Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers
104 points by axihack 4 years ago | 130 comments- cableshaft 4 years agoThis is just: "Don't invest what you aren't prepared to lose," which has been the advice for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for a decade at this point.
The headline makes it sound like they're threatening legal action or some sort of regulation, at least to me.
- SilasX 4 years agoAnecdote: my credit union[1] went beyond caution and threatened to close down my account if I interacted with a crypto exchange. From a secured message in June 2017:
>>A transaction has posted to your account involving CoinBase.com (Bitcoin)[2]. Please be advised that in an effort to protect your credit union and all our members, A+FCU does not allow transactions involving CoinBase or any virtual currency. If you attempt to conduct any future transactions involving virtual currency, your account may be subject to closure.
>>Some of the reasons A+FCU has chosen to refuse virtual currency transactions are: - Virtual currencies have a higher risk for fraud. -Virtual currencies have no consumer protections. -Virtual currencies are not backed by a government or central bank. -Virtual currencies are targets for hackers, who have been able to breach sophisticated security systems in order to steal funds. -Virtual currencies can cost you more to use than credit cards or even regular cash once you take exchange rate issues into consideration.
>>For more information regarding virtual currency, please refer to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) website at cfpb.gov or the National Credit Union Association (NCUA) website at ncua.gov.
>>If you have any questions regarding this matter, please contact us.
[1] A+ Federal Credit Union, yes, their official name has a plus symbol in it
[2] I never ended up using Coinbase, for unrelated reasons.
- oefrha 4 years agoYeah that was my reading of the title, and I highly doubt this nothingburger article would be upvoted to one of the top spots without the clickbait title. Flagged for waste of time.
(I’m not a cryptocurrency fan, and have a grand total of a couple hundred bucks in crypto. Well, maybe a grand now, I don’t know.)
- anthony_romeo 4 years agoTrue, but it's a good reminder given that:
- There are a lot of economic instabilities in the world right now (e.g. COVID, lockdowns) increasing poverty.
- Bitcoin increased by up to 400% in the past year, and about an order of magnitude since its lows in 2019.
There's obviously a temptation to invest more and more when the value keeps going up -- desperation latching onto volatility -- which can cause increase hardship to those who fail to adequately acknowledge the risk. Those who invested in Bitcoin yesterday lost 25% of their value today.
- cableshaft 4 years agoThey only lost if they sell it now. If they're not planning to sell for a couple of years when they invested then it doesn't matter that it dropped >20% in the last 48 hours.
I've been through this rodeo twice before, I've been checking the price regularly since at least 2014. I haven't lost any money because I didn't sell during downturns (although it's been tempting to do so for sure).
It's hard to say for sure if this is just shaking out weak hands and institutions will jump back in and it will start climbing again, or if we're at the start of a 2+ year constant downtrend again. I really hope it's not that, that was annoying, and we just climbed out of that in the past year, but we'll see (although it allowed me to keep buying a increasingly larger slivers of bitcoin every month all the way down to its low of $3500 last year).
It's fine that this article exists for the people that could use the reminder, I just don't like how the headline was worded. It made me think for a moment that there was going to be a major crackdown and we were definitely heading into a major drop in prices (way beyond what it has so far).
- thegreatpeter 4 years agoIt's only annoying b/c you're riding the train and hope it hits whatever # it takes you to sell.
That's what's happening right now. It hit a number and folks are selling. For every seller at 40k, there's a buyer. That sucks for those who got caught up in it.
Bitcoin won't magically "stabilize" if it hits 50k/100k/1m, it will crash, just like its doing now. It will make a small group of people very wealthy on the losses of everyone else
- thegreatpeter 4 years ago
- cableshaft 4 years ago
- SoSoRoCoCo 4 years agoI got that vibe as well. It could be a hint at an incoming regulation sweep.
- bena 4 years agoThat's good advice for investing in general.
- vsareto 4 years agoIt's not really though. That amount of risk aversion would keep people out of the market who would be better served by keeping it in a lazy portfolio for extended amounts of time.
