For BTC? There ain't none other than (just maybe) BTC itself.

The record for crypto 'investments' is truly wretched. A handful were excellent but they've been swamped by thousands upon thousands of miserable failures.

It's a different beast, though similar in spirit. The ETF actually holds the asset. The ETN is just a credit note whose value depends on the entity that issued it.

I know where I'd rather be sticking my money.

I live in the UK. It's one of the most expensive places to live in the whole wide world. Hundreds of thousands of people arrive from 'cheap' countries every year looking for a piece of the action.

It's nothing to do with the Japanese cost of living, it's all to do with their determination to remain a homogeneous society. In the long run that approach is likely to cause them serious demographic problems.

There are already quite a few fledgling crypto remittance services. I would've thought part of the insane cost of services like Western Union is the onerous regulation involved and I don't know whether any of these services have had to deal with that yet.

You've also got the problem of dealing with differing government attitudes towards Bitcoin in every country. It's probably one of the most complex areas of usage these companies could get involved in.

We've been promised endless leisure since somewhere around the 1950s and look at the state of the working world now. Something will have to give eventually or maybe the future of the world economy will involve nothing but selling increasingly convoluted cups of coffee to each other.

I think the phrase 'longer term' is what is driving much of the angst on here.

It gets harder by the day to deny that Bitcoin is going to end up finding some type of place in the wider world.

It's also rapidly dawning that that's something which'll take many years of slog to achieve.

An awful lot of people piled in expecting super early adopter-style gains. That type of explosion is easy to pull off from zero. To go from here to enormity requires real work, real time and the provision of real utility.

Someone getting in now might still end up with a significant gain in buying power. If that takes 10-20 years to achieve it suddenly sounds a lot less sexy.

Anyone who would burst into tears now after another decent price fall is either a very recent arrival or has been in a coma for over a year and a half. Everyone else will just groan a bit and not be remotely surprised.

The OP gets it so hard it fuckin' hurts.

When I first read about this Bitcoin shit there were all these words like liquidity, biggest computing network in the world, network effect.

It made my head hurt so I hit myself in the head until blood came out out of it

Then I read about alts and I stopped hitting myself. I personally invite Gavin whoeverheis to come up with counters to this -

Rapecoin has proof of rape. Does the bitcoin?

Paycoin guarantees to buy my coins off me for $20 each. Do you, Gavin?

Lots of coins have secret amounts created by the developers to surprise us. I like surprises. Does your bittycoin have surprises for me, Gavin?

WELL?

End of the month supposedly. Shall believe it when I see it.

I bought one from him at that price and am pleased I did. If BTC did rise to an intergalactic level I really can't foresee the premium in BTC maintaining, especially for brass, but I just fancied one so I got it. It'll always have some notoriety and they ain't making any more.  

I was under the impression they instantly sold the coins they mined and USD is all they cared about. Maybe if this has been in the works for quite some time they were building up a coin supply, but that also means they could've gotten more money for them back in the day.

Not sure how the exchange thing would work. They'd need to know the level of demand to cut out the multi day wait for money to clear. It would be far more sensible to have OTC deals with people they trust.

Gold grew from $3 billion ish to over $7 trillion in twenty years?

This is news to me.

Put your coins in the most convoluted cold storage possible and store them with someone else you trust implicitly.

I've never had the gambling gene so I've no idea how it feels, but it sounds like you have a compulsion.

And if you haven't seen this, maybe you have, this is another place you might find useful - https://www.tradingview.com/chart/BTCUSD/

If you've been trading for over a year and you still have the same amount of coins maybe it's not for you. I'm sure I would be terrible at it.

You want trading advice?

You could look here - http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/

That's all they concentrate on.

Stop gambling. Don't mess around with alts. Do not 'invest' in any crypto businesses. They're almost all shit.

Stick with your signature campaign.

Your problem has just been solved. Congratulations.

From investopedia - "One factor that affects the ETN's value is the credit rating of the issuer. The value of the ETN may drop despite no change in the underlying index, instead due to a downgrade in the issuer's credit rating."

I think the halving after that will be the most significant. Annual coin inflation will be down to 1.8% by then and the financial instruments will be very established and widespread. If a much healthier amount of demand exists at that point we will see some genuine deflationary effects.

If there's extra money in it someone's going to try and find a way. That's what they do.

Yup. It's a beast of a decision but your present comfort zone is far more important than a theoretical future.

30 BTC puts you far ahead of most people posting here already. If it does seep across the world there'll likely never be more than 5-6 million people who can own more, probably considerably less when lost/Satoshi/whale coins are taken into account. That's a fine place to be.

I could get to 100 coins myself but I'm not doing it because that might compromise future possibilities if it does go totally wrong. I figured out what I was comfortable with and stuck to it even though the urge is strong to go deeper. You gotta resist it.