I’ve been blogging about Bitcoin on iBC since August 2016 when Bitcoin was trading at $586 and have been involved for much longer. I bought my first Bitcoin at $13.
If you don’t know much about Bitcoin I recommend scrolling through my previous posts to get up to speed.
Since Bitcoin is hitting the news everywhere I’m going to commit to answering questions you may have in the comments.
And yes I know the weekly chart is parabolic. It’s a bubble. It’s going to correct. Bitcoin has done this before. It doesn’t concern me.
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First, congrats on being very early to the Crypto party. Very well done. Second, we’re just getting started. What are your thoughts on keeping a diversified Crypto portfolio with a large core of BTC, a piece of ETH, some ZEC and a dash of DASH? Thanks very much! Continued success to you.
FIG
I was a big fan of Monero until Fluffy Pony ….did whatever the hell you call this https://mea.business/
Pony is the biggest asset and liability for XMR.
ALTS got rocked today, which is typical when Bitcoin rallies hard. I’m 95% BTC and 5% Alts. Use alts to stack more Bitcoin. There is blood in alt land today. Could get worse? I don’t know.
Oh, almost forgot the important part. What are your thoughts on all the controversy that went down at Consensus 2017 and do you think they arrived at a proper compromise? Do you think there will be a hard fork and will it be the catalyst for the next correction? Thank you.
I had an opportunity Sunday to catch a redeye to NYC for Consensus and I declined. I very much regret that. I think the deal that was reached isn’t as amazing as the fact a deal was reached at all. People are finally talking.
I appreciate the responses, en1gma. You’ve provided great, actionable info on this blog. The only issue that I’m still unclear on is the potential hard-fork. I still don’t understand why this has to be done or why anyone would want it done. Why try to ruin such a beautiful thing? Correct me if I’m wrong, but this wouldn’t work like a basic stock split. One of the coins would basically become worthless after the fork, correct? I think a hard fork would confuse so many noobs like me into selling. At least we have a rough idea of when they may fork it so we can bail. That would likely be a great buying opp for the savvy that know which coin will win out. Thanks for your help on this.
Fellow early BTC investor here. The same people who were calling bottoms all the way down in 2014 are now calling tops, which strikes me as very bullish. I know some pretty connected traders at brand name funds with outstanding track records who are just starting to get involved. This is EARLY mover action still.
How do you feel about Ethereum? Seems to have more mainstream support from banks etc. Are you a buyer?
Ethereum is killing it in the enterprise space. They make deals. Imagine that. If Bitcoin did half the hand shaking and compromises ETH does we’d be much further along in the cycle.
From what I understand though, ETH is a lot of promise with some critical flaws in it’s design. I have never owned ETH but I do own ETC. This is based on ETH is not really an immutable blockchain. ETC did not rollback transactions when a hacker stole money. For that reason alone I have bought ETC instead of ETH.
Thanks for clarifying ETC vs ETH. If the floor is still open to questions–Did any of the good developers remain with ETC and does it have the potential to pull an ETH type move? Thanks, en1gma.
I understand that there is a limited supply. But is there a limit as to how many different crypto currencies that can exist? Sure there can only be 21 million bitcoins, but is there anything stopping us from having 21 million separate crypto currencies? I get the sense that there is name value at this stage, and most likely for quite some time in the future. But is Bitcoin just a name for something that can be replicated under a different name? I’m assuming yes seeing how many alternatives already exist at this stage. So, if there truly is mass adoption, why would I care if I use the most expensive and most known one on the list of crypto currencies available?
I just can’t help but think the limited supply argument has to be flawed. Buying and never selling just seems too easy. Obviously that view has been very wrong thus far and clearly there’s a lot of money to be made in the near term. I’m enjoying watching the wild west nature of it all.