- bena 4 years agoSo, it's not money they're counting on. If they lose it, it won't collapse their life.
There's a difference between "would like to not lose" and "can't lose". I would like to not lose my investments. I can't lose rent.
- bena 4 years ago
- vsareto 4 years ago
- SilasX 4 years ago
- nabla9 4 years agoBitcoin speculation is an almost pure Keynesian beauty contest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
As long as most people think everyone else thinks BTC is the prettiest girl, it can have substantial value and the sky is the limit.
It's a pure speculation asset. You don't need bitcoins to pay taxes. The value has a very weak link anchored to anything in the real economy (limited number of coins and the energy is meaningless nominal detail in this context).
- me_me_me 4 years agoBTC is a value store.
You can use it to exchange large values without traditional middleman.
Saying that BTC is just a hash, a virtual nothing and it has no intrinsic value is silly. Its not a tulip bulb.
Talking about pretty things, how come nobody gets railed up when a painting gets sold for millions and its a single color modernistic piece? Its literally just a hearsay that it has any value and no function apart from being expensive firestarter.
Bitcoin costs money to mine like it take money to mine gold. So there is 'work' involved creating it. It has built in mechanism for fighing inflation (finite source), and security for exchanging it. Try to liquidate 100k of gold.
Also its funny to me how people claim btc has no real value when over 20% of USD were printed last year. Out of thin air. Its all about confidence of people using it. If people were confident tulip bulbs have value of 100m per one we would be trading them to this day no matter how usless they are.
- esja 4 years agoI've just dug a hole in my back garden, and created 21 million tiny slices of air that now occupy that space. It took work to dig this hole, so it definitely has value. And I'm only digging one hole, ever, I promise.
I've also made a list of people who own the different bits of air in the hole. I'm using pencil and paper, but it works. If you give me some money I can write your name on there and you can "store value". Later if you tell me to write someone else's name, I can rub yours out and you can "exchange large values".
If you or your friends want the money back later, I can give it to you. Probably... mostly. But don't ask me for more money than you gave me in the first place, because I won't have it.
p.s. I lied when I said I dug the hole by myself. I really dug up a billion tonnes of coal and used it to power a microscopic spaghetti noodle which dug the hole. For some reason this gave a lot of people confidence that my hole is the One True Hole.
- me_me_me 4 years agoThat's such a crude reductionist argument that I can smell the sent of arrogance and mockery, and I am not sure if response is warranted.
Especially since your simile has rather gaping holes in it.
Actually thinking about it... ironically your example is better description of fiat currency than btc.
Use low resource output to generate cheap tokens that will be loosely tracked by 'One True Government', and people agree that they have value. People can exchange it for goods and even can go back to the 'One True Government' to exchange their gold back token back to gold... oh wait... right we got rid of that whole gold backing while back...
- me_me_me 4 years ago
- nabla9 4 years agoAll assets have value store abilities. BTC is arguably bad value store. Value changes too much. When you need to withdraw the money you can lose or wing big.
TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities) are good value store. You neither lose nor gain.
- alwillis 4 years agoYou're definitely losing.
Inflation of things you actually want and need is 10-15% per year and if you're not keeping pace with that, you're losing. TIPS can't help you with real world inflation.
Look at housing, medical care, higher education, quality food—these items are increasing in cost every year by more than the fictitious 2% CPI the government aims for.
Being a store of value doesn't mean the value of something never changes or that there's no volatility; just that over the medium to long term, it will at least keep pace with inflation, so that you don't losing buying power.
Gold has traditionally been a reliable store of value, but now it's becoming bitcoin.
Bitcoin has never had a negative 5-year period, but the return on TIPS can be negative during a deflationary period, not to mention federal taxes that occur while you hold them [1].
Bitcoin is only taxable when you sell, which, if you're smart, you never actually have to do, since you can borrow dollars using bitcoin as collateral [2].
[1] https://www.thebalance.com/how-do-tips-work-417128
[2] https://news.bitcoin.com/10-loan-providers-taking-crypto-as-...
