Are Cryptocurrencies Becoming Mainstream Investments? (nbcnews.com) 135
The last time the price of bitcoin hit $20,000 was December of 2017. But Matt Luongo, the CEO of a crypto venture builder, points out to NBC News that this time the market is seeing "significant, high-conviction plays from [a few] large funds and even CEOs of publicly traded companies."
"Names like Guggenheim Partners, [hedge fund managers] Paul Tudor Jones and Stan Druckenmiller, and the recent support from Michael Saylor at Microstrategies and Jack Dorsey at Square and Twitter are telling," he said. S&P Dow Jones also announced this month that it will launch cryptocurrency indices in 2021, paving the way for cryptocurrencies to become more mainstream investments.
Beyond the swing of high-profile supporters, there isn't a way to tell who is buying bitcoin. However, the number of new bitcoin addresses, the unique identifiers where the assets are sent, recently hit a record of 25,000 per hour for the first time since January 2018, according to data intelligence firm Glassnode.
Luongo ultimately argues to NBC that "This growth represents real adoption, and it won't disappear when the next bubble bursts."
To get a counter-balancing second opinion, NBC also spoke to the creator of the YouTube channel "Crypto Bobby," who also notes that PayPal (as well as the stock-trading app Robinhood) have also added support for bitcoin.
Sometimes NBC refers to the two men as "crypto enthusiasts" — but other times they're just referred to as "experts."
Beyond the swing of high-profile supporters, there isn't a way to tell who is buying bitcoin. However, the number of new bitcoin addresses, the unique identifiers where the assets are sent, recently hit a record of 25,000 per hour for the first time since January 2018, according to data intelligence firm Glassnode.
Luongo ultimately argues to NBC that "This growth represents real adoption, and it won't disappear when the next bubble bursts."
To get a counter-balancing second opinion, NBC also spoke to the creator of the YouTube channel "Crypto Bobby," who also notes that PayPal (as well as the stock-trading app Robinhood) have also added support for bitcoin.
Sometimes NBC refers to the two men as "crypto enthusiasts" — but other times they're just referred to as "experts."
No (Score:3, Insightful)
First, because it's against the law, Betteridge's law of headlines with a question mark.
Second, gambling ain't called 'investing'.
Cash and gold are not investments (Score:4, Interesting)
They can be hedges but they don't naturally appreciate.
Re: Cash and gold are not investments (Score:5, Insightful)
The closest match to a bitcoin investment, is a share in a company that produces nothing, makes nothing, buys and sells nothing, employees no one. All that it is, is a share promoted by existing owners as a great investment as in see how much we were stupid enough to invest in a company that does NOTHING, is backed by NOTHING and it's only measure of worth, is the value of the advertising backing it, scamming idiots into investing in the IPO pump and dump, so being set up. Kind of deserve it, if you ignore the warning.
Are you defending our monetary policy? (Score:2)
https://twitter.com/JeffBooth/... [twitter.com]
Indeed. Speculating maybe, not investing (Score:3)
You're quite right.
When you put in the hours of work to go to school, in order to gain new knowledge and skills and that will produce good results later, that's an investment. You've bought with your time the ability to produce useful things with your mind.
When you put your savings toward building a chip foundry which will later produce useful microchips, that's an investment. You've bought productive capacity - something able to produce good things.
When you set aside some of your income to help build a sh
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Indeed. They are not only risking their fortune (such as it may be), they are damaging society because they are _not_ investing the money they have.
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Does it make any difference? When they buy bitcoin from someone with money, the money doesn't disappear into thin air, someone else gets that money and they are free to invest it or spend it.
It's zero sum so how is it damaging society? They have merely shifted the option to invest to the next person.
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BTC is negative sum. You forget the immense effort needed to "mine" it.
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I certainly agree about that, deliberately wasting vast amounts of energy is shameful.
Tying the creation of money to the usage of electricity when global warming is threatening our way of life is criminal.
