Share your experiences trading or mining crypto currencies (+in app mining)

For people who understand block chain at a hi level but not at a low level here it is for reference:

 

Earning coin via Mining is just gambling, check it out miners have a 'random' chance of earning coins for mining. So it's just gambling using your GPU and electric bill to pull the one arm bandits lever.

Cryptocurrencies seem silly to me they need massive arrays of GPU's to run some basic encrypted transactions. So they are by definition highly inefficient and bad for the environment e.g. CO2 -> Climate change.

To the point that they boost the complexity of the coin (hash or block size) not for security but to make them harder to mine.

 

That has been my impression as well.
That bitcoin is basically driven through coal energy and not good for the climate at all, in fact the opposite as it detract from the environment and give nothing of value in return.

But I don't know too much about it. So I'd be interested in viewpoints from another direction as well.

 

As far as I'm aware, you're correct. Bitcoin, as far as I know, is pretty much brute-forcing through an artificially complex function which has no practical application aside from being used in bitcoin.

There was a primecoin which actually produced some useful results (prime numbers):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin

But it isn't terribly popular.

 

For context:
The complexity is to drive scarcity and control inflation. It's based by a jock of Keynes about burying banknote underground and let people "mine it" which mirror how gold has been used to control value. Except the jock has been taken dead serious now into an algorithm.

 

haha. so what you did with it?

 

Forgot my wallet password.

 

I didn't want to necro the thread, but since it's back already I will confess: I fell victim to FOMO and bought very close to the price peak a little more than two weeks ago, then saw my portfolio worth melting away to below 75% of it's original worth. I didn't want to sell with losses so I added another 100% of fiat to my trading account, traded a bit during the downtrend, then bought a bunch right before the final deep dip and didn't catch the bottom. Currently my crypto portfolio worth is back to 92% of my fiat currency investment, and I'm sure it'll recover in time. I did not sell anything at a significant loss (though I totally should have at the start of the whole desaster, but hindsight is 20/20) and some of the trades I made during the downtrend were actually positive.
I was looking to some guys in the crypto community on twitter and youtube for guidance, and it was very interesting to see the different reactions there. One adviced "hodl up in a corner and cry " (hodl is their inside joke equivalent for hold), one said "Bitcoin is on sale right now!", one was super bummed that he missed a good trading opportunity even though he made a profit during the whole downtrend, and one seemed to enjoy these "exciting times". The whole experience was very educational and lessons were learned.
The way I've set up my orders I just have to wait long enough and in all likelyhood I'll still be able to get away with a plus, and when I can do that, I will cash in and pull all my fiat currency out of the exchang account. Then I'll wait till Bitcoin "goes on sale" the next time, and then maybe buy back in and sell again when it's almost back to its previous height from before that next crash. I have no doubt that there will be another crash like this, and another, and another... the whole system is just too fragile.

 

Sounds like stock market.

I've been looking more into this stuff during past few weeks and I think the right approach to the whole situation might be treating the whole thing as a game or a lottery, rather than trying to profit from it. Meaning have fun rather than trying to chase the big buck.

Basically, it loosk like if the currency is known enough, it is already too late to mine it, and unless you have a GPU farm in the basement, any attempts to gain cash this way will result in tiny amounts of cash. On other hand, there was a dude on reddit (see https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/656sd8/the_odds_of_rmonero_finding_a_block_while_solo/ ) who accidentally "won the lottery" after letting his rather mediocre hardware work for two days. The odds of that are incredibly low, though.

Not sure about the whole exchange thing. Basically, there seems to be large number of people trying to profit from cryptocurrencies one way or another , which resulted in this announcement:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ys-he-d-fire-traders-who-bet-on-fraud-bitcoin

I also think that this article about Dogecoin might be worth reading.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/business/cryptocurrency-bubble-doge.html

^^^ Basically... started as a joke, grew big, and attracted wrong kind of people.

 

It may or may not be that much in 2025 because there are so many types of coins newly invented nowadays,,, anything can happen!