- alwillis 4 years ago
- esja 4 years ago
- danans 4 years ago> The value has a very weak link anchored to anything in the real economy
I think it has a pretty strong link to the degree of fear in the real economy (just like gold at the margin) and more fundamentally the degree of loss of confidence in governing institutions.
In that way it's useful as a hedge, but within limits. If the economy and governing institutions totally collapse, Bitcoin won't be very useful because most of our modern large scale and complex society, including security, shared infrastructure, and the goods and services we consume are built on the foundation provided by those institutions.
Bitcoin has no answer for the needs provided by those (admittedly imperfect) institutions, and it seems to have the historical goal of deconstructing them. Indeed, it can only exist if those institutions exist.
- xorcist 4 years agoThat's true, but it's true for gold and a whole lot of other things too.
- nabla9 4 years agoGold used in manufacturing is significant fraction of annual production. There is real demand for gold.
- nabla9 4 years ago
- eloff 4 years agoI don't think fiat currency has terribly much more going for it, in terms of intrinsic value, other than you do need it day to day because there aren't alternatives for buying things and paying your taxes.
If here in Canada the US dollar became legal tender and I could use it for all my transactions, would the Canadian dollar hold its value? I don't think so.
- nabla9 4 years agoLiquidity matters. Cash is king because it's the most liquid asset. You can sell $100s million dollars worth USD/EUR/JPY/GBP in a day without affecting the price those currencies. Bitcoin is the polar opposite of liquidity. Bitcoin markets are notoriously thin. If you try to by or sell large amounts the price either collapses or skyrockets.
Bitcoin is like water tower where you can move water level (price) up or down by adding or removing 10-20 cubic meters of water. Fiat money is like a big lake or a sea. You can take or put 100 cubic meters per second and it's not visibly moving.
Once BTC price rises to the level that enough people feel rich and start buying things, the price will drop suddenly. Panic hits the markets and the price drops like a stone.
- alwillis 4 years agoBitcoin is the polar opposite of liquidity. Bitcoin markets are notoriously thin.
This hasn't been true for a while, especially lately, as tens of billions of dollars flows through bitcoin exchanges everyday.
- alwillis 4 years ago
- anonymouse008 4 years agoAt least the 'pretty girl' in this example can point guns when she's a fiat - so she definitely gets a few bonus points for that.
- eloff 4 years agoDoes that benefit the currency of Canada at all? I don't think so.
Maybe with the US currency, but that's also special because it's currently the reserve currency of the world.
- eloff 4 years ago
- graeme 4 years ago1. You can use dollars to pay taxes. Big difference from bitcoin
2. No one expects fiat currency to be an investment asset!
Why anyone expects the value of bitcoin to increase like stock ownership of a corporation is beyond me. And it has no intrinsic value like gold.
- eloff 4 years agoGold doesn't have that much intrinsic value either. It's hard to obtain, but so is bitcoin. Gold has the advantage that it has some use in personal adornments - but I believe that's a marginal use. Bitcoin is easier to buy, sell, and store. I've said many times that the best description for bitcoin is electronic gold, not a currency.
- leppr 4 years agoNot all demand for an asset is tied to states. Most activity around Bitcoin is actually precisely about evading state controls.
- eloff 4 years ago
- 4 years ago
- nabla9 4 years ago
- octocop 4 years agoI am human, I like shiny, do you have shiny?
- cambalache 4 years ago> It's pure speculation asset.
> The value has very weak link anchored to anything in real economy
So like dollars but without the big-ass nukes backing it?
BTW kids, dont invest on bitcoin, or for that matter on any crypto-anything.
- me_me_me 4 years ago
- tebbers 4 years agoIn London they are advertising bitcoin on the side of buses and in the Underground with the slogan 'when you see bitcoin on the side of a bus, it's time to buy'.
I thought that was outrageous and actually was a sign to sell. I mentioned this to a foreign exchange trader friend and we even finished each other's sentence with the above!
- thekyle 4 years agoThere is a relevant quote apparently from the 1920s.