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The line is far blurrier than you imply. If I buy the work of an unknown artist, is that investing or speculating? That money might be enough to keep the artist producing art until they go mainstream as opposed to needing to stop producing art to work at Starbucks. Which might lead to them becoming famous and my art being worth more money.
If I buy stocks, hoping that I get dividends, I'm not generating any production. But I am acquiring someone else's investment in an increase in production. Aren't I
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> But I am acquiring someone else's investment in an increase in production. Aren't I taking over their investment
Yes. You buying the capability to produce. Whether you buy (a share of) a brand-new factory machine from its manufacturer or you buy it used from an earlier investor, either way you are buying productive capacity - the ability to produce more goodness every month.
Side note - The original investor probably would not have put their money up unless that they could later get the return of their
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I mean, I don't see the large difference you seem to assume exists between "buy an existing painting" and "commission a painting". An unknown artist stops producing if sales are insufficient.
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> I don't see the large difference you seem to assume exists between "buy an existing painting" and "commission a painting
Oh I agree there's no difference, in the context of investment vs consumption vs speculation.
Commissioning a painting isn't buying the means of production. It's buying the product. That's consumption.
Whether you buy it before it's produced or after, buying the end product is consumption. Buying what produces the product is investment.
Buying an easel and brushes art would be investment
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Yeah, and hiring an employee is normally also considered an investment. That there is a huge difference between "I'm going to hire an artist for a one-off job" and "I'm going to hire this artist 40 hours a week to work in my commercial studio".
You also seem to think 'an artist produces work in a vacuum'. In a capitalistic free market, the artist needs to sell their work to continue. That sale is in fact enabling the means of production. I choose art to talk about because art appreciation is highly tied
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> the artist needs to sell their work to continue.
I'm I understand you right, you're saying that having sales is important.
Yep, it sure is. I totally agree. The burger joint would go out of business if nobody bought burgers. The perfume business would go out of business if nobody bought perfume. Sales are very important to the perfume company, the burger joint, the artist. I totally agree.
Buying perfume, or a velvet Elvis, or a burger are a very important part of the economy called "consumption". That
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One could argue that the Bitcoin system (or a different, actually useful crypto currency system) could provide value.
If someone were to invest in an effort to create a crypto currency system which was actually useful as a currency (store of vlaue, medium of exchange), that could be an investment. Bitcoin already exists. Buying a Bitcoin doesn't create the Bitcoin system.
> Nobody questions that Visa and Mastercard are valuable businesses.
A Visa card doesn't create anything valuable. A factory creates val
Re: Indeed. Speculating maybe, not investing (Score:2)
While I can understand why some think visa and mastercard create negative value. You need to see what they are to understand why they aren't. A credit card is an open ended small value loan. The burden is placed on you the borrower to determine the rate at which you paying back.
By lending the. Money they hope you take a couple of months pay it back. The longer you take the happier they are until you become a candidate not likely to pay back at all.
Learn to keep your cards paid off in 30 days and credit
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> When you buy a Bitcoin, you are actually rewarding the miners for spending energy to find it.
You buy Coke, you are actually rewarding Coca-Cola for producing it. When you a Big Mac, you are actually rewarding McDonald's for cooking it. That's called *consumption*.
Investing is when you pay a price to today in order to own the means of production, when you buy the things that produce. Buying the egg is consumption, buying the hen is investment.
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Second, gambling ain't called 'investing'.
True. But the fools gambling on it need lots of greater fools to push the price up. Anybody that thinks BTC is an "investment" nicely serves as such a fool. The rare stories where somebody actually made a profit are taken as "proof" that BTC is a good bet by these defectives. By the same "argumentation", playing the lottery would be an excellent investment. After all there are some people each week that win big in it. The win just has no reasonable relation to the population of people playing and what they
Re: No (Score:2)
Rare stories of profit? Every single Bitcoin wallet is currently sitting in profit.
