I was looking at it during the dip in July and thought it was too expensive. Of course it's up 100% since then. I also thought it was a bad time to buy when it was $2k.
I've pretty much always thought that it's a bad time to buy and I've always been wrong.
The best strategy is to buy regularly with the same amount of dollars without thinking about the current price. Just think of it as your long-term savings account, and your expectation should be to beat inflation.
Kaplan: Long-term investing works when you keep your money in the market for long periods of time. When you're doing dollar cost averaging, you're not keeping your money in the market over the full period of time. You are keeping much of your money out of the market for much of the time. So, you're not getting the full benefit of long-term investing. Furthermore, when you're dollar cost averaging, you're basically placing a bet. You're placing a bet that the market will be going down shortly after you get the money and that eventually the market will come back up towards the end of the period as you're putting more money into the market.
DCA is a good strategy when the asset is very volatile, and you want to minimize the timing risk. If you're buying a low volatility index fund, then it doesn't make sense. This applies only when you have a large amount of money to begin with, because you basically have to DCA if you're investing from your monthly earnings.
Lots of people have a fear of investing and don't enter the market at all. DCA is a fool-proof strategy which can minimize the fear and is easy to follow for beginners. In the case of Bitcoin, most people simply don't enter at all, because they're too afraid of the short-term movements in the price.
This is obviously true but most people DCA into the market because they’re investing money as they earn it. The put $X I to their brokerage account on payday and buy more indexed ETFs.
Volatility on a log scale gets squashed a fair bit.
Not that I disagree with PlanB's model, but that's not what most people look at, especially not daytraders: PlanB's model's investment horizon is way too long for them.
The advice below is amazingly bad. As humans we are terrible at predicting the future, so why bother trying? We are also taught from birth to fear / hate money. Therefore, we always fear doing the things that we should have done in the first place. Get over it.
1. Buy Bitcoin at any price, it doesn't matter.
2. Tokenize it into a form that allows you to...
3. Put it into DeFi and collect APY on it.
By collecting interest, it disconnects you from the actual price of bitcoin. As long as you're getting that sweet compounding interest, that is all that matters because it gives you the freedom to choose what you want to do with it.
You can "buy" more bitcoin (ie: don't sell your interest), or you can take that interest and use it to bet on other things.
You're making your "money" work for you which is the best of all worlds. This is a similar play to covered calls, but far easier to reason about.
What is different is that instead of handing your funds off to let some bro at a bank or on wallstreet make the majority of the money, you get to cut out that middle man and take control of YOUR money.
If any of the above is confusing... do some research. Start with google: DeFi.
a college dormmate asked if I was using my video card to mine something he called "bitcoin", apparently I had some AMD Radeon model that was better than all the other cards at the time
a) it's *always* about timing the market, whatever the investment may be: because in the end, you die.
b) on a wide enough moving average window (i.e. if your investment horizon is long term enough), and if you only look at the technical analysis pov (like many are wont to do) and ignore the politics/value conversations, BTCUSD feels like quite a reasonable bet to take.
c) had you DCA'd Bitcoin - say $50 / month - since - say - 2013, you'd be sitting *very* pretty right now.
Sure, if you're out after minor short-term gains, then timing the market is important. But most people don't have time for day-trading and jstx specifically mentioned the last time they were looking at the price was multiple months ago, so they are probably looking for long-term investments, not to be glued in front of a screen all day watching the price.
Yes and no, unless you have a magic ball its best to DCA. Maybe at best, you could do a modified DCA so that you're not buying Bitcoin when its at all time highs.
True, but you could use a little to buy stuff off Amazon for example. Think of it like an automatic discount. I use purse.io for this along with dollar cost averaging.
Why ever sell your stock if they continue to go up? The answer is whenever you need the money. Same with Bitcoin.
People need a store of value that beats inflation. Cash is shedding its value. The return on cash is literally negative between low interest rates and high inflation.
You seem to argue two things in the same comment, which conflict with each other.
If there is a stagnation (the price stands still), then people would start using it (since your point is that people are not using it now because the price goes up), how would that lead to a crash in that case?
Not that I agree with any of your points, your message seems confusing as it stands now.
As opposed to holding an asset like AAPL (dividends) or AMZN (earnings growth), where in addition price growth I'm getting a share of future revenues/profits? What future revenues/profits am/will I be getting with BTC? (Or gold for that matter: which is why Buffett isn't into it.)
If fiat had the same properties as cryptocurrencies, I'd agree with you. But you have to at least agree (or understand rather) that they are in fact different, for good or bad. So maybe people other than you see value in those differences.
> Does that $65K represent a trade against USD or a trade against Tether?
