I have never purchased any bitcoin or any crypto and always thought this is a scam/ponzi. Can someone explain what it is used for? This is not a troll post, curious to know what it actually does that normal currency can't do? How is it so expensive now?
Crypto - What Is It and Why and How
Rac00n on 12/11/2024 - 14:43
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Maybe seeking to pay ransomware, avoid tax/currency controls or purchase CSAM? All the real uses of crypto besides speculation.
And at one stage you could buy a Tesla too.. Don't think they still take crypto
It goes up and down. If you buy low and sell high you make money. If you buy high and sell low you lose money.
So that's what I've been doing wrong!!!
Send it via the wrong exchange, you lose money. Receive dirty coins, lose money. Use leverage at the wrong time, lose money.
Sending it isn't exactly rocket surgery provided you have at least year 3 reading ability. No idea about "dirty coins". No idea why you would use leverage on something like this. Sounds like "do something stupid" and you lose money, which is true in most aspects of life.
You probably need to lookup how coins can be marked as dirty or blacklisted are if you are serious about crypto. Leverage can be used in any investment. Its used in realestate everyday in the form of a mortgage. Anyway yes many other common sense rules apply except the market isn't rational.
@buffalo bill: I'm not serious about crypto, I've made money with it but am under no illusion that it's anything more than speculation at best, gambling at worst.
Leverage in real estate makes sense as the risk is far lower.
The market is stupid. You can make money simply by buying whatever newly made coin is created, the moment it's created, then selling it 2 minutes later, before it dumps to zero 5 minutes later.
@buffalo bill: Dirty coins are only an issue if you're taking them off the exchange.
If you're trading crypto, you typically don't do that.
should have bought btc instead of FMG!
Doing what to your girlfriend?
hopefully find her, have you seen her?
Whoever knows the answer, please do share.
Hi google….
The usefulness of Google searches has diminished in recent decades..
1000000000 results give you genuine answer…
10000000000000 give you crapRemember never type into Google Are Bengal Cats legal in Australia
Good luck filtering through it all. :)
YMMVYour google must be broken! First hit is enough, you don't need to go through 1,000,000,000,000 search results
https://www.coursera.org/articles/how-does-cryptocurrency-wo…
Definitely a scam, first link is to skynews!!!
First result is Wikipedia with an extract which is a decent summary.
Did they try to scam you into donating money to the Wikimedia foundation?
just append 'reddit' to the search, that fixes it
It's a highly speculative asset. There are tens of thousands of crypto coins and tokens out there, of which more than 99% have collapsed in price due to theft, scams, fraud, etc. As the whole area is basically free of any financial regulation, it attracts people who naturally love that.
Even the old school well established crypto coins like bitcoin can crash in value. Bitcoin has fallen peak to trough 80% more than four times during its history, so if it crashes from USD$88k now to under $20k it wouldn't be unusual. Price has always recovered and continued to grow… so far.
Only put in money you are prepared to lose. Stick to the well established major crypto coins if you want to speculate and invest.
just say shitcoins
It's useful for money laundering and crime. Plenty of examples of it being used successfully there!
Otherwise not entirely sure…
I think cash is more popular
Cash is if you can find an ATM that works, and/or doesn't charge you $4 to just do a balance check.
Nearly Impossible to find a branch that still exists to get cash outstrange I've never been charged a fee from a branded ATM since the 90s
lots of branches have cash
@Poor Ass: I've never been charged a fee for using ATM's either (depends on your bank).
(Un)-funnily I got out $700 from an ATM last week, and it gave it to me in all $20 notes :( :(
Checks calendar.
Just like I thought. It's not 2011. FFS.
I wish I was in 2011. If I put my $15 an hr part time job into btc I'd be sipping cocktail on an yacht somewhere..
It’s like magic Monopoly money.
Get on now or miss your moon lambo.It's all Greek to me.
Would you prefer Latin ?
