Bitcoins for college fund for my son. Thoughts ideas...

[Bitcoin4College]

Alright so I am using Bitcoin as an investment opportunity for my son whom is only 3 years old. I started buying .01 here and there and right now my balance is around $400.00 in only a couple of months.

My thought is NEVER touch the coins and in 13 years this can hopefully pay for his college.

Right now there is an opportunity for a Group buy into a Neptune 3TH/s machine. It cost $160 for 30 gh/s. which is ~ .017 BTC, in your guys opinion would that have a ROI? Or should I just keep that .017.....

Or should I just do what I do and when I have extra money buy .01 here or .01 there.


So do you guys like my idea? Is that mining contract feasibly have a ROI?

[JunkCoin]

Price is very high right now, very risky.. I wouldn't buy any at the moment.

[DeathAndTaxes]

If you have a very long time horizon then probably the best thing you can do is to make periodic purchases.  Try to get a fixed dollar amount (not fixed BTC) amount on a fixed schedule and stick with it.  i.e buy $100 per week or $150 per month or whatever your budget will support.  People saying things like price is high right now isn't really helpful.  What is it goes up to $5,000 and then "crashes" back to $2,000 while you wait for "lower prices".  On the other hand you probably don't want to dump 100% of saved funds in right now.  By buying a fixed amount each month you can ride out the swings in price and avoid either panic buying or panic selling both of which almost always end up costing you a lot.

This will result in you automatically buying more BTC when the price is low and less BTC when the price is high.  The concept is called dollar cost averaging.  If you do this week in and week out it will lower your overall basis.  That being said Bitcoin should still be considered speculative you may also want to supplement it with contributions to a tax deferred 527 college plan.

Our company will be rolling out a service soon where consumers can buy small (up to $500) amounts of Bitcoins using cash at more than 50,000 locations in the US.  Perfect for this kind of small periodic purchases.

[Bitcoin4College]

Price is very high right now, very risky.. I wouldn't buy any at the moment.

Wouldn't buy any BTC or buy into that Group buy of the neptune?

[Bitcoin4College]

If you have a very long time horizon then probably the best thing you can do is to make periodic purchases.  Try to get a fixed dollar amount (not fixed BTC) amount on a fixed schedule and stick with it.  i.e buy $100 per week or $150 per month or whatever your budget will support.  People saying things like price is high right now isn't really helpful.  What is it goes up to $5,000 and then "crashes" back to $2,000 while you wait for "lower prices".  On the other hand you probably don't want to dump 100% of saved funds in right now.  By buying a fixed amount each month you can ride out the swings in price and avoid either panic buying or panic selling both of which almost always end up costing you a lot.

This will result in you automatically buying more BTC when the price is low and less BTC when the price is high.  The concept is called dollar cost averaging.  If you do this week in and week out it will lower your overall basis.  That being said Bitcoin should still be considered speculative you may also want to supplement it with contributions to a tax deferred 527 college plan.

Our company will be rolling out a service soon where consumers can buy small (up to $500) amounts of Bitcoins using cash at more than 50,000 locations in the US.  Perfect for this kind of small periodic purchases.

Yes of course this is in addition to a 527 college plan. Any thoughts on buying hashing power in a group buy?

[chandrew]

always thought of bitcoin as more of a hobby

-thoughts

[wearepoor]

Is that mining contract feasibly have a ROI?

I doubt mining could make ROI, this is why I preffer just buying coins now.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Yes of course this is in addition to a 527 college plan. Any thoughts on buying hashing power in a group buy?

The two most important factors are time to delivery and price (BTC/GH).  The price is high and the delivery date is far in the future.  IMHO it would be very risky with a good chance of a loss.

[miners78]

I wouldn't rely solely on Bitcoin right now (Very volatile, storage of BTC not as secure as it could be in my opinion) so keep money aside regardless, but I can't see any reason why it won't continue to rise, so its definitely a good idea to invest now anyway.

