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Bitcoin The Almighty Buck

Bitcoin Was the Best Investment of the Decade (cnn.com) 139

Posted by msmash from the all-said-and-done dept.
The decade is almost over -- and one incredibly volatile investment stood out from all the rest as the best of the 2010s. Want to guess what it was? Bitcoin. From a report: According to a recent report by Bank of America Securities, if you invested $1 in bitcoin at the start of the decade, it would now be worth more than $90,000. A bitcoin (XBT) is currently valued at about $7,000. While that's still significantly below its peak price of just under $20,000 two years ago, it's substantially higher than the fractions of a penny that one bitcoin cost at the beginning of the Twenty-Teens. Bitcoin remains a highly speculative investment, but it has soared during the past decade as it emerged as the most-popular and widely accepted cryptocurrency. More retailers are accepting bitcoin as a form of payment, and several investment firms and exchanges have launched futures trading for bitcoin, a move that helped legitimize it.
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Bitcoin Was the Best Investment of the Decade More

Bitcoin Was the Best Investment of the Decade

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  • The taxman knocks on your door and you realize that bitcoin is indeed taxable.

    • Re:That is until... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @01:58PM (#59533238)

      This isn't an issue for people that have done taxes before. I had a full spreadsheet from Coinbase with every purchase and sale, handed it to our tax guy and called it a day. Yes, we paid taxes on them.

    • Re:That is until... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by leonbev ( 111395 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @02:46PM (#59533456) Journal

      It also assumes that you were able to hold onto your Bitcoin for a decade without it getting lost or stolen. Considering all of the Bitcoin exchanges that have failed in the past decade, you should consider yourself lucky if you were able to pull it off.

    • Exactly.

      Remember, every bitcoin "enthusiast" you turn in for dodging taxes, you get 10% of the taxes recovered and they get to go to jail

      It's a feature, not a bug.

      • If you turn in a sex worker for not doing her taxes and the IRS gives you a cut, you are technically pimping.

        • If you turn in a sex worker for not doing her taxes and the IRS gives you a cut, you are technically pimping.

          Capitalism Is Everyone's Pimp - Chuck Mertz

  • Not even close... (Score:3)

    by mschaffer ( 97223 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @01:51PM (#59533202)

    The best investment of the decade was Powerball. For a mere $2 investment there was a 1.586 billion return for a few people a few days later in January of 2016. Sure, it was volatile, but...

  • Commodities aren't an investment (Score:4, Informative)

    by SonicSpike ( 242293 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @01:51PM (#59533204) Journal

    Commodities aren't an investment, they are speculation.

    The definition of an investment is something that grows capital. Buying a revenue producing asset (such as property or a business or stocks or bonds) is an investment. Buying currency or precious metals, or pork bellies is not a true investment.

    • or pork bellies is not a true investment.

      especially if your eating them

    • You can invest in a commodity. It may be a speculative investment, but it's still an investment.

    • The definition of an investment is something that grows capital.

      "Libertas in infinitum" means you're free to realize that all widgets are created equal, and are endowed by their creator [Satan] with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Profit.

      "Libertas in infinitum" also means that Alisa Rosenbaum is free to rise up out of the grave and ream your dutifully good-think objectivist posterior with her white-hot barbed strapon from Hell.

      Which of course she d

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Njovich ( 553857 )

      Commodities aren't an investment, they are speculation.

      Investment and speculation aren't mutually exclusive. Commodities like gold and oil are 100% a way to invest and potentially grow your capital.

      The definition of an investment is something that grows capital.

      That's a BS definition, but by that definition bitcoin is *absolutely* an investment.

    • Bitcoin is a vaporware commodity. It doesn't have anything backing it and is simply wasted electricity..

      • And by virtue of being wasted electricity, it's heat, so in fact Bitcoin == Climate Change.

        That's massive storms, heatwaves, and flooding you're soaking in.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by brxndxn ( 461473 )

      It doesn't matter what you try to call it. For me, it was the best investment I ever made - and I took shit about it. I had people acting like somehow I was going to lose all my money - like the original $2000 I invested was somehow going to lose me my entire life savings. And yet.. despite it being the best investment of the decade.. we have people like you trying to somehow play high and mighty and act like it is not an investment. Anything you invest money in is an investment.

      The real lesson I learned fr

  • Yeah if you would have bought apple stock @ strike (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hsmith ( 818216 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @01:59PM (#59533240)
    you'd be doing well too. What happened to bitcoin hitting $100,000 by 2020? I am sure all the people that were dumb enough to buy Bitcoin at $16,000 sure are happy with the ROI. What a stupid article.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      you'd be doing well too. What happened to bitcoin hitting $100,000 by 2020? I am sure all the people that were dumb enough to buy Bitcoin at $16,000 sure are happy with the ROI. What a stupid article.

