A (bitcoin) blockchain is a database where you can rely on the records/entries to be legitimate since falsifying them is expensive and requires consensus. The older an a entry is, the more expensive it becomes to manipulate it.

In a traditional database, the records can be manipulated by the administrator of the database at will.

As you can imagine, for a currency system where no one should be in control, we can't use a traditional database where someone has admin access. We use a blockchain.

Because it’s literally how market cycles work. We were in euphoria, now we’re plummeting back toward despair because there were no fundamentals causing us to pump as hard as we did, especially from $5-$20k.

Did bitcoin’s core tech suddenly become 4x as good? Did 4x as many people suddenly gain interest in the markets with a full understanding of how the core technologies work?

No. People were looking to get rich quick, and now the market is correcting back to an appropriate price.

It won't die because people in government also want to have bitcoin and all regulations are directed on restrictions in this sphere for ordinary people.

For now, I've kind of bought into Buy & Hold, but I also realize it's not as simple as presenting a simplistic historical picture. For example, in that Schwab article, they glaze over the huge 2000-2002 downturn (part of the study period) and the 2007-2009 downturn (not part of the study period) and don't give context about what happened in 1955-1974 (holding cash outperformed all investment strategies). There's also the issue of survivorship bias. Obviously, they are trying to sell their services, so I can see why they would bias the article.

On the flip side, obviously nobody can 100% predict the future. From what I've read, seems like the main way to "lose" with market timing is that one tends to back out of the market and miss short days of huge gains, thus decreasing your overall performance.

Nice.... but it’s just a buzzword. No different than adding .com to the end of a company name.

Blockchain without a crypto is basically a fancy database with a chain of evidence system. Will Facebook ever become decentralized? Not in your dreams.

Nice try, Zuck.

Remember the time governments had to pay for all the banks after they speculated with money they didn't have and suddenly the housing bubble popped? Yeah, if banks fuck up again governments will probably end banks. So banks try to not get dragged into another speculation bubble to make sure they still exist in a few years. And governments make sure that they don't have to pay for such a shit show again.

You losing money you had, no problem. Banks won't stop you and the government won't stop you. buy bitcoins - but not with a credit card. A few million people losing tons of money they don't have might end really bad, So i am kinda glad that governments stop that.

It is beginning. The crackdown. The European Union introduced harsh legislation against crypto currencies recently aswell. They can't take that everything is becoming decentralized and out of their reach. Once a decentralized system succeeds they can't do anything about it, there is no organisation, no nothing they could attack. Their only advantage now is the gateway to crypto currencies - FAIT. They will loose this in the foreseeable future. If trading is made decentralized even for fait they can't do anything. They are loosing control on all fronts and they are panicking. Decentralized marketplaces like open Bazar is the next thing. On all fronts cryptos are offer decentralized solutions and the government is watching live how things get out of their hand.

China doesn't care about bitcoin, they care about their citizens taking money out of the country. Miners mining bitcoin is no issue to them.

It's never too late! People were saying "it's too late, I missed the boat" back when BTC was at $8,000.

After you do your research and make your first purchase(s), you should start doing research on whether there are any other coins you're interested in, as well. Many of them have the potential to do some really great things.

I see a lot of really good links to check out in the other comments, so read everything you can. It will really help.

You can also follow blogs that show you how it works and explain some of the beginning things you'll need to know. If you're looking for something silly to read, you can try my page http://tothemoon.cool

Just do plenty of research and make sure you are keeping everything secure with 2 factor authentication.

How I learned. Practice. First learn stocks in general - how to understand a financial statement. Learn the various trades - buy and sell orders, limit orders, stop loss orders. Understand earning reporting. Just buy and sell blue chip stocks while your getting the hang of it. You shouldn't lose too much and might make some. Watch and read news.

