Anyone else bought high? Worried? Still holding strong? (I bought in at $1080)

[Bitcoin-hotep]

Also creating a coin that your co workers or class mates can mine for fun and getting in at the beggining is a good way to offset loss

[JulieFig]

These responses all warm the heart. It's almost as if you sensible guys see every bump in the Bitcoin road as just an opportunity to weed out those who really don't believe (for lack of a better word - perhaps 'understand' would be better) in its long term viability. I think it's been referred to as swapping from weaker hands to stronger hands.

Averaging my cost per coin does seem like the smartest strategy. I'm in Australia though and have a good 11 hrs before the banks open... whether we'll still be at the bottom then is another story. This ride is absolutely crazy, that's for damn sure.

I am also in Australia, what is your strategy? I recommend you buy some more at these rock bottom prices.

That's the plan. Do you use exchanges? In the past, I used BTradeAustralia.

[Lone Wolf]

Its the old saying "buy low, sell high" or the warren buffet saying "be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful."

Best investing advice ever and it works most of the time.

Works most of the time?  It WORKS all of time, but 99% of humans can't follow this advice b/c the reptilian part of the human brain is wired to buy or hold at the top out of excitement and greed and sell at the bottom out of fear.  It is extremely difficult to sell at the top when profits are huge b/c the brain greedily expects/wants more and conversely its hard to not sell when something is plunging and losses are piling up b/c the brain fears losing all and just wants to get out at any cost.

For example see Uncle Monty's post earlier in this thread.  In retrospect he did not sell at $1,220 when he had huge profits and when should have b/c he thought it would go higher even tho it had an incredible run up from $100 to $1,200.  And yet he sold after he lost $40k when he was the most fearful and when that was prob a good time to buy.  If he had sold at $1,200 then he could have bought a lot more at $400 or $500 when everyone else was fearful.  See this chart regarding human emotions and the point of maximum financial opportunity and maximum financial risk.

https://twitter.com/YachtsOnTheReg/status/410326529634103296/photo/1

Not trying to single you out Uncle Monty.  Just showing a real life example of Warren Buffet's strategy.

"I sympathize with the OP, I just had a massive learning experience myself. I bought in at about $415 for Bitcoin and Litecoin at $2.90 and held onto those as a "Long Term" investment. Then I started trading daily with "New Money". When it reached its peak at about $1220 and then started dropping I bought more as it was falling, thinking that it would recover again. Unfortunately it never did and I began to be in a loss situation with my New Money. So I kept on buying when the price dropped, thinking "This must be it" and it never was and was in a total loss with my New Money to the tune of $40k. (This included Bitcoin, Litecoin and Peercoin)

Last night I had to make a huge decision. Hold the faith that the coins will rise again or sell everything and still make an overall profit with my "Long Term" coins and then buy in again when it reaches near the bottom. So, I decided to sell and ended with a bit of an overall profit but totally gutted that I have sold my babies.

[Anon136]

most of us veterins just think to ourselves "meh" when we see the price crash. we have seen it before over and over again. but for a newbie to be hodling strong is pretty impressive i must say.

[bumpk1nK]

For example see Uncle Monty's post earlier in this thread.  In retrospect he did not sell at $1,220 when he had huge profits and when should have b/c he thought it would go higher even tho it had an incredible run up from $100 to $1,200.  And yet he sold after he lost $40k when he was the most fearful and when that was prob a good time to buy.  If he had sold at $1,200 then he could have bought a lot more at $400 or $500 when everyone else was fearful.  See this chart regarding human emotions and the point of maximum financial opportunity and maximum financial risk.

You can not know $1,200 is top, predict top before price crashes is not likely.

[Lone Wolf]

You can not know $1,200 is top, predict top before price crashes is not likely.

I didn't say *the* top, I said *a* top.

[JulieFig]

most of us veterins just think to ourselves "meh" when we see the price crash. we have seen it before over and over again. but for a newbie to be hodling strong is pretty impressive i must say.

Much appreciated Anon136. It's been tough... to part with $14k - basically all of my fiat savings - on my measly salary? Ouch. But 12.7 bitcoins are better than no bitcoins.

As a 'veteran', I bet you are really looking forward to the day when there may be no more fiat-B transfers, and you're able to make transactions solely with Bitcoin. It sure as hell beats the wait time... trying to get some fiat out of my account and into an exchange seems to take forever, especially when you compare this wait-time with the fluctuations in Bitcoin price. It's a bit of an ironic slap in the face - to have this obstacle preventing you from getting the cheapest coins when Bitcoin's biggest advantage over fiat is arguably its instantaneous transfers.

[Dr Bloggood]

Buy Low, Sell high..........!!!

I am looking to buy in the $150-$250 range...... Be patient, then be brave.

