The truth is that, depending on your plan, bitcoin may be either an investment or a gamble. If you're buying cryptocurrency with the express intention of becoming wealthy overnight, you're gambling. However, if you honestly feel that Bitcoin is the way of the future and that it will be there for decades, purchasing it now may be considered an investment.

It's preferable to take a long-term strategic approach to investing, regardless of where you decide to put your money. Don't buy something you won't be able to hold for at least a few years, if not decades. In the short term, cryptocurrency is incredibly volatile. However, if you believe in its potential, you may make a lot of money if it succeeds.

Even if you're investing in generally safe areas, there will always be some risk involved. However, becoming a successful investor necessitates taking measured and educated risks, and cryptocurrency is no exception.

Investing your life wealth in cryptocurrencies is unquestionably a risk. There are, however, methods for investing in Bitcoin in a more measured and secure manner.

"Bet on your favorite sports and esports using bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on 1xBit. Quick registration. Welcome bonuses."  1xBit.com is one of the bitcoin betting sites where everyone can earn bitcoins. Okay I'll take a wild guess, you sign up and you automatically get Bitcoins deposited into your wallet am I right?

Look I wish I knew who Satoshi Nakamoto is so I could share it with you, but the identity of the person or persons who created the technology is still a mystery. Bitcoin offers the promise of lower transaction fees than traditional online payment mechanisms and is operated by a decentralized authority, unlike government-issued currencies.

There are no physical bitcoins, only balances kept on a public ledger that everyone has transparent access to, that – along with all Bitcoin transactions – is verified by a massive amount of computing power. Bitcoins are not issued or backed by any banks or governments, nor are individual bitcoins valuable as a commodity. Despite it not being legal tender, Bitcoin charts high on popularity, and has triggered the launch of hundreds of other virtual currencies collectively referred to as Ripple. Etc.

Bitcoin is powered by a technology called a blockchain. To understand Bitcoin, you must understand a little bit about the technology in order to make a wise choice for your investment strategy.

A blockchain is a public database that shows all transactions, with user privacy protected by “cryptography”.

There are many types of blockchains, and many types of coins.

Since Bitcoin was created, there have been hundreds of more coins brought to the market, many of which are cheaper, faster, and more efficient.

For example, Litecoin processes at 56 transactions per second. Newer faster blockchains like EOS can process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

In terms of utility, Bitcoin only processes 7 transactions per second.

So you may be wondering, why is the price of Bitcoin so high?

There are lots of reasons, such as the fact that it was the first coin, it has brand recognition, and you can use to buy services on some internet websites.

But other coins like Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash are catching up.

You're wrong. Bitcoin is a global monetary system function independent of any central monetary authority and is based on blockchain technology. The blockchain is a record-keeping system that makes it impossible to reverse, change, delete, or manipulate the data once recorded. All the transactional data recorded are duplicated and distributed across the computer systems network that supports the bitcoin blockchain connected through peer-to-peer nodes.

Therefore, making it a fully immutable and trustless system. In other words, it’s completely unhackable, tamper-proof, and one has to trust nobody to complete the transaction in the system.

Alright fair enough. Here's what I think, now it's easy to think about the glory days when Bitcoin was trading at 0.0000001 and you could mine them at 300 per hour intervals. Has the hashing algorithm changed? Not really. So there's some value there well because it's withstood the testament of time. Does that make it an invincible currency? Not really. Plenty of exchanges were hacked, wallets get lost and there's no way to recover them, there's millions of coins I would say > 3,000,000 that are gone. So with a fixed supply of 21,000,000 we're down to about 18,000,000 give or take in fluctuation. One of those asks was my 17-year old son, who like many in his cohort is smitten by Robinhood trading apps and easy money. Since the Bitcoin question is one that can trigger a strong reaction, I decided to write a concise viewpoint instead of talking the issue. First, let me suggest the easy and true answer: any “investment” that you buy low and sell high makes you the smartest guy in the room. And if you use that sell-high to buy a yacht, or a vacation home, or an 85” color TV – well those windfalls are as real as a heart attack.

