Bitcoin Forum

For the record, I just sold all of my Bitcoins.  I bought my first Bitcoins in June 2011 at around $28 and continued buying all the way down to $2.  I actually bought about 8000 BTC around the time I made this post: http://www.thebitcointrader.com/2011/10/im-calling-bottom.html.

Needless to say, my return on investment was massive. We're talking 25,000% plus.  For someone to see that kind of ROI today, Bitcoin would have to hit $125,000 each, or a market cap of $2.6 trillion on 21 million coins. Which brings me to my first point:

There's significantly less incentive for someone to speculate on Bitcoin today. To see a return comparable to what we've been seeing over the last couple of years, the amount of capital that would have to be injected into the markets is exponentially more than it was just over a year ago. This is going to cause investors to really do their homework before buying Bitcoin, and recent news events are exactly the sort of thing that will deter new investors.

Next, the vast majority of merchants are using Bitcoin as a protocol, not as a store of value. Anytime we hear of a new merchant choosing to "adopt Bitcoin," what they're actually doing is two-fold. One, they're getting free advertising for themselves, especially local businesses that find themselves on the front of the business sections of their local papers. Two, they're not adopting Bitcoin, they're adopting BitPay or Coinbase. These merchants care about lower fees and irreversible transactions, not so much the value of a Bitcoin itself. There are a few exceptions where the merchants retain some or all of the Bitcoins, but they're the minority, by far.

Third, Bitcoin early-adopters are cashing out. When you hear about Overstock, TigerDirect, Fancy, and others doing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars of business in Bitcoin, those are old Bitcoins that are being sold. No one is going out to buy Bitcoins so they can make purchases they could already make with PayPal. It's inefficient and expensive.

Finally, there are better protocols that are being derived from and have improved upon Bitcoin. If Bitcoin is more useful to businesses as a protocol, then why wouldn't a better protocol oust Bitcoin in the long run? The Bitcoin 2.0s of the world (Ethereum, Open Transactions, Ripple, etc) will eventually unseat Bitcoin. Some say that Bitcoin will remain an ideal store of value, and the other technologies will become the ideal "payment rails," but is Bitcoin really a good store of value if 35% of Bitcoins are held in only 500 addresses (http://bitcoinrichlist.com/charts/percent-bitcoins-owned-by-richest)?

Anyway, suffice it to say that I'm not done in the crypto-currency space. I've divested into Bitcoin 2.0 technologies, and look forward to seeing the space grow. I expect to see better returns on those investments than I would if I simply held Bitcoin.

Good points and well said. Hats off to your investment too! The whole time I was spending my coins I thought it was fine because I will just buy back when I have fiat again.... Until the price shot up 100x!

I had to laugh like hell , come on... centralized premined scamcoin Ripple?  I hope you're trolling, i can't take you seriously.

yes you do make really valid points there, but again who though that bitcoin could go to $1000 in one year when buying at $10 ....

Given the viewpoint you expressed above, I'm surprised that you didn't sell your bitcoins in November to January for over $1000.  Why did you feel they were worth holding at a higher price a few months ago, and worth selling now at a lower price today?

Ripple's chart just follows bitcoin and its liquidity is ridiculously poor. Don't see how that could go anywhere unless they convince big banks to accept their system. As for Ethereum, it lacks the elegance of bitcoin and nobody really even understands it.

Weak hands.

It took $6.8 billion to get from $10 to $500.  It would take $63 billion to get to $5000/Bitcoin.  A lot of people are counting on Wall St. and institutional investors to make that happen, but $63 billion is A LOT of money, even for Wall St. How likely is it that investors will come up with $63 billion to put into a speculative currency?

If I want to buy something online I will only pay in Bitcoin unless it's not available with a merchant who accepts Bitcoin.

I buy on Coinbase and then use those Bitcoins to pay for my order. I think there's a large enough community where if more did this it would greatly affect the Bitcoin economy.

Honestly I think Bitcoin can easily hit $125,000 per coin in a few years. Considering the sheer size of the mining infrastructure, the scope of the new innovations on the horizon, the ones that we know about...

I think the exchange price is irrelevant right now; it doesn't reflect any weakness or limit it's potential growth.

I guess we'll see how it turns out. I wish I had the opportunity to get in when you did. I hadn't even heard about Bitcoin until November 2013...

I should have clarified.  I didn't sell all of my Bitcoins just now.  I've been gradually selling them on the way up, and sold the last large chunk in the last 48 hours.

You definitely not understand market capitalization , you dont need 63 billion dollars to get 5,000 dollar coins.

Why, because 12.5 million coins x $5000 = $63 billion?  I'm surprised someone who's been here since 2011 could still think this. 

I think most investors slowly divest as the price climbs.  This is a logical way to diversify. 

But what I wanted to know is why did you feel the "last large chunk" was worth holding at a higher price a few months ago, and worth selling now at a lower price today?

Thanks for the newsflash, captain obvious.  ::)

If was already awesome, it wouldn't be cheap.
Its similar to when the OP bought his BTC

EDIT - Grammar

As much as I don't like paraphrasing Paul Krugman, I think you're conflating normative and positive analysis here. You are basically making the argument that Bitcoin has a socially undesirable element to it because it has high wealth concentration. However, that does not mean jack to someone looking to preserve the value of their own wealth, and people who have wealth will not put their money into media that try to wash wealth disparities away. Bitcoin has among the lowest inflation rates of cryptocurrencies, with the exception of 100% premined/presold coins like MSC, XRP and NXT, but most importantly it has the Schelling point aspect of being the first cryptocurrency out there. Bitcoin is temporally antecedent to every other crypto, and that is one property that it will never lose; hence, it will always be "special" amidst a sea of innumerable other cryptos no matter how powerful they are. That's why I can see it maintaining its value for quite a long time as a digital gold.

The needed numbers don't match, but the scales do.

The amount of money to 3 times the current price is 3 times the amount invested thus far.

And it's very questionable if bitcoin is going to be THE currency... It has users now, but just considering how easy it would be for a new alt-coin to get in if the really big players would go with it, like Amazon, Paypal and Google.

