Went down the rabbit hole back in April and have yet to climb out. Paypal is now going to be supporting Bitcoin. The dominoes are starting to fall for major adoption. ....or it just goes to zero.

I have spent 5-10 minutes here or there trying to understand what it is. I don't get it. Its not a product or a service as far as i can tell. Its basically mining for digital gold except you don't need to break into fort knox to steal it and its not shiny enough to keep a humans attention.

Depending on your cost of electricity, mining is not a net profit operation. And, this is by design. At one point an individual with a computer in the the basement could eek out a small profit. As more and more miners entered the fray with faster and faster processors, the algorithm was re-tuned. Now, mining is dominated by huge "farms" in colder areas near power plants.

At this point in time, I'm not interested in accepting cryptocurrency as part of my business because the currency value fluctuates wildly. If I accept a payment of, say 50 units of some currency, I don't know how many burgers this will buy next week -- or even if the currency exchange will be operational.

If you can afford to speculate, cryptocurrency is great.

I don't claim that this is a definitive article, but it discusses a few things.

Had a clinet using a T1 line and a very fast server to mine and sell.

Told me he was making, on average, some 10k to 20k a week. Don't know if he is still in it or not.

He was telling me I shoud get in, but I wasn't keen on the idea.

1) Pretty sure he was exaggerating a little (big fish story). But even then, this had to be in the peak time for Bitcoin; which only lasted a few months or maybe a few years?
2) With no government or big financial institution backing, cryptocurrency is the biggest gamble any investor could make. You really are putting yourself on the edge. No way I would gamble my money like that. This is for the playboys, rich, or just really lucky ones.

For every winner, there has to be a ton of losers. That lure of easy money, sent quite a many gold miners to their death in the frontier days.
You remember those days don't you Ken? :)

Valuable thoughts...the history knows a lot of similar situations, but mostly without happy ends...

I look at it as an investment. Buy low, sell high. Currently very happy with the investment as its 100% ROI for me right now.

My guess is it will level off on its current ascent, bounce around, dip back down to around 11k hang around there for awhile then start its climb to 20k. Starting the process over again.

BTC has more market cap the Bank of America.

Yeah, I'm not looking into it for the mining side.  It's all speculation. Although nothing is certain, I see Bitcoin and the associated blockchain products coming as a potential massive wave which will slowly devour the traditional financial system.  As the say, "software is eating everything".  The banks are very tasty main course on the menu in the next 10 years.

One example of the changes this year:

Cash App generated $1.63 billion of bitcoin revenue and $32 million of bitcoin gross profit during the third quarter of 2020, up approximately 11x and 15x year over year, respectively,” the publicly traded payments firm wrote in its Q3 investor letter published Thursday at the market close.


Even JP Morgan Chase sees it potentially coming:
[Link: fortune.com]

Altcoins only, wish I had gotten into bitcoin earlier. TRON is my biggest hold right now.

[Link: digitalik.net]

If you want to have fun look at this model. The model has been on point from 2008 till now.

The model has BTC @ 105k by this time next year.

BTC is 19k now.

This dude Michael Saylor has put his entire companies treasury asset into BTC. He bought 400 million then 50 million and now he has offered a convertible bond note (debt) to raise 650 million to buy more BTC.

I would suggest tossing a few bucks at it before this dude purchases his next round of 650 million.

BTC is about to go parabolic.

?t=48

What is BTC?

[Link: bitcoin.org]

This is the White Paper that started it all. 9 pages not overly technical.

Basically BTC is digital scarcity. There will only ever be 21 million BTC ever produced. 18 million are currently out there now and 6.25 more are spit out every 10 minutes when each block is "mined". The last BTC is estimated to be mined in 2140.

The mining im less understanding of but basically it is incentive for people like you and me to prove every transaction on the BTC block chain. For your effort you get a part of the 6.25 BTC (which halves every 4 years). You cant compete mining so dont even bother. You can run a node though to strengthen the network.

Theres no goverment and theres no corporation. Just a world wide network of computers running the BTC open source core verifying every transaction on the block chain, all out in the open for anyone in the world to see and verify.

It is traded on exchanges 24/7 365.

The next rabbit hole is hardware wallets. After you purchase BTC on an exchange, if you want you can transfer to a hardware wallet. This is offline cold storage and you can have billions $$$ USD in the palm of your hand.

For a few pennies you can send billions of $$$ or hundreds of $$$ anywhere in the world at the speed of light.

It cant be hacked*, nobody owns it everybody owns it. Its divisible to 100,000,000 Satoshis per BTC.

Its already changed the entire world and hardly anyone even knows whats coming.

I still don’t understand it.


It’s basically an algorithm someone created and started selling it. You are mining nothing, you are mining a server that someone created. It’s basically a game with real money. They changed the “algorithm” when someone cracked it. At any point the creators can decide to shut it down or just “take it all”

It’s a scam, the type that even has big banks falling for it now.

The server is decentralized, open source, and there's thousands of them world wide.

Satoshi didnt sell the algorithm he released the proof of work and mined the first blocks. It grew organically from there.

USD is not real money. The Fed prints it at whatever rate they choose, devaluing your reserve asset along the way.

Nobody can shut it down because as long as 1 server survives the attack, the entire system can replicate itself instantly.

The blocks being mined are the transactions on the network. All servers world wide verifying each others work. Any anomalies are rejected by the Network.

t=5576s

Saylor makes a pretty compelling case. Which leads to Raoul, and others.

Right now is the first time in almost ever that a regular person can front run Wall Street.

[Link: decrypt.co]

At 1 Trillion market Cap BTC is 100k USD. If it catches Gold @ 9 Trillion market cap BTC is 500k USD.

Its now over 10 years old. Its the best performing asset of the last year, its the best performing asset of the last 5 years, and its the best performing asset of the last 10 years.

Mass Mutual a company whos entire existence is risk calculation.

[Link: bloomberg.com]

That is an extremely stupid statement to make right there. And the main reason I won't touch it.
I mean the sheer arrogance to make a statement like that, proves how deep in the sand heads are buried.

And it may not be Bitcoin itself (yet) but there are many stories now of how people have lost millions, because their Bitcoin was stolen from hackers where it was stored.
That's not even counting the numbers of people that have lost their arse, 'investing' at the wrong times. Then value plummets.


It seems you are all in on this train dude. Actually, you sound like one of those soon to be victims. Giddy as hell, thinking you have found some kind of goldmine or something. I really hope you don't lose your arse dude, like so many have done.