[TechByPC]

I'm in the same boat with my kids. The way I'm looking at it is this: You've got ~15 years (typical) before the kid is going to be in college. You want something that will have a pretty continual return on investment over that 15 year period. The miner, especially a rented miner, isn't going to do that. The bitcoin itself has a better chance, so I would buy and hold. The only reason to purchase a miner or rent mining power at this point is if there is a very clear path to a positive return on investment in BTC not fiat. Otherwise just buy and hold.

With 15 years you can make some riskier investments. For example, I bought some penny stock with one of my kids when he was 1 and that stock is now in the several dollar range. The kid is now 5.

[xianman]

I've been researching this as an investment opportunity for my son as well and I've come to the conclusion that mining is not worth it at this point. The difficulty of mining looks like it will skyrocket with all of the new ASIC hardware coming online in the next few months, so my thought is to just flat out purchase an affordable amount of bitcoins now and let them ride. Meanwhile I'll still be contributing to more conventional means of savings for his future education.

I'm very new too all of this, so take it with a grain of salt 

[Bitcoin4College]

I'm in the same boat with my kids. The way I'm looking at it is this: You've got ~15 years (typical) before the kid is going to be in college. You want something that will have a pretty continual return on investment over that 15 year period. The miner, especially a rented miner, isn't going to do that. The bitcoin itself has a better chance, so I would buy and hold. The only reason to purchase a miner or rent mining power at this point is if there is a very clear path to a positive return on investment in BTC not fiat. Otherwise just buy and hold.

With 15 years you can make some riskier investments. For example, I bought some penny stock with one of my kids when he was 1 and that stock is now in the several dollar range. The kid is now 5.

Great reply. Thanks for the info. And I think the idea of getting into the renting of a miner was just to help out the BTC community more and have a little insight into that side. I think i might just buy like 10 gh/s of partial contract to get my foot in the door and then the other $120 just buy and hold.

[TechByPC]

Sure thing. One thing that I think the Bitcoin community needs much more than extra mining power is more legitimate businesses that accept it. There is also, from what I can tell, a lack of a place to invest bitcoin in an interest bearing account that is not associated with some high-risk activity. Even just letting your coin sit in an online wallet is asking for trouble. See the inputs.io disaster and similar.

I'm really curious to see what the DZ coop people are going to come up with next.

[Ethan1581]

Personally i think you should mine them. i think the price of BTC will go up a lot within 13 years due to the massive demand (assuming people still trade it) and is no longer able to mine.

[iLinx]

Miners seem a little risky to me right now since you're betting on hardware, a fixed asset, to generate a return on something that will become increasingly more difficult as more people enter the market of generating BTC.

Another alternative you can consider if you have the time / knowledge for it, is to trade BTC like you would on a Forex market. The short term volatility on BTC is huge, the value swings 5 - 30% per day. If you locked in even just 5% a week in ROI on your trades (which is possible imho) with a portion as a long term holding purchased on lower prices, you would be generating a significant amount for your fund (5% / week is a return of 1867% over a year of trading plus additional gains from growth in the general value of BTC) while remaining fairly liquid. Most short term trading principles employed on the stock / forex market can be applied on bitcoin markets as well.

[Bitcoin4College]

Miners seem a little risky to me right now since you're betting on hardware, a fixed asset, to generate a return on something that will become increasingly more difficult as more people enter the market of generating BTC.

Another alternative you can consider if you have the time / knowledge for it, is to trade BTC like you would on a Forex market. The short term volatility on BTC is huge, the value swings 5 - 30% per day. If you locked in even just 5% a week in ROI on your trades (which is possible imho) with a portion as a long term holding purchased on lower prices, you would be generating a significant amount for your fund (5% / week is a return of 1867% over a year of trading plus additional gains from growth in the general value of BTC) while remaining fairly liquid. Most short term trading principles employed on the stock / forex market can be applied on bitcoin markets as well.

Ya I pretend im a forex daytrader on BTC-e.com