After you learn stocks which you may have a basic grasp on already, learn covered calls and buying calls. With buying calls just buy heavily in the money short term calls on blue chip quality companies. Again the risk is limited (you won't make much either) for these trades and a good way to learn. Also you'll have a though time getting a brokerage letting you sell naked (without owning the stock) calls and puts out of the gate without a decent amount of capital.

What go me interested? General curiosity. Desire to make money. Movies.

I don't think so. All alt currencys are pegged to btc. If you want to swap , you almost always go via btc. If you have to pay tax, then pegging it all to btc would also be probably be done. Changing it would require divine intervention, even if the successor is better .

It's like trying to get America to change from miles to kilometres. It's engrained into the backbone of this industry now.

Give nitrogensports a try. They use the same odds as Pinnacle, with the added advantage that you can access it from any country and it's anonymous. Always pay out swiftly, same with withdraws/deposits

Yeah, I’m not too concerned about BTC becoming a world currency. It’s a new type of bankless credit card but it is still only valuable when it exchanges for fiat. At the end of the day you are spending electricity to hash a code and you can’t force the rest of the world’s population to take your code and give you food and gasoline if they don’t want to.

Also, guess what happens when people feel excluded or controlled by a system....they break out and create a new one. Just the same way you are challenging the banks and stock market built over the last hundred years....your kids will ignore your bitcoin wealth and create some other stupid new fad to evade your outdated system.

Yes, there are bitcoins in space. They get beamed back down again so you can get bitcoin anywhere on earth.
https://blockstream.com/satellite/

Get your 10k memes ready, guys.

After researching for a few days and with the help of you fine humans, I'm liking socialism very much. It seems to be the exact opposite of what I have always thought it was.

I'm currently baffled that it has been demonized so much in the US. And also a bit ashamed that I didn't figure this out earlier.

My long term average is around a quarter of a percent per day profit after fees but before taxes.

It goes as high as 3% per day when looking at only the last 30 days, but sometimes there are droughts it goes to 0% or in rare cases negative.

I can live off profits alone but still take on other work because I want to grow my position with the house's money. Once my position hit five figures I stopped trading with leverage and am happy with that decision.

I make a tenth the trades that I did when I first started. I generally opt to wait and watch until I'm reasonably certain of a good opportunity. My average this calendar year has been roughly 4 out of 5 trades being winners. I generally bet with the trend so that I can hold btc and let the uptrend bail me out if I get in a tight spot. This has worked great for the last year, but obviously isn't the optimal strategy in a bear market. Having suffered through one of those I believe I will know when to change my game plan up and start shorting.

There's not much readily available evidence for any of these claims. The best I can do is reference the coinsight.org flair game where I am #3 trader out of people who have made trades in the last 30 days. Since starting I am up 70% against bitcoin which is itself up 270% vs fiat over that time period. The flair game does not allow shorting, stop losses, leverage, or even limit orders; use your imagination on how much those might add.

I was margin called in 2014 and regrew my entire position from the scraps remaining out of force liquidation. Starting small is a great idea, if you can make gains you'll eventually get to a good place even starting with a hundred or a thousand dollars. If you can't make gains then you'll want to subject yourself to as little in losses as possible.

investing more than you can afford to lose

for someone who begins trading in a bull market, it's easy to think that things will just keep going up

the last few months have shown us this is obviously not the case

this ties into the Selling at Cheap, Buying at Costly mistake, you have to be able to deal with a constantly shifting market

if a downturn causes you to panic, you've probably invested too much

lost coins only make the commodity more scarce increasing the value of remaining coins. mining subsidies will end and miners will start depending only on the fee market to get their income. fees will naturally increase but we'll have extra cheap and fast 2nd layer payments way earlier.

another good thing that's derived from that is empty blocks and spam will reduce when block rewards approaches zero.

When only 71 percent of the worlds population has a bank account let alone access to crypto.

I don't see it happening for a LONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNG time

Not untill the very least the market is stable, if fiat had as inherent risk as crypto did it would be next to worthless.