For those of you on the way in, rather than the way out, it makes sense to develop an opinion on exactly what you are investing in, in order to make a decision. Most people think of Bitcoin like money. It’s often described as an alternate currency. It even has a handle for money in the name. To develop a sound stance on Bitcoin, it’s worthwhile to have a sound stance on money: what is it? Can’t decide if Bitcoin is money if we don’t know what money is.

Because paper money is so useful, it’s easy to forget how inherently worthless it is. Intrinsically, it’s worth as much as a scrap of paper. You can’t eat it, wear it, or use it to stay warm (ok, you know what I mean). Paper money issued by the US government until the early 70’s was backed by gold. So paper money had collateral. It could be exchanged for a fixed amount of gold. Gold is a real asset: it is scarce and it has value: people covet it for jewelry and its various industrial uses. The most argumentative would say that in the context of a true apocalypse that gold is not valuable either: you can’t eat it, wear it, or use it to stay warm… and I agree with that: gold is a real asset that can serve as collateral for worthless paper money in ordinary times.

A finer point on how intrinsically worthless paper money is: some people like to hide cash in their mattress because they “don’t trust banks”. Paper money may be worthless, but at least it’s tangible. Once you put it in a bank, it becomes just the 1’s and 0’s in software and printed on your monthly statement that may or may not be backed by sufficient assets or collateral at the bank. There is no drawer at the bank with your name on it full of your cash. That said, our government, who sponsors the currency, has a network of organs and regulations it uses to ensure the banking system does not collapse. If it were ever the case that our government could not sustain the banks, those greenbacks under your mattress would be just as worthless as your bank statement. Wipe your ass with them. Without banks, paper money is meaningless. So if you’re worried enough to hoard cash, I’d bury gold instead.

To answer the question “What is money?”, you have to consider what happened to the US dollar when the government decided to abandon the gold standard in the early 70’s. Up until that time, paper money was just a convenient way for exchanging gold in economic transactions without having to carry it around. In 1971 the government said it would no longer exchange gold for paper money at a fixed rate. What happened? There were a couple of bouts of high inflation, but fundamentally the dollar has held up pretty well. One reason has been sound and improving capabilities to manage the supply of money on the part of our Federal Reserve.

By now you should be asking why the worth of worthless paper money did not collapse when the real asset (gold) was taken away. I have an answer for you. Paper money still has an asset behind it. Paper money (and its bank-statement equivalents) are backed by the full faith and credit of the US government. SO what? Why does this make it valuable? This is an essential point: Money is valuable because people believe that our government, the issuer, has the power to tax the productive output of it’s citizens. That’s it. I can’t eat dollar bills, but there are farmers out there. Those farmers make a tremendous amount of food. And our government has the credible ability to take a portion of that output. And THAT is the collateral for the US dollar today. THAT is the asset that makes money valuable. The US economy.

Currencies that are not backed by tangible assets are called fiat currencies: The dollar has value because the government says it has value, and we believe the government because we believe in the government’s power to tax. Instead of a trove of gold in a vault at Fort Knox, the government has the right to a slice of the ongoing and future output of the world’s most valuable workforce.

And that brings us back to bitcoin. Is it money? Well let’s start with this question: is it a currency, a medium of exchange? The answer today is “no”. A good medium of exchange has to be easy to transact and fairly stable value. Bitcoin has been neither. Transactions are fairly slow and expensive because they have to be written into a distributed universal ledger that is the same everywhere. It takes a fair amount of electricity, computing power, and time just to record a transaction. That’s why it isn’t great for small transactions. In terms of stability – well we know that Bitcoin’s price in US dollars has been $10,000 and $2,000 and $50,000 all within the past few years. So it doesn’t have stable value either. It’s not a great currency. Is it an asset like gold? Well it’s scarce. The software that created it set a for-ever limit on the number of coins that could exist. The issue is that, unlike gold, it has no intrinsic value. You can’t use it to make jewelry, or for industry. You can’t even touch it. And then again, is it really scarce? Kind of. Whoever wrote it’s software (and that remains a mystery), programmed scarcity. But anyone could write a new coin software for a new coin and “make more”. This software, which is generally called “blockchain” is practically open source now. In fact people have made many knockoffs of Bitcoin using blockchain.