I’ve been asking exactly the same questions for the last 2 years and the answer always is, wait for it…, wait… the BTC is the first, and only, superior, irreplaceable, uncorruptible, etc, etc. crypto currency answer. So sit back and just wait….here we come…
Andreas Antonpolous did a talk where he mentioned we could have thousands or millions of cryptocurrencies. Your local corner store could have it’s own coin. I don’t think that’s likely but yes, we could have more than just one coin, but there are lot of initiatives to have any missing features in Bitcoin added via sidechains etc. So yes, sit back and hold Bitcoin….except it may be wise to sell a few here at $2450 and redeploy that fiat in the next dip.
I tabled a number of issues in this post:
https://tinyurl.com/y9sjydbe
Without repeating myself here, would you be able to address them since it’s clear the commenter I was exchanging information with was out of his depth.
how/where do you hold & buy/sell monero or alts?
poloniex.com – don’t use these guys, they are scammy and may collapse
bittrex.com – recently opened an account, so far so good but no margin
kraken.com – I would classify the interface as horrendous but it’s safe. 5x margin.
en1gma, comments please
Tone Vays: ‘Consensus was a huge scamfest’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz98GHDVKJ4
There will be a blow off top at some point, but not when 99% of people do not even know what bitcoin is – which is the case today.
Shoe shine boys are not talking about zcash.
2ndly In the history of the world, there has never – ever been a non-inflationary currency, until BTC. (It is inflating now, but is capped at 22 million)
3rdly The banks, Fed, insurance companies, wall street, real estate indusrty… hate Bitcoin and would love to destroy it. But for 9 years they have not been able to.
This is their Kodak moment. (The moment when the digital camera went mainstream & Kodak kept trying to make money processing film, until digital ate their lunch, breakfast, dinner and bedtime snacks)
First of all, GBTC is over $500. LMAO!
I’m not a Tone Vays fan. I have never been able to get through an entire youtube video of his ever. Much like the dot com boom when pets.com was a $500M valuation for a website the scams come in the form of ICO, Initial Coin Offering. ICO are like an IPO for cryptocurrency. People don’t understand what they are buying and there is a flood of pets.com cryptocurrencies right now
We are parabolic. We will have a blow off top. If we break $4400 we’ll go to $10k. Reeeeeeee!!!! A lot more people know about Bitcoin than just a few months ago. See my previous blog posts about adoption rates and Bitcoin reaching $10k.
I think we will revisit <$1800 Bitcoin again at some point.
Re: Inflation. There will only ever be 21M Bitcoins. Get yours now.
Bitcoin is a huge shift in removing the middleman from financial transactions and removing Government's ability to ride off the citizen's production.
$GBTC has backed off a bit to $405 but still trades at a 83.6% premium to “Bitcoin holdings per share” as per their Governor Greyscale. Tough short I can attest.I think Japan’s recent moves are part of the reason for the skyward march in Bitcoin values (I’ve read that Bitcoin has just under a 50% mkt share in crypto’s now). Japan made an edict that from April 1st Bitcoin was a legal payment method (i.e. a currency), no longer subject to the 8% consumption tax but now subject to capital gains tax (30% here). Ms. Watanabe loves to punt fx and no cross has been more adrenaline driven. Coincheck offer interest on Bitcoins domestically now too; 1% for 2-weeks up to 5% for 1 year locked in. Building even a semi-liquid curve that allows hedging is the next stage of evolution. Japan has not seen rates > 1$ for many moons! Even after a near 30 year bear market (real estate driven bubble burst 1989) the Japanese hold 15% of world wealth ….. a staggering #. If 5-10% is “invested” in Bitcoin and other alts the rally is likely not over, but situations like $GBTC are just plain stupid and regulators should see that even a Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust is better than a Hotel California GBTC (2% fee, narrow exits, no fire alarms).
If there is mass adoption, retailers and institutions would be forced to hold bitcoins for long periods of time. So, there would have to be hedging mechanisms in place. This would be easy enough to create in the OTC market. But, given the current volatility, hedging costs would be enormous. What will have to happen in order for volatility to come down?
There’s gonna be some broken charts (and hearts) today. Great call on BTC going sub $1800 again, en1gma. Who’s picking up the pieces today?