"Taxi drivers told you what to buy. The shoeshine boy could give you a summary of the day's financial news as he worked with rag and polish. An old beggar who regularly patrolled the street in front of my office now gave me tips and, I suppose, spent the money I and others gave him in the market. My cook had a brokerage account and followed the ticker closely. Her paper profits were quickly blown away in the gale of 1929."
https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...
- jbay808 4 years agoBut these days we do expect every cook and taxi driver to be in the market, because dollars in a savings account are getting returns below inflation.
- leppr 4 years agoThat's the real tragedy of this uncontrolled fiat money printing. Any way you cut it, the poorer one is, the lower the % of assets to cash one owns (all the way to 0). Small bouts of token helicopter money don't fix this. Bitcoin doesn't fix this.
- diegocerdan 4 years agoAgents are forced to play to avoid getting robbed by inflation thus wealth is transfered to owners from no-owners.
Luckly for the working class, nowadays everybody can invest with a cheap smartphone and their little capital thus there is nobody to rob from and the system collapses.
- leppr 4 years ago
- esja 4 years agoThe original "shoeshine boy" story featured Joe Kennedy (as the speculator), father of JFK.
- jbay808 4 years ago
- agumonkey 4 years agoIt's a sad possibility that people are actively getting newcomers to join the game at the worst of times.
- benibela 4 years agoI bought some millibitcoins in 2018, at almost the worst time
Last week it has become my best investment so far
Although now I wonder if I should sell them
- agumonkey 4 years agoYes long term it's no biggie, the thing is, as a newcomer, good luck sitting on big losses when you never experienced that before.
- agumonkey 4 years ago
- rootsudo 4 years agoOr the best!
- agumonkey 4 years agoTotally depends on the psychology. To some speculator buying at 40k will be the best move of your life.
- agumonkey 4 years ago
- benibela 4 years ago
- phil21 4 years agoWith lockdowns I've been wondering when this tipping point was going to hit, it's been really hard to judge the 'taxi driver' phenomenon not going out often or being able to overhear conversations.
Makes it a lot harder to time any bubbles, which I honestly think may be contributing a bit to how high this one got.
- zorbash 4 years agoI've seen that, it's so scammy. I feed bad for people who'll fall for it.
What can we do to improve financial literacy so that nobody ever takes investing advice from a bus ad?
- leppr 4 years agoIncreased financial literacy is precisely why people are drawn to Bitcoin. If Bitcoin didn't exist, there'd simply be a mad rush on stocks and gold (well, there has been one).
The media has spent years teaching people about what happens in countries with high inflation, and people are now rightfully scared it's coming to their countries too.
- leppr 4 years ago
- thekyle 4 years ago
- trident5000 4 years agoI find this hilarious when many European banks have lost 98% of their market caps and individual stocks have just as much volatility in many cases. Maybe the investor warnings should be more even.
- bichiliad 4 years agoYou're not wrong about stock volatility, but I think the point that there aren't any mechanisms for safety at all are fairly valid still:
"Investors who are out of pocket will not be able to rely on the Financial Ombudsman Service to settle complaints or order compensation from offending firms. Consumers are also unlikely to be covered under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which covers losses up to £85,000 on fully regulated accounts and investment products including pensions."
You also can't, say, sue BitCoin for securities fraud (or, more realistically, be part of a class-action lawsuit) like you could against a company that you own stock in[0].
Again, I'm not trying to say that stocks are "safe", but it's also true that you have more protections investing in them than you do with Bitcoin (at least for now).
[0]:https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
- trident5000 4 years agoI see what you're saying but this is still a bit ridiculous. You sue a company when malpractice occurs, that is not possible with btc. It simply exists. Its like saying you dont have investor protections when you buy oil or corn (unless we are talking about the exchange, and by the article I'm not sure what they're getting at).