A fair question to ask, but there are quite a few places where BTC can be traded against actual cold hard cash and not monopoly money (insofar as you consider USD not monopoly money, a shaky proposition in itself).
People who are buying/holding now - what's the long term plan? Expect even more demand... until? Or is there not "until" and you expect it to go up indefinitely?
Been holding/using Bitcoin (when possible) since ~2013. I have it because I'd rather use it than anything else, and I imagine a future when it's a decent alternative to cash, but we're not there yet so I'm still waiting. I have no qualms with the price going up or down, as long as eventually I can use it for purchases and giving/receiving friends/family, which I can already do, but it's on a very small scale.
This is very controversial, but as long as someone accepts that Bitcoin is better money than fiat currencies (which I believe) with a 2x/year adoption rate (right now it’s hundreds of millions of people), fiat currencies will hyperinflate in 2030. I already have non-Bitcoin friends using either stocks or houses as savings, and fiat holders will be the bag holders…people who get into debt will be the winners.
Keep holding until the sell orders I have trigger, then put the after tax proceeds into my brokerage. If it goes up more, sell repeat. Never plan to sell 100% of my holdings. Once my brokerage account and/or the portion of my stash on crypto interest platforms is enough to provide a generous regular income, FIRE.
I never expect to hold zero Bitcoin, but I do plan on selling some in 2022 just to rebalance into other investments / reduce risk exposure.
I still see a lot of growth potential, and I believe the current market cap is overstated. Many many coins are permanently lost, my bet is that the true market cap is significantly under $1T.
In long term it should replace other forms of money and assets that are used for storing value. Demand stops growing when everyone uses it, and the value will stabilize.
I had a large amount of savings in Bitcoin in September 2020. However, after reading the salient arguments against Bitcoin made by Stephen Diehl on his Twitter account, I liquidated my entire position.
And I couldn't be happier.
Thanks to his nuanced decomposition of the technology I have avoided the wild price swings over the last year, and protected myself against the inevitable crash.
I would recommend anyone with a position in Bitcoin to read his informed analysis on the technology and cash out while you still have chance.
The best time to get out of Bitcoin was a year ago. The second best time is today.
prob not smart idea to rely on investment advice solely from a single twitter user. Diehl often makes inaccurate claims about the technology he is criticising, and refuses to enter into any discussion that goes against his beliefs
With Bitcoin, it's not a good idea to sell at all. Just wait how it plays out over the years and replaces the existing monetary system. It's much more fun playing the long game, than trying to time the ups and downs.
However, if you want to try timing the market, then perhaps wait until December / early next year when hype is at maximum. The current hype cycle is just starting.
Yes, we're totally ready for the thing that taps out at 7 transactions per second to "replace the monetary system"
And don't give me the L2 lightning network bullshit. Both you and I know that it doesn't work as an actually decentralized payments system, and it plausible deniability and makeup for a centralized workaround of BTC's fundamental flaws
> And don't give me the L2 lightning network bullshit. Both you and I know that it doesn't work as an actually decentralized payments system, and it plausible deniability and makeup for a centralized workaround of BTC's fundamental flaws
seems like you've made up your mind so doesn't make sense to engage, but if anybody else comes across this comment - it's pretty much tribalistic bs. lightning network works, it's a system that preserves Bitcoin's security guarantees while decoupling value transfers from onchain settlements. this is how you scale global distributed systems - you localize them into lots of smaller systems that can change state independently in a consistent manner.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but to open a payment channel with another party on the lightninng network (for example Starbucks to buy coffees) you need an onchain transaction. Then when you finally want to settle all of the lightning network transactions (pay your tab) you need another transaction. So you need at least two onchain transactions for every merchant you want to trade with.
The reason this doesnt scale is because for 100 million people to open one payment channel, it will take over a year to process all of those transactions. That wouldn't happen though as the transaction costs would skyrocket to the point people wouldn't bother.
Am I wrong? Genuinely, this is how I see it and why it cannot work.
> you need at least two onchain transactions for every merchant you want to trade with
you absolutely do not. you open a channel once with some node and that channel can be used to send payments to all other nodes.
it's also simplistic view that you need 2 transactions per settlement of a channel because with channel factories you can batch-open-and-close-and-top-off many different channels with single (albeit fairly large) transaction.
systems like that grow organically and people get onboarded via many different methods, so it's not like tomorrow we will have a queue of 100 million people waiting for channels to be opened.
i do expect bitcoin network to hit capacity limit by transactions in future and we will see what it is going to look like, but i rather prefer bitcoin's glacial pace of becoming more and more efficient at ground layer, forcing all sorts of experimentation to happen in upper layers and in sidechains without ever compromising the foundation.