Cogito, ergo sum
It’s crystalline material originating from Superman's home world of Krypton
LOL
As retail enters we have 6 months at most before the peak of the cycle. Best of luck @techfast @rektrading and the others let me know if otherwise
I think rekt got rekt. He couldnt cope with the bear run and got washed out.
nah rekt made it
source: i like to believe he/she/they made it
Last time he/she was online was peak bear market. It's now Bitcoin season and it's hunting down 100k fast. He absolutely got rekt I reckon, otherwise he'd be here boasting like usual.
But, head canon is also an entirely acceptable line of thinking too :-)
@KangaDrew: surely to have gotten to that point he'd have weathered a few bear markets. the most recent bear market wasn't even brutal by historical standards
nah not possible, they were buying the dip even if it included luna. I doubt their majority was luna. Most likely diversified into btc and random others. Either way, they are for sure chilling. The convicted stay convicted no matter what
It's gambling. A completely unregulated currency which has no backing at all, using a computer system you know relatively little about, in a "digital wallet", whatever that might be.
Invest heavily, obviously, because as with all gambling, for every winner there has to be many more losers. /s
It can do far less than a regulated currency, and is expensive solely because of cryptobros, scammers, and other people you probably don't really want to know. Note the lack of /s here.
30% of it is owned by UAE (so likely only a few people).
to be fair, most trading (as opposed to investing) is calculated gambling. how successful you are depends on how informed you relative to other gamblers, your risk management and a healthy dose of luck
Key word: regulation.
there's btc and eth ETFs now to bring it into the open arms of uncle SEC.
which doesn't mean very much mind you, everyone knows how much insider trading goes on that cannot be prosecuted.
yet so many institutional buyers have BTC
Never let facts get in the way of a sleepy bear
ever done kanga?
like others say, it is too late to buy, you are buying at the peak and it might go up a bit or a lot however the most likely situation is that it will come back to normal level.
This is not financial advice.
Remember this
It is best to buy when the (owners) start to cry (value gone down around 80%)
and sell when the people outside want to buy (now)true, so now we should try to sell to OP
I don't think it'll crash that bad anymore now that there are more institutions buying it
Maybe. However, investment banks make money by trading, not buy and hold, and definitely not hodl. As soon as it falls below some support line many institutions will dump it.
Yes they will dump and buy it back for sure
But overall they would want the price to go higher and higher so for people who hodl until they need to cash out is alright
too late to buy
That’s what they all said in 2017. Just because the price is at ATH doesn’t mean you’re late. MSTR just bought a bunch of BTC recently.
In every other crash, once you are hearing about BTC everywhere (such as here, now) you are too late for current cycle.
I have never purchased any bitcoin or any crypto and always thought this is a scam/ponzi.
Most crypto seems to be a scam, the remainder a ponzi.
Can someone explain what it is used for?
Speculative trading and a way to easily transfer money from crime. Bitcoin has been a boon to ransomware scammers.
This is not a troll post, curious to know what it actually does that normal currency can't do? How is it so expensive now?
Serious answer, in a way it's a reverse currency. With a regular currency, we print more of it and increase the circulation to ensure it's easy to use and there's plenty of liquisidy in the economy. It also decreases in value over time. Managing money supply is complicated business.
Bitcoin does the opposite, limit the amount available and you don't need to manage the money supply anymore, you just let it run free and the price goes up and down (more akin to gold, yet without something physical backing it up and very predictable supply).
Imagine if there was only $20m Australian dollars available, no more were ever made. In the 1800s, that might have been all the currency we needed. But if we didn't increase the money supply (which we have done so, massively over the years), each of those dollars would be worth a small fortune because they're the only way to trade here. You could buy a house for 50c but actually carrying out that transaction would be incredibly difficult. That has happened with bitcoin. The total pool of bitcoin needs to be valuable enough to deal with all the trade and free flow of money to keep it going. But because it is so valuable the idea of buying a pizza with bitcoin is long dead, it's most valuable to people who want very unregulated movements of money and are prepared to take a large hit on foreign exchange gains/losses (like ransomware scams).
