Bitcoin Forum

I find myself spending a lot of time reading these forums, trying to understand economics and lately my mind has been on bitcoin a lot. I grew up in a broken home with poor conditions and looking back on my past I tend to find myself having more regrets in my past. I have made bad financial decisions and I wish I knew how to invest or understand the stock market but it all seems so complicated and I feel like I have nothing to work with. The ones that do understand how the system works seem arrogant or insult me for being "stupid", ...at least in these forums XD.
Being a college student with stupid debt from bad decisions, working part time at night as a janitor for a private school, I tend to sometimes feel trapped at the bottom of the social status, not knowing how to get out and seeing my dreams slowly fade away out of reach, an overwhelming feeling of my life possibly amounting to nothing. That is why I decided I will start buying Bitcoin with a small percent of my paychecks, because even as unstable as it is, I see it as a small glimpse of hope. The chances feel slim, but this could be my way out of this mess I am in, and it gives me something to hope in.

Anyways... kind of unrelated, I had an incomplete thought today while cleaning a toilet. It might not even have a good point or relevance...
I don't know where I am going with this but maybe someone can help complete it haha: It is interesting to me how we base the value of Bitcoin off of USD, but at the same time for the value of bitcoin to go up the value of USD needs to go down (I think this is what I have been reading, correct me if I am wrong). So when Bitcoin is valued by more USD, won't the large amount of USD mean nothing? I just think about how when I think of the value of USD I don't compare it to other currencies I just hold a value to it within myself along with others around me. Do we want USD to crash and bitcoin to rise, or do we want them both to carry a stable value together?

My thinking is along the same line as yours but no offence, I have a better explanation for it, it's like with Gold and Silver, while it's a good thing that there's such demand people will be willing to trade that much USD for it there's also another factor that you're not taking into account and that's hyperinflation. The establishment hate precious metals but lately Bitcoin in particular has become an extreme target of their hatred because all three are accurately representing just how many Dollars are being printed, if the dollar was really connected to gold as it was back in the day then 1 Bitcoin should have been worth 1 dollar or maybe slightly higher depending on the demand but that's not how the Dollar works.

They've been printing like crazy so naturally all that cheap money is going to flood the markets and it's going to push the price up because everyone will be rushing into precious metals and now cryptocurrencies to safe guard themselves from inflation. I get into conversations with some people about keeping my scrap silver from my work and then they ask whether I keep the dust and my basic line of thinking that if something as little as silver dust is worth that many paper notes then hyperinflation has already occurred and it's just not worth saving it, you wouldn't even really be able to do anything with that much anyway.

If you're really interested in studying economics, you should look at currency history and how currency and money is actually created, don't just read bullshit news articles because they barely explain the surface of what's going on and try to draw conclusions without going into any detail of how the economy works, fyi, Mike Maloney's videos are very good and have been linked a number of times so I'll leave it here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFDe5kUUyT0

Oh and there are several schools of economic thought, not just one, the one that's mainstream right now and has been around for centuries is this weird and butchered brand of Keynesian economics that central bankers constantly peddle so they can justify their money printing. You're clearly just getting started, so it's time to go look at some proper history and not the shit you were taught in public school which is going to be pretty damn useless.

Well ideally we would want everyone to be rich, but money is just a "meaningless" token system humans use to prioritize what needs doing without central planning.

If everyone switches to Bitcoin the USD would loose all value yes. The value you know within yourself is based on experience; ~0.4$ = 1 apple and so on. If you compare prices of items now and 15 years ago you'll notice your perception of normal has actually changed slowly towards accepting higher prices.

Bitcoin aims to be a better token for prioritizing and hence the world as a whole may make better decisions - leading to increased wealth for all - but at the beginning it is a zero sum game.

I think we need to brace ourselves for Bitcoin being blamed when people loose their pensions. Unfortunately.

You're a female janitor?  :D


Well that's just what people peg it to and how much they are willing ti pay for it in fiat money. 1 bitcoin will always be worth  1 bitcoin though.

I was being polite, but hawt :P lololoololol :D

Oh and Sophia, I get called stupid by people on this forum, mainly by morons who haven't studied any mathematics behind what they say and think they know everything a lot of economists treat their shit like religion and so when they're confronted with logic they tend to get really angsty about being called out.

In a way, the adaptation of Bitcoin would be like reverting back to old times before a centralized bank was even established. Back like trading Gold coins, except it is electronic, it is amazing. Would reverting back be an "advancement" for the human race? =P

Go look up the Byzantine Empire and you'll understand why, they established a gold currency and they lasted for 1000 years, Ron Paul made a couple of references to them in his talks with journalists.

