Bitcoin Forum

I am about to receive $70,000 in a couple days. My parents want me to put it into an investment account, but I am thinking about investing in BITCOIN. Do you think that I should do this? What would be the best way to invest in BITCOIN? How long should I keep it invested? What is my probability of loosing money? Thanks a lot for your opinion.

First of all, only invest an amount you can lose. The BitCoin price is going up steadily, but it can crash just as any other market.
If you do invest in BitCoins and want to get more out of it I would advice you to buy some shares from a stable company.

The word investment literally means risk.

That being said the old adage is that you should never put all your eggs in one basket. Diversification is important.

Depending on your age 30 to 70% should be in something low risk, then the rest can be spread around a few medium to high risk options.

The younger you are the more risk you can take.

Cheers...

Is the best inversion you can do. All in man! :) but keep an eye on the market and sell when you believe is a good price. Anyway, don't put all the eggs on the same basket ;)

I strongly suggest you start small and get a good understanding of BTC before making a 70k investment

What is your location? I maybe able to suggest some funding options

With that much I would go with one of the exchanges that has the lowest price. First send a wire transfer of a relatively small amount, a few thousand dollars, just to get used to the process.

Then once you have the process down send the rest.

Once you purchase your bitcoin, send it to a secure offline wallet. Learn about that as well with your few thousand dollar purchase. Do not trust third parties with your bitcoins.

Either create a vanity address or several, print out or write down the public and private key. Or create a paper wallet or create a wallet and put it on a disk/USB, whichever you feel comfortable with.

Put that all in a safety deposit box. Maybe even have a few backups in different places that are very secure.

As for what you could lose...in the short term you could lose around half of it, in the long term it is likely to go up.

But in the end, Bitcoin is all about being a spendable currency. Keep some bitcoins available for buying things.

Depends on your tolerance of risk, how old you are, and your net worth.

I'm in my forties. About 5% of my net worth is in Bitcoin. If I lost it it would suck, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. I'd have time to make it back.

Well if you ask, if you can invest, the short answer is yes. But it depends on your time frame.

You can buy shares for cex. Check my sig.

On the question on how you should do it, buy bitcoins from bitstamp or localbitcoins and then buy shares in cex and sell when it's a little bit profitable. You also will have a mining power in every share.

you parents want stability , you want fast big profit.
It is differents between young and old people.
If you lose your money your parents will be very sad.  :(

I would rather set fire to my own private parts than buy shares in cex.io. It is designed to fleece fools of their money.

It depends on what the terms are set by your parents but getting that much money is a big deal for most people, what I would do is take a relatively small amount, if you want to put it in Bitcoins maybe do it on the dip but with such a chunk of cash you should easily be able to get interest payments rolling in that would make a savings account look like a joke, you just need to be extremely wary of scammers and so on. If I had total freedom, I would take a chunk of it and put it into gold/silver and then another chunk in Bitcoin, all of which would be fairly long term moves but it's much better than leaving it in a bank or with a capital investment firm.

+1. Don't buy from Cex.io. I highly advice you to avoid that company. You won't make any profit according to the calculations I made.

My simple and plain advice: You can invest up to $10,000 in Bitcoin (about 50 BTC at the current spot price). Don't put all of your eggs in one basket that's what everybody knows. Why $10,000? You could loose only a few thousand bucks if the price crashed, but if BTC value goes up quickly if you can make some handsome profits with just only 50 BTC.

Pftt $70k. Make the push to $100k so it's nice, round number.

Thats true, put only small part of this money to Bitcoin. Something like 5% - 10%. So even in worst scenario, it wouldnt be big loss

What is that saying so popular amongst the unbelievers? YOLO???

Extreme diversification is for clueless pussies. Those who really understand and know a product inside out don't go for this level of diversification. Sure, don't have 100% of all your wealth in one basket but don't put 10% either in something you believe can change the world.

You can lose way more more by diversification than by narrow focus on a handful of investments. Big investors know this all too well.

Buffett or Soros didn't make lots of money by diversifying. Of course, it takes some due diligence to understand what you're getting into but once you do diversification just seems stupid.

it would be wise to make use of cheap gold/silver at the moment. it will soon be on the significant rise after we spent few months at the bottom. just do 33.33% of each investment if you plan to slowly gain and have some sort of backup ahead of major developments after christmas.