BTC (Score:3)
The bigger players are entering the market.
Non-believers will stay so until a BTC equals a large sum.
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Actually yes -- they are becoming mainstream investments. What they are not becoming is mainstream currencies.
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That's not right. In the early days the community was trying to make a worldwide digital currency because it was cool, useful, and could be far cheaper than bank transfers or things like paypal or western union. The get rich quick people came later and soon after the twitter, reddit, and forum trolls turned up en-mass seemingly to disrupt adoption.
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No, it has been a libertarian affinity scam from the very beginning. Even Satoshi's whitepaper is full of libertard dog whistles.
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The question is not, "Is Bitcoin worth something?" The right question to ask is, "Will Bitcoin go up or down from now?" If you can answer the second question, you can make money on it.
But answering that question is not easy.
My estimation is that Bitcoin will go up, especially as people are worried about inflation. So then the question becomes, "Will Bitcoin go up more than other assets?" Gold increased more in value than Bitcoin this year. Apple stock has risen more since March than Bitcoin has, and it giv
Re: BTC (Score:2)
Gold is 2x this year? Apple doubled this year? What charts are you looking at? What pipes are you smoking?
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Apple price on March 20th: $56. Apple price yesterday: $126. Eat crow.
A fool and his bitcoin (Score:2)
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That's not how investing works. You have to speculate a little and play safe a little. It's about finding your personal balance between risk and reward. As a 20 year old risk risk is good, as a 70 year old low risk is good.
Garden store (Score:2, Insightful)
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When a garden store accepts Bitcoin for my tulip bulb purchases, I will then consider it investment worthy.
When you check out, be sure to ask if they carry the Blinding Irony varietal of bulb.
When they say "What are you talking about?", just smile and say "Exactly."
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I tried to use my stock options and silver bullion but those bastards wouldn't accept those either!
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I wasn't aware that stock options or silver bullion were billed as a decentralized currency.
How do you buy? (Score:3)
Bitcoin isn't very easy to transact, at least from what I know. A few years ago I bought some crypto currencies. After struggling to figure out how, I ended up going to BitStampm, an Eastern Europe based exchange. Most of the exchanges were offshore.
One really needs an easy way to buy bitcoins, through simple electronic transactions. Should be as easy as buying a stock or ETF in a brokerage account.
How do people actually buy and hold bitcoin in a way that a grandmother could do it?
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The last time I bought gold, it took 12 weeks for the coins to arrive, the company went bankrupt a few weeks before my delivery. Now the coins are sitting in a safe deposit box 2,500 miles away and have no practical use to me.
BTC might be growing up, but what it is growing into might not be what you want it to be. It de
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One way is through futures [cnbc.com].
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There are bitcoin ETFs you can buy in your brokerage account.
It might be worth putting in something you could afford to lose. It will either work or not.
Re: How do you buy? (Score:2)
It's easier to transact in than every other currency in the world, with the exception of USD and your local currency.
USD is hard to transact in over the Internet. It involves pulling in banks and credit card companies, passing money through several intermediaries, submitting to government reporting and oversight and tracking by ad networks. Bitcoin is just scanning a QR code and sending a few packets into the network.s
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Ease of use has been fixed by a number of different apps out there that will manage a wallet for you basically.
The big problem with BTC, and I don't think they've fully fixed it, is the fact that its slow to process transactions on it. Even with SegWit, I believe it can still take 10min to an hour to process a transaction; compare that to Ethereum which can take seconds up to 5 minutes. You can't build any retail sector around BitCoin, some of the newer coins out there hold more promise though.
It will crash again (Score:5, Interesting)
As a long term store of value it makes even gold look stable and neither gold nor bitcoin are investments, there is no organic growth, it's purely a speculative asset.
To paraphrase Warren Buffet :
Bitcoin is a way of going long on fear and stupidity, and it's been a pretty good way of going long on fear and stupidity from time to time. But you really have to hope people become more afraid and stupid in a year or two years than they are now. And if they become more afraid and stupid you make money, if they become less afraid and stupid you lose money, but the Bitcoin doesn't produce anything.