      About 10 years or so my grandparents gave me a call. They had gotten a check in the mail- back in the 80s they had bought about $100 worth of Apple stock. My grandmother was a middle school math teacher and my grandfather was a college basketball coach, so $100 was about all they had to spare. They promptly forgot about the stock purchase, especially once Apple stopped paying out dividends. Flash forward a couple decades and a couple stock splits and they ended up with a pretty decent chunk of change fr

    • As with all 'investments' when evaluated with hindsight it is easy. It is very very rare to buy at the low and sell at the high, if you had invested $1 in 2010 you probably would have sold in 2012. At that time bitcoin was nothing but had gained significant value (resale value obviously not intrinsic value) and what assurances would anyone have that it would not crash to zero or at least drop significantly. Volatility is good for traders but bad for investors, investors need to have reasons to buy and to se

    • What happened to bitcoin hitting $100,000 by 2020?

      They're still trying, I guess.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by brxndxn ( 461473 )

      The people that bought Bitcoin at $1200 in 2012 were kicking themselves for a few years too.. Every other all time high in Bitcoin has so far been a good investment - there's no law saying the last all time high won't turn out to be a good investment too.

      If I made 2000% on an investment and then it went down 90%.. I am still pretty happy with my investment.

  • 2020 is the end of the decade, since it started 1/1/2001.

    • They didn't say which decade, and I'll bet they don't care. It's a stupid article.

    • The new millennium and new century started Jan 1 2001, but by convention, decades start at year 0, i.e. the 1960's are 1960-1969, 1980's are 1980-1989 etc. The 80s didn't run from 1981 to 1990 for example.

      • Nope, it started when everybody says it started, which is Jan 1 2000. Sames as centuries starting at '00 and decades starting at '0. Only a small handful of pedants insist on counting forward from year 1, everybody else just ignores the (valid) argument and has the first decade, century and millennium run one year less.

        • Everyone doesn't say century started on Jan 1 though, only ignorant people and those that ape ignorant people do; not a "handful of pendants" but educated people.

  • So we invested in imagation. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @02:08PM (#59533282)

    This is actually a sad state of our society. Our best investments are not in anything practical or beneficial to us. But in just a computerized number calculated and given to us, either by calculating it ourselves, or buying it from someone else with real money, which could had gone into investing into something real and practical.

    If you invest in Apple, Apple makes products with your money.
    If you invest in Google, Google offers services with your money.
    If you invest in Bonds, the government creates infrastructure with your money.

    You invest in bitcoins, you get a hashkey

    • Ackchually... buying stocks post-offering doesn't give public companies any money. Apple and Google don't benefit once they IPO'd (other than issuing new shares), the stock market is just us exchanging bits of virtual paper so that we say we own a part of a company that produces things. The government does receive money directly from bonds, though, and none of this invalidates your point that we invested time and resources into a virtual asset that produces nothing.

    • Bitcoin provides a service of money transfer and storage with clear benefits over traditional banking. Do you think thousands of brilliant programmers have worked a decade on pet rocks?

      Also, if you're going to criticize a payment system, please familiarize yourself with traditional money first, for example watching the "Money as debt" documentaries.

  • Most of the gains got gobbled up by big institutional speculators.
    • No, that's usually the case with new tech, but in this case it was mostly criminals who saw all the profit.

      • MtGox, etc. Literally nearly half the Bitcoin in existence has provably been owned by criminals, probably more.

        • Plus most innocent people who buy bitcoin do so to either commit crime (buy illegal stuff, launder money) or support crime (pay ransoms.)
  • The chief contribution of bitcoin to the economy is excess heat and GPU sales.
    • Don't forget all the coal it consumes. Plus, it makes CIOs look like they didn't overbuy IT tech - they flood the company with mining, take their own golden parachute in the form of crypto, and make it look like they bought exactly the right amount of hardware.
      • Saifedean Ammous: "Textile machines use more energy than needles. Cars use more energy than horses. Modern homes use more energy than tents. Bitcoin uses more energy than central banks. Human progress is the development of technology replacing fallible precious human labor with reliable energy."

  • No, retailers generally don't accept bitcoin (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lanthanide ( 4982283 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @02:25PM (#59533360)

    More retailers are accepting bitcoin as a form of payment

    Actually very few retailers accept bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency, directly.

    Instead there are payment providers that you can hook up your cryptocurrency to, then you use their debit card to pay for things in retailers. The providers sell your cryptocurrency at the going market rate and send the regular fiat over to the retailer.

    Given how slow and expensive bitcoin is, it is unlikely to ever gain acceptance at retail other than by the above means.

    Bitcoin is a flop at its stated purpose - a coin for transacting.

    • 'Gresham's law': bad money drives out good. Nobody will use a hard money, like Bitcoin, to pay someone accepting an easy money, this is just basic economic.