 

Yeah, I think that's the right mindset to treat it. If it didn't mean I'm losing money it would be hilarious how bad I sometimes am at this game. I'm currently not owning any coins anymore and I'm down 5% compared to my initial investment because I didn't see the latest uptrend coming and sold all because I got scared of taking part in another "crash".
Now I'm waiting for the next "crash", though that'll probably take till after the next fork which I didn't take into account.

Did you end up buying some? I don't think it can reach 15k this year anymore.

 

Well, consider yourself lucky. I think I burned more than 5% when I tried day trading, but in all honest, the sum was insignificant to begin with.

Normally, there's an additional instrument for situation where market is going down - it is shorting. Meaning you first sell (getting negative number of stocks), and when the price gets lower, you buy the stocks back, getting profit. In practice, however, it means that you'll have twice the opportunities to burn your money by incorrectly predicting trend direction. Not sure if this is available on cryptocurrency exchanges.

 

I'll consider myself lucky if I ever make it to a significant plus . I think I made more good than bad trades, just the bad ones were... worse.

I've heard of it, but the exchange I'm using doesn't even have stop-loss or take-profit orders at the moment, so I wouldn't be surprise if there's no way to short either. It's something I don't wanna touch anyway, same as margin trading.

 

Anyone still playing? While I'm waiting for BTC to crash again I've traded a bit on ETH and made a few bucks. Not quite out of the red yet, but getting closer. I moved from -5% to about -2.5% compared to my starting sum. Still nowhere close to what I make with regular freelance work.

But that's not why I'm posting. I've seen a fulltime trader say something along the lines of "it's better to lose money doing the wrong thing, than win money doing the wrong thing, because the lessons you learn from those trades can prevent or cause much greater losses in the future". He was referring to people buying BTC now while it's very high - if they make profits from that, they learn the wrong lesson, because right now isn't the right time to buy, the next crash is. I found that really interesting because it's applicable to many other business related things. You might get lucky once with one kind of game, but betting the farm on the next project of the same kind might be a desaster.

 

I'm reminded of Tacoma and Gone Home. Gone Home was a lucky break in many ways that pushed the team who made it into the spotlight and had great success. Tacoma in comparison was not very successful, because it didn't come in at that perfect time.

There's a PC Gamer article on it. http://www.pcgamer.com/gone-home-pr...-judged-on-its-own-says-creator-steve-gaynor/

 

I don't know anything about bitcoin trading but i did a good amount of work with markets.

The lessons I learned about traders (and I worked very closely with many very successful ones) is that they're all full of S***.

Basically, modern trading in ever rising markets is akin to tossing dice with dice loaded slightly in your favor. You win more than 50% of your tosses. After tossing the dice (win or lose) people then rationalize the results (usually favoring/protecting their own ego). The bigger the win or loss, the more important that rationalization becomes.

Looking at some of the bitcoin charts, that level of price volatility means that the market itself is inherently unstable.
https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/price/

With so little oversight on those markets, the only people I would trust on the subject are people operating the exchanges or people with close contact to them. There is so much opportunity for massive amounts of market manipulation.

 

Not planning to trade cryptocurrency.

When I looked into it, I was disappointed to find out that Bitcoin has fairly high transaction fees, which makes it useless for daily operation. The other fun thing is that a lot of the currencies forgot about security part, and for example, somebody can look up how much money you have by simply knowing your wallet address. At least in some of the currencies.

 

Nice example! The 10k units sold for Tacoma doesn't seem bad at all on its own, it's just the context of the success that Gone Home had, that makes it look like a failure. I don't like the walking sim genre very much, but I got Gone Home through a bundle and finished it. I actually liked it, though I wouldn't go out of my way to buy games in that genre. Tacoma somehow made it onto my steam wishlist, which for me is like bookmarking a game, but I can't quite remember why I put it there.

I certainly can see where you're coming from. Though there's one fulltime trader guy on youtube who I like. He once made a video about why he doesn't do the classic technical analysis stuff like Fibonacci retracements. He used the bitcoin charts, put on the Fib overlay and pointed out places where it worked out and where it only "sort of" worked out. Then he did the same thing again, but this time he drew in completely random lines... and then scrolling down the history of the graph those actually would have been better predictors of price changes. So yeah...

