocurrencies:
@damo said in Cryptocurrencies:
Takes balls (and PATIENCE) though.
Yep - and time. I've done stupid shit in haste, rather than holding my nerve and selling at what I think is a good price.
FOMO and FUD. They're real, and they're deadly.
Now I've just got an app with alerts for particular prices set up on it.
I'm still toying with putting another $1K in though - could pick up a stack more of the coin I've got, to help cover those losses once they start to come good.
Yes you gotta hold your nerve and remember that most surges are not breakouts and very few falls are crashes.
I would stick to some of the more reputable coins now. Some of these newer alt coins look like they might fold/be out and out scams.
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Heard good things about Gencoin, although whispers it is used by Russian Maria fir illegal shit....
