Bitcoin, and other tulips

Now closer to $200,000

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Wow! A house deposit from doing nothing in less than a month. This is the craziest thing I have ever seen. There is zero benefit to society, but insane wealth generated out of thin air.

I’m on Ripple and think Tron will be my high risk flutter investment.

It’s a zero-sum game (excluding fees and commission).

Some people will make a fortune…others will lose a fortune.

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How’s it a zero sum game? One person’s realised gain in crypto isn’t the inverse of someone else’s realised loss - it’s not like derivatives trading or a game of poker (which are zero sum games as each position offsets one another).

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If an asset has no real value, and its market price rises to $100 and then falls back to its real value, then it’s a zero-sum game.

I thought the value of cryptos was as an alternative currency which would bypass the large transaction costs charged by banks, with the aim of providing efficiency. The other potential source of value is that banks hold very low liquid reserves, ie they cannot withstand a run by depositors, so the security for our deposits (I think) is provided by some very over-inflated property values. That is, our banking system is not as secure as we are led to believe and would collapse if we wanted our cash back to put somewhere else.
If cryptos are not relent as part of the credit-creation cycle which banks use to skim 2-3% margins on each recirculating $ lent, ie if cryptos do have 100% reserve backing, then they are potentially less risky than bank investments.
Hence there are these 2 potential sources of value which would mean this is not a zero sum game but rather a new product offering competition on bank margins and potential lower risk.

My skepticism is that I don’t think governments and banks will allow cryptos to happen on a large scale unless they get control. Hence the risk is hostile behaviour from big players.

How exactly do Criptos offer anything? Can you buy food/alcohol/petrol with them? What stands behind them to give them value? Why does it take weeks to establish an account to ‘trade’ them.

Deposits in the bank are backed by the Government, and the banks have been stress tested to be some of the strongest in the world. They are required to have billions of dollars in reserve.

Sounds a bit to me like at the begining of the Cripto bubble, they had all the cripto and you had all the money. At the end, they will have all the money and those who hold at the bust will be left holding coins worth a fraction of their cost.

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of money can be made in a bubble, just don’t be the one left holding when the music stops. Even if Cryoto is the way of the new world, at the moment it is in a bubble. Spam for Viagra in my inbox has been replaced with spam about trading Crypto which is a sign that we are closer to the end of the bubble than the start.

https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-ab0ac83a04a4cd48c78fff0985434e0b

Where do you think we are on the attached graph?

Until like 50 years ago what real value did gold have other than shiny?

This thread needs more people who aren’t invested in crypto, and don’t really understand it, to come in and say it’s a bubble.

Well farkin derr.

Thing is though, the price is actually the least interesting part of cryptocurrency. It is dramatically over-valued at the moment, and despite the fact I stand to make a not-to-shabby amount of money out of it (if I play it right), I’m aware that this could be at the expense of something that really could change things up.

The international banking system is old and clunky. We now live in a global economy, yet the financial systems are all a throw back to an era before the personal computer even existed. Truth is, if we started from scratch right now and created a currency system around the technology that exists, it would look far more like bitcoin than it would FIAT currency.

If nothing else, it’s making people question ‘What is Money?’ Why / where / how is value stored and transferred, and what gives it value? Because that’s something that’s never really been challenged in the public sphere before, certainly not on this level. I mean, has there ever been a genuine challenge to the banking system?

I heard a good answer to the question of ‘What is money’ on a podcast recently. Money is trust. You trust the value, you trust the currency, you trust the bank to handle it. You also pay for this trust.

The infallibility of the blockchain system is trust, and that’s where its value lay.

Hopefully the over inflated values and spammers don’t kill it, because this sh*t is mighty interesting if nothing else.

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You are spot on the biggest asset in business is trust.

There is a white paper now given to Parliament in Australia stating how Crypto Currency should be treated in relation to taxation purposes.

Bring it on I say. The more official recognition crypto gets the greater the legitimacy and the more people signing up in droves fearful of missing out like me.

I have made a 72% return on crypto since December 19th. Get in! Get out!

…and yes the TECH side is hear to stay and revolutionise.

Some of the companies have real world applications tho, they’ll have valid products that government and industry want to utilise.

It would appear in the short term that this is a genuine threat to banking as we know it.

Say I pull out a big chunk of MY money from the bank to invest in cryptos, x that by a couple hundred thousand people in OZ alone. I don’t think the banks have the answer to that, other than blocking people from making deposits.

Crypto itself is fine, talking to crypto traders does my head in.

Short term its no threat to the banking industry, in the future maybe. People are taking their money out of banks everyday for different things, investing in stock market, buying a car, investing in crypocurrency, whatever. It will only affect the banking industry when people can walk down to safeway buy a packet of chips and pay with Bitcoin.

You move all your money from the bank to Bitcoin or Ripple or whatever…what are you going to do with it? You cant use it to feed your family, you cant use it to buy a new smoker for your backyard, in the future maybe but right now, no.

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it’s a buble

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OK, so I’ve said plenty of positives, here is the annoying dodgy side of things how they currently stand.

A mate of mine got sucked into something that appears to be quite dodgy. The story starts with a young local guy who worked at maccas, chucked a few hundred bucks into bitcoin at the very very start, and then cashed out at $10 million. (And quit Maccas)

From there, he and another guy started their own blockchain company, with the intention of rolling out bitcoin ATM’s. To raise funds, they launched their own crypto coin.

The ICO (Intial Coin Offering) could only be purchased in bitcoin. So my mate bought the bitcoin on BTC, then transferred it to the other company.

The Bitcoin price then doubled in a week but, the ICO price still hasn’t moved. So these guys doubled their Intial funding stake, which allowed them to pump out the bitcoin ATM’s, and here’s the thing… They don’t owe anybody anything. The Bitcoin ATM business may make a killing, but their crypto coin may never do ■■■■.

It is possible that the success of the business is reflected in the value of the coin, but then there is the danger of the owners (who own more of their coin than anybody) cashing out at its highest price, and totally crashing the coin. And there is nothing anybody can do about it.

An ICO is a good way to raise funds without owing anybody a single thing.

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Australian dollar won’t be replaced any time soon. It’s our legal tender. You can’t trade in Australia and refuse the currency and accept only bitcoin or whatever. It’s illegal. You can do multiple currencies but you must always accept Australian dollars.

So no one here actually does mining as oppose to just buying the currencies?

Oh, and don’t forget the ATO counts your profits on crypto just the same as any other investment. Currently under watch.

Bitcoin mining on an individual level is no longer worth it. You’re competing with massive mining farms with optimised networks designed with only a single purpose.

Apparently Litecoin is still worth mining on the individual level, but you still need a pretty fancy-pants PC set up.

I don’t agree with the above. Any pc can do it. It’s a matter of time vs watt per coin cost. I’ve got two PC’s that mine ethereum. Only in daylight hours when the solar panels are running. When they are not then the costs blow out.

If you want to make millions sure you need to spend money but I’m happy with my hundred bucks a fortnight.

Doesn’t processing power come into it?