Anyone keeping tabs on the bitcoin boom?
Trying not to because I’m one of those that wanted to buy when they were at £200ish each and wasn’t sure so didn’t bother. Regret!!!
I seem to be reading lots of accounts though of people selling and buying big things with the profits such as property and now HMRC are getting involved.
Also being said to be misused for money laundering.
Crypto currencies are making me an awful lot of money at the moment tbh.
Useless investment if you don’t regularly monitor it and get out at the right time though.
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Argh thats unlucky. I wish I invested more, got like 0.14 bitcoins in 2015 for like 50 quid just for a laugh and now its gone crazy. Trouble is Im reluctant to cash it just in case.
I’ve noticed now that people do seem to be putting lots of investment into all sorts of crypto currencies in the hope that they become the next bitcoin, I don’t see it though. Granted I don’t check the values all the time but I do browse now and again and nothing really comes close.
Similar, I was ranting and raving to anyone who would listen when it was around £500 back in 2014. I also remember telling my dad to invest in Apple when I was 12, and later on Netflix, Tesla and Blackberry. It turns out I have a pretty good gut feeling about stuff, but just never fucking act on it because I don’t have the capital and my dad just apparently doesn’t listen to me.
Bitcoin is fucked now though, it’s become nothing more than a store of value, it’ll have no use as a currency.
I think Ripple is really where it’s at, and that’s where I want to put my money. Some pretty big banks like Santander, Agribank, Soft Bank etc. have been trialling it for about a year now as a way to settle international payments and they’ve asked Ripple to prolong the trial because it’s just working so well. It can settle international payments in around 4 seconds.
I don’t really know anything about Litecoin or Ethereum or BTC Gold/Cash or whatever, but I think Ripple is legit, especially since Ripple the company completely controls the flow of Ripple and it isn’t mined and doesn’t have a finite source so it won’t be as volatile as BTC.
I guess they’ll just have to pay back-taxes on their gains which I guess will be 18% or 28% CGT on any gains over £11,000 which I guess sucks but really isn’t that bad. CGT is 27% or 47% in Denmark dependent on income haha
What REALLY sucks is if they’ve spent all the money and didn’t declare any of it and now they’ve being made it to pay back those taxes hahahaha
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I actually hold a portfolio of cryptocurrency, including bitcoin. Understanding the technology behind it and the enthusiasm it thrives on explains a lot of its popularity. And, of course, there is huge speculation and influx of investors riding the wave high to the moon.
Other cryptos that do well and will do even better - to my mind - coming year are: ethereum, litecoin, dash, IOTA and Monero.
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What’s the deal with dash, iota and monero? I’ve never heard of them
I’ve actually been keeping track of IOTA recently. seems to be doing reasonably well at the moment seems very close to overtaking Ripple. Although have heard good things about Ripple, I read some banks have been trialling it and have extended the trials as it’s been quite successful.
IOTA just announced a partnership with Microsoft so it rocketed a bit. It has got a very good market cap (which to me is important in terms if a coin is trustworthy). IOTA could be a good long term investment, it’s also still cheap.
Dash is supposed to provide a faster transaction time than any other coin and has risen really a lot over the past few weeks. I think it will drop a bit in the coming weeks (market correction).
Monero is a coin that is about privacy, strong market cap as well.
@BergkampsLoveChild Ripple is doing really poorly right now. Dropped dramatically past few weeks. The thing with it is that it is backed by banks and crypto is all about decentralisation so a lot of people are not participating in that coin (because of the banks).
Personally, I think a diversified portfolio of 5 strong coins is a good bet.
If you want to Day Trade I suggest observing smaller coins with steep climbs and sharp drops. Analyse and observe the charts before you jump into this game. You can earn quickly, but also lose even quicker day trading, some care and experience is preferred here. 
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Bitcoin mining now uses more electricity than about 140 countries.
It’s gone from being a cool new invention to being a ridiculous phenomenon doing more harm than good.
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Interesting. What does IOTA do? Like what sets it apart from anything else?
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IOTA is the next step in blockchain evolution. They provide what many other coins say to do as well, but they do it better. Better team and huge support from the academic world as well. There are no miners, no blocks and thus also no transaction fees. I’d have to write a small essay here to fully explain IOTA, easiest is just to check their website and / or read all the existing articles on them.
I do believe they are here to stay and offer one of the most innovating technologies in the cryptoworld. Not to mention they are still very very affordable (under $10). Invest now, wake up in 2 years to reap the rewards. And if it didn’t work out after all, it was just a couple of tenners for tens of IOTA coins (but, I really do think it could see 500% increase in a year’s time).
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Bitcoin continues to rise.
I’m interested in IOTA. Going to do a bit more reading on it and possibly invest.