A great idea would be to invest 2-4k in Bitcoins (money that you can lose), and bring the rest to a trusted financial adviser.
If you are fully comfortable with the possibility of losing more money you can use the cash to invest in BitCoin startups or companies, to be honest, it would be better than speculating in BTCs directly. 

Wrong! :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psPr1dRiyeY&feature=youtu.be

great video, great point taken

I personally wouldnt invest in BitCoin startups or companies. It seems extreme risky to me.

You can invest in Bitcoin but maybe about 25% - 50% of your total portfolio..

The rest go to high interest CD, gold, stock and etc.

Among the few startups I find interesting is the Neo&Bee bitcoin bank/payment network https://www.havelockinvestments.com/order.php?symbol=NEOBEE. They are basically a bet on the rise of Bitcoin as a commodity as they'll basically be buying Bitcoin with customer's euros. It's also a bet on the future of banking. So you get to hit two birds with one stone.

agree currently investing in bitcoin is very risky just watch then do something any bad decision and you lost all money

eggs and baskets my friend. baskets and eggs.

Buy a small amount of Bitcoins first to get used to it (especially how to store them securely).
Avoid the tons of other investments that are going on here, unless you really know what you are doing (altcoins, mining equipment, securities)!

The biggest risks are trojans stealing your Bitcoins (avoidable by storing offline) or you screwing up something (e.g. accidently deleting the wallet, having no backup)

Buy at respectable Exchange like Bitstamp or Coinbase (if your US based). Learn to use secure handling of BTC with small amounts first (Armory offline or paper wallets)

i'd wait until the price drops again I don't see it staying as high as it is right now.

That's pure speculation, but of course the price could go lower.
You could buy only some now to avoid missing the boat entirely and buy more if it drops to get a better average.

Bitcoins rates are very high now

Wait for sometime so the rates comes down you can then invest half of the amount

Only if you have the ability to leave it alone for at least 10 years, even if the price crashes, or when it rises rapidly. Don't look at the market price if you have to.

If you cannot do this, don't do it.

Use CoinBase to Buy Bitcoins...  Keep some bitcoins there, and transfer a few to your bitcoin wallet.  Backup and Encrypt your bitcoin wallet.  Do not loose your Password or lose your wallet.dat file.

Risky is to invest in some bitcoin startups... I wouldnt do that.

Possibly take some bitcoins and transfer to BTC-e and buy some Litecoins.  But not a lot, say 10 BTC worth.


Also if in the US, and you are using coinbase, use my referral linky, because I haven't even gotten one referral yet:

https://coinbase.com/?r=51b32620106c3c3d58000001&utm_campaign=user-referral&src=

Go for the 20% rule.

Invest 20% each in Bitcoin, Gov/Corporate Bonds, Gold, Silver and Platinum.

20% rule is good but too much on commodity. I would suggest only 20% on Gold, Silver and Platinum....

diversify put 10-20k in bitcoins, the rest elswhere

The averaging works, I buying small amount almost every month. I dont look at price often so I am immune from panic sell  :)

Buy MasterCoins then. It  was 0.01 few weeks back and now it' selling for 0.29 per MSC on http://buymastercoin.com/
MasterCoin Buyer/Seller Thread : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=287145.0

Value acquisition is the name of the game. The precious metals market has been the target of panic selling in 2013, which makes it ripe for buying.

Physical bullion will never let anyone down over the long run.

I don't think invest in another alt coin is a good investment long term, at least is higher risk than bitcoin.

Being 29 times as expensive as a few weeks back is more of* an argument against buying something rather than for it. Did you ever tell a friend: "Dude, I bought an apple yesterday for 20 cents but today they're selling them for $5.80, you should really go buy one!" ?

* "More of" because it's not really an argument against buying something either. If something worth $1000 is selling at $1 one day then it's still a good value at $29

If you're getting 70k. I would not spend it all on bitcoins. 35% on bitcoins, and save the rest. And if you want, why not buy mining gear?

Because that's a terrible investment choice right now.