You probably won't get that chance. I mean who knows, but your chances are slim.

Buy for 50% now. Or 30% if you are really convinced we will go lower.

Always buy in chunks.

[dynodog]

After following gold and silver's bull run starting back in 2002, I feel like I learned something about buying/selling/holding.  Trying to predict high and lows is a sucker's game, and trying to trade highs and lows is really stressful.  I learned that the best thing to do is establish a position, whatever the price.  After that, only add when it hits the 200 day moving average.  It will get there at various times over the next 10 years or so.  Go back and look at the charts of gold or silver during the run up.  the price would revert to the 200 dma and then bounce back up.  bitcoin may move faster than gold and silver so i rec maintaining a position - don't sell - and add as the price hits the 100 dma and more if it hits the 200 DMA.  this takes all the stress out and you'll be better off in the long run.  bitcoin is one of the greatest ideas of all time, and we are very very early in this bull run.  Good luck to us!!!!!!!

[Lone Wolf]

After following gold and silver's bull run starting back in 2002, I feel like I learned something about buying/selling/holding.  Trying to predict high and lows is a sucker's game, and trying to trade highs and lows is really stressful.  I learned that the best thing to do is establish a position, whatever the price.  After that, only add when it hits the 200 day moving average.  It will get there at various times over the next 10 years or so.  Go back and look at the charts of gold or silver during the run up.  the price would revert to the 200 dma and then bounce back up.  bitcoin may move faster than gold and silver so i rec maintaining a position - don't sell - and add as the price hits the 100 dma and more if it hits the 200 DMA.  this takes all the stress out and you'll be better off in the long run.  bitcoin is one of the greatest ideas of all time, and we are very very early in this bull run.  Good luck to us!!!!!!!

That worked for a while, but gold and silver have broken and been below the 200 day for most of 2012/2013.  What have you done during that time?

[lightfoot]

Works most of the time?  It WORKS all of time, but 99% of humans can't follow this advice b/c the reptilian part of the human brain is wired to buy or hold at the top out of excitement and greed and sell at the bottom out of fear.  It is extremely difficult to sell at the top when profits are huge b/c the brain greedily expects/wants more and conversely its hard to not sell when something is plunging and losses are piling up b/c the brain fears losing all and just wants to get out at any cost.

Yes, but if everyone followed this strategy it would not work.

Same reason you can't wish you had bought bitcoin instead of a miner: If you had and everyone had then the price of bitcoin would have skyrocketed while you were buying and miners would fall.

Weird that people don't understand this.

[judyballhairy]

IF bitcoin becomes a legitimate currency, which it's well on its way to - the market cap will be massive, so buying in at even $1200 will seem like a major bargain.  Forget about this current price drop.  China is irrelevant to Bitcoin's long term success.  The Chinese were trying to dump their money into it as a way to get it out of the country more easily, so of course China was going to put an end to that.  The huge run to 1200 had to do with investment and not value being created by bitcoin being used in commerce.  Every time a new merchant starts to accept bitcoin, the TRUE value goes up a little bit.... the die hards will ignore the swings due to investment caused by hype and will hold.

The only thing this does kind of mess up (at least temporarily) is mining worthless coins and trading up for bitcoins and litecoins due to all the hype and ignorant newb investors buying anything that says crypto on it.

[Skoupi]

Any clueless positive comments are as bad as clueless fud imho.

[CoinGeneral]

I bought higher than you

        

[pungopete468]

I had the opportunity to write a little bit about how I personally view BitCoin and crypto-currency two days ago when asked about it by somebody who knows very little about it. It's a long read but I think it's relevant here because the market price is determined directly by the attitude of the buyers. If you have BitCoin hold onto it.

I'll just copy/paste the email I sent out.

To understand the market I think it's important to understand the circumstances behind its value... I'll separate it by category for you in case you already know.
 
So from the top starting with some history...
 
=============================================================
The foundation.
=============================================================
 
To understand BitCoin you first need to understand a little bit about the Dollar and the Gold Standard that precedes it...
Starting with the Dollar; it's surprising how very few of us actually understand how it works despite our attachment to it. Every single US Dollar is owned by a very small group of private international bank owners called "The Federal Reserve Bank." This banking cartel is not a government agency, nor is it subject to the demands of the US Government or the people of the United States barring an Act of Congress. This business is privately owned and operated for profit by several prominent banking families who gained power in 1914 with back-room politics and shady deals. The Dollar has ABSOLUTELY NO VALUE aside from what the people and Nations who accept it as payment are willing to trade it for. The value of the Dollar has been manipulated with international deals like the Petro-Dollar to stave off the imminent collapse of its value. (Every nation in the world must obtain US Dollars by exporting goods to the US. If a Nation were to stop trading USD, that Nation would not be able to purchase oil from any OPEC nation. The US pledges the full force of the military to protect Middle Eastern Oil interests in return for accepting ONLY USD as trade for oil.)
 