Actually gold is quite cumbersome to use in real life.

As much as people here hate fiat, fiat is very likely cheaper to use for society than gold.
If you start to count the gold storage, transportation, splitting, accounting and counterfeiting costs you quickly realize gold probably costs more than the inflation of most stable nations - at least SOME of that inflation money goes to healthcare and such, all gold costs are wasted entirely.

However I believe Bitcoin is the next thing, so not a step back at all.

I was thinking about that, most of the rich now or those that rely on centralized currency will lose all their value and investments. So many people would have to lose a lot before the "better" way of life is established. Everyone would kind of like reset and start equally at zero except for those that already have bitcoin. But the endless amount of fake money not backed by anything being created is bound to fail sometime regardless of bitcoin isn't it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6Cr_ipD13o

Watching now, that first line "could bitcoin be the death of the US dollar" I can imagine so many investors and self proclaimed economists just laughing at that. A lot of people make fun of bitcoin =P

Well, I'll be laughing even harder when I see them in denial next year when the stock market crashes again and Bitcoin goes past $500 :D

In the video the reporter said that the Federal Reserve has not established much regulation on btc yet but she can't imagine they will let it remain that way, that scares me.  How much control/regulation can the federal reserve actually establish on bitcoin? Sorry I have a lot of questions.

Haha even the comments on the video people are calling Ron Paul a Nutcase and no one should listen to his conspiracy theories...

Yeah, those are the people who are in denial, you get it on here as well, especially when people are talking about countries who are planning to dump the Dollar.

I am becoming more convinced that Bitcoin is better to hold onto than USD and that USD will have to fail. I wish we knew how long though until it crashes. I can totally see why we look completely crazy to outsiders though haha! ....being all lame on our bitcointalk forum, prophesying a collapse of a nation. No one wants to face reality, everyone is distracted by their stuff, USD, and it is a general human condition for someone not to believe something simply because they don't want to believe. Americans are spoiled and do not think something bad can happen because we are blinded by our prosperity.

I like this answer, I totally get what you are saying XD I was just overthinking it.

Fiat currencies will fail eventually, but like you said we can't know for sure when. They're unstable if they keep printing more to try magically solve their problems.

You have the opposite problem -- your debt has caused you to cling to even the smallest hope that bitcoin will make you rich.  So you're blindly hoping that the dollar crashes because then you think you'll be OK.  You're the one who is blinded.

You should just fix your debt problems.

Lethn, I have some questions.

1. are you an investor in stock?

2. I get payed around $400 a month and a lot of it goes to food, gas, payments. Is there a way to use the stock market to make a little extra per month? Or is it only a long term type of thing.

3. How much % of my pay should I put into bitcoin? If I only have enough to put around $5 - $20 a month in it, do you think that that small amount would have potential to be a lot?

4. Where can I even buy stock? Can I buy it online? Are there any companies you recommend?

Sigh, both statements are probably right, I still feel like putting a small amount into it is worth the risk. I am paying my credit card and car payment every month, I don't have bad credit it just makes it hard to get by.

As much or as little as you can afford to invest. Bitcoin isn't a magical get rich quick scheme, but a lot of us can see the potential in it for investment but nobody can tell you how much btc will be worth in the future as it is all baseless speculation.

I definitely don't trade on the stock market but I did try it, believe it or not I did try I also tried forex, lost quite a bit of money :( little did I know back then that it was so badly rigged. What I'm doing is I'm working on Bitcoin related stuff, so things like cloud mining so that I can gain a relatively stable income and what I'm doing is saving up so I can increase my hashing without spending anymore money. You won't get immediate ROI ( Return on investment ) on some of this but over time you will gain more and more over time and you can put that into more riskier investments at least that's what I've got planned.

If you can genuinely get $20 a month then you should search for non-scammy passive investments, you have a job, so that's something, but maybe if you can find a higher paying job that might be more worthwhile even if you've got some spending money left over each week you can re-invest that into income when you'd otherwise try and save it etc. because your money is going to get constantly devalued anyway.


And Rampton just said it best, absolutely, don't be stupid with your money, can't count the number of times we've had people coming in here making threads about how they lost all their life savings and so on or are in massive amounts of debt because they got stupid, the great thing is about Bitcoin is it's a genuine open market so you can go in with just $5 a week if you want just make sure it doesn't cut into your living standards unless you're ditching a game or something you'd normally buy :P

Whatever you do don't let yourself get further in debt, that's for damn sure, you're going to have to do a lot of maths and double check everything, be pessimistic, signature campaigns are also another way of getting some extra income as long as you don't just spam as you can see that's a bit of what I'm doing.

