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Cryptocurrency - Bitcoin & others..

Nashtyone said:
I made a few grand on NBA Top Shot last year but stopped buying any of the packs a few months ago because nothing was selling. Bought fractions of a BTC and own a few ETH that I've had for a few years. Wish I would have sold awhile ago but hindsight is 20/20
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20 years ago something like bitcoin would have been likely something I would have taken a chance on.

I've gotten more conservative after retiring especially with my wife's soon planned retirement. I trust our FA who has us about 60% invested in equites - mostly a diverse basket of stocks including these ones:

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Pyramid Scheme IMO. If you know anything about pyramid schemes you want to be the first folks in and not the last folks in. If you got in the last 4 years you’re too late.
 
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This is fascinating stuff here. FTX failed basically because they were acting as a bank and using their own coin’s value (FTT) as about 40% of their reserves. When that was leaked from an internal source the owner of Coinbase and a couple of other exchanges dumped all their FTT which took the value of FTT to basically $0. That took FTX’s reserves down to a point they couldn’t cover their internal trading activity.

I have some side opinions about the celebrity endorsing they touch briefly on in this article. That’s the pyramid scheme side of crypto & NFT’s.

Anyway, the crypto market is in for some interesting days. Will be interesting to watch from the sideline. Going to be some folks making a lot of money and some folks losing a lot of money.

nypost.com

Inside the epic crypto collapse of FTX—and how it hurts Tom Brady, Steph Curry and Joe Biden

Gisele Bündchen, Tom Brady, Steph Curry, Naomi Osaka, Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Jones and Joe Biden and the Democratic Party could also lose big in the downfall of FTX and crypto guru Sam Bankman-Fried.…
nypost.com nypost.com
 
Jeff Spicoli said:
This and be skeptical when people are trying so hard to convince you to invest in something.
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Crypto, to me, is like closely knowing a mine speculator. When he says buy at $0.25 cents, buy it. Set a goal and cash in, cuz you know he's a speculator and chances of a strike are quite low. He's out at $5.00, moving on to the next big "find"

Now the folks who are still in, need more buyers to pump up the value, cuz there is no product or service.

tahoebum said:
“Never invest in a business you can’t understand.” Warren Buffet.
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I don't understand crypto as an investment. Its not a product or a service. Sure it trades, but its trading on fear and greed.

It seems to only be popular because computers are involved and folks that are now in their 40's grew up with computers (add anything of your choice that is digital). If its online, its gotta be real.

Block chain, I think I get. A method to make permanent records of transactions, that can't be changed. That seems like a product or service. But thats not Crypto, IMHO

I guess I've been involved with the financial industry for too long. I have lent money to companies large and small. Some riskier than others. But one thing they all had...a product or service

Just can't get my head around crypto
 
Now supposedly ftx was "hacked" and half a billion dollars was moved and taken. :oops:
 
Crypto and NFT’s are not a legitimate form of investment - for me. I just can’t get behind them. I know many are big into this and if I’m missing the boat on them, so be it… I’m ok with it.
 
NeverWiff said:
Crypto and NFT’s are not a legitimate form of investment - for me. I just can’t get behind them. I know many are big into this and if I’m missing the boat on them, so be it… I’m ok with it.
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What makes a stock any more legitimate? Look what has happened with many a stock. Yes, there are more legitimate companies - no disagreement there. But they can be and are manipulated.

If you treat crypto and nft with the appropriate level of understanding and risk assessment, they can be an acceptable 'investment'.

Years ago, I bought ETH when it was $28 and change - I sold too early in the run up last year - but still made ~100x. I got into nfts and had a Tiger Woods signature nft, and a bunch of nfts in Top Shot, Topps, Candy, etc. buy buying into drops and sold all of them for good profit. The Tiger sign nft was the best - $50 drop, sold for $7500. I got into Veve and lucked out on drops for Disney stuff and made 10x.

Currently, I am stuck with a ton of baseball, basketball, football, other nfts that are worth very little to nothing and did lose a chunk on some altcoins.

But, I also am stuck on most of my stock (with 401k in shite shape currently), have collectibles like cards, jersey, etc that some are worth a lot and others worth nothing; and have artwork that has gone both ways.

What happened at FTX was total bs, and should/could have been seen. It was a bunch of muppets who indeed run a 'ponzi' scheme. But there are legitimate uses for blockchain and crypto, and they are not going away. These days, you can look to trade it, there probably won't be anything that makes people multi-millionaires like it did in the past. But you never know.
 
Lousy golfer said:
It reminds me of a new version of the old ponzi scheme.
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Crypto is not a Ponzi scheme it's a pyramid scheme.

Pyramid scheme: A small group of early investors blow a bunch of hype to get a much larger group of later investors to drive up the price of the investment. The early investors sell into the demand created by later investors and the later investors are left with a worthless investment.

Ponzi Scheme: A group creates an investment brokerage and attracts investors which they send fake account statements to and in the meantime spend their money. A Ponzi scheme lasts until too many people come to get their money at one time and find out the whole thing was fake.
 
lockstockrye said:
What makes a stock any more legitimate? Look what has happened with many a stock. Yes, there are more legitimate companies - no disagreement there. But they can be and are manipulated.

If you treat crypto and nft with the appropriate level of understanding and risk assessment, they can be an acceptable 'investment'.