Just consider those 3 would start offering it as option for payment for all the sites they are now available... Why would they, because they would be early adopters in that case and gain the benefits form it instead of giving it to current early adopters...

while I really appreciate the math you did there and while you have a strong and valid point regarding the growth strongly slowing down when reaching some point (I think this is what you are trying to point out)but again, you are ignoring a really important fact, let me point out few things out.

-there is more than 12 million BTC on existence (without ignoring lost bitcoins or satoshi's coins...) now you don't need to dump all these coins to bring the price to 0, I was discussing this before on the wall observer, if you have around 100K available for instant dump on all exchanges, you can bring the price to 0 and kill confidence... but if you had that amount of coins you wouldn't do that because this is plain stupid, why sell for 30  millions or less when you can sell for 5 or 10 times that in batches.

- we would never reach the $1000/BTC if all coins on circulation were traded daily in other words if we had that volume.... there is no demand near that point yet not even near 5% of that, we are far and so far from that point.

Aside from all the possible counter-arguments, there's an implication here that 300% is a poor rate of return. Tell that to the average stock investor.

The top was not obvious until it was passed. I was hoping to see a return to the $800 level before I sold the remainder, but the Mt.Gox fiasco has motivated me to sell earlier.

For sure this is very risky and it could be -1000% too.

facepalm.jpg

Ripple was started by the original Mt.Gox CEO. I wouldn't go anywhere near something founded by Magic The Gathering folk.

Alright, alright, bad math acknowledged. However, I stand by the point I was trying to make.

yes growth will slow down after a certain price is reached, I think this is what you were implying to...

Fair enough.  Thank you for the explanation. 

I was interested because I actually view the MtGox fiasco as medium and long term bullish (especially if the missing coins were stollen in 2011 and long ago sold into the market).  I see this event as the impetus needed to create real exchanges in the US, as well as a supply shock reducing the bitcoins currently available for purchase. 



Thanks for acknowledging the mistake.  But your point that it would likely take an order of magnitude more fiat is still valid.  My counter argument is that more than an order of magnitude more people now know about bitcoin and may be considering purchasing some. 


Only time will tell....

That's the million dollar question, isn't it?  Based on the various attempts at investigative journalism I've read, I'm leaning more towards the Bitcoins having been either seized or temporarily frozen by the US government due to something likely related to the Silk Road investigation, or to money transmitter licensing issues.

If they have in fact already disappeared and were sold, or the private keys have been lost, then I agree with you that it's a bullish situation. I'm just concerned that the US government may now be in control of hundreds of thousands of coins. To me, the downside risk of such a reality makes an investment in Bitcoin untenable at this juncture.

most likely a sheep

I agree, I've posted before about how I believe bitcoin is over as an investment

Wow you're rich! Send me some coins!  ;D ;D ;D

Well, if it can go from zero to $1000+ off the back of a few hundred thousand enthusiasts, scammers and libertarian whack jobs then all bets are off if it gains traction in the wider world.

There are ever increasing rumblings of that being the case.

2014 may not set the world on fire in terms of returns, it is creating the building blocks for the infrastructure it requires to spread far and wide.

How do you manage to lose more than 100%?

You make a good counter-argument, but I'm not sure if "first mover" status is sufficient to generate a large ROI going forward. It might be, but I'm not convinced.

In this case first mover status means that it's taken a beating that'll echo down the centuries.

It's still standing and many are still choosing to trust it. That counts for rather a lot more than any groovy innovations.

This is correct. Explaining the valuation of bitcoin seems to be intrinsically hard.

Think of a game of tennis, where one player hits the ball and it travels over the net to the opponent. Then imagine the audience, their heads turning from one player to the other. It is the market players that change their valuation. If the players value bitcoin higher, whether they have some, many or none, the price also rises. Nothing has to move. The price we see on the market is only a part of it, namely we see a price when someone who valued it low, reconsiders and values it higher than the current offer. If some permabull changes his valuation of the first coin he might sell, from f.ex 1000 USD to 2000 USD, we don't see that on the market.

The value enters into bitcoin from whatever the participants earlier placed value on. It could be fiat money, cars, houses, beer or whatever. There doesn't even have to be equality between the old and bitcoin. So if everyone sold their dollars for bitcoin to the extent that the dollar lost all value, the total value of bitcoin will not necessarily be the same as the total value of the dollar now. It could be more, or less.

Props to the OP for making a very fat profit. If it were me I would've kept a few hundred coins just in case.

Umm, telling the truth that it's based on enthusiast, scammers and crazy anarchist and state denying libertarians isn't really a positive thing.

Many bubbles have had crazy people and they didn't end too well... Some survive out of those and the value stagnates a long time... Maybe never recovering or going up again...

True true.

But for better or worse professional investors, VCs and large finance is slowly waking up. Unless I'm mistaken that was never the case for beanie babies.

I'll admit I'm a little extreme when it comes to my investing/trading decisions.  It's how I ended up in Bitcoin in the first place. I *did* hold onto those last few hundred coins for three months, but I've made my decision, and I'm out.

I hope you enjoy your gains. I still think it's worth squirreling away a symbolic amount, 21 perhaps.

Having said that being out completely is probably going to be better for your social life and blood pressure.

i think we are seeing 2011 play out, maybe $100 by march end. Bitcoin is less attractive as an investment after gox demise

I dont think so, what we are seeing now is the pressure it takes to change the way we do things. We have used exchanges to trade our btc, soon we will trade btc in the client itself, I have read some interesting projects for decentralized exchanges and when we get there its practically game over for the nay sayers.

these previous 2 posts reflect in a nutshell the current market standoff: those who are looking backwards, and basing their estimations on the past, and those who are leaning forwards, basing their estimations on an assesment of the future.

