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.
I don't know any secure invesments in the developed world that pay 1% a year yet along 10% a year.
You can achieve an average of 5-10% a year if you take short term risks.
There is no safe investments paying 20% a year that I am aware of.... But everyone has a different tolerance for risk levels and one man's idea of safe might be very different from another
Everyone thought they were safe in 2008 when the property and credit bubbles busted and caused a global recession....
I guess people in Cyprus and Greece thought they were safe too because their money was "safe" in the banks etc
Anything paying 20% a year is likely risky or even an outright scam.... The Madoff ponzi paid 12% a year to put that that into perspective...
I agree with everything by the last two posters in this above thread of discussion.
The ridiculous claim of QuestionAuthority is assuming that regular people can find safe investments of 10% to 20%, and the fact of the matter is that if regular and/or even sophisticated investors are earning 6% to 9% in a longer term basis, they are doing pretty well.
Yeah, sure we are going to have the potential of years of 20% or 30% performance on our investments, but there are going to be down years as well, and difficulties in determining how or whether to move our funds based on shorter term predictions and even whether the cost of moving funds is worth the change, and many investors attempt to diversify their various investments in such a way that overall they are consistently attempting to get good performance or to average good performance...
And, part of the reason that index funds tend to do so well, even in comparison to professional advisors, is that those funds diversify rather than attempting to predict and time the market.
The experts get it wrong a lot, so I don't buy any claims that either regular people can get decent overall safe returns or that experts can.
There are 10-12% return investments that aren't hard to find. I've averaged 14% a year on a WSIB Real Estate Investment Trust. The problem is you need investment money and the knowledge to know what's right for you.
QA can brag all that he wants about his past performance, but it is likely to be merely words than supported by actual facts, and even if he has actual facts of good performance (such as 14%) in the past, unlikely he would be able to repeat consistently future equivalent levels of performance.. and then to expect other regular people to achieve such levels of performance on a consistent basis is fantasyland logic.
Coming from you that means absolutely nothing.