Bitcoin Forum

I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked about Bitcoin as an investment. And it's no wonder – if the crypto-currency hadn't been invented by a shadowy tech guru, it could have been the stuff of a movie director's wildest imagination.

Take the aforementioned "inventor" of Bitcoin, who may or may not be one of the half-dozen people suspected of being behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Then, add in the fact that his invention came to prominence on the eBay-for-criminals website Silk Road, and that the libertarians love it because there's no role for government and you can't be identified.

I can almost see Matt Damon in the role of action hero Jason Bourne. Or Daniel Craig, on Her Majesty's secret service as Bond, trying to bring the bad guys down.

Then there's the legion of supercomputers "mining" new coins in China and Eastern Europe, and reports of people who threw out hard drives with Bitcoins saved on them, or who paid for two pizzas with Bitcoins that are now worth $20 million.

http://www.smh.com.au/money/investing/bitcoins-not-a-fraud--but-dont-risk-it-20170920-gylbno.html

I know that a Bitcoin forum is probably a bad place to say this, but there really is no guarantee to the future of Bitcoin, whether it be a good, prosperous one, or a bad one in which it crashes back to nothing. To the average person, I certainly would not recommend investing in Bitcoin in big amounts unless proper research is done and the risks are properly calculated. In this sense, Bitcoin really just acts as a more volatile asset which may not be worth the risk for some. Circumstances matter, and are the sole reason I am invested in Bitcoin, but that is also because I have many fail-safes in case something goes wrong.

There will always be trade-offs between safety and returns - if something is guaranteed, it can't be highly profitable, as everyone would invest in it. So far Bitcoin has been extremely profitable for people who held it for more than a year because many viewed it as risky, but it doesn't mean that it will always be like that. Bitcoin price may be very volatile, but the network itself is very stable, there were very few critical bugs and attacks over the last 8 years, so there should be no doubts that Bitcoin works. And since it works, it must have value and right now there's no fundamental reason for it to fail.