Re: I am pretty confident we are the new wealthy elite, gentlemen.
You're one of the ultra rare lucky ones. Talk to the thousands of people with money in Mt Gox, Bitinstant, ButterflyLabs, Gaw Miners, MyBitcoin, Pirates Ponzi, Bitcoinica, Bitscalper, Inputs.IO, Vicurex, Cryptorush, TradeHill, CryptoXChange, GBL, Just Dice, Bitcoin Rain, The Silk Road Seizure, Sheep Marketplace, BS&T, PicoStocks, Bitfloor, Basic Mining, Mintpal and many, many others.
Why is Just-Dice on that list of ponzis, scams, hacks, and thefts? Just-Dice took care of the over 60,000 BTC entrusted to it and returned it all when it shut down.
Ok, you found one that was corrected. The point remains that Bitcoin facilitates loss in a way that no other payment system does and has no insurance or fraud protection covering it. I was one of the lucky ones that made money when you could mine with a gpu at almost no cost other than electricity. From now on, people will need to put their own money in to it and they will only make money if they live long enough to see an enormous increase in the exchange rate. It's a gamble that may pay off but it's high risk.
There are many secure investments that pay 10-20% a year. If you start today with $10,000 and average 20% a year for 20 years, you'll have over $380,000. Add $2,000 a year to the pot, and you'll wind up with $756,751 after 20 years. Granted, 20% a year is not super easy to achieve. But even if you only make 10% a year, you're still going to become very wealthy over the long term. People are getting scammed or throwing their money at gambling bitcoins because the return isn't happening fast enough for them. They should simply try a stable long term investment.
What you said has nothing to do with Bitcoin. If you invest your USD cash with a shady startup, you have no way to get it back neither. It's naive people making bad investment decisions, has nothing to do with Bitcoin. Bitcoin behaves just like USD cash in terms you never get it back if you lose it. Any "guarantee" or "security" of USD comes from a 3rd party service (banks/insurance companies)
I agree, the naive people are here claiming Bitcoin will hit $10,000 a coin in their lifetime when the exchange rate sat almost perfectly still for two years.
It doesn't seem to be impossible. If we look at the money entering Bitcoin start ups and the true potential of Bitcoin, it definitely is possible that Bitcoin will appreciate in price in the future.
Of course it will appreciate in price. It will also decrease in price shortly after the mining reward decrease. I'll return to this post after the current bubble pops and list the annual percentage of investment gain per year for the last three years. It won't be impressive and actually could end up being a negative number.
Why only 3 years? Many of us probably bought bitcoins 6 years for single digits or even pennies..... I would say the percentage gains I've made over the years in btc would embarrass any legitimate savings scheme..... Maybe if you bought at $1200 you would be down at the moment but $1200 will easily be surpassed this year..... And ultimately... Those people will be glad if they held their btc
Because this entire conversation thread has been about people buying in now instead of buying into other investments. I made a shitload of money too. As user CornedBeefHash I remember mining a shitload at less than $2 a coin, being so happy when it went to over $15 a coin and so depressed when it crashed to $2 and stayed there for what seemed to be forever. I'm looking at average rate of return for a few years for the average investor. The good old days are over dude.
I remain optimistic or I wouldn't even be here, the first coins I bought about 6yrs ago so I have made several thousand percent roi already (and I have not sold the majority of my coins but have taken significant profits out along the way )
I am still trading but mainly hodling, I bought my most expensive coins ever a few days ago in the bfx panic drop lol
All the disasters you listed are real, but could have been avoided if people had not trusted Mt gox as a "bank" or been greedy enough to join the ponzi schemes that were offering a few % a day etc (I could list even more disasters that happened with investors cash so Bitcoin is not really less safe than the people you trust to look after it)
I keep private keys securely backed up in various forms and different physical locations and I don't trust foreign unregulated exchanges to keep my funds.....
I think a price rise is enevitable but I don't think coins will double in value magically on the day of the halving.... More like the reduced supply will eventually push the price up over $1200 to a new ATH before the end of the year
the ethereum crisis will probably dump money back into btc too because whether they do a hard fork or not will result in some % of disgruntled users.... And the dao Funds may be released around the same date as the halving which will be interesting to see as I guess huge trust will be lost in eth/dao
To summarize, this is Gentlemen!