      • Gresham's Law is very problematic to the future of Bitcoin. Unlike typical fiat currencies, the value of Bitcoin is only proven by the network of people/institutions moving it around and providing liquidity on a day to day basis. When Bitcoin is no longer traded, its value goes through the floor. Thus if Gresham's Law applies to Bitcoin as a hard currency, its value dies and it is no longer a hard currency.

        The bottom line is Bitcoin will never be a hard currency.

      • 'Gresham's law': bad money drives out good. Nobody will use a hard money, like Bitcoin, to pay someone accepting an easy money, this is just basic economic.

        You think Bitcoin is hard money? Are you daft or just ignorant of the term?

        Hard money is also used to describe a physical currency, such as coins made out of precious metals including gold, silver or platinum.

        Bitcoin is made out of nothing but useless information. It is just a number and has no intrinsic value

        Also, circulating currency whose value ties directly to the value of a specific commodity is known as hard money.

        Bitcoin isn't tied to anything of value.

        Bitcoin is literally the opposite of hard money.

        • You really think, you will defeat Bitcoin. This is magical thinking.

          The only questions you have to ask yourself: Why Gold was the reference as money in the free market? The second question, can Bitcoin be killed?

          Scarcity matters!

  • Bitcoin is the only digital scarce asset (Score:4, Insightful)

    by slashways ( 4172247 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @02:25PM (#59533362)
    "Bitcoin is invincible; This is already too late to kill it. The scarcity of Bitcoin is not a conspiracy theory. The scarcity of Bitcoin is very real. Some people have no idea about what they are doing. They buy it, as the magic internet money; They fall for scams like PlusToken, or Onecoin... The price of Bitcoin stays very volatile. But the people who know what Gold was about, and look at Bitcoin for what it is; A new invention generating the scarcest asset humankind can have. These people will do well."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by RobinH ( 124750 )
      Except you can make any number of parallel coins, so it's not actually valuable.
  • The fully documented best return on investment was corporations bribing (donating to campaigns) of politicians that then gave them a huge tax cut. Payback ratios of well over 1000x the money "invested" in less than two years.

    • "fully documented"?

      Please share this full documentation that clearly sets how how much was invested, when, by whom, and how they received their payoff, who from and how much.

  • If you invested $1000 in the Madoff fund in 1990, by 2008 it was worth $5400.

  • Or money laundering, which is what cryptocurrencies amount to these days. Maybe they will fulfil other purposes in the future. Maybe not.

  • There's no con like a long con, and this one is a doozy.

  • They would be fools to accept it. One day, a single Bitcoin may be worth $10,000, the next it may be worth $7,000 or $5,000 or it may be worth it's intrinsic value: $0

  • Remember: Any rise in worth and any profit emerging from that former nothingness, is relative to YOUR wealth and purchase power.

    So whenever they say Bitcoin made them great profits, then to me and you, that means there is more money in the pockets of others, to buy more and at higher prices, leaving less and at higher prices too, for us. Meaning it is equivalent to you getting a pay cut.
    Because the total amount of people (man-hours) and natural resources did not change at that rate.

    Yeah, unless you're one o

  • ...shiny pebbles, or anything else that people decide is a medium of exchange.

    It's purpose is to transfer or store wealth.  It's not used to grow that wealth.

    Failing to understand that is why people will continue to lose their own accumulated wealth buying Bitcoin as an investment
  • It's still more useful to criminals than it is to anyone else, and has enabled an entirely new class of criminal enterprise: Ransomware.
    I'd just as soon so-called 'cryptocurrency' had never been invented.
    • Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860) famously observed that "all truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
      • The truth is that bitcoin is imaginary and gold is not.
        • If you can't grasp technology; everything is imaginary. Gold was defeated; Bitcoin happened.
          • If you think gold has been defeated, feel free to send me yours. Bitcoin is an electricity-aided hallucination. Have fun with that.
      • 'Truth'? The 'truth' has already been spoken: So-called 'cryptocurrency' is mainly used by criminals and has even enabled new crime in the form of ransomware, which would not be anywhere near as prevalent without an 'untraceable' digital means to collect the ransom. It's at least as cancerous to our society as so-called 'social media' is.
        Let me guess: you have a financial interest in Bitcoin continuing, am I right? I'll assume you are which means you need to recuse yourself from opining on the subject.

  • The given evidence only proves that bitcoin was the best investment, for a moment that was exactly a decade ago. That too, only if the duration of the investment was supposed to be a decade.

    Best investment for a decade would be one, which, if you invested a little fixed amount in it every day* of the last decade, and the accumulated compounded returns are more than any other investment made in the same manner.

    Bitcoin may or may not satisfy that criteria because of the extremely high price 2 years ago.

    * : In

  • I thought Bitcoin was BTC? Where does this XBT come from?

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