The Investment Thread

[homer]

How do you "cut and run" on this though? The way I see this thing is the only to use Bitcoin is to spend it. Am I wrong on that?

 

This is from the Coinbase website:

 

For supported countries and payment methods, you can sell or "cash out" your bitcoin for your local currency and have the proceeds deposited in your linked bank account or local currency wallet.

[homer]

Yeah, I just don't see this ending well for Joe Investor:

 

 

1,000 people own 40% of the bitcoin market

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-08/the-bitcoin-whales-1-000-people-who-own-40-percent-of-the-market

[nate82]

Yeah, I just don't see this ending well for Joe Investor:

 

 

1,000 people own 40% of the bitcoin market

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-08/the-bitcoin-whales-1-000-people-who-own-40-percent-of-the-market

 

Their is always going to be a risk associated to investing. It doesn't matter if you are investing in future commodities, precious medals, stocks, currency or bonds there is always going to be some kind of risk. Timing a market is always going to be something that you have to do no matter what you are investing in. For Bitcoins if you invested say last year and you are comfortable with your gains that you have received so far I would definitely cash in right now. Yes the price could go higher but it can also go much much much lower than what you originally invested for.

 

The biggest mistake most investors make is always waiting on an investment to turn it around when it starts to fall. It may turn it around but you might be looking at 10-15 years in the future for an investment to turn itself around to get back to the value you once had. Basically what you need to do is set a point at where you will be happy with your return on investment. So say you invested in Amazon lets say 5-years ago at about $250 for 1-share of stock in Amazon. Now today Amazon is selling at about $1150 per share. At any point that an investment grows to where you are happy with the return you should be selling or at least putting a stop limit order in. Lets say you put in a stop limit order today for Amazon at $1000 and that is where you are comfortable in taking your gains from this purchase. This will allow to keep the stock but if it does fall you can limit your losses.

 

Now Bitcoin you can't really do this as there is no stop limit order you can put in. You have to watch the market carefully and plan carefully for it. If you got into something like Bitcoin and you already have gains that you are comfortable with you should definitely be looking at the risk factors and then determining if you should sell or not. If you are comfortable with taking on the risk of your investment disappearing then keep on holding onto those Bitcoins but if you are not comfortable with the risk definitely cash out now.

[JackNicholson1974]

Full Disclosure first: Im sour about crypto. I bought 55 litecoins in August with an average about $70. Instability in China tanked it to $45 in a matter of hours and I jumped ship. primarily because I had an unexpected housing expense. So yeah Im sour about it...but honest question time.

 

What happens when bitcoin starts becoming accepted at places like Ebay, Amazon, Wal Mart, etc, and nobody spends it? Because that is what I see happening. I see it being adopted but then nobody spending it. Nobody is buying to spend, they are buying to profit/invest (thats why I bought). But it keeps going up because its the future of currency. But its not, because nobody in their right mind is going to spend it.

 

When ebay starts accepting it and nobody uses it, then what?

[homer]

Reddit thread on bitcoin. The first commenter was so savage in his response that the original poster removed his post.

 

[nate82]

Full Disclosure first: Im sour about crypto. I bought 55 litecoins in August with an average about $70. Instability in China tanked it to $45 in a matter of hours and I jumped ship. primarily because I had an unexpected housing expense. So yeah Im sour about it...but honest question time.

 

What happens when bitcoin starts becoming accepted at places like Ebay, Amazon, Wal Mart, etc, and nobody spends it? Because that is what I see happening. I see it being adopted but then nobody spending it. Nobody is buying to spend, they are buying to profit/invest (thats why I bought). But it keeps going up because its the future of currency. But its not, because nobody in their right mind is going to spend it.

 

When ebay starts accepting it and nobody uses it, then what?

 

Bitcoins have been used for purchases. Steam a digital media company (they sell video games and software digitally) accepted Bitcoins as a payment option until recently I think it was last month they stopped accepting Bitcoins as a payment.

 

The problem with Bitcoins as a payment right now is the rapid fluctuation of the price for a Bitcoin. Unlike notes (dollars, euros, etc.) that don't normally change all that much and if they do it is a fraction of what they are worth Bitcoin can change by $1 to $100 in a second or two. This causes a lot of issues with using Bitcoin as a legal tender. I don't think Bitcoin is going to be the cryptocurrency that changes the world into a cryptocurrency but it is coming.

 

The way that technology is moving now it is only a matter of time before paper and coin based currency goes away. The way that banks are setting themselves up lately is to take advantage of the cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency does has its advantages but right now the disadvantages just out weigh them. Sweden and South Korea have started to move towards a cryptocurrency it is still unknown if this is going to work but the cryptocurrency revolution is going to happen maybe not in its current state but one way or another cryptocurrency is going to be how you pay for things in the future.

[crickets]

Will Crickets be buying the Brewers after he sells his ETH stock?