Re:It will crash again (Score:5, Insightful)
^^This^^. Though it definitely DOES produce one thing...and a LOT of it. Pollution. Fools have spent the equivalent of the GDP of Switzerland every year for the past few years "mining" bitcoin. The last estimate I saw was that JUST Bitcoin consumed somewhere between 50 and 100 terrawatt hours of electricity per year. China accounts for about 65% of that hash power. And what do you think China's primary source of electricity is? C'mon say it....go ahead.
COAL
That's right, coal. So you hipsters that smugly try to pawn off bitcoin as some cool "investment" that really only benefits a handful of whale investors are promoting a huge greenhouse gas generation engine. Congratulations.
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The physical money market handles a lot more transactions than Bitcoin ... if you think a Bitcoin transaction has similar or lower energy consumption as the levelized energy cost of a physical currency transaction your intuition is miles off mine. Electronic transfer of national currencies are closer to 10 orders of magnitude more energy efficient than Bitcoin than 1 order of magnitude ... Bitcoin is on an entire other plane of energy wasting existence, it's very very stupid and Lightning is as stillborn as
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Two wrongs don't make a right, bitcoin doesn't need to cause so much electricity to be consumed but it's designed that way. That design flaw could be fixed but the people in control of bitcoin aren't fixing it. IMO they should pay 100% of the carbon footprint of making bitcoin.
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Fools have spent the equivalent of the GDP of Switzerland every year for the past few years "mining" bitcoin.
That is nonsense.
The planet does not even produce a noticeable fraction of the electricity you can buy with Switzerlands GDP. Common sense ... what was that again?
Re: It will crash again (Score:2)
70% of Bitcoin (and climbing) is mined with renewable energy. You're clueless.
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Hogwash.
https://cointelegraph.com/news... [cointelegraph.com]
Note the "as part of" bit of the equation. Inside the article, we see:
"The report also notes that APAC miners contribute almost 77% of the Bitcoin hash power but use the lowest amounts of renewable energy sources. "
Bitcoin mining contributes an enormous amount of pollution. There's no sugar coating that.
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Damn. When you put it that way it actually sounds like a reasonable bet.
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As a long term store of value it makes even gold look stable and neither gold nor bitcoin are investments, there is no organic growth, it's purely a speculative asset.
To paraphrase Warren Buffet :
Bitcoin is a way of going long on fear and stupidity, and it's been a pretty good way of going long on fear and stupidity from time to time. But you really have to hope people become more afraid and stupid in a year or two years than they are now. And if they become more afraid and stupid you make money, if they become less afraid and stupid you lose money, but the Bitcoin doesn't produce anything.
Indeed. The whole thing is a shit-show that may make a tiny number of already rich richer, but at the same time destroys value. Not only because the money is not available for real investments anymore, also because tons of hardware and incredible amounts of electricity are just wasted with no positive result whatsoever.
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To paraphrase Warren Buffet :
As far as I can tell he never said that or anything like that. It looks like you just made up some text and attributed it to him.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2011/03/0... [cnbc.com]
He was talking about gold ... which has some similarity to Bitcoin, minus the malware, at least some usefulness and different types of pollution.
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Roubini: BTC Doesn’t Have Any Fundamental Va (Score:2)
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Well, the manipulation has the level of "solidly proven" now, at least for anybody that understands statistics. It is basically some already rich people getting richer by taking from poor but gullible people.
Investment? (Score:2)
If you want to invest buy something tangible with intrinsic worth - property, stock, gold etc. with the legal protections that go with it. Or if you're an idiot then invest in digitally signed bytes from a broker operating out of the Ukraine or Cyprus. If you're a SUPER idiot, then use one of those faux trading firms
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How fucking stupid are people to buy into this garbage?
Flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, followers of religion, patriots, believers in "alternative medicine", covid-deniers, climate-change-deniers, "trickle down" believers, and so on, and on, and on, ad nauseam.
The only thing the human race does really well is "stupid".
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Only the idiots in the general public (and on slashdot too) think this is an investment. People buy all kinds of substances with BTC on various markets. It's pretty successful in that regard.
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Re: Investment? (Score:2)
So, investing in an ETF made up of Bitcoin derivatives is a legit investment to you, but buying the underlying asset is crazy? Ok, dude. You obviously should stay far away from stocks because it's a bad idea to invest in things you don't understand.
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Electricity Shortages in China (Score:2)
Given electricity shortages are starting to appear in China [sixthtone.com], I wonder if it might have an impact on the massive energy drains that are the Chinese crypto mining farms. Bitcoin is a eco nightmare and the low hanging fruit if energy conservation is needed.
Not really, but a little bit (Score:2)
Listen, 'cause... (Score:2)
"Buy a hundred bucks worth of this newfangled Bitcoins, it's less than a dime each."
"No! Waste of money."
"Buy Apple or Amazon or Google."
"No, they're like $100 per share. This is stupid to do in this modern year of 1999!"
"Apple just passed a trillion dollars in value!"
"No! It's way overpriced! It's not like it's gonna be worth 1.3 in only a few months!"
So, I advise not to buy $20,000 bitcoins!
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"Buy a hundred bucks worth of this newfangled Bitcoins, it's less than a dime each."
"No! Waste of money."
"Buy Apple or Amazon or Google."
"No, they're like $100 per share. This is stupid to do in this modern year of 1999!"
"Apple just passed a trillion dollars in value!"
"No! It's way overpriced! It's not like it's gonna be worth 1.3 in only a few months!"
So, I advise not to buy $20,000 bitcoins!
Yeah. Want to list all the investments that went bust in the same period?
I got a little burned first time around... (Score:2)
I made a good bit of money in 2017, then gambled some more - which is really, what this game is.
3 years later, it looks like I will soon break even on that extra gamble - not being foolish enough to spend more than I could afford, but being foolish enough to do it in the first place.
I did actually HODL and shifted all of the shit coins I had, some time back, into the largest shit coin, BTC.
Turned out to be the only wise move I've made regarding crypto.
Best to just steer clear, unless you have the funds and
It's a suckers' bet not an investment (Score:2)
Investing in criminals (Score:2)
The vast amount of users are most likely using it for non-legal purposes. So congrats! You've enabled criminals to hide and transfer their money more easily.
Investment? (Score:2)
More like a shady, high stakes casino
Answer to article title question (Score:2)
No.
Tulip Bulbs (Score:2)
Were also a mainstream investment... until it wasn't ...
No. (Score:2)
Doubtful (Score:2)
They aren't investments (Score:2)
just as any other asset that people like to trade around between each other but doesn't actually produce anything: gold, pork and cocoa futures, bitcoin et al are a vehicle for speculation. Nothing wrong with speculation, buts lots of wrong with calling somebody buying any of the above "investors".
"Proof of work" coins are ponzi schemes (Score:2)
Like a ponzi, however as it grows, it becomes exponentially more costly and generates greater and greater burden - just this time it is in the form of energy consumption rather than actual money.
Success requires a steady supply of idiots. (Score:2)
Skilled speculators will make money out of this non-asset. If people think bitcoin is worth something, then its value may increase, even though it is all just hype. It does not matter. Just make sure to sell out before the ordinary folks notice anything.
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Bitcoin is only worth that to whoever will accept it. To everyone else it's completely worthless.
Oh Ye Worthless Sage...Anything of value is only "worth" what someone else is willing to pay for it.
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Umm.... No. If you're hungry, piece of scrap bread has a value and is "worth" something. It doesn't matter if anyone else is willing to pay for it or not. Same thing with my old and used underwear. They are still worth something to me, even if no one else would pay for them.