His actual method is identifying the last historic price level that gave a major bounce after a drop, and then waiting for the price to go even lower than that, so that people panic. Then he keeps buying as long as it goes down, with increasing volume per trade, and when it's going up again, he starts selling with the goal to get a reasonable profit and keep some part of the profit in that crypto currency. Those are what he calls "free coins". If the price keeps going up, he participates in that with the "free coins", if it goes back down again "who cares, still made a profit". He talks like someone who knows his stuff and is risk-averse. Says it's still like gambling, but with the odds skewed heavily in his favor.

He even made a video about a case where his strategy didn't work out on a trade in the stock market, trading penny stocks (also he clearly advised everyone who isn't already a trading pro to stay away from trading stocks). He made a bit of a loss there, and without his experience he'd have made a big loss. I also never saw him advertising anything, he has no products that he's selling. I always question why people do what they do. In his case I think what he's getting out of it is, that the kind of community that he creates around his channel, makes useful stuff for him. Like one guy has made a market scanner that automatically scans for sudden pricedrops on exchanges and gives him an alert to check it out himself, and then decide whether or not to buy. He doesn't want to use bots. To be honest he seems like someone who just enjoys trading like others enjoy video games. I can understand that. I wouldn't wanna play a shooter with an aimbot either.

But yeah, I've seen far more dudes with fancy hipster offices or pretentious vlog-like videos made in their car that talk about opportunities, and being excited, and how crypto is gonna change the world etc. etc..

Iirc the fees I'm paying per trade are somewhere below 0.25%. I don't care about the details of actually using crypto to pay for things. I'm just in it for the speculation game and the related learning experience. It has been very educational so far. Also I know I'm neglecting the security side because I've heard a million times you shouldn't leave your money on exchanges. But with how long transactions can take and how much of a pain it is to deal with this stuff and how much you can F*** up along the way... I feel like just leaving it on the exchange is the lesser of all evils. I mean the most popular method seems to be to put it onto an electronic device that can break or get lost, and I don't have the faintest clue how it even works. That's more red flags for me than the potential of the exchange shutting down or my account getting hacked.


I did get an interesting phishing mail 2 days ago. It was of above average quality and tried to blackmail the recipients into transfering 300USD worth of bitcoin onto a wallet address. I thought it would be funny looking that address up to see how many fall for it, but of course we can't know how many other wallets have been created to customize those phishing mails. Afaik making wallets is free, so they could have made one per mail theoretically. It went to my address compromised in the Unity forum hack by the way. Normally I get more spam on my other addresses because I use this one so rarely.

Did anyone else from here happen to get a phishing mail that claims to have recorded webcam and screenrecording footage of them from their last pornsite visit, and threatening to send it to all their mail contacts if they don't pay up?

 

Uh, why not just trade stocks then?

 

Lol, no.

 

This sounds a lot like "resistance trading".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_and_resistance

I did a lot of work with so called "statistical arbitrage" which I would put more weight into than any kind of charting. Although that technique is more difficult with this type of security. Even more quantitative methods can have problems though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_arbitrage

From casual reading (a few articles, I'm not very familiar with bitcoin or bitcoin markets) it sounds like they have real problems from exchange to exchange, with price level differences that are sometimes massive. I'm not sure how this could be possible without traditional arbitrage producing price equality. So I may not really understand how these work.

If you want to learn about this stuff - I would probably look into ForEX trading in general if bitcoin is actually a becoming a more mature currency (I don't know if this is the case or not).

 

Finally, it's also worth noting that his system as you described is essentially a "Martingale" betting strategy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)

It would essentially have the same characteristics as the martingale if leveraged consistently.