So you're not long.  Figured as much.

bitcoin is gonna have an incredible network effect, so i highly doubt $100k+ isnt possible in less then 8 years

Not really, think about it its not that great. Ripple much superior as a protocol

FED is still printing $75 billion per month and it will take only one month to reach that goal, there are already trillions of dollars printed since 2008 and they are all waiting to be invested

I just don't see any reason to change a money with limited supply for a money with unlimited supply. Do you urgently need those dollars to buy a yacht? 8000 coin is almost 1/2625 of the bitcoin money supply, but 6 million us dollar is almost nothing in USD monetary base, and it will continuously shrink due to exponentially increasing money supply of USD

As for alt-coins, none of them have the infrastructure (hash power) to withstand an attack or hard fork

Why would you do that? ???  ???
Doesn't it cost you more than buying outright with fiat?

itt caputalation. now *I'm* calling the bottom ;)

I'll try to sum my viewpoints up a bit to not bore you people.

a) Bitcoin may potentially have less ROI than some other highly speculative investment but it is probably less risky than investing in some altcoin project (how will you know you picked the right ones out of the GIANT set of options). What I don't understand is that you invested in bitcoin and now that it is looking like it may actually be used on a large scale you switch to different projects.
If you are seeking these fantastic 25000% ROIs well then that move makes sense. But you are also taking huge risks because it is definitely not certain that these altcoins or different cryptos will definitely reach the scale that bitcoin has today.

b) Stop whining about what bitcoin as a protocol can't do.  This reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer designs a car.
The only people who state bitcoin as a protocol is dead are those that desperately want their newly invested altcoin with a billion new features to shine.
You know there isn't just one "internet protocol" that does it all. There is actually a protocol stack where each thing does something different.
Why should a crypto be a distributed exchange and this and that and defrag you old harddrives and serve as an instant messenger all at the same time?
This is the classical recipe for screwup

[edit] just to clarify, yes there is an internet protocol, it is part of a stack of protocols. what I was referring to was that you don't have a giant blob that "gives you internet"

Explain why ? You have no idea about real investors, they will use Bitcoin investment trusts or ETF's

What's the connection MtGox -> Bitcoin?

Some major points you're overlooking-

1) New markets, China, India, arab countries. Are you aware of chinese capital controls? Are you aware of their real estate bubble (theyre about the equivalent to where we were in 2007-- except perhaps 50%+ more inflated). We are talking about a 10 TRILLION dollar bubble. Further, it was in 2 short months, and out of NOWHERE that China alone moved the price of bitcoin up about $10 billion worth of market cap. Now digital currency is on the radar for the masses, and there are hundreds of billions of dollars stockpiled there each year looking for new investments. The Chinese are LOOKING for the best investment they can- their stock market is rigged, their real estate bubble is in an immense bubble, and they're VERY restricted from sending money overseas (even wiring more than $500 from a Chinese bank account to a US account is an extreme pain in the ass and raises eyebrows).

Also, digital currency allows the chinese to invest money easily or transfer money overseas with much greater ease than anything before. Yeah the chinese government hates it, as does india, as will arab countries (all countries where money is leaving will hate bitcoin, while, in general, countries where money will come to (like the US), will like bitcoin (you can see the Fed reserve's actions of passively acknowledging bitcoin(they realize its good, they dont want to publicly support it due to retaliation (esp from China/India).



2) Also, bitcoin may not have the kind of exponential growth as before- but these alt currencies very much can. Coins like dogecoin, or other novel small market cap coins. Dogecoin currently is around 50m, but should really be around $500m based off bitcoins current price just by the size of its community and volume(and note it is not even traded on btc-e yet where 80%+ of bitcoin and litecoin volume comes from). Not to mention, the community rocks.
Indeed, bitcoin had a good run but these alt coins can SURPASS bitcoins growth rate in the past few years-- this is why even in this current short-term downtrend I don't dare sell my position, because it is my position and it can take off at any moment (just like it did in Oct-Nov 2013)

Can you point me to any links (news etc.) related to the above?

related to what part? also try google, all the info is online

I like posts like these... they usually get posted right at the start of the next of rally :)

EDIT: Typo.

give it 2-3 years, and it will be an excellent read.

on the other hand: exit strategy is a hard one to accomplish. all those years of tension. it sure is great to be part of it. but as price rises all of a sudden some are multiple $ millionaires. the game changes. become independent for the rest of our life or risk it all on a virtual thing still in beta? once you reached that it must be a great feeling to step out of crazy ccmf ride to da moon in some way.
at what price would you get tempted ? $ 10k, 30 k ? 

I was all out too, but now back in :) Never say never

interesting. could you quantify a bit ?

Yes sheeps listen to OP. He sold all his coins and suddenly decided to voice his "honest opinions"

We need FUD like this to buy in lower.

Do you really believe it took $6.8 billion to get to $500? LOL. I find it hard to believe you believe this.

Why not? after all he sold all his coins .... after mtGox fiasco

Doesnt sound like hes smart to me. His math and "analysis" is comparable to a 5 yrs old....

just because someone's been registered here since 2011 doesn't mean they're any less likely to be an idiot

You are so cute, and you don't even realize it.

Absolutely adorable. Like a kid or something.

Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization

$63 billion is not a large amount of money.

I'm having a hard time understanding the premise of this post.

In the subject you suggest that 300% ROI is not worth getting out of bed for.. and after 25,000% its understandable why you might think that.  But as others have said in this thread, 300% is a very nice return. 

This leads me to believe your are solely focused on high risk / high reward speculation, but the confusing part is you have been a big supporter of Bitcoin for 3 years, with a active blog, twitter feed and BCTalk account, you attended most the expos and conferences, you've started a couple of bitcoin businesses..

This makes me think that through most of your involvement you believed in Bitcoin.  Realizing your profit is certainly a wise choice, but I find it strange that someone so supportive of Bitcoin for so long would sell everything and can find no appeal in it anymore.. the fundamentals haven't changed.. Its still cheap, decentralized, secure, easy to use, cant be inflated.  Why dump it all?

Like you, I am also excited about other innovative cryptos like Ripple, OT and NXT etc, but I think the biggest most important asset to any of these crypto's is not the technology or people working on it, its the "mindshare" and effort of the general public to acknowledge and accept.  Bitcoin has a 4 year headstart on the competition here, another crypto would have to be significantly better to begin to erode some of that lead.