- grey-area 4 years agoHere are some possibilities for malpractice with Bitcoin: Exchanges lying about transactions, pricing, Exchanges refusing to allow or unable to allow extracting wealth stored in bitcoin, Exchanges front-running, Exchanges stealing money, 51% attack by miners, Governments expropriating wealth 10 years later claiming back taxes for undeclared earnings, Developers changing the rules of the currency (which are encoded in the client) and persuading enough to go along with it, Currencies which the price of Bitcoin is closely tethered to lying about their reserves... I could go on, but the entire edifice is built on confidence, and once that confidence evaporates for a second time, it's going to be very hard to recover.
There is a lot of risk investing in bitcoin, it is nothing like commodities, that's just the latest identity have dreamed up for it after it completely failed to live up to the hype of the previous identities first as a currency outwith government control, then as a distributed trust-free database, then as a foundational layer for myriad apps, and finally as a 'commodity' which nobody actually uses (unlike other speculative commodities like oil or corn which usually have a use value which the current value fluctuates around).
You do in fact have lots of protection when you buy other commodities, in the form of rules against cornering the market, rules against fraud, insurance, regulators etc. Look up the silver corner or similar episodes for what happens when markets in commodities are completely unregulated, as we see in the Bitcoin market at the moment.
- grey-area 4 years ago
- trident5000 4 years ago
- SoSoRoCoCo 4 years ago> when many European banks have lost 98% of their market caps
I can't find a single source for this claim. All Eurobank market caps look fine, even in COVID, for the past 5 years.
Can you explain this statement?
- trident5000 4 years agoDeutsche Bank: a high of $146, it now trades at $11. AIG went from $1,913 to $40. HSBC 75% loss, Barclays 85% loss. All across the world its the same story.
- jcfrei 4 years agoParent is probably alluding to market caps before the great financial crisis. So about 14 years back.
- afavour 4 years agoBut individual deposits were guaranteed were they not?
- afavour 4 years ago
- yreg 4 years agoErste Group is where it was 5 years ago (and 40% off all time high). Maybe the parent poster is just overexaggerating?
- trident5000 4 years ago
- matsemann 4 years agoIn Europe one got MIFID II and MiFIR a few years back that makes it so that everyone wishing to buy certain investment stuff have to pass a small knowledge test beforehand or show that they have understand the risks etc. So here this goes for most financial instruments and not just Bitcoin. I'm allowed to buy mutual funds at my trader, but in order to buy options I have to complete this tutorial to unlock that, for instance.
- mcintyre1994 4 years agoAt least in the UK bank deposits up to £85,000 are protected by a government scheme, so you can't lose all your money. I expect the FCA would offer the same "be prepared to lose all your money" advice to anyone who wanted to invest in a single stock too.
- danhak 4 years agoWhy are you comparing individual stocks to a currency?
- dsomers 4 years agoBecause this ‘currency’ is volatile like a small cap stock. This is the thing I always get a runaround about from Bitcoin advocates. Some say it’s a great currency, some say it’s a great investment. Well, by definition if it’s good at one thing, it’s bad a the other. Investments should provide good long term appreciation, and currency should be stable ideally not fluctuating in the double digit percentages in a given year. Bitcoin, you’re a fun experiment, but what’s the point of your existence?
- prionassembly 4 years agoBitcoin hopes to be a currency, but isn't one.
People who have bought e.g. a pizza with bitcoin are examples of what NOT to do with Bitcoin. The very fact that Bitcoin holders expect it to rise in value makes it unsuitable as a medium of exchange.
- melenaboija 4 years agoI guess for the same reason you implicitly compare BTC to USD or EUR, it needs to be compared to something to give it a value as it does not have an underlying one
- dsomers 4 years ago
- WhoCaresLies 4 years agobuy bitcoin then, go ahead, you can buy everything with bitcoin right?
- prionassembly 4 years agoIf it appreciates indefinitely in value, yes.
I have a huge box full of precious photography film. Slide stock, Kodak Portra, beautiful B&W by Ilford... I should store it in a freezer but that would make holding costs high, and there's a going market for good and bad film at any condition (there's CVS-brand film on ebay)...
These rolls have the capacity to produce beautiful imagery in my incapable hands, and I know them to have great value -- my 120 format Portras smoke anything in your digital quiver when it comes to displaying beautiful people in outdoor-sized frames.