But back to that pool of money, it's also worth recognising that very little bitcoin is actually traded, making the amount actually circulating quite small. Which means the value of that traded piece needs to be quite high in order to support the whole network. Those that hold a lot of bitcoin could introduce more liquidity to the market, but they have zero interest to. They're not a reserve bank, they're here to make a profit. It's a speculation game on whether anyone will want to blink and simply cash in on it, start selling off before everyone else does. Much like billionaires having a paper value but turning that into cash value is quite difficult (it's why they borrow against their shares and not sell them).
It's too late. By the time your grandmother is showing you her crypto portfolio on her phone, you know it's too late. There's no more rubes left.
It was too late when institutions entered. Making 20-30% profit is their target so they will pull their investment long before anyone doubles their money. You'd have to take a gamble on a small layer 1 coin to have a shot at 10 or 100x, but there is exponentially more risk of that being a rug pull.
People entering crypto now are being manipulated by the large holders who need liquidity to cash a fraction of their holdings out to buy some assets. Next cycle they will do it again.
Hi ChatGPT…
<retail has finally entered the chat>
(albeit, too late)
Daddy Trump is going to make it illegal not to own Bitcoin , so everyone in USA is buying it before they get deported to Brazil
Here's the rules:
When I buy Bitcoin the price goes down
When I sell Bitcoin the price goes upcan you please tell us when you buy, many thanks
He's about to buy
Is that you, Jim Cramer?
he bought? dump it. he sold? pump it.
I'm pretty sure they're haunting me now
No one was wondering
reverse kanga
If OP can't do even basic research…¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It has no significant purpose for legal use. It's good for money laundering, extortion, scams etc.
"It is, I’m told, a very clever system. But what problem does it solve that can’t be handled more easily and cheaply in other ways? I’ve been in many meetings over the years in which skeptics have asked crypto advocates that question and have never heard a clear answer."
Paul Krugman
same could be said about precious metals
Nah, not really. Precious metals generally have real world uses.
gold's industrial uses are miniscule compared to its role as cash surrogate and as reserve backing currency
@ihfree: all central banks hold vast reserves of gold to anchor their economy..imagine if there was an unhackable digital asset that actually has a finite supply..
@May4th: Not really all - https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/gold-reserves
Australia sold off two thirds of its gold reserves under Howard/Costello when gold was at a low. We have 80 tons remaining.
@ihfree: sure, most. 80ton is still a $hitload. the point is most countries of scale still has a reserve of some sort. BTC has just eclipsed silver in total market cap.. gold is next
Google broken again?
Seen some of these comments at 18k, 45k and now at 89k. Cool.
Best arguments i've seen are it's efficient (as far as human labour that is required to keep the systems ongoing), and that it enforces accountability. As far as I understand, that was a lot of the driving force behind satoshi designing bitcoin. All of the financial shenanigans that surrounded 2008.
Here's a statistic I heard in some financial media, that you would need to verify for yourself. The m2 money supply, after accounting for population growth, ie divided per capita, has increased 400% since 2005. Per person there is 4x as many dollar bills in existence (USD?), over the last 20ish years. Pro-crypto advocates would argue that the dollar is a terribly distorted unit of account.
Pretty much everyone has done the same. The Australia M3 supply (broadest measure) is up ~7.3x since 2000, whereas population is only up 41% over the same period.
https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/money-supply-m3I get sick of reading those news reports about how the rich are getting richer. I mean it's basic maths, you increase the supply of money 7-8% per year but limit consumer inflation and wage growth to 2-3% then of course investments / assets have to gobble up the rest. That is our system… throw extra in the money pit and wait for businesses to generate activity in order to collect it (creating more goods / services and a better standard of living for everybody). If you stop the tap investments won't generate as big returns, businesses pull back and you get a slowdown. Governments are trying to manage social cohesion and productivity more so than equality (but most Aussie politicians are far too dumb to even be thinking at this level).
Anyway as I see it both housing and Crypto's success is a function of the fundamentals. I pumped some of Australia's data into ChatGPT to the other day to see how well it could estimate historical house price growth… pretty accurate!