Ok so I've learnt something there, just one transaction to open a channel that everyone uses. But then what happens when you've transacted with say 30 different merchants, and the tab is called? Is that one bitcoin transaction to settle, or 30 since you're presumably sending bitcoin to 30 different wallets?
Personally I don't like the glacial pace of ground layer dev, as it makes me think this stuff can't be solved. Each way you approach it is a compromise.
It's called lightning network for a reason. It's a network of Bitcoin channels. You can open a channel with Burger King and use it at McDonald's. The latter will route the payment instantly to the former, and all channel states will be updated. Read the lightning channel technical papers if you're interested, it's really worth it.
It’s one transaction to settle any number of in-channel transactions. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to talk about 7 transactions per second because every one of them can represent a billion value exchanges.
It is infinitely more important to preserve stability of foundation than it is to experiment with new features. Bitcoin runs in its current form for more than a decade and that stability is worth a lot.
I'm concerned that looks a lot like a more conventional system where you have centralized payment processors. The best-connected ones are most successful, incentivizing acquisitions until there are very few of them or even a duopoly.
Try finding the shortest path to a network where you only discover the edges once you reach a node. You only get hilariously suboptimal solutions
Which is why in practice such a system has to be centralized (eg. El Salvador) or it's effectively useless (you resort to opening a new channel rather than passing the money along an unknowable list of channels)
you're overthinking it. and in the meantime LN works great. your analysis is obviously wrong somewhere, but your ideological position prevents you from accepting that fact and re-evaluating your assumptions.
again: LN doesn't need to optimally solve np-hard or worse problems to work, good-enough approximations are easy to find.
It works great at tiny scales between small cliques of people who know each other. And it has for years.
But it can't and never will work at large network sizes without being centralized. And no amount of development work will fix that, because it's a core design flaw.
Which is why the meme with LN was "its 18 months away from wherever you are in time".
It's always in early stages, because it can only achieve early stage levels of usability without devolving into a centralized system. By design.
> Which is why the meme with LN was "its 18 months away from wherever you are in time".
yeah, if memes are the way you keep yourself informed on the topic then i totally understand your point of view.
the reality is that LN works and what you call "small cliques" are just subnets that route payments internally efficiently but are also able to route externally when the need arises.
this is literally how distributed systems are scaled, internet being the largest one.
it would be centralized if nobody could use LN if some one or two largest nodes failed, but the protocol is open and everybody can open a channel with everybody else and nodes in the middle have no way to censor traffic because they don't know neither the sender nor the receiver.
removing any big LN node will cause disruption only to the channels directly opened with that node, but will largely be unnoticed by the rest of the network.
so unless you point out the centers without which LN collapses, your claims are just bogus.
It either has to be a centralized system, preallocating large channels to work for people or you're exposed to an unsolved network discovery problem (Canadian Traveler problem)
It is already proven that USDT is not backed by the equal amount of USD on their accounts, contrary to what was claimed, so I very much doubt that the price propped up by huge volume of USDT really equals its price in USD. If you exit now, it probably does, but this music got to stop one day.
> If you exit now, it probably does, but this music got to stop one day.
Right, currently USDT trades for USD 1 to 1. I'm not sure what you mean by volume propping up the peg. They would need to be buying massive amounts of USDT spending real USD which sounds..expensive.
(let's just say that we both assume "you're clueless and have no idea how any of it works" and not repeat ourselves?)
tether volume *by definition* will be close to BTC volume because BTC and most other altcoins are traded in stablecoins and tether is one of the largest of them. every time BTC changes hands into some other asset - there's a stablecoin on the other side of that transaction. of course trading volumes will be similar, that means literally nothing.
what you're trying to claim is that somebody is actively printing tethers to prop up BTC price, but in that case number of available tethers must grow by amount that correlates with daily trading volume during green days. it doesn't.
between july and now tether cap grew barely by 10% or $6bn while BTC market cap grew by hundreds of billions.
Just do a simple mental exercise and imagine if somebody would sell 1.88M BTC (10% of the current supply) in a span of 24 hours. Where would it take the price, and what would be the resulting market cap?
According to your claims, it would reduce the market cap by 10%, right?
gotta explain where you taking those numbers from. how did 1.88m BTC enter the picture?
i was talking about $6b in tether. if sold on market instantly BTC price would probably not even drop below $50k judging from books i see on different exchanges. there's just no evidence to your claim that all the demand for BTC is created by tether.
also, imo if tether was found not-solvent today, everybody sitting on tethers would run for their lives trying to buy BTC, sending the price to half a million easily.
1.88 BTC is 10% of existing BTC. I'm trying to explain to you that market cap of an asset is not how much it is worth. It's just a function of a latest price multiplied by total supply. If you start offloading significant part of that assed, the price will tank very soon, taking your market cap with you. So any arguments pointing to gigantic market cap are just not valid.
