https://www.independent.co.uk/life-...ankrupt-china-bitmain-giga-watt-a8646821.html Right time to buy ?
It's hard to call it a crash - the whole crypto space has been on a slide since the bull run of last Dec/Jan. Mostly due to a lack of real-world use cases, delays in upgrades to big projects (Ethereum) and the ICO craze that robbed a lot of people of a lot of money. It's looking like we're very near the bottom though, so if anyone is thinking of dipping their toes, it's a great entry point at current levels.
I still love that nearly £3,400 a coin means it's "crashed" - last lot I sold was at £600-ish a coin... Now, there's no denying I'm down heavily from peak - but if you view it on a year or two-year graph, the peak was an anomaly. Do I wish I'd cashed out then? Obviously. But I'm up 33% in the last year - a good six times better return than, say, my ISA - and that's after I'd already withdrawn five times my original investment in profit-taking. I'm not sure I'm ready to put more money in to the crypto markets, but I'm also not sure I'm ready to take any out just yet.
I'm definitely thinking of a 5-10 year view although I have no idea if the measly £40 or so here and there I put in a select few altcoins will go very far by then.
BTC had been relatively stable at $6xxx for the last couple months and from that perspective it can be described as a crash. Personally I'm in the same boat as Gareth, still well up on what I put in, so not too fussed about recent sell offs.
Doesn't the current market situation have more to do with the BCH fork (aka BTCABC vs BTCSV)? With nChain boasting that they had 51% of the hash rate but when the fork happened it turned out that miners stuck with the original fork and put 2 fingers up to SV (Satoshi's Vision) Sauce
Same. I left "something" in a handful of different coins whilst mainly pulling out the rest. I have no idea what the effective cost basis is for what was left so I've basically written it off, so basically if it doesn't entirely disappear, one rainy day it will be pure profit.
For me it was that I came late to the party and I just had £300 to play with. I have a few thousand coins and if any of them hit a tenner or so even for a brief period I'll have an asset in five figures worth clearing out for something nice. Suffice it to say if I'd gotten in even a year earlier and cashed in Dec 2017 I'd be a happy chap, so it'll probably come round again in a few years.
That's not what I said, I wasn't referring to BTC (original), or it's fork, it was talking about the recent BCH fork.
Looks to me like Bitcoin may me be going through another boom and bust cycle, as in late 2017 to early 2018.
I've still got some Ripple I keep meaning to rebalance across to Bitcoin. I should probably get a wriggle on with that before anything dramatic happens...
I struggle with crypto currency, just can't get my head around trusting an investment in it. What governance is there with these currencies? From what I read, it seems like a bit of a wild west scenario.
Trusting an investment in it? Yeah, that is going to be difficult... After all everyone who owns any of cryptocurrency A could easily ditch it tomorrow in favour of cryptocurrency B, which would instantly wipe out all value in cryptocurrency A, so in that sense it is currently still more of a gamble than investment. Governance? It varies. There are varying degrees of transparency depending on the specific currency allowing you to more or less track what is going on, the degree to which it can or can't be fiddled with by the creators also varies from one crypto to the next and when it comes to government regulation... that is very much in constant flux as governments haven't exactly settled on any one approach yet, so on that front you can look up what it is today, but it won't really tell you anything about the future. Wild west scenario? Absolutely. If you invest into a cryptocurrency you are basically betting on which currency will be used to pay for shovels when the gold rush hits.
Adding to my earlier post. Whilst I find the machinations of the cryptocurrency market mildly interesting, I never have and never will, risk any money on it.
I think there's still a big separation in knowledge between "cryptocurrency" and "blockchain". There are a LOT of crypto "coins" that exist, with value, that are nothing more than whitepapers currently. By the same token, there are many blockchain projects that have nothing to do with money or store of value.
Though you would have to convince everyone who holds A to deliberate tank the value of their own holdings (i.e. burn their own money) in order for that to happen. This is something that has been tried multiple times with the original Bitcoin (forked as Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin SV), with each time for fork petering out as most holders (and miners) remain on the original branch. Cryoptocurrencies are often couched as "against" fiat currencies (e.g. GBP, USD, etc) but it's more of a different sort of fiat. With cryptocurrencies, they have value because several million people with those coins (and mining to operate the network) consider it to have value. With 'normal' fiat currencies, they have value because a government (the face of several million citizens) consider it to have value. A fiat currency is 'backed' by the economic output of the nation whose government supports it. A cryptocurrency is 'backed' by the economic 'effort' put into mining (a combination of electricity cost and amortised hardware cost). Neither's value is actually set by the economic force put into the backing however.
fiat = The protection of your non liquid assets provides a vested interest to not withdraw your trust (by removing your liquid assets), this provides a basic level of protection in case of a non fatal crash and an incentive to rebuild. crypto= Where is the vested interest to not withdraw your trust (through removal of your liquid assets)? There are promises of potential uses of the network the crypto runs on that could serve the same function. However the problem is that stuff is still mostly contained in white-papers rather than existing and as such would be easy to replicate on another network after having shifted to another crypto. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to put down the concept of cryptocurrency, just saying that it is still early days and plenty of cryptos will be left behind in a ditch with zero value along the way.