 

This has been a ridiculous run, a few years ago for work I bought 10 bitcoins as the network I maintain got hit with a crypto virus and one frickin folder on our network wasn't being backed up(which I am extremely grateful for at this time) and it would have required a few years of labor work to bring it back, work ended up paying 2 bitcoins to decrypt the files, price at that time was $212. I bought 10 more personally just to have in case something happened again. One of my developers was very knowledegable about cryptocurrencies in general and explained to me how everything works and got me very interested. When the recent fork came in a couple months ago, I received 10 bitcoin cash(about $1,500 each as of last week) as a part of it for free, each bitcoin you owned you received one bitcoin cash for free if you had your coins in an offline wallet. I just cashed half those in for USD around $7,500 and the other half of those in to IOTA coins last week around $4 each, for about 1900 coins. The IOTA is harder to buy as you need to setup a binance account and trade the BitCoinCash for BNB then buy the IOTA. If IOTA gets in with Coinbase on their exchange which is where I have my ETH, it will explode just as ETH and Litecoins did. IOTA has doubled already in the past couple months. If it crashes hard, so be it, I've cashed in a bunch of profit already and the IOTA were free and all profit.

 

I'm holding my ETH and Bitcoins for a long time and hoping IOTA explodes, if it does, I will be asking Mark A if I can buy into the Crew for sure.

[PlayerHader]

I don't pretend to really understand cryptocurrency, but I've read enough about them to be intrigued to investing some "spare change" what I'd view as a lottery ticket. IOTA has me intrigued. What would be the best way for a guy to throw $500 or so into this to get going?

[crickets]

I don't pretend to really understand cryptocurrency, but I've read enough about them to be intrigued to investing some "spare change" what I'd view as a lottery ticket. IOTA has me intrigued. What would be the best way for a guy to throw $500 or so into this to get going?

 

There is no way to directly buy IOTA with US Dollars. You need to buy a cryptocurrency like Ethereum or bitcoin first.

 

 

This tutorial is essentially how I bought my bitcoins and ETH through Coinbase, which you can buy with linking to a credit card or paypal I think now. Ethereum transactions are much faster than bitcoins if you don't feel like waiting around for hours.

 

So you would basically buy the $500 in Ethereum, once you have that verified in your Coinbase account, you need to setup a Binance account which allows you to purchase IOTA. You transfer your ETH coins to binance, then they have exchanges where you can convert ETH to BNB(Binance Coins used for trading and converting) then BNB to IOTA. So basically USD -> ETH(Coinbase) -> BNB(Binance) -> IOTA(Binance).

 

If you do this, I am warning you that you need to read up on the procedures and risks for transferring and obtaining coins. There are alot of stories of where people are sending to different exchanges and mistyped something and lost everything. It would be like sending $500 to a paypal address and mistyping their email, you will lose it and no way to retrieve it back. I spent alot of time learning about this process, its not simple by any means.

 

At this time, IOTA is like most cryptocurrencies in their infancy where its difficult to buy, but once they reach solid ground, exchanges like Coinbase will pick them up and that's where Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoins took off as anyone can open a coinbase account and buy them in a few minutes and sell them to cash out with a click of a button.

 

Info on IOTA:

https://coincentral.com/what-is-iota-cryptocurrency-coin/

 

Best of luck, but warning you to read up first and be very careful when you need to transfer the funds around.

[pogokat]

you can always just buy bitcoin and litecoin at whatever they are right now with your 500 and hope they keep going up. I did this about 10 days ago and made 400 bucks, mostly on the litecoin. There's a bit of risk, sure, but there are fewer gate keepers than the stockmarket, and the fairly low. It's not hard to withdraw cash. At this point, I've removed my initial investment, so I've only got the profit I turned still in coinbase, which i've moved around a little to try and make more.

[homer]

Bitcoin down almost 40% from high water mark....that only took a week. I don't have the stomach for those peaks and valleys...play money at best for me if I ever get into it.

[owbc]

I'm thinking about buying some crypto for fun if Bitcoin goes below $10K. Agreed that it is best for play money...extremely dangerous for serious investment although a few have obviously gotten lucky.

 

The most ridiculous thing about the crypto fad is how terrible it is for the environment. Governments are going to need to do something to discourage mining.

[brewcrewdue80]

The old buy when its low in the week or so has finally been paying. An IPO I traded last year successfully was way down. I bought some here and there as it continued down. I was down some 30% in it, but my averafe was lower due to a buy a month earlier. Its climbed back to about half it's IPO and suddenly Im up 50% in my holdings. Merry Christmas me.

 

A lil story as I keep an interest in stock prices on shares Ive sold out on. My dad told me he did this a lot with Kohls for a long time.

 

On the other end of this spectrum, I've got stock at one was maybe $16 andIve gobbled up extra shares every 20-30% its fallen. Its down to $4 for whatever reason turning a profit when it was 16 and not for the yeat befor that. Im confident it will grow and will probably get some more shares as at some point rivals will step in and buyout the company with its value.

 

Schneider is still "trucking" along strong. Wish Id bought more at its ipo.Its had increases on a dividend with it stock rising, so im hanging on vs selling. I may more than double my money by this point next year.

