Bitcoin

[pacoalcracker]

Dont have any and never will. I will trust Warren Buffet, Charlie Munger and Jamie Dimon who are the smartest money and investment people on the planet ( Munger is gone now ). If they say it's not an investment...it isn't. Period. Sure, it's a trading vehicle, like many, where your ONLY hope is to find someone willing to pay you more for it than you paid. It's nothing more and nothing less. I've been investing for more than 45 years and have done quite well without it. Like Warren says...only when the tide recedes will you see who has been swimming naked!

 

[william schmaltz]

Yes, ledger for me for cold storage.

I use Exodus wallet for stuff I want immediate access to. Then 2 different Meta Mask wallets. Very little ever in MM as those are what I need to connect for airdrops, swapping, NFTs, etc. Then I send that stuff to exodus short term so I can exit when the time comes.

Write seed phrases on waterproof paper and place in fireproof bags. I have two copies and they would require me leaving my home to get. Depending on how much you have and what your risk tolerance is, safety deposit box at a couple different banks, gun safe, buried under your favorite tree, or dresser drawer. It’s up to you. I have a ledger for each kid that have as much as their 529s with 1/10th the investment.

Edit: I’d recommend even going as far as using an encrypted email like proton mail and a VPN. In this day and age, you should be doing that for all your financial accounts IMO. Even just simple bank transfers.

 

[Doc Holliday]

I have some COIN in my portfolio that I bought at the peak, but it's gradually coming back....it generally follows BTC. I'm not a trader, so volatility does not bother me. I just put horses on the track and let em run

 

[grossklw]

Seed phrase for a large Ledger balance should be in a safety deposit box.

If I can't access the safety deposit box that's unhelpful. I feel good about having one in my house hidden and another at a trusted friend's house hidden. I'm confident I could give someone unrestricted access to my house for a week and they wouldn't find it, same with the 2nd.

 

[ScreamingPotato]

If I can't access the safety deposit box that's unhelpful. I feel good about having one in my house hidden and another at a trusted friend's house hidden. I'm confident I could give someone unrestricted access to my house for a week and they wouldn't find it, same with the 2nd.

It's a personal thing, as long as someone is OK with it. You're obviously covered for fires and such, but for me there's no place in my house, even the safe, that I'm 100% confident some thief methhead or FBI goon couldn't run across it and pocket it and drain my Ledger.

 

[Mighty Mouse]

Can any of you explain to me, as if I’m a third grader, what the end plan is with BTC? Meaning are you envisioning a day where retailers scan some device of yours and deduct some amount of BTC for a bag of groceries?

Acceptance as payment has been growing steadily, and I believe bitcoin will some day be readily accepted most places in everyday commerce.

Inflationary concerns associated with fiat currency aside, I know what the US government is and its backing means something to me. Gold means something because folks find it pretty and it’s used in some manufacturing. Isn’t BTC just a nebulous idea floating around out there backed only by hope and opinion?

What backing is there to the US dollar? You can't go to your local bank and trade your dollars in for gold. If there were any real link between the dollar and gold, you should be able to take a Benjamin ($100 Federal Reserve Note) to your local bank and exchange it for two 1 ounce American gold eagles (each stamped with a face value of $50). If you find a bank that will make that trade, please let me know. The dollar was officially decoupled from gold in 1971 (the decoupling began decades earlier but was made official when Nixon "closed the gold window").

The "backing" to bitcoin (the token) is the value of the Bitcoin blockchain as a decentralized, immutable record of transactions. The token allows you to utilize the blockchain. I concede that this idea is nebulous and can be difficult to wrap your mind around but would contend that there is "real" value to the Bitcoin blockchain as a store of information. The price of bitcoin (denominated in US dollars) is still very volatile right now and is being driven largely by speculation. Bitcoin is still young (15 years old) compared to other media of exchange (Federal Reserve Note = 111 years, gold = millenia), and price discovery is still taking place. I believe bitcoin's value relative to other currencies will eventually stabilize as it gains adoption and as the halving cycles become less impactful.

What about concerns regarding digital theft, not only like what that weird Bankman Fried guy pulled off but how about some moderately talented hacker at the corner Starbucks?

Valid concern. Most folks aren't accustomed to financial responsibility. They rely on their credit company to protect them from fraud and rely (usually unknowingly) on the FDIC to secure their checking/savings accounts. Bitcoin has fewer safeguards, but anything of value is at risk of being stolen and precautions should be taken accordingly. Online exchanges are not a good place to keep large amounts of bitcoin. Companies offering any sort of yield on your bitcoin (à la FTX or Gemini) should be treated with caution. A software wallet is a pretty safe storage option, and a cold/hardware wallet is even better.