I've to agree with that. Lets see how is difficulty by january.

If you look at BTC/USD graph then any 1 year investment did not loose value regardless when you bought. But then, no one knows future and there is always possibility BTC gets banned worldwide

I think yes :) But never invest all your money in single place.

So I bought a BUNCH of CEX.io shares at 0.0890 BTC/Gh/S. They mined for a week or so and they made me some BTC. Fractional compared to what I invested, yes, but it made me BTC regardless. Earlier this week, I sold off all my shares at 0.1089. 29% profit, not including the BTC I mined with their service. I was then able to buy back in at 0.0900. Today's price? 0.1110. I could do it all over again if I wanted.

Sooo... Keep telling yourself that, and keep sitting on BTC that is not technically earning you any money other than change in market price. I'll be over here making cash while I sleep, while I watch TV, and while I shower (but only during those times).

To the OP - yes put SOME of your money in BTC. Then, hedge that investment by using it to mine for you (like on CEX: https://cex.io/r/0/neuros/0/) as well as using an EMA trader for a long view on BTC. Because while sitting on BTC is profitable, trading them is more so. Also, I would take a certain percentage of that cash and put it in a traditional investment. $40k USD goes a long way in a mutual fund (not as volatile but promised, steady returns, usually).

Mining for Bitcoin is more risky than holding Bitcoin directly.

I'd recommend to buy Bitcoin (don't make it 100% of your holdings though! :P) but Dollar-cost average in over several months to a month (or indefinitely after that from your wages).

If planning to hold long term, anytime is a good time. If you are going to fret day to day over the price, consider not putting all your eggs in one basket.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNo1-AqU61A

If I were you I'd buy a separate bitcoin only computer to do transactions. I would never use it for anything else.

And look into two-factor authentication. And paper wallets. $70K is a huge sum, and bitcoin is very unforgiving.

trusted financial adviser  ::) No such thing! World markets are just as volatile. But one would think that sense bitcoin diffaculty is stedaly going up so should the value of bitcoin. less steady supply should = Higher value. so It's a gamble ether way. If it were me bitcoin would be the better risk   

so do you actually have a separate computer yourself to do only bitcoin transactions?

In my opinion, it depends on how long you wanna be invested in. If you are talking about long term (2~5 yrs) and have a strong heart against short-term dramas, investing some of your EXTRA money in Bitcoin right now is not a bad idea. Right now the best way to invest in Bitcoin is to buy actual Bitcoins and hold. But remember to backup the wallet file every time after sending out Bitcoins, otherwise you can lose the entire balance.

The tragic lesson: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=782.0
and "Insti" has the explanation:

"It sounds like they are lost for good.

Sad

Lesson to other people: Remember you need to back your wallet up after every transaction!
(The wallet metaphor is actually a bad one, because it makes problems like this more common than they should be.)

Edit: (more explaination)

When you do a transaction you always spend ALL of the coins in that address, part of the money goes to whoever you're paying, and there rest is returned to you an a new 'change' address. (This helps your anonymity as someone watching cannot tell which amount you spent and which amount you kept.)

Before transaction:
Address1: 9000
Address2: 0

After transaction:
Address1: 0
Address2: 1
Address3: 8999

It sounds like you have wallet.dat that contains the private keys for Address1 and Address2, but not Address3.
(Although the numbers in your story don't add up.)
What were the Bitcoin addresses? (If we know these we can do some more in-depth block chain research)
"

MasterCoin is technically not an "alt coin".
Do check this out: 300 BTC Coding Contest: Distributed Exchange (MasterCoin Developer Thread)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=292628.120

Thanks for the lesson. All newbies should learn about this.
On the other hand, if you use Electrum [http://electrum.org/ (http://electrum.org/)], it works diffferently from the Bitcoin-QT.

Only partially true. The current client stores the next 100 addresses in the backup. This includes change addresses and newly generated addresses. You only need to backup your wallet once every 100 transactions.

I've invested approximately $30,000 into Bitcoin miners.  In my experience I would say that it certainly is worth it if you know what you're doing and you have your logistics covered.

If you are looking for a quick buck without putting in any time and learning the particulars of whatever currency you're after... you'll be in for a rough haul.