Before the Dollar came around there was the "Gold Standard" where every piece of US currency contained precise amounts of Gold or Silver and each paper note was a certificate verifying that the face value of that note was available on demand from the local treasury. A Gold Standard is based on REAL value and held its value no matter where in the world you would travel because the World's Gold Reserve only contains so much gold. The price of one troy ounce of gold was equivalent to $18.93 from 1833 until 1913. It was only after the ratification of the Federal Reserve Act that the price of gold became unstable.
 
After the enactment of the Federal Reserve, the new organization immediately flooded the economy with paper money to encourage debt. They set the stage for the Great Depression and then one day silently pulled the trigger.
 
The Great Depression was manipulated as can be seen by the fact that the Federal Reserve restricted the money supply in 1929 and then remained neutral on monetary policy after the stock market collapse. The Fed simply wouldn't loan money to non-Federal Reserve banks but was quick to buy what remained for pennies on the dollar. During the Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a deal was struck to end the Great Depression by declaring that the National Debt will no longer be an "unsecured" loan. The Federal Reserve agreed to inject a fixed number of new Dollars which were to be issued for each American citizen alive and each new American citizen to be born. The debt is therefore secured by the life, labor, and property of every American citizen. Nearly every American citizen alive today was born into debt. President Roosevelt had no choice as part of the deal with the Fed but to confiscate and make it illegal to possess gold unless its purpose was solely for use in manufacture or industry. It was illegal to own gold for several decades. The Federal Reserve Bank acquired practically the entire National Gold Reserve of the US. After this a large portion of the world's gold reserve was forever off of the open market and the price of gold skyrocketed.
 
Here comes the interesting part. It's taken 100 years for the people of this country to catch on to what happened to us. With the invention of the internet and the instant availability of information you can now do research and connect the dots in an instant. You can also spread ideas through social media...
 
Regardless of the accuracy of this information, the market consists of people who are driven by emotion and speculation. This is the single most important factor in BitCoins' fate as well as the reason that MANY in this country as well as around the world have lost faith in the US Dollar, which we all know is backed by nothing more than the "Good Faith in Credit" of the US Government.
 
=============================================================
What is BitCoin?
=============================================================
 
1 BitCoin is simply the electronic equivalent of 1 unit of a type of currency, the same way you would look at 1 dollar as 1 unit of currency, or 1 Euro as 1 unit of currency. The differences between BitCoin and other “normal” modern currencies is in the way BitCoin is created and the way in which it's transferred from one person to another; that’s where it sets itself apart. BitCoin isn't “owned” by an organization, rather it’s “mined” or a better word might be “found” the same way somebody might have found a nugget of gold in the past when it was the world reserve currency. There’s a FIXED number of BitCoins available to be found much in the same way that only so much gold is present in the Earth’s crust. To find a BitCoin you must use a computer or device to de-crypt a long and complicated equation and the answer must be verified for accuracy. The difficulty of the equation is directly correlated to the amount of processing power working on identifying the solution and will increase or decrease as the network fluctuates. If the network speed doubles, it becomes twice as hard to find a BitCoin.
BitCoin is born with ZERO intrinsic value just the same as the Dollar. BitCoin is given value by the people who are willing to trade it for goods and services, as well as by those who believe that one day it will be widely accepted for such a purpose.
 
=============================================================
Why so much interest in BitCoin?
=============================================================
 
BitCoin has a tremendous appeal to a large section of the world’s population because in a sense BitCoin represents freedom. Freedom is the single strongest desire in mankind and people tend to view BitCoin as an opportunity to trade more freely. BitCoin is decentralized so its value cannot be manipulated by the “owners.” It can be traded anywhere in the world without a currency exchange much in the same way you can trade a gold piece straight from one hand to another. You can send currency instantly without fees to anybody in the world. For merchants who accept BitCoin they no longer have to wait two business days for the money to become available in their account and without the middlemen the transaction is direct and painless.
 
The interest in BitCoin is driven by people who believe that BitCoin offers a better way to trade than in other widely used currencies. Imagine you were an international corporation and needed to transfer the equivalent of $500 million USD from your National HQ in China to your International HQ in the US. Imagine the burden and cost of currency exchange, fees, accounting, not to mention time.
 
=============================================================
Is it safe?
=============================================================
 
Every transaction that occurs is recorded in a digital record known as the “block chain” which is public record. There are no names linked to BitCoin wallets but anybody can look at the ledger in real time making it impossible to hide BitCoins.
 