I mean, I can stuff my mattress with hundos or bury some gold in the pasture, BTC isnt tangible, right?

You could bury bitcoin in the form of a cold wallet and its associated private key (in a waterproof box) and keep it safe indefinitely.

Asking out of genuine curiosity, can’t disagree with the gains but just can’t wrap my head around how this isn’t digital tulip bulbs.

For one thing, Bitcoin has already lasted significantly longer than the Dutch tulip bubble and has survived multiple runs up and down.

 

[fmyth]

Dont have any and never will. I will trust Warren Buffet, Charlie Munger and Jamie Dimon who are the smartest money and investment people on the planet ( Munger is gone now ). If they say it's not an investment...it isn't. Period. Sure, it's a trading vehicle, like many, where your ONLY hope is to find someone willing to pay you more for it than you paid. It's nothing more and nothing less. I've been investing for more than 45 years and have done quite well without it. Like Warren says...only when the water recedes will you see who has been swimming naked!

Warren Buffet passed on investing in Amazon not once but twice. Jamie Diamond is best know for being Jeffery Epsteins banker and racking up nearly 40 billion dollars in legal and regulatory fines during his career. While in Davos for the WEF Diamond stated that "Bitcoin is a 'pet rock' that does nothing—except help with fraud and money laundering". Weeks later his bank became the Authorized Participant for Blackrocks Bitcoin ETF.

 

[Split toe]

So is anybody still buying?

 

[DeepTimber]

After a little research I am planning to!

 

[Wrench]

 

[Wrench]

I get nervous about a product that can't be touched, isn't necessary to do business or survive, can be "mined" out of thin air and has questionable roots.

I'm not arguing that people are not making money on it....but in my eyes it's today's amway....or the greatest ponzi scheme ever dreamed.

 

[william schmaltz]

We talking about the Jamie Dimond who said at WEF in 2017 that he would fire any trader in his company that bought BTC (causing price to drop 25%) and within 12 hours the largest buyers of a BTC fund in Europe were JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley? Same guy that testified to “shut crypto down” in front of congress in December 2023 and then less than a month later his bank became the largest custodian of the BTC ETF? Same bank that has more than tripled their crypto department in the last 3 month and is reportedly working on a stable coin that would allow trading crypto funds bank to bank? Seems to me like every time Jamie Dimond talks trash about BTC is just a way to set himself up for another buy.

Watch what they do, not what they say.

 

[fmyth]

So is anybody still buying?

788 million dollars of the Blackrock ETF shares were bought yesterday. A total of $562 million of all 12 BTC ETF's were purchased yesterday. I have a daily buy set up on Coinbase. I "caught the dip" yesterday and will continue to do so up to 100k.

 

[hicountry1]

Tulips part II.....

 

[fmyth]

I get nervous about a product that can't be touched, isn't necessary to do business or survive, can be "mined" out of thin air and has questionable roots.

I'm not arguing that people are not making money on it....but in my eyes it's today's amway....or the greatest ponzi scheme ever dreamed.

I'd say the US dollar has more in common with a Ponzi scheme than Bitcoin does. Stick $100,000 in your mattress and watch its purchasing power evaporate month after month as our government prints more and more of it each year. Why do you think the price of everything has increased at an exponential rate over the last 5 years? Every time that printer goes BRRRRR the dollars you own are worth less when you exchange them for goods and services. Since 2020, the US has printed nearly 80% of ALL US Dollars in circulation. To put that in perspective, at the start of 2020 we had ~$4 trillion in circulation. Now, there is nearly $19 TRILLION in circulation, a 375% jump in 3 years.

 

[fmyth]

Tulips part II.....

 

[Mighty Mouse]

Tulips part II.....

Nah, we're witnessing at least part IV of this crazy, doomed-to-go-to-zero mania. Part II was in 2017, part III in 2021.

 

[hicountry1]

If anyone thinks the gov is going to allow a competing currency to exist, your smoking something.

It's a trading vehicle....period.

I stand by my statement.....tulips II

 

[william schmaltz]

If anyone thinks the gov is going to allow a competing currency to exist, your smoking something.

It's a trading vehicle....period.

I stand by my statement.....tulips II

Explain to us how the government stops me from sending BTC to my neighbor. I don’t like losing money so I’m all ears.

I can’t wait until Tulips part VI. Hopefully we still get the big bear market crashes after the ETF approval.

 

[NDGuy]

I don’t understand it at all