Years ago, I bought ETH when it was $28 and change - I sold too early in the run up last year - but still made ~100x. I got into nfts and had a Tiger Woods signature nft, and a bunch of nfts in Top Shot, Topps, Candy, etc. buy buying into drops and sold all of them for good profit. The Tiger sign nft was the best - $50 drop, sold for $7500. I got into Veve and lucked out on drops for Disney stuff and made 10x.

Currently, I am stuck with a ton of baseball, basketball, football, other nfts that are worth very little to nothing and did lose a chunk on some altcoins.

But, I also am stuck on most of my stock (with 401k in shite shape currently), have collectibles like cards, jersey, etc that some are worth a lot and others worth nothing; and have artwork that has gone both ways.

What happened at FTX was total bs, and should/could have been seen. It was a bunch of muppets who indeed run a 'ponzi' scheme. But there are legitimate uses for blockchain and crypto, and they are not going away. These days, you can look to trade it, there probably won't be anything that makes people multi-millionaires like it did in the past. But you never know.
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Very well said. Only the ignorant think what happened with FTX has anything to do with bitcoin or crypto in general. It was a bad actor. Simple as that. Even factoring in the 75% drop since last November, bitcoin has outperformed every other asset in existence in the last ten years and it is not even remotely close.

DataDude said:
Pyramid Scheme IMO. If you know anything about pyramid schemes you want to be the first folks in and not the last folks in. If you got in the last 4 years you’re too late.
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If you know anything about bitcoin, you would know thats a foolish statement
 
jbb2388 said:
Very well said. Only the ignorant think what happened with FTX has anything to do with bitcoin or crypto in general. It was a bad actor. Simple as that. Even factoring in the 75% drop since last November, bitcoin has outperformed every other asset in existence in the last ten years and it is not even remotely close.



If you know anything about bitcoin, you would know thats a foolish statement
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I know a lot about Bitcoin. It’s worthless outside of hype. It has no use or purpose other than creating demand for servers and graphics processors.
 
DataDude said:
Crypto is not a Ponzi scheme it's a pyramid scheme.

Pyramid scheme: A small group of early investors blow a bunch of hype to get a much larger group of later investors to drive up the price of the investment. The early investors sell into the demand created by later investors and the later investors are left with a worthless investment.

Ponzi Scheme: A group creates an investment brokerage and attracts investors which they send fake account statements to and in the meantime spend their money. A Ponzi scheme lasts until too many people come to get their money at one time and find out the whole thing was fake.
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Crypto (some) is a 'Ponzi Scheme': FTX claimed and sent and displayed assets of 5.5 Billion in crypto and only had 650K
 
DataDude said:
I know a lot about Bitcoin. It’s worthless outside of hype. It has no use or purpose other than creating demand for servers and graphics processors.
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Yes, clearly you do.
 
DataDude said:
Crypto is not a Ponzi scheme it's a pyramid scheme.

Pyramid scheme: A small group of early investors blow a bunch of hype to get a much larger group of later investors to drive up the price of the investment. The early investors sell into the demand created by later investors and the later investors are left with a worthless investment.

Ponzi Scheme: A group creates an investment brokerage and attracts investors which they send fake account statements to and in the meantime spend their money. A Ponzi scheme lasts until too many people come to get their money at one time and find out the whole thing was fake.
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Ponzi scheme, pyramid scheme…. We can call it whatever we want and it still ends in a bunch of people being scammed. It’s about as trustworthy as a good pump and dump!
 
Somewhere Madoff is mad he didn't think of crypto sooner.
 
liamyhmallant said:
Bitcoin’s already lower than it was, and it supports my belief that cryptos are essentially a myth. A currency not backed by anything material cannot live long because it’s too volatile and unstable. It is possible to make money trading cryptos, but they are totally not suitable for long-term investment.
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Bitcoin has been around since 2008 and was worthless for years and is now worth over 16k, not sure how that's not living long.
 
Just a spam account Ohio. Not worth the trouble.
 
mav52 said:
just scams in crypto in general. Just pull up the FTC website. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/dat...06/reports-show-scammers-cashing-crypto-craze
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Is that the fault of crypto, or the naiveness of people who don’t understand what they’re doing? Case in point, seed phrases. They are your ATM PIN number for crypto. Why would you share that with anyone? Your private wallet address is like your social security number. You wouldn’t give me your social or 99% of people. Yet here we are, with people giving both of those out and not being aware of what they’ve even done. Or, they click on something they should have known better in doing, much like people clicking links in emails and uh oh’s.

It’s the same fraud like game, just under a different way of doing it.
 
MWard said:
Is that the fault of crypto, or the naiveness of people who don’t understand what they’re doing? Case in point, seed phrases. They are your ATM PIN number for crypto. Why would you share that with anyone? Your private wallet address is like your social security number. You wouldn’t give me your social or 99% of people. Yet here we are, with people giving both of those out and not being aware of what they’ve even done. Or, they click on something they should have known better in doing, much like people clicking links in emails and uh oh’s.

It’s the same fraud like game, just under a different way of doing it.
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NO clue, since there is no controls on crypto, its not regulated so there are no rules. You invest and take your chances, something I rather not do with my investments. ANd I agree, fraud is fraud regardless how one about trying to pull it off.
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