Also, your country of origin is an important factor.

Invest $35,000 in Bitcoin and $35,000 in Litecoin. 10 years later WOHOOO...

Diversify. Sure it sounds good to maybe hit the btc jackpot, but there is always the opposite end of that as well.

be safe. make sure you only get assets with no counter-party risk and diversify. maybe 33% in bitcoin, 33% in gold, and 33% in silver. for example.

Here is what I recommend. Spend 35 thousand in a stable stock and keep the other 35 thousand. Bitcoin may crash anytime soon so be ready to buy when it does.

nobody can tell you what BTC will do in the coming years but if you look to other developments the last few years (Facebook and Twitter beat social life, Whatsapp beat text messaging, Skype beat paying for phone calls) This makes me hope BTC and cryptos as a decentralized system will take over the powerful people who decide what my dollars and euros are worth.

That is highly dependent on a lot of things.

Thats a good amount of money to work with , many options there would i invest all that into bitcoin mining or buy them ? I wouldnt buy them find a reliable place to buy your mining gear . Try 10k to 20k to start for the investment next buy some gold to park that capital into not all but a chunk this would be good for future . The main thing is if you dont buy your shoes to run you wont be in the race so its pay to play go for it . and i see many say multiple baskets with your money . Over 20 years has brought me to the conclusion that is the only way to make money consistently baskets fail and so i always keep my eye on new baskets to add to my income . In the end its a personal choice   for sure you just need ot make one , Peace

The first reply is immidiately the most important one

+1 invest in Litecoin is higher risk than Bitcoin.

ultimately it is your parent's money, so you should check with them, but I would say 10-20% in bitcoins, and the rest in stable stocks/bonds/savings portfolio... the return is nice on bitcoins, but tomorrow the price could be 2 dollars per bitcoin... there is no way to tell unfortunately. It also depends where you are, because if you are in the US and the US tries to outlaw it like they did with online poker, you might run into some trouble liquidating your funds.

At the current price it seems that Bitcoin is higher risk compare to litecoin...

There are tons of altcoins that cost way less than Litecoins, does that make them less risky?
(hint: no, this is only one parameter of the equation)

The LiteCoin price drops when BitCoin increases (I have seen that multiple times), so investing in LiteCoins seems like a stupid move if you ask me. I burnt my hands twice on them. I never ever want to have LiteCoins again (except as collateral for a loan when the price is steady / the total value is much higher then the loan value).

Well, when Bitcoin price drop Litecoin increase. So the risk is just the opposite....

I think Bitcoin won't drop that much anymore. Just look at the SilkRoad price recovery.

I have never held more than ~$25 worth of Litecoin but as I do recall Goat made a ridiculous amount of money buying Litecoins when Bitcoin went up a lot (and Litecoin down) and reversing the the process when it was the other way around. if you expect the 1:50 ratio as XAU:XAG than there is money to be made right now. I'm not planning on buying more Litecoin however, I'm busy watching the basket in which I put my Bitcoins like a hawk ;)

Who knows, china might just dump Bitcoin and decided to have fun on the cheap alt-coins..

It is hard to give advice on this without knowing what your goal is.  Are you in it for a long haul (years? decades?) Or is this a 6 month thing...
I have a good idea of what *I* would do, but I probably have completely different goals and circumstances.

Be careful. Invest in BTC and LTC as a backup. I would split 70/30 BTC/LTC. Buying a large mining rig as well.

So do you have it in your hand already?

Put half of it into BTC. Buy coins. Don't waste it on hardware. The other half spend wisely on crap you need. If your serious about investing it all, then do it in BTC if you wish to have a large return in short time. You may also want to invest in Apple.

I've invested over $100,000 in bitcoin over time through both buying BTC and hardware. It's not black or white, so to just say all hardware is worthless is kinda narrow minded but same goes for buying btc. The reason you may get a huge return so fast could be the same reason you lose very fast. Volatility can be bad also.