Now I can hear Bitcoin fans saying “But the issue is that Bitcoin is widely adopted and accepted. Nobody will trade Bitcoins for Dogecoins on an equal basis.” And that’s a key point. Bitcoin has value because everybody believes it has value. This is a characteristic of all asset inflations whether it be Dutch Tulips, or GameStop shares, or real estate that keeps going up and up: a large group of buyers who agree that the value is high and increasing, even when there may be available facts to the contrary. To make matters worse, for Bitcoin, there is no asset, not even a tulip. The only guess at “something valuable” is an artificial scarcity derived from its software. No fiat. No credible threat to tax and take productive output. We may agree that for the US government, the fiat currency and the power of taxation is not as good as gold; however, when comparing to Bitcoin, it’s better "nothing".

That takes us to all the incredibly smart people who love Bitcoin. Elon Musk. Marc Andreesen. I know why they like Bitcoin. Two reasons: it is incredibly easy to establish a trading system built on blockchain, and such systems incredibly robust. No paperwork, lawyers, government filings, bureaucracy. Just easy software. And it’s essentially immune from interference, especially government interference. To be fair to those with a libertarian bent, our government in the US is outrageously abusive of the power conferred by the fact that the US dollar is a global reserve currency. We use the banking system as a weapon, a judge, and a jury. Ambitious federal prosecutors engage in narcissistic pursuits and vexatious prosecutions using the dollar as a bully and a bludgeon. Our congress makes laws and regulations that shut actors out of the system with no due process.

My son asks me, “Should I invest in Bitcoin?” Proponents of Bitcoin say “Absolutely, invest. It’s a new kind of money.” To which I say, most novices invest with money, not in money. In fact, while I’ve taken great pains to assert real fiat currency has an underlying asset (the US economy) most wealthy keep most of their wealth invested in instruments backed by tangible assets: real estate, commodities, company shares. The richest don’t even invest primarily in real money. Investing in an aspirational money-like instrument that has some technical characteristics of money but lacks its key feature is a game for only the truly smitten.

There’s also a really valuable software in there that banks will one day use to process transactions of certain types, and has tremendous value for transactions that are high value and low frequency (provenience of art , for example). But with Bitcoin, unfortunately there is no tangible asset for collateral, beside that freely available software called blockchain.

So the appeal and pursuit of the Bitcoin ambition is very easy to understand. Many of us would like to see it democratize money. It’s evident that today Bitcoin is not a good currency. It should be evident to most that it is not an asset, will never be an asset in its current formulation, and isn’t backed by an asset. Unless the proponents of Bitcoin plan to go conquer a wealthy nation and then tax its output, it’s not money.

Here's another good one:

Journey - Don't Stop Believin' (Official Audio)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k8craCGpgs

Can't we have a civilized conversation instead of attacking one another? That's not how you talk to people man.. You don't just start pointing flaws or trying to pick apart someone just because they're trying to have a conversation.

What do you think about this song?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJUUw3piMl8

Look the only reason I added my email list is because you asked about what I went through. I'm not going to re-write it out or make a video specifically for this forum, if you're interested go ahead no one's stopping you. You can read my emails sent from Kano and you either like it or you don't. But guess what, Bitcoin is here to stay. We can all agree on that, it's not going anywhere at least for a while. China banned cryptocurrency mining and is it a hazard to be running mining farms around the world that are contributing to global energy consumption? Without a doubt...

