People think 2013 was the year of Bitcoin. It was of course but you would've made a lot more money if you'd parked a similar initial outlay in LTC.

Same for plenty of other alts too but there aren't many others that you could actually pull all your funds out of without wiping out the market. The rises are larger and the falls are more brutal.

Effectively Bitcoin is in the exact same boat as all the other coins with a little bit of utility tinsel at the moment. If we take the $1 mil scenario then it's become a completely different deal. No other coin could be anywhere near in terms of market cap. Alts would have enormous rises on the way up and then plummet.

As ever in alt world you can make more money if you know when to enter and when to exit. It's the timing that makes or breaks you.

Maybe I was being a drama queen. Time will tell. Let's go for 2024 instead.

From listening to the VCs, many of them have quite a lengthy time frame of a decade or so but that's irrelevant if adoption is still hopelessly flat or actively falling before their time frame runs out.  

The world is moving ever faster and I'd say gaining proper traction is a one shot deal for Bitcoin, not the technology it gave birth to.

It's not a passive thing waiting to be unearthed and repackaged some time in the future. It requires a lot of ongoing maintenance, commitment and effort from a lot of people to keep it ticking over and growing, and its potential future users have to see such toil taking place to develop the faith that it needs.

If we guess where the infrastructure should or could be in 2020 - shit exchanges gone forever, scalability dealt with, legal and regulatory grey areas cleared up, foolproof solutions for usage - and that doesn't look like it'll ever foster what it's intended to which is a decently-sized closed loop economy and lots of fiat interaction, then the future is looking dicey.

Miners will keep on trucking but they're backroom boys that the public is barely aware of. If the public faces that make it all usable such as the present and future Bitpays, Coinbases and exchanges eventually throw in the towel then it's not looking good and at present they're placing just as much speculative faith on the whole thing as anyone in this forum.

If it was effectively discarded en masse I don't think a resurrection would ever be on the cards. I think there's a relatively narrow window for it to take off and if it doesn't then no one will care other than those who tried to make it happen. It's a million miles away from being 'too big to fail'.

That's a very interesting question. A $1 mil coin at similarish buying power to now would mean that it had effectively conquered the whole world. The speculation phase would be long, long gone.

Most of Bitcoin is still speculation, LTC and friends is in a similar but even more intense boat. I'm sure they'd rise massively as many people are so fucking dim they think it's 'cheaper' to buy but they'd eventually be exposed as totally useless and turn to dust as BTC sailed away into the future.

It would be the greatest pump and dump in human history. If you could time it you'd make even more money.

Design and that's about it for me. Far too many physical coins are totally unappealing to look at.

That ETF has a fraction of one per cent exposed to BTC. It's not exactly a direct comparison.

http://ark-funds.com/wp-content/fundsiteliterature/holdings/ARK_WEB_X.0_ETF_ARKW_HOLDINGS_HOLDINGS.pdf

0.27% of the fund is in GBTC. Not really worth a fap.

I don't think the Winkies will be hanging themselves quite yet.

It's Bitcoin in an ETF, but it's awfully far removed from what COIN would be. The coins are a small part of all the other items in the investment basket  and it's through GBTC. Fun for a little dabble but not the magic bullet. Darned cool all the same.

Why not drop an email to Bitpay? Their European HQ is in Amsterdam. Maybe there'll be someone there who can point you in the right direction.

So you've outed your thread as a honeypot to attract the hopeful and swat their dreams like flies. Slick move.

I did not know that. If it were me I would've sold the majority of it and taken a back seat. There's always been a hunger for this type of market and it was starting to go places.

There's plenty of low grade doom and boredom. I'd say that's more corrosive than despair.

And even if you feel despondent at your own little investment disaster, there's so much backroom cool stuff happening that you'd have to be a bit dim not to conceive of long term possibilities. Then again I guess that's beyond the grasp of many minds on here.

Interesting. I wonder whether its sheer convolution will turn prospective buyers off. Quite a different beast compared to COIN.

His bottom? Not that I'd object if it happened.

I think you'll find it's the same for all industries, but we're focused on the BTC space. Millions are thrown at terrible ideas and incompetent people every day.

Bitcoin's extreme youth might also be a factor. No one knows what's going to work and what doesn't. It's all still being made up as it goes along.

Lazycoins made a fair bit of noise about having UK banking but I haven't heard much else. They all start off saying 'we have banking. No, really' and then it's gone within a few weeks.

Coinfloor's account is in the EU so you have to dick around with wires and so on. You may as well use Kraken or Bitstamp.

I like Lakebtc's idea but those who volunteer to be bankers will be shut down just as quickly as any exchange.

This method clearly makes Uber really, really like you and so they pay for all of your future travel because they think you're totally swell.

For $30 that's a goddamn deal.

The developing world is where it might be at. There's a huge amount of female entrepreneurship bursting to expand there.

No.

Bitwage can convert part of your salary into BTC but that's a third party thing. Overstock employees can accept BTC if they want. Blockchain.info only pays in BTC.