I can pretty much sell a handful of Ilfords in 2-3 weeks and buy my wife a nice steak dinner. Is it money?
- WhoCaresLies 4 years agogo ahead then, why people want the approval of random people on the internet
that is what's weird with bitcoin weirdos, just buy and stfu, PLEASE
- WhoCaresLies 4 years ago
- prionassembly 4 years ago
- Blikkentrekker 4 years agoI've seen many claim that mathematically the stock market is more of a game of chance than a poker tournament, yet the latter is what is most often covered under gambling laws and the former is not.
- RivieraKid 4 years agoBitcoin has essentially no intrinsic value. If people only used it as a currency, not as a speculative "investment", the price would be orders of magnitude lower.
Stocks are much "safer" because the intrinsic value is often similar to the market price.
Gold and some stocks (Tesla) are somewhere in between. They have intrinsic value but people also buy it speculatively so the price is way higher than the intrinsic value.
- trident5000 4 years agoPeople use Bitcoin as a form of gold 2.0. Thats why the MC is where it is. Nobody in their right mind is making a cash flow case for btc unless you include lending which actually makes a decent return.
- RivieraKid 4 years agoIt's true that people use it as gold 2.0 and it's the bull case. But, the value is approximately 100% speculative. If people for some reason decided they will only use it for transactions and not as investment, most of the value would disappear.
- RivieraKid 4 years ago
- trident5000 4 years ago
- bichiliad 4 years ago
- 0xmarcin 4 years agoWhen I open this link in iPhone safari I get a strange popup about downloading 3887 something? Strange...
- andai 4 years agoSame. Probably server messing up MIME type.
- andai 4 years ago
- permo-w 4 years agoThis is incredibly frustrating, as, just before this massive spike in bitcoin’s value, I bought a significant amount of BTC using Coinbase. They took my money, then retroactively made it look like my (brand new) account had exactly the amount of debt that I had paid in, and now my account was at 0.
I sent in 2 support tickets and received no reply, so I resorted to a chargeback, presumably forfeiting any right to the BTC I purchased.
Just to add salt to the wounds, I now constantly see adverts for Coinbase
Avoid Coinbase like the Covid
- basdftrewq 4 years agoBitcoin, always crashes:
- janmo 4 years agoConsumers should be prepared to “lose all their money” if they invest in products that promise high returns from cryptoassets such as bitcoin, the City watchdog has warned.
The HN title is misleading, it is more a warning against all the Bitconnect like ponzi scams that will popup and promise huge return by mining or trading Bitcoin.
- farseer 4 years agoIs it fair game and legal to break into a wallet via cryptographic means alone? I mean without hacking someone's computer/storage to steal the private key that is.
I understand this is not realistic right now, but might be if someone has discovered new math or physics for example.
- carterschonwald 4 years agoSince the only proof of owner ship is private key material. Yes. And in fact this has been done and demonstrated for certain ethereum or other systems.
edit: certain elliptical curve crypto systems use randomness as part of the encipherment process. If two uses of the same key have low quality randomness/no randomness, solving for the private key material essentially becomes a slightly tedious high school algebra math problem.
heres a paper from last year where they did such an analysis, found some weak keys, and then saw that those wallets had already been hacked/drained! (possibly by someone who did similar work, for profit rather than science) https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/023
- Cthulhu_ 4 years agoTheoretically it could probably be labeled as hacking and / or theft in a court of law. Practically, you'd never find out who did it unless they admitted to it, happen to live in the same country, etc etc etc.
I think the saying "it's only a crime if you get caught" is applicable in this case.
That said, you can get charged with tax evasion if you have crypto without reporting it. If they find out that is. I have some crypto stashed on an exchange, so I'm expecting them to report to my tax office at some point.
- carterschonwald 4 years ago
- dartharva 4 years agoThe headline makes it look as if the regulators are out to ban crypto trading or liquidating (be prepared to lose all your money?!)