This is stuff you probably already know or run into at least once a week as Bitcoin weekly digest subscriber, but it's what I like to talk about and I'm sure there's at least one of you that share the same views. Yeah, I think the  Bitcoin forks were a huge mistake. And probably the whole mining thing isn't good for the environment, and as more countries find the inherent and apparent problems of Bitcoin and similar virtual currencies, they'll begin to dislike it more and more. Is it truly anonymous to send and receive Bitcoin? Not entirely since the ledger is published and it's not hard to follow where coins go once they go into a wallet address, so there's obviously a lot of innovation that needs to be done but forks were not the best approach in my opinion.

Obviously the community here is not as supportive and friendly towards one another as it once was back in 2009. Which makes sense, Bitcoin was more exciting back then, by every sense of imagination. Thinking back on it, everyone was more interested in the fundamentals of the technology instead of the market potential. Now it's become some evangelist, archetype, hierarchy control, rebellion anarchist sensation where people forgot what we were trying to build in the beginning. What the hell is Bitcoin Cash and all these other branches, soft-fork, hard-fork. IMO Bitcoin would have been at $1m a coin by now if you didn't desecrate Satoshi's original vision. Totally threw off the brand and potential for a singular widely adopted digital currency. Way too complicated now the technology is dead. I'm moving on.

Look the image that was posted was for an live training presentation by Brunson:
https://event.webinarjam.com/register/37/57l37i3z

It's something I've been learning to be a better in email communications. There's the concept of sending valuable information whether a video, book, pdf whatever you think would benefit the reader and using that as a means to build rapport. Now I'm totally new to this build an audience, send an email once a week when you have something important to say, but no one ever got good at something without practice or exercising what they were doing.

You can check it out so you know I'm not full of chit.

I'll try to keep sending an email once per week but you can expect less or more depending on your subscription settings.

Thanks for all of the replies and showing support. It's been a long journey and we're still only in the stages of infancy. I talk more about it on my email list since a lot of people have been taking an interest on how I started one of the first exchanges with over 70,000 users and we were trading 100,000 Bitcoin daily volume. I talk about what happened with Mt.Gox which was a competitor of ours at the time and how they got hacked, they also did thorough investigations on who had coins on their exchange and were able to return them if you had ever a very slight proof of documentation. I was fortunate enough to have conversations on Skype saved on my desktop and screenshots, along with my previous login ID and password which allowed them to access my account and return my BTC.

It's all on my subscribers list if you're interested you can read about it I won't be typing it all up again it's too long but it was a hell of a ride.

I'll be working on a new exchange in the meantime since I've started to take an new interest in cryptocurrency.

You can subscribe to my email newsletter for free. I would typically charge $50,000 or one Bitcoin to my readers by you're getting it for free because this community has helped me financially in a big way. It's given me the ability to keep going "while the going get's tough" in cryptocurrency. As I was one of the few pioneers with getting started on building the ecosystem (creating one of the first exchanges) and I've held on to a few coins since then, but even then I never really cared or paid attention to the financial side of things. I just thought what was happening was exciting.

My newsletter has nothing to do with cryptocurrency as much as it talks about how I got started and what I did since then:
http://kano.enterprises.com is the correct URL.

Glad to see someone else on this forum with at least half a brain.

If you want to follow along and read the emails I send once a week to my subscribers you can here:
https://kanokano.gr8.com/

I'm old school and still have the tendency to give like 0.0000138 Bitcoin once a week to readers if you're lucky. You have to promise to open my emails though or you're disqualified.

Anyone on this forum knows that Craig Wright is completely full of chit. SN is probably rolling in his grave...

I was the owner of the original, original Bitcoin7 exchange. Before it was hacked, even back then I was using cold wallets to store all of user funds. Fortunately I was able to return everyone's currency with no issues, which would is worth billions today. We peaked around 60,000 - 77,000 users in 2009 running on basic APACHE. Dare I say it, I made a lot of people very rich, especially if they've HODL'ed. After my exchange was hacked I was discouraged to continue and went back to developing websites and applications, so I sold the exchange. What they did with it after, I could care less.

Nope, just saying hi. Was the Tether and BitFinex owner mystery solved? Were they the same group and were they manipulating market conditions or was that an entire lie?

Poor guy. I like picking up bastards as I feel bad for them lol