I agree with this advice. Figure out what percentage of your 70k you're willing to subject to maximum risk/reward, and buy Bitcoins with that amount. Do some dollar cost averaging over the course of one month to make sure you don't get hit too hard initially on a major fluctuation, but then once you're in just let it sit. Take the rest of your portfolio and invest it in an index fund.

the bitcoin actuall price is to high and not mature enough .so you should wait a little..a little for me its two month ,to see where the price get stable and your own opinion.because of large swing in btc price you cannot think of putting 70k this is very a bad option

Price could easily be $230 or more in 2 months.

or $170 or less

its a win/lose situation

you could just do a fixed rate usd -> btc investment every month

1) Learn more about bitcoin before investing.

2) Don't invest more than you can afford to lose.
If you put too much into it, you have to pay with many sleepless nights and your life will be ruined.

3) Never buy any BTC stock, company shares, mining hardwares, and cloud hashing shares (such as cex.io).
BTC stocks are dead, and so is mining. There're some winners there, but what they won are from other investors' pockets. I really wish someone had told me this 3 months before, and then I may still have the other half of my bitcoins.

4) After buying bitcoins, put them into cold storage and enjoy your life.

All the best to you and your parents.

This. Put only the amount you dont mind to loose. If its $0, then dont buy BTC

Invest in stocks, Mcdonald, Google and Apple :)

If this is your only investment, you should split it in three pieces:

1. buy BTC for one third

2. invest one third in a fixed-term deposit account (one year or longer)

3. invest the rest in an instant-access savings account, this will only give you an annual interest between 1 and 1.5%, but you will have quick access to this money if you need it

And stay out of the mining business! The current calculations are not very encouraging...

I'm impressed by advices like "BUY ALL IN BITCOINS" and the such.

First reply was the best. Don't GAMBLE invest more than you're willing to lose. Bitcoin is not an investment, it's a currency.

I like love the concept but it's very volatile. Many people are hoarding the coins expecting to go up another 1000%. Let me give you an example.

George buys 10k usd worth of bitcoins. A year later that same 10k usd is worth a million. He has two options:

1- Cash in and RETIRE! With a million, he'll be averaging around 7% (70k) annually with a diversified portfolio. World markets could crash but the companies he invested in aren't going to vapor and stop paying dividends.

2- Hold his bitcoins expecting to be the next billionaire. It could happen…. OR NOT! Maybe a new and better crypto-currency appear, maybe the price crashes (with many more people cashing in to retire), it's too early to say. A selloff is bound to occur, could be tomorrow or in 10 years.


My advice? Buy 10% (7k usd) in bitcoins and the rest in conservative stocks with a good record of paying dividends. You might not become millionaire but you won't risk all your money.

And don't bother looking for mining stocks and other risky "investments". Those "companies" can run away with your coins in any minute. Some could vouch for it but it's the same as entering early in a ponzi scheme. You might get lucky and make a quick-profit but eventually someone gonna get hurt.

10% is a good number. The reality is that bitcoin is never going to zero, not at this point. I do think that it will 10x a couple more times, but obviously with great reward comes great risk, so making sure to only expose a small chunk of your portfolio to that risk is a good move.

The real distinction of note here is that whatever percentage of your money you're willing to invest in bitcoin, the best bet is to probably just buy coins. Don't try to mine, don't buy shares of anything. The coins still have huge upside, and while there may be a couple of investments out there that will outperform them, they are very few and far between. Most will fail.

$70,000 is a lot, you can even start up a business using it. Maybe start selling Ice Cream Online for Bitcoin? :P

I think you should invest some money in bitcoin because now bitcoin very expensive..if you want invest should invest at low price...bitcoin is too riskier

I'd take a long shot and invest it in Litecoin.
If litecoin goes from $2 to $4 you dubbled your money, where as to bitcoin has to go from $190 to $380 to double your money.

Litecoin capitalization is around 50 million usd. Doesn't offer anything Bitcoin doesn't have.


Too many people saying where you should GAMBLE your money. Talk to a financial advisor. A good one will explain in a way you can understand.

Why not invest in mxcnow since the share is open to public?

Nice, I use multibit though. The gigabytes of blockchain data are certainly a giant pain to download.

Thanks for the update. That accident was in 2010.

I did not know that, thanks for bringing this up!

Learning more and more every day...  :)

I know this starts to be offtopic, but this is real? Is fixed now? Do we really need to make a backup on 2013 on every transaction?