- Jimmc414 4 years agoThese HN bitcoin threads sure do garner a disproportionate amount of downvotes. My opinion and advice would be to stop listening to opinions and advice on Bitcoin do your own research and follow the money. https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/explorer
- kolbe 4 years agoYou should be prepared to lose all your money in any investment.
This PSA is a pretty lame scare tactic. Sure, BTC seems riskier than say AAPL stock, but both can go to zero. So, a PSA like this one seems like propaganda more than level-headed investment protips.
- lupinglade 4 years agoSo much riskier, though.
- lupinglade 4 years ago
- stinkytaco 4 years agoThis could really be said for any currency speculation. I expect crypto attracts more of this than other investment vehicles, but currency speculation and forex trading are insanely risky.
- Triv888 4 years agoYou can easily loose most of your money in stocks too... I just made $1k in stocks and $10k in crypto though...
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4 years agoWith dollars or pounds you are GUARANTEED to lose all your money, if you hold it long enough.
- coldcode 4 years agoI was going to buy a bitcoin at 6K but thought it risky. Now I feel dumb.
- jordan801 4 years agoI put 2k in at one point and was up to 40k in a month trading alt coins. Then btc started to tumble. I realized it caused a massive amount of subconcious anxiety. I ended up walking away with a very generous ROI. My buddy told me to get in again at 10k. Id could have paid off my house last week if I did.
But thats how investing goes. If you could nail every investment you'd quickly become the wealthiest individual in the world.
- wpietri 4 years agoYou were right. It was risky. It's even more risky now. Hindsight is a terrible way to value assets.
- Reedx 4 years ago> It's even more risky now
How so? The bigger it gets and the longer it lasts, the more it's derisked. It was more risky 10 years ago (i.e., odds of going to 0, finding a critical problem, lack of adoption, would've been easier for governments to ban it).
- wpietri 4 years agoFor approximately the same reason it's more dangerous to climb on the roof of a hundred-story building than a one-story building: there's much farther to fall.
I also think its price has become thoroughly decoupled from actual use value. Back in the day one could plausibly (if optimistically) argue that it was going to become the new cash, the new credit/debit transaction. But it has obviously failed at being the digital cash it set out to be. (With the exception of the untraceable envelope/briefcase of cash popular with criminals of various sorts.) There's also now a much richer market manipulation apparatus. That increases risk directly, but also indirectly via increased regulatory interest. Tether, for example, is under heavy investigation.
- wpietri 4 years ago
- Reedx 4 years ago
- afavour 4 years agoI bought $100 worth in 2014 when it was $580. Now I wish I'd bought $1000. But of course I never would have, because it was a crazy risk at the time, and still is today.
- cryptopia 4 years agoBetting 1000$ is not a crazy risk.
- afavour 4 years agoDepends how much spare money you have.
- artificialLimbs 4 years agoIt is if it means you may not be able to feed your family for the month.
- Cthulhu_ 4 years agoTell that to those who don't have $1000.
- afavour 4 years ago
- cryptopia 4 years ago
- christiansakai 4 years agoI think it was around 2014/2015 but didn't remember exactly when. I was in a programming bootcamp there was someone in my cohort on a temporary visa to the US. He managed to stay in a decently expensive area near our bootcamp, paid the bootcamp fee, and other cost of living. We asked him how, he said he was selling bitcoin to fund it. He sold it at $500 each.
If I calculated correctly he probably sold more than 20 bitcoin lol. He could retire now if he kept it.
Imagine how he feels right now, lol. But as long as he made profit, that's all that matters. Hindsight always 20/20
- herodotus 4 years agoYou are in good company:
"I made my money by selling too soon." ...Bernard Baruch
- Cthulhu_ 4 years agoI probably could have bought BTC at either $25 or $250 because I had a colleague who was really into it, but I shrugged because nobody can predict the future and it seemed dodgy as fuck. Eh, hindsight. In hindsight I should've bought google, apple, tesla etc as well.
- jetpackjoe 4 years agoI sold my bitcoin at 6k when I lost my job. IDK how I feel.