I can see from your tweets you've been more involved in Ripple, while I think Ripple is great and use it regularly I fear its complexity is its biggest barrier to adoption by the wider public.

To summise, not sure if:

• Speculating
• Wants confirmation selling 100% of beloved btc was the right choice
• Promoting new fav Ripple

Merchants adopting BTC as a 'protocol' as you put it, is the first step to Bitcoin becoming a money. When Bitcoin can be spent on most anything (even if the merchants then just sell Bitcoin afterward), then Bitcoin is a much easier sell to consumers.

lol.

I was just thinking that I am a late adapter and stupid as fuck. I am prouding myself to see someone early adapted spreading fud as a 5 year old child which contains the dumbass opinions about bitcoin to buy in again from low.

It is not that hard to reach that 3000$ point and it doesn't even needs 2billions or so.

Maybe it is harder than past because market is shared and portioned with other exchanges and upping the price is a little difficult, it will need more coordination and care. However it still not as hard as being in need of higher than 1 billions.

I am pretty sure that you will get in this train again when you see us going to the moon at the end of 2014. Winklewoss brothers planing something for Q4.

Especially England plans to tax bitcoin. This means we are getting high. I will be more honoured to sell my bitcoins to you with %100 profit at that time. And honestly I don't care if a profit is %100 or %20000. Profit is profit. There is nothing to be regret about missing huge profits. No need to be greedy as fuck.

There always been oppurtunities, and there will always be. Maybe it will be ripple or maybe ethereum but be sure about this:

The firsts will always be the firsts. Bitcoin is a cult and must for cryptocurrency, and will always be a gate for other protocols. There is nowhere near support for other coins or protocols as bitcoin community has.

If these people don't sell their bitcoin instanly after mtgox announcements, this means that a fairly good trust has been created around bitcoin now. You need to go steadly to see new highs, you need to be prepared, you need to spread your roots to handle that growth.

This is what is happening right now. The weak roots dry. Strong roots grow.

I am.  Have done so many times.   Usually buy with existing coins, then replenish what I spent.  I don't think the stats from Overstock reflect a tiny few number of people making up their $1 million in Bitcoin sales so far.  That would be the result if it were just the early adopters with thousands of coins going on a shopping spree.

-B-

So far I just see you trolling:

Incredible.

Four pages of discussion on the future of Bitcoin and not a single one of you has made mention of infrastructure progress or worldwide adoption status. That blows me away. Allow me to say this once and for all, to all of you "day traders""

THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS WHEN IT COMES TO THE FUTURE OF BITCOIN, IS THE INFRASTRUCTURE AND ADOPTION GOING ON AROUND THE WORLD.

Let that sink in.  Please.

If you aren't an expert on whats CURRENTLY happening with Bitcoin on a daily basis around the world, then you know *nothing* about Bitcoins future. It doesn't matter how good you think you are with graphs and charts and sweet trading jargon.  You know absolutely nothing.

It's always the guys with fewer than 100 posts saying how confident they are that the Gox thing is the end of Bitcoin.  You hopped on board when BTC was at $1,000 because you wanted to ride the highs and dips.  Make a quick buck.  You did very little learning about what Bitcoin is, and as a result you have zero confidence in its future, and no interest in the things which are true predicters of its long term success (adoption/propagation/infrastructure).  

Anyone who actually believes that Bitcoin is not going back up, has done zero research on Bitcoin's activity around the world right now. To me its just absolutely insane that there can be 4 pages of discussion on Bitcoin and not a single mention of this. The foundation to the current $550 price is because speculation is going down, and a substantial base is being built.  Why didn't Bitcoin die already?   How bad can the news get?   The whole world thinks Gox *is* Bitcoin and Gox is dead.  What lunatic believes that a $550 price after that news is not substantiated by anything?  

There is a whole world of Bitcoin adoption going on out there.  A whole world of hundreds of startups being created that provide financial services related to the protocol.  What are they all going to do?  Just drop bitcoin and throw it in the trash?   After years of planning and learning the system?  Experiencing its benefits and power?  You don't understand human psychology at all.  Anyone who looks only at the Gox situation, has blinders on.  And has absolutely no clue what Bitcoin is doing around the world right now.  And no understanding of Sociology, psychology of populations, or marketing.

Mark my words.  Bitcoin is going back up.  The fact that I even have to say that is astounding.  Its so obvious.

This has been my mantra from the start:   When I start to see the adoption levels decreasing, and infrastructure falling apart around the world, then I will begin to consider the downturn of Bitcoin.  As it stands, adoption levels are at an all time high, and infrastructure is as well.  How anyone can poo poo the Wall Street investments coming in the next month via SecondMarket is bewildering to me.  "ehhh.  might help.  im not convinced though".  LOL .... wow.

-B-

I try to understand ethereum, but everytime I hear the words "beautiful foundation", it sounds too much marketing for me.

+1

Good riddance. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.  :P

That's the spirit. I only read this far down the thread but these guys are crazy. Don't get me wrong OP, you are set for life from bitcoin and that I respect and admire tremendously. I wish you luck on your future endeavors but I think you missed the mark here.

This post clearly backs up what I was thinking. I know the returns we've seen has been outrageous and most probably wont be seen for a little while but big money has still yet to flow into bitcoin. There wont be a bitcoin 2.0 as bitcoin will change to make sure its stays at the head of the game. it will be a store of value that will only rise over the next 30 years. the protocol will be built upon and rely on the underlying bitcoins to function.

I too sold many coins over the last few years and made a very nice bank account for myself. I was never into finance before this, I now put money into stocks taken care of my retirement and am taking my future seriously.

I still have many btc, mostly offline on paper wallets and I don't plan on touching them for 10 years, if my play works out I plan on having more money then anyone in the bitcoin game has now from bitcoins which I estimate is around 100 million.

Good luck to you OP and +1 gentlemand

 ;D

You crack me up.

You know he still holds BTC right? No way he sold every single one!