Now, with Tether. There are a total of ~70B of tethers. You claim that it grew by only 6B, but you kinda forget the previous 64B. Did they enter the market and are sold to people? Or maybe they are still controlled by bitfinex guys, who can use all these money to prop up prices on an exchange controlled by themselves, basically, putting money from one pocket to another, then transferring it back behind scenes? It is more then enough volume to move the price to 1M without putting in a single real USD more into the exchanges.
Also, note that every previous run to ATH has coincided with extremely high blockchain activity, which was a result of a great public interest, with new money entering the market. But now, blockchain is very quiet, mempool falls to zero often. This makes me consider that this run is likely not real. Maybe it is exactly what you say, ATH is the result of tether holders running for their lives trying to buy BTC.
I consider high on-chain activity to be an indicator of new people getting into bitcoin, bringing in new money, which drives the real valuation higher. In this regard, LN effect, as important as it might be, is not relevant: new money are not brought in via LN.
time will tell. this fairy tale of tether printing and propping up price is being told and re-told for 6 years and nothing ever happens. you can't hide a deception that large for this long.
Ad hominem is not necessary. Trading volume plays a role, but for everyone trading Tether -> BTC there is someone else trading BTC -> Tether on the other side.
If the USDT/USD peg began to fail naturally, you'd need a massive amount of non Tether currency to prop it back up (ie buy Tether at peg).
It's not really so. You create Tethers out of thin air, buy BTCs from it, the price rises. Then you sell them for real dollars, while unbacked tethers remain on someone's accounts. Now, if USDT holders would want to withdraw it, they might run into some unexpected obstacle. So far it looks like nobody withdraws USDTs, so this fraudlently injected liquidity remains on the exchanges, powering the current bubble.
(and mind me, I'm a bitcoin maximalist, but I just don't see how bitcoin's price can be considered real at this point)
Yes..but that only works exactly once per tether they print. You seemed to think the USDT volume was much more important than the total supply.
> To get a clue, check daily trading volumes and compare them to market caps.
Why does daily trading volume matter? In order to pump BTC twice with the same Tether, they must buy it back from the market right? So the artificial pump is only the total supply, not volume traded.
I find it beyond fascinating that people on this forum who are deeply involved with Web 2.0, completely disregard Web 3.0 as a scam. Technology is growing exponentially during our lifetime, if you are not open to the idea of new technology you will be either late or completely left behind.
Many people thought Web 2.0 was a scam and it would never amount to anything more than an online newspaper. Imagine putting your credit card on the internet, Heavens no!
It’s easy to punch down that what we do not understand.
HN has a surprising amount of luddites. In this case though it's just a matter of people being mad they missed out. It's embarrassing for them since the world presumes all hackers cashed in on Bitcoin. So they feel like failures for not seeing it and rationalize by dismissing cryptocurrencies altogether.
There's a lot more adoption going on with big business. In addition to the most powerful people in government looking at crypto seriously, both Visa and Stripe are heavily investing in crypto teams and infrastructure.
Eg. Stripe = 1 guy and 4 additional staffers. That's really peanuts for a company with > 4000 employees. They already did it in the past and abandoned it then.
Seems more like FOMO, just because a competitor is also doing it ( eg. Paypal).
As a reminder, there were similar "investments" in 2017 and the only one that remained from then is Square, which has the same CEO as Twitter...
Let me see the % of payments in crypto versus other payments methods and we'll see. I don't think anything changed.
The all time high at those dates was $20K, today is closer to $65K, how is that considered a "fall" for you?
Sure, zooming in at specific points in time you can find good/bad numbers, but the only thing that matters is what the current price is, not what it was before.
Capital gains tax make it hard to pay with Bitcoin, so the network is not used as much as it could be, but Lightning Network is improving continuously (there are still lots of interesting and important developments going on that can scale it up). The first real world usage that is happening in real time is remittance. It’s really hard to remit money between countries (it takes days to send money from EU to US for me, and my bank asks for $20).
>Not really sure how someone can claim crypto isn't a big thing now.
I think skeptics have moved from "it's not going to be a thing (ie. get acceptance)" to "it's a scam/environmental disaster and government will/should crack down on it".
El Salvador putting BTC ATMs in US and El Salvador just started, but already is having a great impact, as it’s much cheaper to remit money using Bitcoin than with Western Union. Other companies will need to compete with Strike when it launches in EU.
Do you sit out capitalism as a whole? Or looking at your username surely the CCP also fits that definition, are you chinese yet refuse to participate in the economy?
I've pretty much always thought that it's a bad time to buy and I've always been wrong.