From Wikipedia:
In economics, economic value is a measure of the benefit provided by a good or service to an economic agent.
Some items, like money, are only used for transactions and are therefore only worth whatever someone else is willing to pay but such things are exceptions and not the rule.
Re:Regardless of its value... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some items, like money, are only used for transactions and are therefore only worth whatever someone else is willing to pay but such things are exceptions and not the rule.
In this case it is only useful as money in the context of money laundering, since it isn't accepted as a payment method for most types of payment, and the value is too volatile anyway.
It is just a fiat investment instrument to these people, like an ETF, but it only tracks itself. It isn't a Ponzi scheme, because it contains no promise of a payout; when people eventually can't find a new buyer to keep the price going up, no promise was broken.
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Exactly. It is not an investment, there are no dividents. Even gold is better, it is at least useful.
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Re:Regardless of its value... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bitcoin is useful. I can send it to friends and family in other countries by emailing a text file. How else could you do that without involving a bank? How would you do that with gold?
Is this a real question? Send money without using a bank? Paypal. It's not a bank. The paypal balance you get can be spent a lot more places than the bitcoins. It's way more scalable (currently handles about 5 million transactions per day, whilelast year bitcoin was choking at somewhere around 400,000 transactions per day). And running it wouldn't even show up as a blip on the power grid (as opposied to bitcoin, which uses about 7 nuclear power plants worth of electricity).
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Um... how exactly are you topping off your Paypal account?
Can you use PayPal without any card linked to it?
Can you grab a wad of cash and transfer it to your PayPal account without involving a bank in the process?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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You can go to a website (out of many who offer this service), use your credit card (indeed) to buy cryptocurrencies, then they generate a wallet for you and promptly remove the transaction trace. If you don't trust that, use a mixing service afterwards. Or several.
In the end, you end up with a wallet which is not tied to your identity.
Or you could mine some cryptocurrency.
Or you could sell real goods on various website and accept cryptocurrency instead of dollars. From the buyer's point of view, "John Doe f
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I see you are one of the few people who hasn't yet been robbed by paypal. I assume you will ignore all warnings until you are robbed, then you will join the rest of us.
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That's debatable. It's registered as a bank in the EU, so at the very least if the grandparent poster and their friends/family are in the EU then it clearly is a bank.
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Anything is only worth that to whoever will accept it. To everyone else it's completely worthless.
There, fixed that for you.
Re: Regardless of its value... (Score:2)
That's true of everything
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It's completely worthless. It's a speculative investment that costs an insane amount of energy to use. It's been spec'd out that every bitcoin transaction wastes as much energy as running one 40w lightbulb for an entire day.
It's also going to be one of those cases of abandoned and lost wallets being the only way the currency becomes scarce. It's ultimately reliant on people losing their investments/savings in it to increase the value of it for everyone else.
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It wouldn't be dumb if bitcoin had a reasonable path to value. That value was supposed to be as a currency, but it's hard to see how that will happen. Transactions are ridiculously expensive and slow, and even the biggest proponents predict further bubbles and busts.
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Transactions are ridiculously expensive and slow, and even the biggest proponents predict further bubbles and busts.
An that is the dirty secret here: Once the thing crashes, you cannot sell it because a) it is exceptionally slow b) nobody buys c) selling is exceptionally expensive. You basically cannot get out anymore. Most of that applies even before. All the people that are with increasing desperation trying to push BTC as an "investment" or are ridiculing those that point out (while you can see the pain behind their eyes) what great investment they have made, have noticed they are trapped.
BTC raising in "value" is en
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Bitcoin is fascinating experiment that is still ongoing.
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Sounds like a winner investment.
Re: Only (Score:2)
If by "early adopters" you mean every single person who bought Bitcoin so far, then yeah, only the early adopters profit. And those adopting for the foreseeable future (4-8 years minimum).
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Would you prefer some more stories about what Trump is tweeting about?