RIPPLE tries to introduce the IOU concept from the very beginning, and this is a typical trick to scam customers by traditional financial institutions, so I never looked at it again

Actually, you are wrong.   It just takes $5,000 to get to 5,000 per coin, one print.  Less even if you just print 0.1 coin (I am exaggerating to make a point).   You are mistaking the entire float changing hands over the marginal shares that actually trade.   There is a huge difference.   pull out all the day trading volume and then divide by 2 and you can figure out how thin the volume actually is and you can figure out how little it would take to get a large number.

Well $63 billion isn't that big if for a large cap company.   It is entirely possible.   However, $63 billion is tiny compared to something like gold.    

+1 EXACTLY.

Idiots like OP never really understood bitcoin will be confused Ripple as a currency,... some even call it Bitcoin 2.0

Dumb as fck.

I completely agree with you, also I will like to add, that is expensive to get into Bitcoin, to go out a purchase a single BTC is next to impossible.

And yes, Im aware of Coinbase, ect. But Lets I wanted to buy something in the next 20mins  or place a Bet on GoWest website, in the next 20mins, If im new, I wouldn't be able to do that.

You will in a couple of months. This is being developed by several parties at the moment. Patience, grasshopper.

And why do you need a whole bitcoin? Buy a fraction of one.

Do you only buy gold by the pound?

Was using it as an Example, but I do place bets much more higher than 1 BTC

$63 billion is peanuts to the global finance industry

Daily transactional volume in FX alone is USD 4 trillion.

If you sodl instead of hodling you are going to have a bad time.

The funny thing is if you present the case that a bitcoin buyer will 'only' see a 300% return on their investment within the next few years to a professional main stream investor, you would only be reinforcing the image that bitcoin is one massive pump and dump scheme.  Just because we've seen returns in the thousands of percent doesn't mean it's normal or will be repeated in the future.

Well, the OP is already a millionaire, so I dont think he will have a bad time  :D

oblig...

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/500x/46724696.jpg

+100

No way, we have constantly fall 

OP sold his coins, price already 10% UP.

https://i.imgur.com/LxvAI7n.gif

http://www.thebitcointrader.com/2013/06/is-this-end-of-experiment.html

I thought the experiment ended mid 2013?

Was I right? Or was I right?  ;D

+1

few added points:

1) an early adopter advantage is not only because BTC is 1st. it is because it proved after 5 years that the network is strong, large, stood attacks and can now provide infrast. for the next stage

2) This is the next stage: The potential value and market cap is dependent upon growing use of the currency and code (bitcoin is also a code). There are no less than hundreds of start ups and serious smart money invested in and around the BTC network. This is very important since they create a different user experience and surrounding services that will drive adoption. this can ONLY happen since BTC is proven now and risks that are less speculative can be taken. Bitcoin 2.0 concepts such as XCP and more that are built on the BTC network also have a good chance to make it since it will make centralized networks less worthy to use.

these 2 points alone- and there are more are enough to drive trading volumes and usage in real markets from 300M last year (in actual commerce volume) to 300B or 3T at some point. want to guess what can 1 be worth then? (hint: the trades will be in MBTCs not BTCs)

good luck to all. 

Well the OP is worth a million less than he would have been!  (Price now way over $650)

Yes. Buying at 2$ after a long run from 30$ is not risky at all. When you are saying you bought 8000btc that is pocket money, you involved. A couple of grands.. But today? Only 300%? That's nothing. I'll rather buy some Facebook shares.
btw: let me guess, you sold all coins above 1000$. hihi

When you consider that 300 of this addresses belongs to me and non of them is cold storage (of an exchange or other service), then no!

I thought it was autumn 2011.

Exit strategy for bitcoin: What exit?

Mt.Gox fiasco started when you had to wait months for your money. Fortunatelly I stopped using Mt.Gox.

The Bitcoin v2.0 part was funny indeed :)

I've been here since 2011 also. I have to admit, I think you're (OP) suffering from bear market syndrome.

Given where the world is going, I would not be surprised if we hit $1,000 coin again. Having said that, bitcoin will continue to be highly volatile, so we could well go down to $100 in the meantime.

RE: Ripple / Ethereum - these new coins may or may not be better than bitcoin, but bitcoin was the 1st crypto-coin and it will always have that 'first mover advantage' as a crypto-currency, as being the most heard of and used crypto-currency. Besides, the innovations offered by all the alt-coins, ripple and ethereum are not (yet) really substantial enough to cause people to drop bitcoin and move to something else. The innovation that satoshi created (bitcoins vs. paper money) is head and shoulders above anything added by any alt-coin.  Ethereum in particular has a long way to do. Ripple I am not so sure of and have not investigated fully (particularly as the source code was not available for a long time). However, the kind of scenario that would see bitcoin go alot higher would also drive the prices of all alt-coins higher. Even if bitcoin is superseded in the long term, it will not happen overnight and there is still profit potential remaining in holding bitcoin.

I have to admit that it is a little crazy to sell every coin. However, I have been in and out of BTC over the last few years (would have been better just to hold of course) ... so I know your feelings and motivations.

The market is always open however. The thing that worries me the most is if bank accounts are locked down (like is happening in Ukraine these past few days) it would become very difficult to get money to exchanges.

Perhaps I am naive but I still think the best days of bitcoin are ahead. Although I agree with you that I don't think crazy 3,000% returns are possible, I  still think it's feasible that bitcoin could go into the thousands of dollars again. That, and the possibility/probability that FIAT money may evaporate or be confiscated, keeps me invested in bitcoin.

However, if you're worried about bitcoin and would rather have something more historically stable, you can always buy gold instead. In the event of economic problems, bitcoin, gold and alt-coins will retain value together.

JUst 300% wow that sucks....  ::)

There seems to be a lot of that in the last 3 months.

How soon we forget.

Hey it is a good thing as is spreads bitcoin over a wider group. 

God dammit!  :o

Sorry for your timings. 

One of the first lessons I picked up here is - always keep some skin in the game.

why r u upset ?

Where you that guy with the 2k+ sellwall at $402?