The martingale works better in markets than it does in casinos since the chance of hitting a long losing streak is often lower (markets have a long term up trend). But it's basically the same system

 

I'm not super convinced that is fully applicable because neither can a stock or coin go down forever, nor is it 100% guarantueed to ever go up again. It's likely to follow a certain pattern within specific situations, but that's about it. It's more like doing a thing over and over again, that statistically has worked out for you e.g. 90+% of times, because if it works you earn enough to make up for your F***ups.
The investing more and more as price goes lower is more a way to lower the average buy-in cost for as long as the price drops. And selling in increments is a way to try to maximize the profit without waiting too long and risking to miss the top. The dude in the videos always says "anywhere with a profit is good, I'm usually one of the first ones out again".

I think it just takes too long to make your money go the roundtrip of bank -> exchange -> buy crypto -> transfer to other exchange -> sell crypto -> withdraw fiat to bank and repeat. One round of that can take days. Crypto being so volatile most traders probably can just make more money if they keep it in one exchange and trade. Hell, during uptrends just holding BTC should have bigger payoff than that arbitrage thing between different exchanges. It's just that the risk profile is different (though I couldn't tell which is riskier). Verification on kraken was such a pain, otherwise I would have tried to arbitrage between kraken and another exchange, just to see how well it works in practice.

The fees are much higher. I think that youtuber I was talking about mentioned paying 5-figures per year in fees for his stock trades. And Iirc all brokers I checked in the past had minimum fees that aren't just a percentage, so it only makes sense if you do big trades, which I don't want to risk.

 

Honestly, this is the martingale system. Just think about the eventual outcomes, the performance characteristics are exactly the same. If you do a search for "martingale investing" it will also talk about 'dollar cost averaging' and other stuff like that.

I'm not saying that it can't work, but this is essentially an 18th century betting system and comes with the same fundamental problems regardless of how you dress up the language or justify it.

The anti-martingale can also work, I would argue that it probably works better for swingy markets since a lot of the fallacies actually exist in markets more so than other areas (hot hands fallacy, etc).

btw - I'm not trying to discourage you or disparage your youtuber. But I would always advise caution to anyone involving themselves in retail speculation. As a small scale actor, you are always the 'dumb money' - inside actors are always in the advantage. Also, in terms of what algorithmic trading is capable of and the lack of oversight, I would imagine these markets are probably being immensely warped.

 

Some ideas for how these markets could be very easily manipulated would include:

- Selling execution priority (this almost certainly happens)
- Selling data feed on market depth

To give you some idea - here is a description of the different execution feeds you can get access to in regulated markets:
http://www.investopedia.com/university/electronictrading/trading7.asp

With less regulation you can also do more and more work with execution prioritization and stuff like that. I imagine that in an entirely unregulated environment you could give a well funded actor a view of all executions before those executions take place and priority. Allowing them to intercept nearly any execution.

Order cancellation can also be used (and is also used in better regulated markets) to create illusionary pricing. In other words, they can enter orders which sit on the books and are reported to datafeeds then cancelled before execution.

https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/21/fut...-market-contributing-to-2010-flash-crash.html

These kinds of things are being done on major stock exchanges with regulatory oversight, the kind of stuff that you could sell in an unregulated environment is ... just crazy.

 

Yeah, I agree, this is martingale. THis stuff is occasionally used by people trying to sell somebody an "amazing never previously heard of way to win in casino". In Roulette, it goes like this : Say, you bet on black. If you get black, next time you bet on red. However, if you get red, you place double amount on black. The idea is that the same color cannot keep coming up forever, and eventually luck will turn in your favor, meaning you'll get everything you bet back. In practice... red/black probability is not 50%, there are zeroes on the wheel, the record same color streak was 37 consequentive numbers of the same color, and casinos have minimum/maximum bet to prevent this system from being used.

 

That's not to say that these kinds of systems can't work, they can. But you need to understand the behaviour.

Martingale style trading is basically trading higher short term win rate in exchange for a higher risk of ruin long term.

You can win with any system you want (you can bet according to the phase of the moon, because of how it affects the psychology of traders), but it doesn't make the system actually work.

