I had a thought today

[Sophia1029]

I am becoming more convinced that Bitcoin is better to hold onto than USD and that USD will have to fail. I wish we knew how long though until it crashes. I can totally see why we look completely crazy to outsiders though haha! ....being all lame on our bitcointalk forum, prophesying a collapse of a nation. No one wants to face reality, everyone is distracted by their stuff, USD, and it is a general human condition for someone not to believe something simply because they don't want to believe. Americans are spoiled and do not think something bad can happen because we are blinded by our prosperity.

You have the opposite problem -- your debt has caused you to cling to even the smallest hope that bitcoin will make you rich.  So you're blindly hoping that the dollar crashes because then you think you'll be OK.  You're the one who is blinded.

You should just fix your debt problems.

Sigh, both statements are probably right, I still feel like putting a small amount into it is worth the risk. I am paying my credit card and car payment every month, I don't have bad credit it just makes it hard to get by.

[Rampton]

3. How much % of my pay should I put into bitcoin? If I only have enough to put around $5 - $20 a month in it, do you think that that small amount would have potential to be a lot?

As much or as little as you can afford to invest. Bitcoin isn't a magical get rich quick scheme, but a lot of us can see the potential in it for investment but nobody can tell you how much btc will be worth in the future as it is all baseless speculation.

[Lethn]

I definitely don't trade on the stock market but I did try it, believe it or not I did try I also tried forex, lost quite a bit of money little did I know back then that it was so badly rigged. What I'm doing is I'm working on Bitcoin related stuff, so things like cloud mining so that I can gain a relatively stable income and what I'm doing is saving up so I can increase my hashing without spending anymore money. You won't get immediate ROI ( Return on investment ) on some of this but over time you will gain more and more over time and you can put that into more riskier investments at least that's what I've got planned.

If you can genuinely get $20 a month then you should search for non-scammy passive investments, you have a job, so that's something, but maybe if you can find a higher paying job that might be more worthwhile even if you've got some spending money left over each week you can re-invest that into income when you'd otherwise try and save it etc. because your money is going to get constantly devalued anyway.

As much or as little as you can afford to invest. Bitcoin isn't a magical get rich quick scheme, but a lot of us can see the potential in it for investment but nobody can tell you how much btc will be worth in the future as it is all baseless speculation.

And Rampton just said it best, absolutely, don't be stupid with your money, can't count the number of times we've had people coming in here making threads about how they lost all their life savings and so on or are in massive amounts of debt because they got stupid, the great thing is about Bitcoin is it's a genuine open market so you can go in with just $5 a week if you want just make sure it doesn't cut into your living standards unless you're ditching a game or something you'd normally buy

Whatever you do don't let yourself get further in debt, that's for damn sure, you're going to have to do a lot of maths and double check everything, be pessimistic, signature campaigns are also another way of getting some extra income as long as you don't just spam as you can see that's a bit of what I'm doing.

Edit: Oh and the best thing about getting any income in Bitcoin is if the price shoots up you get a discount on stuff sometimes a major one and that can make all the difference.

[cutesakura]

bitcoin is currently being economic issues on the rise, which many investors to try to invest in bitcoin, bitcoin prices currently tend to rise which in china is going on massive buying on bitcoin, to peak at 1 trillion, it is jacked up price bitcoin world, hopefully bitcoin can be one of the alternative investment world .... 

[El Emperador]

Relevant thought.

My idea would be to definitely avoid to compare BTC price to USD price.
BTC price should only be compared to itself.

[johnyj]

OP you are very smart, this is the problem that almost everyone never noticed: The fiat money has become the default unit of value domestically

It is so natural to measure value using USD thus people have already get used to it, just like uneducated people always think the sun is going around the earth

The value is all relevant, people will stop using fiat money as unit of value once they had some better unit, I think energy could be the most objective measure of value. Because bitcoin is produced mostly by energy, it is a much more accurate measure of value than fiat money

[tim2020]

OP you are very smart, this is the problem that almost everyone never noticed: The fiat money has become the default unit of value domestically

It is so natural to measure value using USD thus people have already get used to it, just like uneducated people always think the sun is going around the earth

The value is all relevant, people will stop using fiat money as unit of value once they had some better unit, I think energy could be the most objective measure of value. Because bitcoin is produced mostly by energy, it is a much more accurate measure of value than fiat money

I've been redirected to bitcointalk.org many times, and finally opted to join, I bought some Bitcoin in April of 2013, for the fundamental reason that dollars are what we use to measure value. I became quite doubtful, hence the incessant obsession with Bitcoin.