I've certainly been lucky to see 300% ROI.  I will be even luckier to see 3000% ROI.

In order to displace bitcoin any successor will have to grow to be larger than bitcoin.  Good luck with that.  It will take years.  Not 5 years perhaps, but years.  And we will all see it coming.  Right now, there's nothing on the horizon that has the necessary order of magnitude improvement in overall value proposition. 

In fact, any sensible project would build on top of the blockchain, to bootstrap.  99.99% chance of failure otherwise.  Better to give yourself a 100x better chance of success by working with bitcoin instead of against it.  Then you only have a 99% chance of failure.  Consequently, any "successor" will only increase the value of bitcoin.

I do not plan to take financial advice from someone who sells at the bottom.

I'm afraid you sodl too early. The price just skyrocketed.

Just thank him for giving away cheap coins  ;D ;D ;D

+1 (and possibly in six months or less - how miserable)

No problem. Interested in making 300% ROI in one year? Just stuff your million of dollars into Bitcoin  ;D

I'm currently in 600% ROI with Auroracoin in just 4 days of investment. OP your topic is older than that still pretty old so already your point is proven wrong. Now crawl back to your bear cave.

300% positive or negative value ???

http://www.dodaj.rs/f/V/JM/4H6veSvX/yyy.jpg

LOLOLOL

 :) ;) :D ;D

I can understand what you're saying. BitCoin was the "Wright Flyer" but we need to move onto "Monoplanes" and then the "Jet Age".

This was your reasoning? You only see bitcoin as competition to the stock market and nothing else?

That's like saying that Chocolate bars could never get big because they compete with peanut bars and the market for ONLY peanut bars isn't that big...

Meanwhile, chocolate bars kept on getting more popular as they took tiny chunks of the markets away from tens of thousands of other sweets.

I've always seen bitcoin as stealing the Remittance market away from WU and co first, then precious metals like gold and silver second.

Stocks? I barely see the connection. What a freaking idiotic thing to assume your market is limited to!

Bitcoin can EASILY grow to a trillion dollars if the public likes it, not because remittance + gold markets have that much room to spare, but because ALL investments and financial systems on planet earth have a tiny bit of room to spare each.

What a waste.

Okay that's better.

Since you're still reading this, I gotta ask...

Do you plan to get back in when you spot the next bottom? Also, I noticed your call of $2 was actually off by a month. You posted that in October 2011 but Bitcoin didn't hit $2 till mid-November.

Bitcoin seems, to me, to be traded like a commodity. We know exactly how many Bitcoin there are, so selling out of everything and trying to call the bottom with certainty is a fool's errand. Granted you've done it before, and I see you noticed this (http://www.thebitcointrader.com/2011/11/125000-waiting-to-buy-bitcoins.html) as well, but don't you potentially see that happening again? Someone with millions or perhaps billions wanting to stockpile such an easily-manipulated currency?

Bitcoin on BTC-e was valued at $657 on March 7th, 2014.

Will bump again once it goes past $2604.

So, I was wrong, but 2 months later and any purchase at $553 is no longer underwater.

Not a long time to wait really :)

Patience in BTC world is handsomely rewarded.

I am actually feeling relief as I read your post as I believe that the newest owners of Bitcoin won't attain 10,000% gains until early holders sell their coins.

I personally have little doubt that you will regret liquidating. Bitcoin won't be going anywhere, and competition is really non-existent right now it will live on and be worth far more than what it is today.

It exclusively depends on the willy bot.  :)

Even though I haven't seen a response to my question yet, I did want to go back to your comment here and address this misconception.

A market cap of $63 billion != $63 billion in fiat purchases. In fact, it's likely that under $2 billion has ever been "spent" on Bitcoin.

The difference between market cap and cash flows is well-understood to most investors. Bitcoin's market cap right now is just over that of the company Energizer, the one that makes batteries. Which is more important, though? Energizer or Bitcoin? This should be an obvious answer since the market cap of Bitcoin basically encompasses every Bitcoin entity, including old miners, whales, investors, traders, merchants, processors, and etc. $63 billion dollars for a market cap is indeed high, but still only on a level of a Monsanto or Time Warner, which IMHO, Bitcoin definitely has the potential to be bigger than.

I recall reading somewhere that at current supply levels it would take $250 billion of direct expenditure to get BTC to around $80,000 per coin. Market cap don't mean very much at all.

Still think ripple is headed past bitcoin, gowest?

You are correct, but this expense is mostly in know-how, and can be overcome with a little experience.

The BTC protocol makes sure that there is, and always will be, one and only one way to buy and take possession of BTC in <20 mins, and that is on the network by interacting directly with another bitcoin holder.  That is what BTC is all about.  You dont need banks.  You dont WANT an intermediary.  It wont work well through an intermediary.  To get BTC you get it directly from someone else on the network.

When I was a noob (ok I still am a "junior" member) I spent an entire weekend trying to buy my first BTC so I could plunk it immediately into BITTREX.  Coinbase would have made me wait a week.  Every other BTC/USD site wanted my ID, phone bill, and naked pictures of my girlfriend... no way Im sending out a photo of my passport (although my gf is happy to provide pics).  Finally I found localbitcoins, and I had my BTC on BITTREX less than 2 hours later.  Now I can repeat the same process in less than 20 mins through the trustworthy seller I found on the localbitcoins site.

So in the end, the BTC protocol enforces itself in real-world practice.  Not only does it circumvent banks.  It doesnt work when banks try to insert themselves into the transactions.  In terms of executing transactions P2P, its brilliant and foolproof (regardless of its vulnerabilities on the mining side of things).

I have been struggling to wrap my head around all of the "bitcoin 2.0" stuff and Im leaning more and more towards the position that it is merely the old money institutions trying to hamstring the transaction process all over again through mandatory nodes and pseudo-centralization.  Call it, "re-centralization."

Some one tell me why I need XRP instead of bitcoin WITHOUT mentioning the benefits of the "trusted" third party that all of these re-centralizing 2.0 platforms introduce, and maybe Ill buy some 2.0 tokens from you.  But if I have to hop through unnecessary gateways just for the access to your 2.0 system, Ill stick with BTC, darkcoin, pinkcoin, or whatever other 1.0 network suits my purchasing need at that moment...