 

My experiences so far...Started in July 2017

*I didn't build a mining rig, just used what I had ( 2 x GTX 1080)
*run it when I'm not using the system

Mining​

I've tried alot of different ones, but decided to stick to NiceHash for now.
You could make more mining specific coins, but NiceHash will mine whatever is most profitable and then just put bitcoin into your wallet.

*back in July it made about double the current amount.
Here are some current stats:



*Electric costs about $20-$30 for me (added on to normal bill)

I send the bitcoin to coinbase, and transfer to my bank account.


Final verdict (~ 3 months):
I made about $500 - $600 (keep in mind I "cashed out" when bitcoin was at different values)
Not bad, it has paid for 1 of my Graphics cards!

Trading​

I really think this is where the money can be made or LOST!
I traded for 1 month with $50 for fun...(I believe 90% of people lose money trading from my research)

Learned alot on my "bad trades", but overall i'm Plus
$50 to $68.30






I even made a C# scriptable scanner to alert me (ignore this "code", it's just base code for a new scanner)





I'm really interested in the otoy render token:
https://rendertoken.com/
Make money and help developers...win win

 

People need to understand that cryptocurrency is the biggest con. It used to be lucrative. It used to be you could make a profit. Nowadays it's practically gambling, and every new ICO, every new currency, is explicitly designed to fill the pockets of whoever is offering it.

Why else do they do it? for your benefit? for charity? hell no. Wake up, guys... the ship has sailed and you're all just behaving with the exact same excuses and mannerisms that gamblers do.

It's probably fine to use bitcoin as a donation spot or to pay for things but doing it for business is laughable. It's entirely unregulated nonsense. At some point it will (and this is not debatable) be regulated by governments. Japan is doing it. China is acting on it. America is too slow as usual and England is as always, clenching it's arse like Theresa May after a hard night of trying to digest the internet.

Edit: Russia has just begun regulation as well, probably others too. I would predict most of the world will be regulating cryptocurrencies in some form or other by Q4 2018.

What I am saying is that it will always be gambling with this amount of volatility. You are gamblers. That is not business.

Again, cryptocurrencies will generally benefit the currency provider, not the small fry that use it. I have yet to see a consistent benefit for the users. It is usually always going to be a company that will benefit from this. Unity, Otoy, anyone else - it benefits them much more than it does you. It's the classic gold rush fever with no shortage of people selling you maps, snake oil and shovels.

I don't see that a classical exchange where both parties benefit equally, at all. I know there is a lot of potential benefit but it will be for the few, not the many it promises.

TLDR: When everyone says "buy" it's time to sell.

 

Do you mean per month while mining or do you pay a fixed price no matter how much you use? For me even without mining I already pay about double that for electricity. If you have a flat rate for electricity or it is vastly cheaper than here, that could easily explain the difference in profitability. Either way, I'm glad it worked out for you. Congratulations on being in the plus with trades too.

As always, your bluntness is greatly appreciated!

I'm trying to remember what kind of statements I've heard on that topic but I think all bigger traders pretty much said things along the lines of "this is a market, it shifts money from the hands of the many into the hands of a few, like any other market does".
I'm only interested because of the gambling, so I didn't hear much from the ideological bitcoin believers that would buy bitcoin, even if they were sure to lose money on it.

 

I ran benchmark on my machine, the best benchmark results were 0.000045 BTC/day. This is definitely not for my hardware.

Speaking of which, Forbes had this story:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrap...criminal-case-involving-bitcoin/#6fdcfb255b6e

 

Also, I heard statements like that used to explain while it makes more sense to trade stocks than to speculate on forex/bitcoin.

IN stocks, you actually have portion of the company, and as the company grows, so does the value of your stocks. In speculative markets you're playing a zero-sum game whose primary purpose is redistributing wealth.

Not sure if it is entirely correct or not.

 

Stocks are mostly speculation at this point. The entire market is really driven by algorithmic trading and unless you're deep in it, you have almost no idea what's "really" going on. People who write for trade publications or talk about the market on tv usually have no friggin clue what they're talking about. Stock performance is almost completely divorced from any real performance of the underlying company at this point.

