Did anybody get in early on BTC and ETH? Are you still up? what do you make of the recent nose dive? Too me it seems like dumb money followed smart money, and when the uber driver was telling you to buy ETH a few months ago, I knew it was oversold.
Haha! I hadn't thought of this in years!! My buddy passed the word to me a while back. I looked it up and saw how "out of the garage" its roots were. The info didn't do a good enough job to show me how it would work on an international scale, so I thought very little if it. It's really difficult to think in this day and age to foresee the next line in currency. Digital does make sense, in a sense, but I think I'd have to watch the first two Terminators to really want to push my future and my kids future into that realm. I'm also glad for this thread. If I'm wrong, I'll be able to calculate "what could've been" with the time stamp attached to this post.
I bought two bitcoins back in 2014 and sold them a year later after almost quadrupling my investment. Should have waited a bit longer as well, but glad to have gotten out when I did. The fluctuations nowadays are far too unpredictable. I do wish I had gotten in on ether at it's start though. My oldest brother made a pretty penny on it.
My brother has 25 BTC or so, bought in when they were around $200, says he will never sell. I also have a friend who mined them early on and he had tens of thousands at one point when they were like $0.000006 or some shit. He held onto 100 of them when they started to to increase but had he held onto them he would have made A LOT OF MONEY!
The first time I looked at btc with a friend it was ~$10 usd a coin! Ahh if only we had followed up on a plan to buy some at that point. Classic story lol. I think crypto has the potential to be hugely important in our world. Think about how much money all of the world's data is worth: companies like Facebook are literally some of the highest valued corporations ever. Cryptocurrencies allow us to programmatically add value to the data we exchange, the potential is crazy! The technology is still in its infancy, it will be awesome to see what sort of applications come out of it! Projects like ethereum are incredibly interesting. I mean, its kinda lols to call it a nosedive when a year ago it was ~$600, and now it has dropped from $5k to $4k. I'd say don't come to bitcoin looking to make a quick buck, its safer to place a longterm bet. Try to understand why the tech might be important, and the sort of things it may one day achieve. If you're in, then remember "don't invest more than you can afford to lose", because nobody has any clue wtf to value this stuff at, its a crazy experiment in network tech worth billions of dollars, and ambitions to 'change the world'! I can only expect the swings will continue.
Oh, probably also worth mentioning: The Terra Kendama shop has been accepting bitcoin as payment since late 2013. We also offer 5% off for customers paying with btc, using code 'BITCOIN5'. Spend ur magic internet bucks on some good wood! The site will accept btc directly, if you want to spend eth / ltc / dsh / whatever just hit me up. Whats your reasoning behind some of these? I haven't ever read into strat, omg or adx, is it some cool tech that makes them stand out? In the world of more 'obscure' alts, I've played with iota a little bit, but I must admit I haven't fully grasped the maths behind the tangle, still need to spend more time reading up on it. Lastly, here is my dogecoin coffee mug, for some lols
Woops, never saw this! Yeah, just interesting tech and solid real world applications, I've since sold the OmiseGo for Waves, they've got a really strong timeline into next year. Little correction today might be a good time for anybody interested to get in to crypto, although nobody knows if it will keep going down or stabilize before the next run, so do your own research and trade at your own risk.
Oops! Sorry about that and thanks for fixing. Prior to this reply a search with the keyword "Cryptocurrency" was returning no results so I didn't see it. It's definitely a wild day for all the major currencies. I went ahead and put a little money into Ripple last night and would be psyched if it went somewhere. Here's a major question I've got. Does anyone have recommendations for a more reliable wallet than Coinbase?
If youre in for the long haul and youre just HODLing, get a cold wallet. Especially if you have more than $5-10k riding on it. here is a pretty great guide: https://blockgeeks.com/guides/paper-wallet-guide/
That was a super good read! I’m treating it more as a hobby right now. Only have a couple hundred in and have been enjoying using binance to move it around. My main frustration has been with how absurd the fees are to move bitcoin out of coinbase. So far the lowest fee I’ve seen is a $30 fee to move $1 worth of bitcoin to binance. Since that’s so expensive I’ve been buying litecoin in coinbase then transferring it to binance then selling it and buying bitcoin I can use to exchange into ripple and iota.
Me and My Cousin invested in Ripple (XRP) about a year ago when it was less than 1 cent. I sold most of mine but he held on to his. Now my cousin is 25 and retired because of a $5000 investment in XRP. Its crazy to think how many damas I could cop if I held on to mine!!! But seriously now is the time to buy ripple. There are 3 things that make it the best cryptocurrency. 1.Ripple payments settle in 4 seconds, compared to bitcoin (5 hours) 2. Starting to be used by the biggest banks in the world 3. Soon to be on Coinbase - price will skyrocket Let Me know what you guys think!