- Max_aaa 4 years agoFeel good that you were able to extract 6K or so of value from it. If you held it until it busted, you would feed dumb.
- cft 4 years agoWhen did it bust?
- cft 4 years ago
- wolco5 4 years agoIt last hit 5k in March. It hit 5k three years before. Wait a bit, it will drop before raising again.
- Cthulhu_ 4 years agoOr it'll be end of the line for BTC as the institutions crack down on it.
A Twitter thread the other day (probably linked to from HN) showed a strong correlation between the BTC price and Tether's money printer going brrrt, warning that once they get sued (and they will), they'll go down and take the artificial price increase of BTC and all other crypto along with it.
- Cthulhu_ 4 years ago
- Max_aaa 4 years ago
- timonoko 4 years agoI was trying to buy at 3K from a bitcoin machine last winter. There are several machines in Helsinki from different companies. They did not work. I decided this not a "free open market". These "banks" are only buying cheap and selling only when they themselves make a profit.
- jordan801 4 years ago
- isthispermanent 4 years agoWhat a click-baity title. This isn't worthy of the front page of HN
- cubano 4 years agoI have 0.75BTC locked away in an encrypted distributed Android wallet that I am unable to remember the password for.
I received this BTC from an amazing soul here on HN (again, THANK YOU so much for that blessing if you are reading this!) who, after I wrote up a blog post about how I was arrested without any probable cause in Las Vegas, so very generously sent it to me after asking if it could "be of use?."
BTW, the end result of the bullshit arrest was I was released with time served and the felony possession charge dropped due to the improper nature of the arrest, which was all caught on the officers bodycam.
So at the time I read the email, I was literally walking down Fremont Ave. wondering where I was going to sleep that night (remember I had just been released from Clark County Detention Center) as my 34 nights in jail had made me lose everything I owned in the weekly place I had been renting. I was asked for a wallet address, so I quickly jumped on the playstore and dl'ed the first app with a good rating and was highly "secure". At the time I thought he or she would send me $50-$100 TOPS, so imagine my surprise when 0.75 (at the time worth like $600) plopped into my wallet.
I must have fat-fingered the password entry, and of course I couldn't remember the 12-word phrase that the app author pleaded with me to "write-down and store in a safe, secure place"..no matter I thought at the time because of course there must be a password-reset email/text thing. right? RIGHT?
Well, no.
Alas, no happy ending here...I lost my very interesting and well-paying remote LAMP-development job working for a fast-growing company that was focused on lowering the overall cost to everyday people of filling drug prescriptions ( I know the irony of it all has not been lost on me ).
The owner was someone I really respected and was smart enough to know his systems needed a total re-design for security and performance reasons, and to be honest years later I still have not recovered, work-wise and economically, from that night I was illegally (not my opinion, the actual criminal court finding and its' legal outcome) arrest. I still hate the feeling I get in the pit of my stomach I get when I think of the bind I put him in...ugghhhhhhh.
So anyway...I still have the wallet safely stored away on an unencrypted USB (kind of late for that) that is physically locked away. I did contact the app author and fortunately for me, his app code was FOSS on github and I have the archive. Another fortunate item here is that I know I only used lowercase letters and the password was 12 char long.
At approx. $30k in value, it's getting to the point where a concerted effort at cracking the damn thing is in order...however, I am personally very optimistic on the FV of BTC in particular and think I will hold off my attempts at cracking it until 1BTC=$100kUSD.
Finally...the main reason I wrote this up this long post was to ask the community if anyone here knows of any reputable services that crack wallets such as mine for a reasonable fee and that I can feel secure that they will not just steal the BTC if they do manage to open it?
- tommit 4 years agoI'm sorry but what makes you think that cracking a BTC wallet is as easy as contracting a reputable service? The fact that you think this is the way to go makes me believe that you did not bother to read up on crypto/BTC, even after you got burnt badly by misplacing your password.
- tommit 4 years ago
- NicoJuicy 4 years agoI sold when unknowledgeable people talked about it and acted like they knew how it worked.
It was ~ 18 k then. I didn't leave much on the table.