In terms of putting money into stock markets, I'd recommend looking at indexes or other automatically balanced baskets.

This kind of thing isn't fun or exciting though, and if you want to gamble I certainly can't blame you. Personally though, I prefer casinos. I would never speculate in markets without, at least, professional level data feeds.

 

I mean it adds that much more to my electric bill...so I have to subtract that from the "profits"

this is a good site for getting estimates:
https://whattomine.com/

 

I came to a similar realization a few months ago, thinking about buying and selling and buying on margin and short selling...it's moved so incredibly far beyond "invest in a company and see return [dividends] when they grow." It's not even really about the company anymore.

I think it's a little sad honestly, but I guess that's just the way it is now.

 

I'm more interested to see where they move block chain ideologically, bitcoin was an experiment in the free market and the invisible hand, finally free of regulations ... and what happen is exactly what anti capitalist has said would happen, monopoly, centralization and the few profiting vs the many ...

But instead of learning the lesson, they moved to fix those issues concretely by designing and testing new protocols (from proof of works to proof of stakes and other strategies), they are basically trying to recreate their ideal vision of how the invisible hand would behave, which is ironic because the whole concept is about "laissez faire" not have any regulation at all, as the interest of each would keep others in check (that surely didn't happen). They are basically trying to remake the equivalent of the government, ie a regulating, supposedly neutral, third party.

The thing is while people call the thing a scam, that was the same argument against paper money when it was introduced in Europe (china had millennia of advance as usual). People where highly suspicious of using something that had literally no value and has to be exchange for something of actual value.

And that's kinda all currencies in a nutshell, they don't have intrinsic value, they practically work like a ponzi scheme, you place thrust in the backing originator, on thrust of future values, and when he bails out, you are left with nothing, which is exactly what happen when the monetary institution that back the currency fails, ask Greece.

Money fundamentally is a contract based on thrust, you need to enforce it for it to work, you need an authority to regulate it, bitcoin (and cryptocurrency) place their faith into the algorithm as a regulator. Any currency with no thrust just fail, there is an amazing story about the brazilian economy and how thrust was restored by creating a virtual currency to compare the failing one.

The conclusion of my opinion is simply that the future of crypto currency, taken to its logical conclusion is pure science fiction. Currency are contract backed by an institution that have some kind of power to arbitrate litigation, it does that by having a monopoly on coercion (to maintain stability), Crypto currency don't have that, it open them to abuse, like we have seen with multiple Bitcoin affair (and the many fake alternative created to make quick cash).

The only way to finalize this vision would be to have an all encompassing AI with police bots to be the "neutral party" with coercion. The future of Cryptocurrency is literally a benevolent skynet, I don't know if I want that future lol.

 

Trading slowly is still an option. Meaning buy now, sell weeks later.

It is less draining than daily trading for sure.

 

Crypto is kinda crazy right now. Bitcoin was going up the recent weeks in anticipation of the segwit2x fork (whatever exactly that may be - I chose not to research it), and now there... won't be a fork?! Some altcoins went up every now and then, Bitcoin Cash is doing well, and even Jim Sterling has a reason to talk about crypto:

Finally, micro transactions and crypto currencies united!
But to be honest I think it's kinda clever to use an ICO to basically get what amounts to venture capitalists who are not into gaming, to be into your project. Now if only someone could do the same thing again and sprinkle some trendy buzzwords like "machine learning" over it...

I've made a few trades on altcoins and now I'm very very close to having my crypto trading account at break even again. Hindsight is 20/20 and I could have made way way way more money these last weeks if Ihad more faith into all that stuff and went in bolder and held for longer. But on the plus side, I haven't lost money on any of those trades. Though the Ether Classic that I bought yesterday isn't looking too good right now, so that one might not turn out so well, but it's just a tiny sum.

I still think Kraken is a remarkably bad site. Never ever have I experienced this amount of poor UI responsiveness and error messages (some of which aren't even correct, which I find the worst). Support gave me a typical "sorry, we're working on it" response. But really, the site is just terrible to use more often than not, I could not recommend it to anyone. If the verification process wasn't such a hassle, I'd be long gone to another site.