VERY IMPORTANT: the instructions to make a 'cold storage' paper wallet here are NOT as secure as they are advertising. I would NEVER make a paper wallet using these instructions. To truly call a wallet/address 'cold storage', the private key controlling it needs to have NEVER existed on an internet-connected machine. Using an internet connected machine and printer to generate and print the wallet does not qualify as a 'cold wallet'. Saying "make sure you have no malware on your machine, and then turn your internet connection off" is like a bad joke, except its not funny. A good antivirus program works in a reactionary way, it is entirely possible that your machine is infected with a yet-undiscovered malware that no antivirus software will detect. The advent of cryptocurrencies allows hackers to steal value itself, rather than just data that can hopefully be sold at a later date. If you think the smartest blackhats out there aren't investing time into quietly positioning themselves to steal cryptocurrencies, you may be in for a rude surprise one day. So, if you really must use a paper wallet, buy a cheap computer, and make sure you NEVER plug it into the internet (like, literally rip out the wifi card, and destroy any ethernet ports before you boot up). Another option is to boot up TAILS OS and generate private keys within the VM, but thats a little more advanced. You should also buy a printer that you ONLY use for printing paper wallets. A lot of printers store past jobs in local memory, so if you plug another computer in later, it may be able to access those past jobs. One last thing for paper wallets: MAKE SURE YOU UNDERSTAND HOW CHANGE ADDRESSES WORK, especially in relation to using paper wallets. I've read horror stories of people importing a paper wallet into a software wallet, spending half the balance, deleting the software wallet, and then later being confused that their paper wallet is 100% empty. Woops! Your coins are gone. So all that said, hardware wallets are great. Trezor/Ledger are kinda the standard, but there are a couple of other newcomers on the scene. They're about $100 USD ish, and have a great balance of security/usability imo. Make sure you backup the seed phrase, and consider making more than one copy that you store in isolated and secure locations. For smaller amounts, mobile wallets keep your keys reasonably secure, as long as your phone isn't rooted/jailbroken. For what its worth, I'd trust a mobile wallet over a full node running on my laptop (though really, you should be running a full node, and pointing isolated wallet software at it. I just wouldn't keep funds on my laptop). So thats the end of my rant for now. If it seems over the top, I'll just say that not having good backups cost me once, and hopefully never again
On a less serious note, I'm amazed by the Ripple run up. 100% pre mined, with over 50% held in escrow by a centralized control? Short term profits are there to be had (clearly), but I just don't see the long term potential in something that goes against some of the core tenants of what makes cryptocurrencies important. Not that it can't have utility in its own right, but sovereignty truly can't exist when you're trusting someone to not misappropriate billions of dollars worth of value. Look up the ongoing lawsuit between Ripple Labs and R3, the fate of like 5 billion XRP is being decided in a court of law, based on a legal contract. Thats certainly not how I want the supply side of my investments run! That said, I own some shitcoins that I think have potential, XRP just isn't my flavour. I'm interested to see how DAG-based coins evolve. XRB has had an amazing run-up the last couple weeks, and Iota did the same not too long before it. Both have centralization issues, but I think they're less egregious faults that will hopefully be reduced/removed in the long run.
With regards to the XRP run up, the cynical Libertarian in me thinks that there is some heavy market manipulation at play on behalf of the banks. Here's the sparknotes of what could be going on- Banks fear crypto. They hate it. They might write it off as a scam or point out its flaws, but the truth of the matter is it has a very real possibility of undermining their entire existence, and disrupting their whole world. Of course they hate it! They would also be stupid not to hedge against that happening. I suspect they got in on XRP to hedge in two ways, one more cynical than the other. The obvious one is that they're looking to support a cryptocurrency that is centralized, that is, not really a fair node-based blockchain at all; it's one where their nodes would be favored, and "more secure" (bank's words, not mine). That's what they would have you think. That XRP will be used by banks and financial institutions, but not a front end user facing solution. Hence, if you trust the banks, trust XRP. Plus, it is faster. What I think really might be happening is Banks are shitting themselves that they might not have enough of the 21M bitcoin. By backing an alternative, they can drive the price of XRP way up, expect BTC to fall under fears of competition, and then trade on the strong XRP to weak BTC. And I mean trade on a massive scale. Like... own half or even MOST bitcoins. Then, it doesn't even matter to them whether or not XRP works because they're hodling the digital gold, and we all look like fools.
I think it is safest to default to thinking that there is always market manipulation happening. 'BTC dominance' is a silly measure in some ways, but it does provide some insight into the market, and right now its at an all-time low. Lots of new investors thinking they'll see better returns on a cheap coin than they'll see on btc itself... we'll see how that plays out. It could become a self-fulfilling prophecy (altcoin gains have been large lately), but it could also just be a slow setting of the stage, before some whales dump hard on everyone, and we see the BTC dominance skyrocket back over 50-60% (which would mean a lot of alts dump 50+% of their value). It wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened... but then again access to alts is easier now than ever before. So the game is a little different too. Time will tell!