rkbabang

That has more to do with it being illegal than it does the heroin itself. I think the fact that they are illegal kills far more people than these drugs would if they were simply sold like Tylenol over the counter. A huge reason people OD is that they don't really know what they are taking or the proper dose for the purity/mixture they have just purchased. Is it cut with elephant tranquilizers, rat poison? Does it have fentanyl in it? Is it more pure than the stuff you bought yesterday or less? How would you know? It isn't like you can sue the manufacturer if it isn't what you expected. I know that the Advil I buy at CVS isn't cut with elephant tranquilizers just like I know the vodka I buy at the liquor store isn't going to make me blind or kill me. you are correct in that if it is cut and what it is cut with causes many issues and if it was sold via a prescription it would be safer. I'm pretty liberal with regards to much of our drug laws/customs but I cannot support and think its incredibly naive to think that if Opiods were legal we'd be better off. Your last comment in that you cannot sue the manufacterer is somewhat incorrect. In the case of a HS classmate of mine who lost her brother to a heroin overdose the police found the dealer and he was charged with manslaughter as he was selling heroin that was pure and not cut which is not the standard. They made the argument that he knowingly put peoples lives at risk by selling a more pure substance. The police happened to catch that one. There are many the police didn't catch. When I go to the liquor store the bottles are labeled with the exact percentage of alcohol they contain and I know exactly who manufactured it. I know that I can't drink as much of a 100 proof spirit as I can a 60 proof. There is no guesswork involved. That wasn't the case in the 1920s.

+1, That's my prediction for the new year. That 2018 will be crazier than 2017 which is saying something.

For 2018 stocks I like are: BAM & PVF, BACWSA, POEFF, UBNT I'm also holding: AAPL, AMZN, MIDD, OSTK, BRKB, SYTE, PRDGF, WFCF, MKL, TSLA For crypto I think ETH, XMR,and Tezos will outperform BTC, LTC, & XRP. I'm holding (in order of $ worth) ETH (40%), BTC (23%), XMR (22%), DASH (7.5%), BCH (3.8%), NEO (3.5%), PLBT (0.14%), OMG (0.06%), GAS (0.06%), Tezos (not trading yet). Need to do more research on ADA, IOT, XLM and others.

That has more to do with it being illegal than it does the heroin itself. I think the fact that they are illegal kills far more people than these drugs would if they were simply sold like Tylenol over the counter. A huge reason people OD is that they don't really know what they are taking or the proper dose for the purity/mixture they have just purchased. Is it cut with elephant tranquilizers, rat poison? Does it have fentanyl in it? Is it more pure than the stuff you bought yesterday or less? How would you know? It isn't like you can sue the manufacturer if it isn't what you expected. I know that the Advil I buy at CVS isn't cut with elephant tranquilizers just like I know the vodka I buy at the liquor store isn't going to make me blind or kill me.

More evidence that the “then they fight you” phase is beginning.

I don’t know exactly where the anger is coming from, but if you are reading the same discussion I am, you will see the rudeness, name calling, personal attacks, and other school yard immaturity are not coming from the bitcoin bulls here. Also I am starting to see the same thing else where as well. Just a pattern I’ve been noticing and I’m pointing it out. Then they fight you? Or are we still at the mocking stage? ;) I think what I’ve been noticing is the beginnings of the move from mocking to fighting. On the bright side, I was at a Bitcoin ATM with my son last night, it is in the entry of a restaurant, this family walks by us and the little girl of maybe 7 says “hey Dad their buying Bitcoin too”.

I’ll separate stocks from crypto currencies. Stocks 27% Driven by Overstock, MKL, BACWSA, Amazon, Apple I had a really good year all around, but the S&P was not far behind, so I didn’t beat the market by much. Crypto portfolio 3900%, has been as high as 5000% in early December. Crypto went from being less than 1% of my total portfolio to around 65% now.

Can you imagine having debilitating chronic pain and not being able to find a doctor willing to help you? Because that is the other end of the spectrum. I say that it isn’t right to put the responsibility of reading minds on doctors with possible loss of license or even jail if they get it wrong. Remove the laws, sell this stuff over the counter and put the responsibility where it belongs... on the people who decide to take them.

Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin whatever etc.... I can create an auction site and call it zbay, does that mean Ebay is worthless? As an experiment go create a clone of bitcoin yourself, start mining blocks, and see if anyone else uses it. While your doing that I’m going to start producing a cola and making Coke worthless, because anyone can make brown sugar water.

What kind of investor are you? Obviously, sell them to the highest bidder on a shady corner (or Craiglist). You should have asked your doc for another prescription or two, you could have funded your BRK purchasing habit from the proceeds. 8) Craigslist? This is what bitcoin and the dark net was made for. Download TOR and get started.

I don’t know exactly where the anger is coming from, but if you are reading the same discussion I am, you will see the rudeness, name calling, personal attacks, and other school yard immaturity are not coming from the bitcoin bulls here. Also I am starting to see the same thing else where as well. Just a pattern I’ve been noticing and I’m pointing it out.

What has given me a good belly laugh reading the latest so many posts in this topic is that we are the ones living in a fantasy world and it is we that are going to lose our shirts because these are so obviously nothing but tulips, yet it is they who are so damn out of their minds angry. It’s “Blockchain Derangement Syndrome” I think.

That would be ridiculous. It’s the blockchain iced tea company.

Ha, Krugman gets something right for once. "BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions.” But of course Bitcoin isn’t evil, Krugman is. Bitcoin Is Evil

I know right- it almost reminds me of those who look at the recent price moves and immediately conclude bubble. Everyone knows it’s a bubble, so it must be one. Right?

2014-2016 is when I formed all of my opinions on crypto and also when I bought the vast majority of my holdings. I purchased very little in 2017 as I kept waiting for it to come back down.

Nice! Sold MKL the same day. Also own BAM & PVI ;) Rkbabang & EricSchleien1: I like BAM for their management, alternative investments, and ability to deploy capital wisely during downturns. Plus, am able to buy in C$s. I too have been adding to BAM recently, while continuing to hold previous investments in BIP (Brookfield Infrastructure) and BEP (Brookfield Alt Energy). Also adding to recent Brookfield spinoff : TSU - Trisura. So overall I'm bullish on Brookfield. My question is why are both of you selling MKL? I bought into MKL a year ago with the idea of it being a BRK like stock that could be held for a long time/forever. After a 25% gain in past 12 months, are you finding it overvalued? Has there been a structural change at the company that caused both of you to get out? Thanks, For me it is that it isn’t cheap anymore like it was a year ago, I was way overweight in MKL, I now think BAM is a better bet long term, and, finally, I did this in my IRA so there were no tax considerations in making the reallocation.

In the early years of any new technology you always have such visionaries who can see where the tech is, but not where it’s going. There is never a shortage of unimaginative people who aren’t afraid to share their lack of vision publicly so that the rest of us can read it years later and chuckle. http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306

http://www.newsweek.com/ufo-existence-proven-beyond-reasonable-doubt-says-former-head-pentagon-alien-758293

Why would a billion+ people want to own bitcoin other than pure greed? It can't handle a decent amount of transaction, you have fucked up and unregulated middle men, insane transaction costs, risk of theft and loss, energy consumption issues, it is no store of value due to extreme volatility and worst of all: supply isn't limited at all. Greed driven supply will meet greed driven demand until it reaches a tipping point where supply > demand. Suddenly you will have people realizing unregulated crypto markets are far more inflationary than the centralized monetary system already in place. (A system people don't want but truly need in one way or another to keep some sanity in the financial markets.) Anyway, this dynamic will get really interesting combined with retail speculators taking on margin loans, newly created derivates multiplying the market size, ... Forced selling as sentiment shifts completely will result in a beautiful death spiral for most, if not all, current crypto's IMO. We can only hope this occurs sooner rather than later as the impact on our economy of this crypto K.O. would only increase as crypto popularity increases. Other hits to bitcoin simply weren't fatal because these things take time to mature. The scarcity argument was somewhat valid at the time and structural issues were still under the radar. To break mania's you need the creation of a entire bullshit industry that offers enough supply to act as a counterweight to stop this pure fucking madness. Looking at some behavioral issues is telling enough. For instance, most people interested in speculating in crypto's seem to be between the age of 18 and 35. Corresponds nicely with the entire adult population that was too young to experience the Dotcom mania. No, it's not that older people aren't capable of understanding Bitcoin because of age or because they lack the technological knowledge. The collective mindset of this group of people is simply more fearful and sensible. They have wised up (a little) and sooner or later an entire new generation is going to receive the same painful lesson they learned too once upon a time. You could be right about the death spiral leading to a mega crash and the generational thing, although I'm old enough to remember 2000. But I don't see how you think there could be an increase in supply? How do you see that happening? Again, if someone or some cartel tries to change bitcoin into something else they will need to fork it and their fork will likely be worthless, or at least worth a lot less. Look at Bitcoin Gold for an example of something forking off and I believe is going to zero. There will be so much at stake that people will keep the original Bitcoin blockchain going regardless of who tries to get greedy and fork off a different version which works differently. Explain how someone gets away with changing it and inflating it, because I just don't see how that's possible.