[JohnBriggs12]

I bought Schneider back in September when it was at $23 and it's up 23%. Bought me some Macy's on Black Friday, and that's up over 25% in just over a month. Who needs to go into the giant ponzi scheme of Bitcoin? Bitcoin has very little intrinsic value. If I wanted an investment with a huge upside, I'd go the silver route. Silver's sort of "out of fashion" now but it's cheap and has intrinsic value with very little downside.

[homer]

One interesting thing that bitcoin can potentially do is "program" where the money can be spent. So if you send aid to a third world nation, for example, the money can only be targeted for medicine and supplies and cannot be used to buy a missile launcher.

[superfly]

I bought Schneider back in September when it was at $23 and it's up 23%. Bought me some Macy's on Black Friday, and that's up over 25% in just over a month. Who needs to go into the giant ponzi scheme of Bitcoin? Bitcoin has very little intrinsic value. If I wanted an investment with a huge upside, I'd go the silver route. Silver's sort of "out of fashion" now but it's cheap and has intrinsic value with very little downside.

 

 

I don't think Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme, it's just ahead of it's time. Someday we will be paying for things and running our lives via Bitcoins or something like it IMO. I own no crypto and don't really have any intention to other than maybe a few fun bucks in Decentraland (MANA) if I could ever figure the whole transfer process out. Coinbase is an abomination and No thank you to selfies on GDAX.

 

I wouldn't touch those metals with a 10 foot pole either. There's plenty of things to make money on in the regulated stock market so i'll remain there instead of the wild west.

[superfly]

I joined you crypto folks, buying a small amount of LTC that's going to be put in an alt coin like Ethereum blue or Genesis vision and "Hodl" as the reddit people say. I'll stick to my stocks though rather than the wild west, this is one heck of a pain in the butt to do. I don't see the bubble popping for quite some time if it's really this hard for people to buy things lol. Most average folks will never figure it out until it's available to the masses.

[MrTPlush]

Good luck to anyone and their crypto currencies...I really wish you luck if you are trying to get into bitcoin. You may be right that somewhere in our future we will be using it, but the speed for it to get there is not going to be very fast. These currencies are rising at fantastic levels, but they are no more useful than they were yesterday and no more widespread. These currencies have huge percentages held in not some many hands. The bubble will pop eventually.

 

Crypto currencies are not an investment...at least not a very true one. It is more of a big ole gamble and I hope you aren’t gambling too much. Someday a lot of people are going to lose a whole lot.

[nate82]

The IPO that I am waiting for.

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/dropbox-is-said-to-file-confidentially-for-initial-offering

 

Should be a good stock to own for the long-term.

[DHonks]

I worry that as Crypto has grown and become accepted, it's going to face challenges with governments. In the US, the gov't is investigating why holders of Bitcoin haven't been reporting their profits as cap gains on their returns. It's also supposedly the preferred currency for rogue nations (North Korea supposedly is VERY active in crypto) and organized crime. It's really intriguing, but gov'ts will scrutinize this more

[superfly]

The IPO that I am waiting for.

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/dropbox-is-said-to-file-confidentially-for-initial-offering

 

Should be a good stock to own for the long-term.

 

I can't even imagine what they're going to value that slob at. It may be a good company, but the Goldman Sach is going to price that IPO so high it's going to ruin any chance of making money on it for a fair bit of time IMO. Hopefully you are able to get in on the IPO and not the day it starts trading.

[crickets]

Well this afternoon I cashed out of bitcoin and ethereum. Wife and I had discussed what we could do with the money and she said she was set on building a pimped out pool. The bitcoins alone will easily pay for that and all the ethereum will pay for the kids college funds.

 

Holding onto my IOTA and Cardano for now.

 

Not sure where its all going to go, but with what we cashed out with, couldn't be happier.

[Patrick425]

S&P 500 up over 7.4% year to date after today's close. Crazy. Last 9 years the index has had positive returns each year. There has never been 10 straight calendar years of positive returns for the S&P 500. Something will eventually spook the market, geopolitical or otherwise, and a correction will happen, but it's been quite a ride so far!

[GAME05]

One of Charlie Munger's basic rules for investing is not to invest in an industry you don't understand, so that pretty much puts me out of Bitcoin. I could see it succeeding if the dollar starts to fail as the world's standard currency, but I'm not betting my own money that that's going to happen anytime soon.

 

My father made a pretty quick $1k off of SiriusXM. I don't think he has much faith in it long-term, but it's one he seems to keep an eye on and just noticed it was undervalued.

[superfly]

One of Charlie Munger's basic rules for investing is not to invest in an industry you don't understand, so that pretty much puts me out of Bitcoin. I could see it succeeding if the dollar starts to fail as the world's standard currency, but I'm not betting my own money that that's going to happen anytime soon.

 

My father made a pretty quick $1k off of SiriusXM. I don't think he has much faith in it long-term, but it's one he seems to keep an eye on and just noticed it was undervalued.

 

Buffett owns SIRI if my mind serves me right, not a huge position but still pretty large #'s to any of us.