rkbabang

No. You have to decide if you need the 'super security' of Bitcoin. If you do need it, pay up for the product offered - 'super security'. If you don't need it - why are you in Bitcoin? If Bitcoin is a 'investment', this is just the transaction fee. No different to the realtors commission when buying a house. SD Couldn't Xi Jingping destroy bitcoin's security by nationalizing all Chinese mining power? Nation states have huge piles of money and weapons and often do crazy destructive things. So while the answer to that is yes. I think that would only serve to destroy bitcoin rather than control it. People would move on to another cryptocurrency if they did that as no one wants a cryptocurrency controlled by any nation state not just China.

I won't be writing any puts. If I could at a reasonable cost I'd buy 5yr $20K calls and 5yr $5K puts. I'm almost positive that in 5 years BTC will either be way above $20k (like $100k+) or way less than $5k (like close to or equal to $0).

Would you be willing to write a 5 year $15k call?

Yes, that is why I was struggling to make a comparison. The product itself as far as the regulations are probably going to be closer to tobacco or alcohol, but the ease of producing it yourself is much closer to backyard tomatoes.

The whole basis of this thread is flawed. You are supposing that there will be long term winners in this space to brag about. I disagree. Pot is an agricultural product that is easily grown by anyone (even by yourself in your own garden). That is like saying you are going to get rich investing in tomatoes. Unless the government steps in and creates an artificial monopoly (i.e. licensing only certain companies to grow and/or sell it), then I don't see what competitive advantage any one grower or seller has over any other. I'm sure there will be name brands with proprietary strains and pretty packaging, but that is a long way off and impossible to predict. I think the safest long term bet to profit from pot would be Altria, probably not a bad idea actually. I don't think that's what he's saying at all. Crypto was the #1 performing asset class of 2017, but Canadian marijuana stocks were probably number 2, with many/most up hundreds of percent. As just one example, TSX:WEED is a 10 bagger in the last 18 months or so. Of course, its market cap was unreasonably large before that 10X, and at $7 billion is absurd, its clearly a bubble. But there are people who are absolutely convinced that everyone is going to start using marijuana recreationally, and that these companies are the next MO because of it. Maybe there will be a couple of winners out of this (probably) but I don't see a way to find them in advance, and the valuations assume that all the companies will be big winners, but that's absurd. Very much like crypto, actually. Maybe one or two coins will work out as long term stores of value, but the world doesn't need hundreds of crypto-currencies, so most will flame out. Plus, the companies changing from ice-tea (for example) to crypto probably don't have a durable competitive advantage in crypto currency, so the fact their stocks are going up on a name change is absurd. Basically, there are two big bubbles right now, and we have a thread with people discussing their big gains in one. Surprising that no one has big gains on the other to brag about. I was the only one who admitted owning any of them, and I only had it as a merger arb position. The two segments don't seem that different to me in bubblyness, so I'd be surprised if we had buyers of one but not the other on the forum. Fair enough I guess. I've been out of the loop on this and not following it. I do think long term there is something there with crypto, something completely new on a par with the internet and weed is an agricultural product on a par with avocados or tomatoes. Thinking out loud, maybe coffee is a better analogy since there are many different strains yet they are all similar (unlike beer which varies greatly as many different ingredients and processes are used to make it). So maybe there will be a Starbucks of weed someday. I don't know. But to try to equate pot to crypto is like trying to equate coffee to the internet. One is plant product that you either enjoy or not and the other is a fundamental technology which will change the lives of every human on Earth.

The whole basis of this thread is flawed. You are supposing that there will be long term winners in this space to brag about. I disagree. Pot is an agricultural product that is easily grown by anyone (even by yourself in your own garden). That is like saying you are going to get rich investing in tomatoes. Unless the government steps in and creates an artificial monopoly (i.e. licensing only certain companies to grow and/or sell it), then I don't see what competitive advantage any one grower or seller has over any other. I'm sure there will be name brands with proprietary strains and pretty packaging, but that is a long way off and impossible to predict. I think the safest long term bet to profit from pot would be Altria, probably not a bad idea actually.