Inputs:
Base House Price in 2000: $245,000
Population Growth: From 19 million in 2000 to 27 million now (Growth factor: 1.42)
M3 Money Supply Growth: From $442 billion in 2000 to $3.1 trillion now (Growth factor: 7.3)
Consumer Price Index (CPI) Change: From 69.1 in 2000 to 139.1 now (Growth factor: 2.01)
Investor Sentiment: Property investment is considered a foolproof wealth development vehicle.
Lending Laws: Borrowers assessed at 3% above their borrowing capacity.Summary: Given the inputs of population growth, M3 money supply growth, CPI change, investor sentiment, and lending laws, a house that sold for $245,000 in January 2000 could now be worth approximately $1,269,480.
If you want to learn how it actually works and why:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4Probably one of my favourite 3Blue1Brown videos…
Do you sometimes go out and spend money on pizza and watching a movie with your friends?
Crypto bros usually save that money and dump it on shitcoins. Some make it huge. Most lost it all. Everyone tries.
Why not just invest in something real instead with much greater potential? I remember running into my younger step brother during Covid, he was fat prick about 50 kilos overweight, and kept wanking on about Crypto, when essentially he was poor cont, that never will be as wealthy as his own harder working father, or my old man.
My father was a carpenter/builder by trade before retiring in 2013 at 58 when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer which later spread to his lungs (he’s still alive and very healthy), he worked hard and often for 12 or more hours a day 6 days a week running his own business, and he took the philosophy that there is no such thing as easy money, you have to work hard for it. You would never catch him wasting his time posting on websites like this and online in general, instead he would use his time much more wisely to make more money. For example, in dads spare time he would buy a house that he felt was cheap, quickly renovate them, and then sell them for double the price he paid… The last property dad bought and renovated before he retired was in Woy Woy essentially where the central coast begins just outside of Sydney, it was a block from the water, the house cost him just over $400000 from an elderly deceased estate, he spent $50000 on higher quality materials to renovate it and because of his skills he did all of the work himself, and sold the property for just under 1 million dollars 2 years later. Doing things like that is how smart people make money and get wealthy rather than investing in Crypto and chasing it.
What's your personal plan to generate wealth? Is it wasting time posting on websites like this?
@ihfree - You’re right, it is pretty pathetic wasting timing posting on here, so what’s your excuse? I’m doing just fine for myself, and a part of the reason for that is because I have been smart enough to listen to my father and take his advice and guidance, however I don’t need to worry about it either way, I can do anything I want, since I have a wealthy father that has cancer, and I’m going to inherit a substantial amount 🤷♂️
What are you currently leaving for your kids?
cevolution aka "Billy Bob":
You would never catch him wasting his time posting on websites like this and online in general, instead he would use his time much more wisely to make more money
also cevolution aka "Billy Bob":
You’re right, it is pretty pathetic wasting timing posting on here… I have been smart enough to listen to my father and take his advice and guidance
Cool story bro. You really love contradicting yourself on here dontcha!
Noice, edited with extra salt.
Was basically just calling out the contradictory nature of your post. But to add to it, you really seem to have a chip on your shoulder.
Assuming your step brother will also be benefiting from your father's wealth?
I don't comment on my personal situation online and ultimately anything said could be a lie anyway - so it's largely meaningless.
@ihfree: How is there a chip on my shoulder? I posted that I think Crypto is a waste of time, and why, and example that you can choose to smartly accept and embrace, or foolish be hurt over, which is likely for average people that waste their time investing in Crypto. If you are smart, you would be responding and arguing with me for whatever, you’d deactivate your membership on OzBargain, and you use the time instead much better to build your wealth.
P.S. the step brother I was referring is on my mothers side, and certainly won’t be benefiting from my fathers wealth… And his father isn’t as smart and as wealthy as my father.
@[Deactivated]: I've found crypto to be reasonably decent. It's certainly outperformed some other investments.
Don't fear what you don't understand.
I have a wealthy father that has cancer
This merits a good ol' "(profanity) capitalism". Considering that your father has a son like you, he can't be any poorer.
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You are very late to the party!