I've read the Tether fraud theories and I really don't know if there is something there or not, but even in the worst case it will be a short term problem for Bitcoin like MtGox was. I think there is room for more than one crypto in the market used for different purposes. I see Bitcoin taking the digital gold function. To serve this purpose it will have to have a huge network effect. It is like asking what is the chances that a new social network comes along and destroys facebook. FB is valuable because everyone uses it. Yes there was myspace, but they never got to the size FB is. Anything new will have to have something FB doesn't have and can't implement to make a billion people switch. There is still a chance that something else moves past Bitcoin and serves the gold function leaving Bitcoin valueless (i.e. making bitcoin the myspace of digital gold), this is a winner take all function and in a few years the winner will become clear I think. The other cryptos will be used for other purposes. I think there will be a popular silver to the Bitcoins gold. It might serve more of a medium of exchange to replace the dollar. This is the currency that people will be paid with and used to buy their everyday items, because it will have low fees and be fast. People will regularly convert it to bitcoin for long term savings as this other currency will be POS and much less secure than bitcoin. There will be many single function coins that people use for a single purpose such as buying storage in the cloud (where you can earn the coin by providing storage and you pay the coin if you use storage) or paying for video poker, etc. There will be a lot of these. I think there is a good chance these run on the Ethereum blockchain so ETH will be very valuable. There will also be coins that represent equity in a company or organization, which will be similar to stocks today and many will pay dividends. These may even replace the stock market as they can be traded quickly without days of settling time and the ownership is always clear. There will certainly be types of crypto that I can't think of yet because no one has thought of them yet.

Only the good ones.

Who is this "they" you are speaking of? Gold isn't really limited there have been times when A LOT more gold has been introduced in circulation in a short amount of time, some say bringing massive amounts of gold home from the new world destroyed the Spanish economy. Consider the fact that there are near earth asteroids which contain more gold than has ever been mined on Earth. It is much more likely that gold is inflated massively in our lifetime than it is bitcoin. You will never get half the mining power of bitcoin to agree to destroy its value. If you did the original unedited chain would simply fork away and continue to exist leaving the new inflation chain to die.

To put this current "crash" in perspective. The 50 day moving average is $12,100 and the 250 day moving average is $5,900. The last time Bitcoin traded under its 250 day moving average was in October 2015. But it has traded under its 50 day moving average 7 times this year, it just touched it then moved on up higher every time. We've have multiple 30% drops in 2017 so far. I'd hardly call the current move anything but normal volatility. Normal for bitcoin anyway.

I sure hope so. I'm buying more under $9K, under $5K would be ideal. Just curious, but how are you determining your price points to add? There is no real way to determine an intrinsic value, so is it just based on regressions or prior trading ranges? I can't give you an exact value, but if Bitcoin becomes what I think it will you will have 7 Billion people who want to own and use those 16M-20M coins (depending on how many you think are lost). I don't know if the price in 10 years is $500K or $25M, but it won't be $5K unless my thesis on bitcoin is entirely wrong. If that is the case then you probably shouldn't buy it at all as $0 would be my best guess. I've been buying on the dips since 2014 and it has served me well building my position. I think the real runup is going to be in the 2020s. As we go from way less than 1% of people using/owning bitcoin to 20-40%. Facebook has over 1 Billion users, what happens when a billion+ people want Bitcoin? I still think that there is plenty of time. This drop will be one of many along the way.