While I've always thought energy is what backs productivity through mechanization, and countries issue currency based on there productivity, in my understanding energy is potential wealth, why do you think it is used energy that makes Bitcoin valuable?

[Sophia1029]

Lethn,
Thanks for the replies and advice I really appreciate it!

[qxzn]

I don't know where I am going with this but maybe someone can help complete it haha: It is interesting to me how we base the value of Bitcoin off of USD, but at the same time for the value of bitcoin to go up the value of USD needs to go down (I think this is what I have been reading, correct me if I am wrong). So when Bitcoin is valued by more USD, won't the large amount of USD mean nothing?

Perhaps, though there is also a lot of room for Bitcoin to go up in value (relative to USD) without USD going through hyperinflation.

Ultimately for you, the question is probably whether you'll be able to pay more rent/buy more groceries with the BTC you saved versus the USD. In other words, bitcoin's worth is really measured in terms of what it can buy.

[Lethn]

Lethn,
Thanks for the replies and advice I really appreciate it!

No problem, the main thing I've learned is you just have to do the maths, there's no way round it once you do that you'll know what sort of income is possible and what isn't with your current lifestyle, the best one I ever saw on this forum actually was a bunch of guys who decided that they were going to quit smoking and they'd buy Bitcoin with every bit of money they saved from not buying packs lol

[johnyj]

While I've always thought energy is what backs productivity through mechanization, and countries issue currency based on there productivity, in my understanding energy is potential wealth, why do you think it is used energy that makes Bitcoin valuable?

A very natural consideration would be that electricity is used as currency and can be freely transferred throughout the world

However, as a currency, one of its main function is store of value. It is very difficult to store electronic energy without huge loss over time, so it is not suitable to act directly as currency. Crude oil works more or less close to this goal, but they can not be send over internet

When you issue currency based on your asset, currency users could redeem those asset any time, but more frequently they never redeem them, they just need a value behind the currency issuance to give them a rough idea about the currency's value, to make sure it is a fair trade

From this perspective, the bitcoin exchange rate is always related to the recent mining cost (mostly electricity), thus give its value for a fair trade (you can either mine bitcoin with certain amount of energy, or produce some goods with same amount of energy, they are interchangeable)

[thejaytiesto]

If you are in for bitcoin you are doing the right thing. Dollar cost average, buy whatever you can monthly, dont get too excited, that's all. Only people with massive luck or massive money make massive money, the rest is hustling and hustling unfortunately requires patience and gives not much wealth, but thats why you and me are slaves waiting for that chance of luck.

This is how the big sharks make money:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2831108/Five-world-s-banks-fined-2BN-rigging-foreign-exchange-markets-prosecuted.html

Here in the crypto world we have big whales playing with the bitcoin market as well, so you can't really predict it for shit. What can be done is obtaining more slowly and hoping it goes up and it becomes trendy in the future and people actually use it to get paid in jobs and pay for commodities like a real currency, for now it's a game of trust.

[ekissane]

Sounds daft but we should measure the value of bitcoins in Big Macs or something like it.  It would give a far clearer picture long term.

[Lethn]

Sounds daft but we should measure the value of bitcoins in Big Macs or something like it.  It would give a far clearer picture long term.

Are you talking about the affects of inflation/deflation? Or just joking around? lol

On a serious note, somebody already did that with the dollar and compared the prices that you got for things like coke, I'd need to dig around to find a proper chart and stuff though.

[Sophia1029]

Sounds daft but we should measure the value of bitcoins in Big Macs or something like it.  It would give a far clearer picture long term.

Are you talking about the affects of inflation/deflation? Or just joking around? lol

On a serious note, somebody already did that with the dollar and compared the prices that you got for things like coke, I'd need to dig around to find a proper chart and stuff though.

I think he was being sarcastic because dollars are the best way we  can measure/understand the value

[Lethn]

Actually, I think it's precious metals, but to each their own, the reason being is because precious metals tend to easily account for inflation since there a natural resource that's rare.

[ScreamnShout]

Sounds daft but we should measure the value of bitcoins in Big Macs or something like it.  It would give a far clearer picture long term.

No. It should be the other way around. The prices of individual items change too much for a number of reasons and the price of individual items are different in different places of the world due to different costs for producing such goods.

You could potentially measure the value of bitcoin based on some kind of measure of CPI (eg purchasing power) however this is somewhat complex and would probably be difficult to understand for the average user

[username18333]

The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.