One word: PotCoin :)

Yeah, this is a good warning, SD. In my case, I bought a PC in September because my old one was 7 years old, slow, and getting BSOD every few days. I got a better graphics card than I would have otherwise--maybe an incremental cost of $300--so I could mine effectively. Normally my computer is on whenever I'm awake, so the incremental cost of electricity is low. I don't know if it was a good decision, but seemed like a reasonable gamble in that $300 isn't that much money to me and I've enjoyed doing it. Economically, it has paid off, returning about $600 so far. Of course, that's just an outcome that says little about whether the decision to buy the better card had a positive expected return. Even if one happens to win at roulette, it doesn't imply it was a smart decision to play. Another way to look at it is that if you would have bought $300 worth of Bitcoin in September at $3800 (it traded as low as $3500 in september) your bitcoin would be worth around $850 right now at bitcoin $10,630.00. You actually lost $250. This is why I have never bought hardware to mine. With the rising prices and rising difficulty it doesn't usually make sense to mine rather than purchase the coins outright unless you already own the hardware for other reasons.

Though frankly you could also describe Berkshire that way. Hence the fallacy of dismissing the value of any entity based on it's physical make-up. All fermions matter!

Why would I be concerned? Don't touch Tether with a 5-foot pole and you'll be fine (it's 100% a scam). The theory is that they are “printing” thether out of nothing and using it to buy bitcoin, thus inflating the price of bitcoin far above its actual demand. I’m not sure how much of the bitcoin demand is tether related, but long term it means nothing either way.

Interesting. Based on your thoughts, I may give it a shot too. Just be mindful that today - much of the reason for selling you a rig; is because the seller expects to make MORE from you - than he would had he simply kept the rig, & mined for himself. It's OK for a hobby and experimentation, but it's not what it seems. Obviously, not a popular view among many! At the aggregate: 1) Only the fastest miner gets paid. New rigs are always faster than yours; meaning that over time you progressively earn less, and more & more of it is in less desirable token. Rigs have a short economic life. 2) Appearance of distributed security. The more rigs sold outside of the 'tech' community, the more diverse the aggregate mining network 'appears' to be, and the more real distributed security 'seems' to be. Problem is that its a 70% layer of very fast computers in mining consortia, and a 30% layer of much slower computers spread throughout the world, with hash rate controlled by degree of hash complexity. A small drop in complexity, and the faster computers win - erasing distributed security. 3) Capital cost downloading. Every utility downloads the capital cost of producing its product onto its customers, most often by the customer paying a 'debt service' charge on their bill every month. An alternative is to simply have the customer build their own generation facility (take on the capital cost) and buy their net output. See any difference between this and a mining rig? SD I agree. I think it would be better to just buy $500 worth of bitcoin rather than go out and buy a $500 video card to start mining. But if you already have the video card like my son does, why not mine whenever it is otherwise idle.

It concerns me. But I put it in the same category as MtGox. A short term problem that won’t matter in 10 years. I’m in for the long haul I’m not all that worried about the little problems inbetween. If it all blows up the panic will create a nice buying opportunity.

Thanks wachtwoord for saving me the trouble. Maybe I should have said ”coin-out”.

FWIW, I am mining zcash with a 1070, and recently I've been making in the region of $3-5 per day. At this instant, it's $3.54 per day. Your son's 1070 TI should be slightly better than that. It's not going to make anyone wealthy, but it's pretty fun. We were looking into Zcash, Monero, Ether, etc but he decided to try this https://www.nicehash.com/cpu-gpu-mining They use both your GPU and CPU and have you mine whatever is most profitable at the moment with each of them. They are about 1% more expensive than most pools, but you should make up the difference in higher earnings. It says that he is earning between $5.50 and $6.00 per day right now (it changes from second to second). Yes I know they were hacked a month ago, but I figure if you cash out once in a while there will never be much in there to loose. And they changed their setup so that every transfer out of their system is human approved so that should mitigate someone hacking in and wiping out all the accounts again.

To crypto bulls, you probably look like this: (i'm joking here; take it lightly) I would think that is more a representation of people who still don’t get it. Funny story. My son just build his own gaming computer (an i7 7700k with a 1070 ti video card) and I was telling him last night that he should try to mine some altcoins and earn some of his money back. My wife said, “so if he starts mining, how does he get his check?”.

This is really the bull case. If the economy for criminals, terrorists, tax evaders, and money launderers is large enough (and it is), some of these tokens might actually have value as currencies. But which token will become the fiat currency of the underworld? There is a pretty good chance it hasn't even been invented yet. Are we still at the Napster stage of digital currencies? Yes, way back before that damn Satoshi published his paper criminals, terrorist, tax evaders, and money launderers didn't exist. There was just no way for them to apply their craft and trade. Obviously I'm joking, so don't worry, I'm sure the majority of criminals, terrorists, tax evaders, and money launderers will continue using the USD just as they always have for a long time to come.

