Cryptocurrencies

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I was talking to a friend and his brother is well enough off to dabble in rare wines. Apparently people buy, sell and trade bottles for a small fortune. Apparently there's a lot of fraud as well.

It seems you buy these rare bottles of hooch and never open or drink them. If they are wrapped in some obscure paper it never gets removed either.

The bottle could contain horse urine far all you know and it's a lose lose situation. If you open the bottle to check it goes down in value even if it is the good stuff. If you don't open it you never find out if you've been had.

Like Bitcoin who calls the shots to values?
 
Speculators.

It blows my mind the number of companies that have been set up to "mine" Bitcoin based on total speculation.
It blows my mind the amount of electricity being used to power the massive banks of computers used to do that.
And it is all based on "nothing".

I know of no legitimate businesses who use Bitcoin as a native currency (in the way that, for example, Apple Inc operates based on US dollars, Volkswagen AG operates based on Euro, and the tiny company that I work for operates based on Canadian dollars).

The very few companies that I know of that accept Bitcoin as payment, are surely simply converting it to whatever their native currency is so that they can pay their workers and suppliers. That's what we do any time we get a payment in anything other than our native currency. If we get a payment in US$ it immediately gets converted and deposited in a C$ account.

Bitcoin is ALL speculation. That's why it's so volatile ... and as long as it remains that volatile, it can't really be used to store value. To be functional and useful, a legitimate currency needs to have a reasonably stable valuation measured by real assets (bricks and mortar, land, etc).

The underlying "blockchain", which I don't understand either, appears to have some value to it, but Bitcoin itself ... is nothing but speculation, and the way it is set up, I doubt this will ever change.
 
More energy in Iceland is being used to mine cryptocurrencies than for other uses now. This is lunacy.
 
Just found this thread.
I'm personally a believer in blockchain technology.
Bitcoin is not the best in terms of utility but it is the main driver of cryptocurrency market.

From briefly skimming through this thread, it seems like most of you that commented are not a fan?

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moarmoto said:
Just found this thread.
I'm personally a believer in blockchain technology.
Bitcoin is not the best in terms of utility but it is the main driver of cryptocurrency market.

From briefly skimming through this thread, it seems like most of you that commented are not a fan?

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Click to expand...

In principle, it seems like blockchain is an interesting concept that can solve some shortcomings in our current banking systems. In practice, due to rampant speculation and inadequate security at repositories, many of the advantages have been lost.

You are now left with something with limited liquidity, high transactions costs and time, unknown value and it can disappear at any time with no recourse unless you are physically keeping it yourself. Remind me again why it is a good idea?
 
GreyGhost said:
In principle, it seems like blockchain is an interesting concept that can solve some shortcomings in our current banking systems. In practice, due to rampant speculation and inadequate security at repositories, many of the advantages have been lost.

You are now left with something with limited liquidity, high transactions costs and time, unknown value and it can disappear at any time with no recourse unless you are physically keeping it yourself. Remind me again why it is a good idea?
Click to expand...
Looks like you know quite well about it.
I agree on your points.
I'm not saying people should get into it blindly.

For myself, it's a good idea because as you said, it's a speculative market and I'm willing to lose what I put in for the likelihood of the tech and market taking off tremendously.

This is the first time in my life when someone like me (millenial) can get into a market where big things could possibly happen. Previous generations had dotcom, real estate, etc. Sure there are risks, but also rewards.

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moarmoto said:
Looks like you know quite well about it.
I agree on your points.
I'm not saying people should get into it blindly.

For myself, it's a good idea because as you said, it's a speculative market and I'm willing to lose what I put in for the likelihood of the tech and market taking off tremendously.

This is the first time in my life when someone like me (millenial) can get into a market where big things could possibly happen. Previous generations had dotcom, real estate, etc. Sure there are risks, but also rewards.

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Click to expand...

So you're in for the thrill of gambling. I get it. I would argue real estate is vastly different in Canada as it can never go to 0 nor be stolen and more land can not be economically created so at the very least it should be inflation hedged. Dotcom is a good comparison, some good ideas, lots of turds and lots of people throwing money in hoping for a lottery win.

I you want to get in on the ground floor of things that can be big, look for an investment that does something that a) you can easily describe (the more complicated the explanation needs to be, the more likely it is based on BS eg. Apple makes devices with integrated stores for content vs. mortgage credit default swaps) and b) provides a service or product that many normal people see value in (eg. coke or heinz ketchup vs. random dotcom ideas with no advantage over competitors, path to profits or reason for people to use the product). Tesla a few years ago or marijuana are recent examples that met these tests. Once too many speculators get in, it is no longer a good investment. Blockchain companies don't pass either of these tests right now (and the speculators have already driven the price to the moon).
 
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GreyGhost said:
In principle, it seems like blockchain is an interesting concept that can solve some shortcomings in our current banking systems. In practice, due to rampant speculation and inadequate security at repositories, many of the advantages have been lost.

You are now left with something with limited liquidity, high transactions costs and time, unknown value and it can disappear at any time with no recourse unless you are physically keeping it yourself. Remind me again why it is a good idea?
Click to expand...

Or you can trust the currency supported by a nation lead by an alternate fact guy with an orange hamster on his head.
 
moarmoto said:
Looks like you know quite well about it.
I agree on your points.
I'm not saying people should get into it blindly.

For myself, it's a good idea because as you said, it's a speculative market and I'm willing to lose what I put in for the likelihood of the tech and market taking off tremendously.

This is the first time in my life when someone like me (millenial) can get into a market where big things could possibly happen. Previous generations had dotcom, real estate, etc. Sure there are risks, but also rewards.

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Click to expand...

You had weed stocks to play with!
 
True in hindsight but weed didn't seem interesting for me to do more research.

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The bottom line for me is that my gaming PC is paying for coffee and sometimes a donut by mining altcoin while I'm at work
 
TwistedKestrel said:
The bottom line for me is that my gaming PC is paying for coffee and sometimes a donut by mining altcoin while I'm at work
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Cool, what do you mine? I tried it with my 5yr old PC and mined 0.1 xmr in 2 months. So I'm not doing that again lol

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moarmoto said:
Cool, what do you mine? I tried it with my 5yr old PC and mined 0.1 xmr in 2 months. So I'm not doing that again lol

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Click to expand...

Using NHML to mine whatever, right now it's been on a long streak of Monero & ZCash. 5 years old is about the cutoff for CPUs having AES-NI support, which you basically need to mine Monero. My PC isn't that new either though (i5 2500K & AMD 7950, both oc'ed)
 
Same here. Using Nicehash to mine Equihash while I'm not gaming with my Gtx1080. $3-4 a day in BTC.
 
You guys are talking about actual ASIC machines, I still come out ahead using NiceHash by mining alternative coins.
 
Baggsy said:
Still making money? https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/15/bad...-profitable-to-create-the-cryptocurrency.html
Click to expand...

Technically yes (mining altcoins), but net is currently like less than a dollar a day. My older machine is not slow, but it is definitely not power efficient. Keeping it switched off unless it bounces back, but for only playing around with it for like two months I made about a hundred bucks (CDN in pocket, not imaginary spacebucks) for doing very little, and most of that was made in the first month. Had I clued in earlier last year probably could have done a lot better
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