Gold is as almost as useless as FIAT against an antagonistic government.  They dont teach us this in high school history class, but FDR confiscated all privately owned gold in America before and during WWII.  He just passed an executive order (maybe it was a law, you can google it up) that said: IT IS HENCEFORTH ILLEGAL FOR ANY CITIZEN TO OWN GOLD, PLEASE GIVE ALL GOLD AND TITLES TO GOLD TO ME IMMEDIATELY, OR WE WILL COME AND TAKE IT BY FORCE.  Think that wont happen again?

Another benefit of bitcoin is that it has virtually zero mass, so you can move it, hide it, and prevent it from being confiscated.  That is the risk we are really hedging against with bitcoin, the risk that the government will modify the laws that regulate physical property and/or the redeemability of FIAT money.  

What we really need instead of a bitcoin 2.0 is an internet 2.0.  We need a wireless network that will allow us all to continue to exchange cryptocurrencies WHEN (not if) the world government slams the internet shut in our faces.  If you cant log into the web or the cloud, you cant use bitcoin.  Or, a few predator drones could take out the major mining pools and the network goes down.  Access to a network infrastructre (the hardware, not the code), is the only remaining weakness we the people have.  I wish more people were focused on that - because this whole decentralized crypto economy still has that one real-world achilles heel, which is its total dependence upon DARPANET - uh, I mean the internet.

Theoretically, yes, we know how many bitcoin there are supposed to be.  But I challenge you to prove to me that there is not, or cannot be, a shadow blockchain where a hidden cahce of bitcoin exist that can be shuttled on and off the "real" blockchain.  Doesnt MT Gox expose the prevalence of bots manipulating BTC price and volume with shadow/imaginary USD already?  Just a thought. 

Satoshi Nakamoto was not a lone gunman, he is a front for the leading edge of cryptography, which is a science funded by government intelligence agencies.  If youre in crypto, your job is paid by government grants, thats a fact.  Whoever started this whole thing was not independent of the NSA and the other usual suspects. 

They tricked us with the internet (though we almost won it away from them - until the United States Agency of Google stole it back), and they are duping us with this ridiculous meme that some Japanese hermit spontaneously birthed the blockchain, and nobody knew about its significance until the early adopters magically got rich.  Since the genesis block, the network is being carefully nurtured (and diligently pruned) by hidden hands, and those hidden hands know that whoever controls hashing power controls bitcoin, and therefore it has to be under the purview of the NSA. 

Conspiracy theories aside, I am highly skeptical that fake BTC do not exist somewhere in an underground shadow network with 100x the processing power of the rest of the world combined, processing power paid for by USD being printed faster now than even scamcoins are proliferating.

Well, I be dog.

what?..

This is even better...

https://i.imgur.com/kjP5qCY.jpg

wow. Wasn't expecting to read this kind of stuff in 2014.
You have some reading to do mate.

admittedly... point me to the right threads

Take the U of Nicosia Bitcoin mooc:
http://mooc.universityofnicosia-online.com/pages/login.php

thank you

IPCoinz: In brief, it's possible for a second, secret blockchain to exist. It would, however, be a separate chain, just another altcoin. There's no way afaik to create secret coins, sine the definition of a valid unit of Bitcoin is that it is acknowledged by the public blockchain, traceable to the first block the coins in question were created in. Creating an alternate chain won't help no matter how much processing power you throw at it, since coins originating from such a chain would be rejected by honest nodes who have a copy of the proper blockchain.

just read the article on your blog - you totally have valid points yet.. i personally keep alot of BTC, i wouldnt sell all at this point. it may go agai nto 1k$. 10k? nah i dont believe that.

Gday, you have some interesting points, but you timing to sell btc, is as bad as your choice in altcoins :)

Because the price is going down.

And by all measures it is indeed still too complex for mainstream adopters. But we are getting there and as you have mentioned this goes for any crypto.

It cannot grow the way of the Internet because joining the Internet did not necessitate consumers to divest their financial holdings from the system that has managed them their whole life.

Converting USD to BTC is not as simple as stopping writing letters and using email.

The challenges for a completely nascent money technology to be adopted are considerably more difficult than what any other technology has to face.

Whatever mainstream Bitcoin FUD you can think of, it needs to be the one to succeed  because if it fails, the public's trust for EVERY other cryptocurrencies goes down with it.

This success will require education of the masses, a lot of greed, and a little bit of luck. Meanwhile technologists are actively building the infrastructure to support this network of people until the next rally brings aboard a whole new fleet of adopters.

lol. I'm still holding, but if I'd sold when this guy did, I'd have more money to invest now at half the price.



You guys do know that this was written back in the first week of March, and he finished selling when the price was in the $600 range?

It is going down, who knows for how long.

Anyone who calls it Bit coin knows nothing about Bitcoin.

Author of this thread is pretty accurate on his analysis and what is happening to bitcoin now.

Paying for stuff with BTC does NOT help at all. Because the retailer or merchant simply dump that BTC into the market and covert it back into fiat. The only way BTC will go up is when the people who you pay with BTC, once again use it to pay others and a proper cycle is formed. Tipping with BTC helps since there is a chance that that person will once again rotate BTC to someone else.

The day we see people getting PAID in BTC as salaries is when it becomes a real currency. But then again, the price of BTC will not be so low like as well. So now is a good time to buy BTC!

This. The only salary you can make with BTC now are laughable, like sig campaings and what not, waste of time unless you are in a 3rd world country or something. You can make more flipping burgers in any developed country.

OP has been spot on. The only way Bitcoin can take off now is it simply gets trendy as fuck with correct marketing and so on, if it becomes a "cool" thing to own/use, because for the common folk it's pretty pointless, unless it's cool.

I make good money programing computers and I'm paid in BTC.

or unless they make money with it.....

Really? tell us more. What do you mean with programing computers? and who runs the business, how much do they pay... tell us how it works? most people aren't paying in btc, thats the minority.