The HD wallets like Jaxx follow a standard. You can take your 12 word backup phrase from your Jaxx wallet and restore it on Exodus for example. Also you can list all of the private keys in Jaxx and write them down and restore them on any wallet software. Your Jaxx and wallets like it interact with the blockchain, but they don't store your Bitcoin. Your Bitcoin lives on the blockchain and any software can be used to access them. Jaxx can disappear tomorrow and I would not lose any of the Bitcoin that I have stored in my Jaxx wallet. The particular software you use to view your bitcoins or to spend them doesn't matter. What matters, and the only thing that matters, is that you know either your 12 word backup phrase or all of your private keys.

No problem, glad to help.

Agora Financial has been running these types of ads for $5000 newsletters for years. They used to be about stocks, now they mention cryptocurrencies. Nothing new though. If I knew a fool proof way to make easy 100x or 1000x returns why would I bother creating a newsletter? It's amazing to me that anyone falls for this stuff. A fool and his money are soon parted.

No political agenda here. I'm the chump who got left in the dust in 2017 with my large cash holdings. So trying to reason and learn from my mistake that's all. I would say that not all companies deserve to be 21% higher because the ones with no moat don't deserve to trade higher. To add a few points. A lot of companies did not pay the statutory 35% so the tax cut will be lower for them. I think some will even pay higher taxes. Also there's a lot of talk of buybacks. If the stock prices are overvalued then buybacks will be value destructive. Of course, but no company needs to buy back overpriced stock, they could pay a dividend instead and let the shareholders spend the money.

Is this correct ??? https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=4days The big ones are mining pools, some have tens of thousands of members each of whom can switch pools or start mining on their own with a couple of keystrokes. They also all know each other. Distributed 'security' as advertised doesn't really exist; you're really relying on 'inertia' and self interest ( the fact that the 'craze' is worth much more to everyone if nobody screws the pooch, and the 'ethos' that you don't take your money out). Nothing wrong in that (everyone eventually grows up), but it's a different way of thinking. SD I owned Bitcoin back 5 years ago and sold out after 9 months because it volatility was too much for me. I got interested because of the Silk Road in 2012 and sold before Ullrich got caught. Back then the sellers on Silk Road didn't like it because they preferred a stable currency. I bought/sold through Mt. Gox which shut down later and it took weeks on both sides to set up an account/ get my cash. A few summers ago work took me to China and I spent a lot of time with a few small(ish) business owners that were looking to retire as there were fears of corruption crackdowns as some of the heads of the biggest companies were arrested on their drive home from their towers. These guys were small scale distributors and these actions killed their business by 75% overnight as they waited to see what else would happen. Two of the guys told me that their plan had been to set up a "business" in Canada (Vancouver). Then use the business to buy an asset (house) paid for by the business. Then wait 2 years and sell the house at a loss (10-20%) but it was a way to get around the currency controls. But they had started to hear about Bitcoin as a way to get their money out without doing it via asset purchases. These mining groups are in China due to the huge subsidization of power to create domestic industry which makes their ability to mine (which updates the distributed ledgers) and due to these huge draws I guarantee that China will look to eliminate (reduce) it. RKbabang - Have you downloaded the software to have a ledger on your computer. I did back in 2012 and it took over 3 days to download and setup. (yes speeds were lower but I expect that due its growth the time would still be long). I used it to "mine" for a few weeks - got a little. The infrastructure is more fragile than most people think. (That said - I think there are uses for BlockChain tech but the coins feel like gambling). I did actually download the whole thing back around when you did. I even tried to mine, but after a day or two with nothing to show for it I gave up. I didn't join a pool, I was just using my own computer with $40 video card, it would have taken me forever to solve a block, I was just wasting electricity. It took a long time to download the blockchain, but you only have to do it once. Also I have 400Mbps internet access now, so downloading it again would be doable if I wanted to run a node. I didn't actually buy any back then, but I looked into it. I should have.

You only listed 16 out of the 20. You forgot: - Atlanta, GA - Austin, TX - Boston, MA - Chicago, IL

Read from around page 12 onwards. The inference is only buy in a collapse, only buy Bitcoin, and it'll be your kids who collect https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/john-pfeffer/An+Investor%27s+Take+on+Cryptoassets+v6.pdf +1 Anyone who hasn't read that paper yet, do not invest in any crypto assets until you have read it. BTW. I bought some more Bitcoin yesterday.

Each bar represents a decade and the plane represents flying coach. There, I fixed it. :)

That one looks pretty good. But as DooDiligence said, it would look best if you started from the original editor file with all of the layers.