Edit: Oh and the best thing about getting any income in Bitcoin is if the price shoots up you get a discount on stuff ;) sometimes a major one and that can make all the difference.

bitcoin is currently being economic issues on the rise, which many investors to try to invest in bitcoin, bitcoin prices currently tend to rise which in china is going on massive buying on bitcoin, to peak at 1 trillion, it is jacked up price bitcoin world, hopefully bitcoin can be one of the alternative investment world ....  ::)

Relevant thought.

My idea would be to definitely avoid to compare BTC price to USD price.
BTC price should only be compared to itself.

OP you are very smart, this is the problem that almost everyone never noticed: The fiat money has become the default unit of value domestically

It is so natural to measure value using USD thus people have already get used to it, just like uneducated people always think the sun is going around the earth

The value is all relevant, people will stop using fiat money as unit of value once they had some better unit, I think energy could be the most objective measure of value. Because bitcoin is produced mostly by energy, it is a much more accurate measure of value than fiat money

I've been redirected to bitcointalk.org many times, and finally opted to join, I bought some Bitcoin in April of 2013, for the fundamental reason that dollars are what we use to measure value. I became quite doubtful, hence the incessant obsession with Bitcoin.

While I've always thought energy is what backs productivity through mechanization, and countries issue currency based on there productivity, in my understanding energy is potential wealth, why do you think it is used energy that makes Bitcoin valuable?

Lethn,
Thanks for the replies and advice I really appreciate it!

Perhaps, though there is also a lot of room for Bitcoin to go up in value (relative to USD) without USD going through hyperinflation.

Ultimately for you, the question is probably whether you'll be able to pay more rent/buy more groceries with the BTC you saved versus the USD. In other words, bitcoin's worth is really measured in terms of what it can buy.

No problem, the main thing I've learned is you just have to do the maths, there's no way round it once you do that you'll know what sort of income is possible and what isn't with your current lifestyle, the best one I ever saw on this forum actually was a bunch of guys who decided that they were going to quit smoking and they'd buy Bitcoin with every bit of money they saved from not buying packs lol :D

A very natural consideration would be that electricity is used as currency and can be freely transferred throughout the world

However, as a currency, one of its main function is store of value. It is very difficult to store electronic energy without huge loss over time, so it is not suitable to act directly as currency. Crude oil works more or less close to this goal, but they can not be send over internet

When you issue currency based on your asset, currency users could redeem those asset any time, but more frequently they never redeem them, they just need a value behind the currency issuance to give them a rough idea about the currency's value, to make sure it is a fair trade

From this perspective, the bitcoin exchange rate is always related to the recent mining cost (mostly electricity), thus give its value for a fair trade (you can either mine bitcoin with certain amount of energy, or produce some goods with same amount of energy, they are interchangeable)

If you are in for bitcoin you are doing the right thing. Dollar cost average, buy whatever you can monthly, dont get too excited, that's all. Only people with massive luck or massive money make massive money, the rest is hustling and hustling unfortunately requires patience and gives not much wealth, but thats why you and me are slaves waiting for that chance of luck.

This is how the big sharks make money:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2831108/Five-world-s-banks-fined-2BN-rigging-foreign-exchange-markets-prosecuted.html

Here in the crypto world we have big whales playing with the bitcoin market as well, so you can't really predict it for shit. What can be done is obtaining more slowly and hoping it goes up and it becomes trendy in the future and people actually use it to get paid in jobs and pay for commodities like a real currency, for now it's a game of trust.

Sounds daft but we should measure the value of bitcoins in Big Macs or something like it.  It would give a far clearer picture long term.

Are you talking about the affects of inflation/deflation? Or just joking around? lol :P

On a serious note, somebody already did that with the dollar and compared the prices that you got for things like coke, I'd need to dig around to find a proper chart and stuff though.

I think he was being sarcastic because dollars are the best way we  can measure/understand the value

Actually, I think it's precious metals, but to each their own, the reason being is because precious metals tend to easily account for inflation since there a natural resource that's rare.

No. It should be the other way around. The prices of individual items change too much for a number of reasons and the price of individual items are different in different places of the world due to different costs for producing such goods.

You could potentially measure the value of bitcoin based on some kind of measure of CPI (eg purchasing power) however this is somewhat complex and would probably be difficult to understand for the average user