Well after doing quite a bit of reading until the early hours last night I may have jumped on the IOTA bandwagon, I went and got 300 euros worth. Got in there at $3.81 and stayed up until the early hours watching it rise up to $5.67, it’s now settled down to $4.70.
It’s quite fun watching it go up and down. It’s also quite interesting reading how they’re looking at using it.
I have bought it with the frame of mind that it’s just a bit of fun and not a real investment because I’m fully prepared to lose that money which is also a possibility. I used Binance.com to do it seemed easy enough, it was more frustrating to buy the Bitcoin to be able to buy IOTA if anything.
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This is essential, read about the coin, try and understand what it tries to do and then invest accordingly.
Second step is, unless you are day trading, switch off the charts and open your eyes when you hear about it in the mainstream media, it will most likely mean it’s worth now 100+ and you can cash out, or keep it in the hopes for it to become as huge as bitcoin is. 
I usually deposit euros via coinbase and then transfer that money to other exchanges like bitifinex, bittrex and binance.
p.s. Don’t Panic Sell! Bitcoin for instance can rise to 9.000, then drops to 7.000 people panic sell only to see it rise again to 9.000 and go further through the roof.
Best thing to do is: HOLD for the long term.
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Yeah, I used Coinbase too. Well it’s just a bit of fun so there’s no plans to cash out unless it gets stupid. Will keep reading, the founder is Norwegian so it’s fairly easy to find lots more information in Norwegian as well as all the stuff in English.Although I did find an interesting post on Reddit explaining some of the negatives and problems with Iota/Tangle and that it will face. Will see if I can dig it out.
Edit: Found it, it was in reply to someone asking why Tangle was superior to Blockchain…
Basically a transaction is verified on the IOTA tangle by making it so that every time you want to make a transaction, you have to verify 2 previous transactions. They say you can send transactions without fees but actually your fee is you are a mini miner for 2 previous transactions. The idea is that instead of specialized miners, every person wanting to make a transaction is a miner and the network actually grows in efficiency and security as it gets larger unlike say Bitcoin which grows in security but not efficiency. Currently, there aren’t anywhere close to enough transactions to make this model work and be secure enough to prevent malicious attacks and spamming so they have a specialized node called the “coordinator” who verifies transactions. It’s built upon the idea that eventually there will be millions of transactions per minute due to the “Internet of things” and “Machine economy” which can supply the network with enough transactions to make it impossible to attack. However, there have been some criticisms about whether or not a small cpu (eg. your fridge or Keurig or Nest, which is what this idea is based on) would be able to handle the memory requirements necessary to verify 2 transactions before making one because although it is not necessary to download the entire blockchain on every machine, each transaction is significantly larger than traditional transactions.
There are other potential cryptographic issues with it as well like it being written in ternary instead of binary and even with pure intentions this can definitely lead to security flaws. I’ve also read that their cryptographic hash is at least partially original which is a big no-no in the cryptographic community as it takes a lot of peer review to come up with a well functioning cryptographic hash such as SHA-256. MIT research labs recently found a vulnerability (relatively easily according to them) and although they reported it to IOTA and it was fixed before any major breach and loss of funds happened, they said that IOTA failed to address the underlying issue of using a ternary hash function instead of a binary and merely placed a band-aid on the problem. The IOTA people responded by saying this flaw was minor and fixed. Other criticisms of the MIT paper claim that they are biased (which is probably true) but they did report the bug privately to the IOTA team before going public to allow them time to fix it which is the proper professional thing to do and did them a favor by finding the bug. That being said, it was the IOTA team that requested the peer review in the first place. I think their intentions are mostly pure, despite there being some behind the scenes things going on, but like ethereum it might just wind up being a lofty goal with not much real use (at least as of yet, that’s not to say you couldn’t have made a bunch of money on ethereum though). Here is the article I’m referencing.
In addition, partly because it doesn’t have traditional miners that generate new coins, it was an ICO which turns a lot of people off.
All in all, I’m not sure. It could potentially be amazing but right now it sounds like a lot of promises and “hand-waving” by the coordinator behind the scenes to make it work. It is currently completely centralized and by no means a functioning product like many other cryptos are. Could it be amazing? Maybe, but it is already the #5 crypto by marketcap without a working product and an idea that sounds great but 90% of people invested would not even be able to explain in layman’s terms let alone technically so I’ll keep my eye on it but I’m not investing and somewhat wary of it
Edit: Just to shill, it can never be private like Monero, and it’s not replacing Bitcoin as a store of value any time soon so from what I’ve researched, its biggest current competitor seems to be Ethereum
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Took a little punt on QuarkCoin in 2013 but that shit didn’t bang in the slightest
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