I've found an interesting quote on twitter:

Talk about "hit driven markets"...

Anyone wanna share at what price levels they plan to buy more Bitcoin? I'm really unsure, I feel like it's got a whole lot more of room for falling, compared to altcoins that already are at like a third of what they once used to cost. I realize this is just as good as rolling dice. I have placed a very small buy order at 4300 Euro, but mostly I'm just clueless and watching where it's gonna go.

 

My understanding is the money to be made is mainly in the release of an ICO where you buy/mine and sell it on the way up before the inevitable crash which can be from hours to days/weeks(if lucky). I have a friend who is way into this and is now involved in an ICO on the side that makes most of the money(the developer of the currency). From what I learned it is mostly all a big scam, at least in regards to ICOs.

 

We are reaching peak of inflated expectation of the hype cycle, dark time ahead.

 

Sounds sketchy, but I'd be interested to how this turns out for him. I understand if you don't want to share what coin it is, but if you've got any interesting stories to tell, feel free to share.

We're already a few days past the peak for Bitcoin and this weekend was great for me. If kraken wasn't such a S*** site where I need to try 20 times to place one fvcking order, I could really see why people call it a "money making videogame". If this was an actual game on steam, people would trash it in reviews as "not fit for purpose". That site is ridiculously unreliable.

It seems GDAX doesn't allow trading against Fiat in my country. I'm unsure if I should send some etherium or bitcoin over there and start trading on crypto/crypto pairs. Does anyone have experience with GDAX?

 

Not buying any bitcoin. Transaction fees make bitcoin quite useless in my area, so the currency serves no practical purpose.

Someone with thousadns of USD/EUR to waste could try to play the game, but with low amoutn of cash I largely see it as a waste of time.

 

After another crazy alltime high of 14k Euro, Bitcoin is going back on sale right now (though the dip might be over already when you read this). I'm still in the plus with my crypto trading account and currently trying to buy more bitcoin. In hindsight #hodling bitcoin through all highs and lows would have been a vastly better strategy in terms of payout. I've made plenty of mistakes while trying to be risk-averse at the wrong time and also impatient at the wrong time. Just buying and holding Bitcoin when I started trading would have outperformed my current gains by a pretty huge factor (like more than 10 times I think). I want to trade less and hold more in the future. So while I arguably failed pretty badly, I've still made a profit of ~10% in about 4 months.

If kraken wasn't so crappy I might have argued that trading is more "fun", but it really isn't, if you take into account how poor the feedback loop gets, when your exchange is down half the time, and takes x number of tries for any order being placed.

Well arguably gambling on its price changes is the practical purpose of it for most people who own it. When it wasn't worth this much, people used to buy things with it. Now that its price is skyrocketing imho it would be foolish to use it to actually buy goods with it. I'm starting to believe it'll reach crazy high prices, while still being essentially irrelevant in the real world. It has created enough "success stories", for people with more money to start chasing that and drive the price even higher. I think it'll likely be a self fulfilling prophecy for a while and then crash every now and then and start another cycle.

It's a shame I'm not a "believer" in general, because currently this apparently is a market that rewards people who have faith that it'll all keep going up. I've read an interesting tweet where someone said if you want to be a "hodler" you need to built your own happy-place-twitter-echo-chamber that confirms all you believe in, because all the fear, uncertainty and doubt that people opposed to crypto spread has no value for you and only serves to distract you from following your plan. I found that... kind of insane... but of course I see where he's coming from. This market is so emotion-driven it's hard to believe.

I'm still hesitant to put more of my real money into my trading account and even there I have not even half of it in crypto at the moment. Most of the time it was lying around in fiat, placed in buy orders for dips that mostly never came.
A friend of mine just invested a bunch of money into a bot based stock trading fond or whatever it is. I'm curious to see how it'll work out for him because in terms of diversifying I'd consider investing a small sum in something like that as well.