Some have postulated that once the network has been “mined out” that the number of “miners” will decline leaving the network open to attack. However, they fail to understand that the block chain isn't secured by the “miners.” The block chain is reinforced by every BitCoin user or client who has a BitCoin wallet. Even if mining halted and the network hash rate were to cease down to 0 the block chain would be secured by the cumulative records of millions of daily users making it incredibly difficult to trick.
 
The highest risk of losing BitCoin is completely 100% preventable. Make a backup of your wallet and use the “encrypt” feature of your wallet. You can use Google Drive, a USB stick, a CD, any data storage device. Just don’t forget your passphrase!
 
=============================================================
How do I get it?
=============================================================
 
The easiest way right now is to buy it on the open market. You can use several different exchanges. I personally use CoinBase.com to buy BitCoin. If you can somehow find a way to make it past the captcha without knocking your monitor off the desk and stomping away in anger then I suppose you've passed the test and are now qualified to become a BitCoin owner. But seriously, CoinBase has an attractive interface that's easy to understand.
 
If you want to mine BitCoin you'll need to spend some serious cash on hardware with the current network difficulty. I would suggest mining LiteCoin rather than buying personally.
 
=============================================================
What is LiteCoin?
=============================================================
 
LiteCoin is a product of BitCoins’ success. Coincidentally the most attractive thing about BitCoin will also be the one thing that prevents it from absolute market domination. When industry stepped in it resulted in a sharp increase in the BitCoin network difficulty. It got to the point where the “common” person could no longer mine BitCoin; at least profitably without a large scale effort. This isn't so much of a problem because there was no way to stop the underlying currency revolution that BitCoin had inspired. This revolution is unfolding right before our eyes and resulted in the creation of LiteCoin and later followed by a number of alternate coins.

The proverbial “Pandora’s Box” had been opened and the major attractor behind LiteCoin is that the devices which allow corporations or large scale mining operations to flood the BitCoin network won’t work to mine LiteCoin. LiteCoin offers some small advantages over BitCoin, but the one thing that sets this currency up to flourish at the moment is the ideology in that it's designed for the people and by the people.

Both coins are extremely promising in the current world environment.
 
=============================================================
What will happen to LiteCoin and BitCoin?
=============================================================
 
It’s been said that “LiteCoin is like silver to BitCoins’ gold.” This is in no way an accurate statement. If somebody were to ask me I would likely reply "LiteCoin would be like Google checkout if BitCoin were Paypal." BitCoin currently holds a much larger market share to LiteCoin but the factors that make BitCoin desirable are equally available in LiteCoin. I expect both coins will find a market share and price balance proportional to the number of coins available. The same market mentality which is currently driving BitCoin will also drive LiteCoin in the same manner. It also helps that every business establishment who accepts BitCoin can also accept LiteCoin without any major modification or learning curve.
 
I see no price ceiling to either currency because the value of both coins is derived from an underlying desire to escape the bonds of existing currency limitations. Both coins will satisfy the same hunger equally tastefully.

The largest threat to BitCoin poses the same threat to LiteCoin, which also happens to be the most powerful organization in the world; the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve holds no direct authority to regulate or control the trade of BitCoin or LiteCoin. But "Whosoever controls a nations currency or system of credit thereby controls the nation." Right now BitCoin and LiteCoin combined are small potatoes but given the market mentality and the numerous benefits offered by these coins its only a matter of time.

[BitcoinFr34k]

I bought higher than you

        

Lol that sucks

[Lone Wolf]

Works most of the time?  It WORKS all of time, but 99% of humans can't follow this advice b/c the reptilian part of the human brain is wired to buy or hold at the top out of excitement and greed and sell at the bottom out of fear.  It is extremely difficult to sell at the top when profits are huge b/c the brain greedily expects/wants more and conversely its hard to not sell when something is plunging and losses are piling up b/c the brain fears losing all and just wants to get out at any cost.

Yes, but if everyone followed this strategy it would not work.

Same reason you can't wish you had bought bitcoin instead of a miner: If you had and everyone had then the price of bitcoin would have skyrocketed while you were buying and miners would fall.

Weird that people don't understand this.

Did you not read my post?  It is physically impossible for everyone to follow that strategy of buying when the price is very low and selling when the price is very high.  B/c the human brain is ruled by emotion and people get greedy and excited when the price is high and fearful when the price is low. 

Its b/c of this that only a very small number of people who invest their money actively in bitcoin or the stock market can make money on a consistent basis.

[koshgel]

lot of false rumors pushing the price down as well as some pump and dump action. I would hold if I bought in that high

[Skoupi]

lot of false rumors pushing the price down as well as some pump and dump action. I would hold if I bought in that high

If you talk about the Chinese ban it's not a rumor anymore and it's not false.

[Sephera]

Go with 50/50 rule.

If something goes to a price point where you think it's a high perhaps sell 25-50% of your holdings. Buy low.

I would hold atleast 50% of it long term, the rest for live trading.