I know I'm in the minority, but there are jobs available out there.  Take a look around the services subsection of the marketplace sometime.

And no, I'm not going to tell you who I work for or how much I make.  That's none of your business.  But I can tell you it involves web development in the Ruby language.

It works like this: I work, I earn an hourly rate in $.  When I get paid, the dollar amount I've earned is converted to BTC (whether an actual exchange takes place is up to my employer, they hold BTC as well) and then sent to me.

This thread reminds me of a chart I've been working on to show what the return on a 365-day investment in bitcoins has been over time. I get the data from the following page: https://www.quandl.com/BAVERAGE/USD-USD-BITCOIN-Weighted-Price
I've filled in occasional missing dates with the previous day's price.

The dates along the horizontal axis represent hypothetical sell dates following a hold of exactly a year. The vertical axis shows the percentage gain or loss that one would have experienced had he decided to sell his bitcoins that he'd purchased exactly a year prior.

For context: For much of May-August 2012, you would have taken a loss on year-old bitcoins. This is contrary to the idea going around that if one had simply bought and held for at least a year, he would have always profited. I will be watching to see if we continue to approach 0%, and hoping that we don't. I've added the red line to show what the future data will look like if the current price remains constant through 11/15/2014.

https://dde19c9eff451e7e0b7d819897f53dd506692a8f.googledrive.com/host/0B2Wm1faUufb7N3J5QkRFeHpRUkk/Bitcoin_price_365_day_percent_difference_2014-10-22.png

Nice. While you are at it, could you find out what returns two years of holding would have given? Or, how long period would be necessary to have had a positive return?

The actual chart for a two-year time horizon isn't anything special, but looking at the data, I calculated that around a 269% gain would have been the worst that you could have done. Essentially, this was if you bought in on the day of the June 2011 peak, and then sold on its two year anniversary. Still not a bad two-year investment if you really had the fortitude to have held over that tumultuous period! If you'd really made it that far, you'd likely not have sold on the exact two-year anniversary, anyway.

The best two-year return, on the other hand, would have been if you bought in during the first week of December 2011 and sold near the peak in December 2013, with a gain of nearly 40,000%!

Finally, the smallest investment horizon across which you'd never have gone into the negative, no matter when you bought in, looks to be around 623 days (~20.5 months or 1.71 years). The single culprit behind this long of a period of time was the steep mid-2011 bubble and bust, with the daily average high back then being close to $30, which was not eclipsed until the end of February 2013.

Very nice, and I'd love to see both a two-year and a 3-year chart!

I can post a "rough draft" of the two and three-year charts later, but I won't have the time to keep them all updated right now; one is enough for me based on how it's currently implemented. (I've actually had to trick Excel a bit just to get the log axis to display correctly with negative data, and I'd have to redo how the spreadsheet is organized to handle more than one chart per sheet). Some further caveats: Since the Bitcoin data, by definition, only go back to July 2010, the longer a period one chooses, the fewer the data points there are to display. :) And, given the large difference in price over such a long period, the three year chart seems to just take on the appearance of an exaggerated recent price chart, for the most part.

The only impactful bit I gained from it was that if you really had been holding that long, you should've sold back at the end of November, not waited for the full three years! Hindsight is 20/20. From November 29th until June 8th of this year, it was down-down-down, from ~539,000%(!) to a chart "low" of 2118%. Still not a bad return, of course, to make over 21 times your investment, but 5390x is what really makes people millionaires. You just can't know where you stand when you buy, and there's always the chance of missing a peak if you wait to sell. If you bought at ~$30 and expect the same returns as the earliest investors, you'll have to be hodling 'til it's $161,700!

Good numbers, thanks.

So? Your advice is? Do not get in the bitcoin biz?

his advice was "you are late to the party sir, don't get over excited"

Here's an update of my chart, with the projected red (if price stays the same) extended through the top of last year's peak. I haven't forgotten about requests for other time windows, btw, I just haven't had the chance to put them together.

https://dde19c9eff451e7e0b7d819897f53dd506692a8f.googledrive.com/host/0B2Wm1faUufb7N3J5QkRFeHpRUkk/Bitcoin_price_365_day_percent_difference_2014-10-31.png

correct - this man is on the money

I forgot that I'd posted that chart in this thread. Here's an update:

https://dde19c9eff451e7e0b7d819897f53dd506692a8f.googledrive.com/host/0B2Wm1faUufb7N3J5QkRFeHpRUkk/Bitcoin_price_365_day_percent_difference_2015-01-30.png

Well, it does show some upside.
That us a relief!

Yea we pretty much bottomed out here. Good times ahead. Finally!

Sure we may go down a little more but not by much. :)

Bitcoin is stronger and more widely known than a few years ago so it is safer to invest now. We could see a price of 10 000$ soon when the US is hit by a massive currency crisis.

I'm starting to see it as possibly a sort of blood in the streets indicator. I'd have to do further analysis on it to see what kind of a predictive measure that it might have.
365 days is somewhat arbitrary, but it's also the line between a short and long term capital gain here in the U.S., so, that's one of the reasons why I went with it. It also just happens to be a psychological reference period/time frame for people.

Back in 2012, it hit the low point where if you had bought any at the 2011 peak, a year later you would've been down 81% on those bitcoins. It actually dropped further than that in a shorter time period back in 2011, and was actually already rising by the time it hit the 365 day mark. This time around hasn't had quite the sheer percent magnitude drop of the 2011 crash, but this bear market has been much longer, and still just hit a low of -76% a couple of weeks ago (on January 15th, 2015).

I am sure 90% of the people are waiting for next year to end , and see what happens after the halving happens.

Some would say that since the halving is a known quantity, that it'll be priced in long before it happens. It's likely to impact things just as the last one did, simple supply and demand (however, speculator actions might still maintain a stronger effect on things). I don't think you can easily isolate a single factor.

would be interested in OPs opinion about market now - were you collecting?

pretty much agree with the 2.0 projects - however they will not become bigger as the reserve currency