Edit: funny story:
"Redditor receives ~1.6m in BTC accidentally sent to their new wallet, posts on Reddit and finds the sender, returning it to them, gets 7 upvotes"

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7ij1q3/can_you_tell_who_sent_you_bitcoin/

 

When people start talking like this the crash will be unbelievably brutal. When the price tanks, it's going to be a total panic. This is much closer to tulip mania than anything else.

Bet on it, take your wins and your losses, but remember, the crash is going to be harsh. As in like half the value wiped out in a day kind of harsh. The bottom of this market is most close to $0.

How much are beanie babies or other random fads worth these days?

edit: worth noting that with futures contracts coming in, huge shorts are coming too. that market is going to get obliterated...although who knows when.

 

I've read a bit more on the subreddit yesterday and iirc historically the worst that happened is losing 86% of value abruptly and taking two years to recover. If it goes to 0$ tomorrow and never recovers, I'll still be fine, because I have less than 2% of my savings in crypto. But if it goes to 1$ tomorrow, I might put in another 2% of my savings, just in case it ever goes back up ~20000% in value. x]
The one difference people seem to see between the fads you mention, the dot.com bubble, and Bitcoin, is that apparently there are by comparison more people being happy about Bitcoin price crashes because it means they can buy more for cheap. Of course new legislation or other unforseen events could somehow change how that usually goes for the next time it crashes.
What I found interesting in one of those "info for newcomers guides" on reddit was that it's not mathematically proven that the encryption tech behind Bitcoin is actually secure. It hasn't been broken yet, but that doesn't prove it's impossible.

 

The problem is nobody will use it for anything. It has no intrinsic value since it actually doesn't really work as a currency (too slow, difficult to make large transactions). It has a million competitors with better products technically.

The only use for it is hoping that someone will buy it for more than you bought it for.

Ah good, 2%. Yeah man, have a ball. I've been hearing too much about people who have all their money in bitcoin trading.

 

Just as a note.

A lot of people say that greed is what fuels bubbles. That's not true. What fuels bubbles is much stronger than that. The two engines underneath every bubble are:

• Jealousy
• Regret

"If I held onto it longer..."
"He made 50% in two days. If only I was in then..."

Those are the things that fuel bubbles.

 

Yes you are right. World has gone mad . Today the price of bitcoin has fallen, but I plan to wait a little more, so that the price will become even less. Because I really want to invest with bitcoins. I have already read a lot of information and I am confident that its price will definitely grow for another 3 years. In any case, various independent sources write about this (see here, for example)

 

Both the stock market and crypto market are speculative mechanisms. You can tell yourself that stocks are based on actual company value, sure. But that company value is largely speculative to begin with, so you're just compounding the speculation by participating in the market. It truly is a fools game... and yet because of currency inflation (which is just an accepted 'fact' of life now), the bigger fools are those who don't play.

The relevant difference between stocks and crypto seems to be the behavior of those participating in the market?

Bitcoin, especially now, has moved beyond having practical value for actual transactions and has turned into a truly speculative activity... a large percentage of players seem to be trying to time the market in the relatively short term. Which will create bigger boom/bust opportunities at a much higher risk/reward multiplier.

While the same activity goes on in the stock market, there is a much higher percentage of the market that is simply in it for the long haul, which creates a stability that is essential for it to function. It's still surely speculative, but you can be relatively well assured that the market, through it's ups and downs, will continue to grow at some rate. As long as that rate is above the inflation rate of money, and you aren't overly exposed to individual stock risk, then you should be golden.

Bitcoin is an obvious bubble. Even those who don't know what a bubble is can look at it and see that something is going to pop, and probably soon. If you're OK with your potential loss in value (i.e. all of it) then I see no reason not to play the bitcoin game. Personally I would rather go the slow-growth / lower-risk route with the actual stock market.

 

Jesus, that's so crazy I wouldn't even consider it. But it seems like it's even worse and a few people are taking out mortgages and loans to buy Bitcoin:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/11/peo...n-says-joseph-borg.html?__source=twitter|main