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Bitcoin-Explain to me how to buy these things (8 Viewers)

ren hoek said:
Really regret not ponying up on silver around, what was it, $12 or $13?  Gold/silver looking real clean going forward.  Do you buy the physical metal or do you go through a PM vendor with vaults like goldmoney etc.?  
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"If you don't hold it, you don't own it," is a popular saying in the world of precious metals.
There have been a few cases of off-site storage companies going under and causing big losses for people who thought they were protected.

The three places I'd recommend buying from are Provident, JM Bullion and APMEX. APMEX is slightly more expensive, but likely the best reputation. If you're just looking for silver eagles or bars, I'd go JMB or Provident.
If you want to trade paper, just use SLV.

 
jvdesigns2002 said:
I have followed bitcoin for a while--but not as long as you. I ended up purchasing 2 bitcoin when they were $800 each because of strong pressure from a crypto believer buddy of mine. I paid him the money and he stored my coins for me in his wallet. When bitcoin was in the $17500 range--I told him that I'd like to sell 1.5 of them and he actaully agreed with me and sold some of his own coins as well.  He paid me in cash--I tipped him handsomely for pressuring me to buy--and I still had 0.5 coin left.  Since then--I purchased one more coin at the $7600 range--just because I wanted some exposure and my previous profits left me playing with the house's money.  

Yes--historically you are right when it comes to bitcoins patterns--but that history is what is stopping the masses from really adopting it or taking it seriously.   If you want the price to hit $100k--the masses have to believe that it is worth that risk--and 80-90% price corrections will inhibit that from happening.  Its far better for the long term health of bitcoin to see a moderate but sustained increase in value with far more palletable price corrections.   If bitcoin were to hit $100k in 2 years--the profit taking that would result would inherently result in pretty massive price swings and corrections.   This is why I think that kind of price growth in 2 years would actually be detrimental to the long term adoption of bitcoin by the masses. 
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There is over $80 Trillion worth of money in the world in the various currencies.  Bitcoin currently respresents about $40 Billion.  So bitcoin could in a crazy theory grow about 2000 times it's current valuation if it by some miracle became the sole world's currency, which means about 1 Bitcoin would be worth about $20 million.  There are a ton of forces which will prevent that from ever happening.  There will be banks fighting it tooth and nail to protect the credit card fees they feel entitled to.  There are centralized banks which will be scared of losing control of the money supply.  There will be governments afraid to lose their currency who will pile on regulations to thrawt bitcoin growth.  There will be other coins fighting for market share.  But the growth potential is through the roof.  I really don't believe that going to $100K in the next few years is unhealthy under the right circumstances.  It is actually neccessary if a significant growth in bitcoin usuage occurs.  Now if the price growth is mostly speculation and not based on real adaptive uses, then yeah a series of negative stories could cause such a rise to tumble again.  

 
culdeus said:
Well the discussion has shifted away from there being a use case for crypto to being an investment like Gold.  Progress?
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My reason to never believe the price, even now, was more of a pump and dump which was easy to manipulate with no oversight/regulations. Nothing stopping people with early loads of Bitcoin to trade amongst themselves and almost set their exit price.

If it’s an investment there’s no real value behind it. If it’s being used, the profit is like Visa. I just never saw the whole no one uses it but it will have the market cap of USDs. Just kind of insane. 

 
stbugs said:
My reason to never believe the price, even now, was more of a pump and dump which was easy to manipulate with no oversight/regulations. Nothing stopping people with early loads of Bitcoin to trade amongst themselves and almost set their exit price.

If it’s an investment there’s no real value behind it. If it’s being used, the profit is like Visa. I just never saw the whole no one uses it but it will have the market cap of USDs. Just kind of insane. 
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Treating it like gold makes sense,  treating it like Visa makes no sense.  

It's just a really ####ty gold.  

 
culdeus said:
Treating it like gold makes sense,  treating it like Visa makes no sense.  

It's just a really ####ty gold.  
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I meant that the goal of bitcoin in the beginning was like Visa, where you’d use bitcoin to buy and sell things and it was more of a middle man. I start in USD, get bitcoin, buy something from France with bitcoin and seller ends in Euros. We save a ton on transaction fees (ideal world).

No different than Apple Pay, credit cards and all these cash apps. I think those have all blown by bitcoin so now it’s turned into gold but there’s really no real physical material behind it, you can’t make jewelry or input jack plating with bitcoin.

It wouldn’t shock me to see bitcoin just slowly trend to $0 and disappear. 

 
stbugs said:
I meant that the goal of bitcoin in the beginning was like Visa, where you’d use bitcoin to buy and sell things and it was more of a middle man. I start in USD, get bitcoin, buy something from France with bitcoin and seller ends in Euros. We save a ton on transaction fees (ideal world).

No different than Apple Pay, credit cards and all these cash apps. I think those have all blown by bitcoin so now it’s turned into gold but there’s really no real physical material behind it, you can’t make jewelry or input jack plating with bitcoin.

It wouldn’t shock me to see bitcoin just slowly trend to $0 and disappear. 
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It's value at some point is the amount of cost it takes to run the miner rigs.  The argument is that it is an integral of this, however I would say it's a single point interval value and will trend towards 0 as well.  Unlike gold there is no use case for this that actually consumes the BTC except in a situation where someone loses their keys or dies without telling anyone how to get them.  

 
culdeus said:
It's value at some point is the amount of cost it takes to run the miner rigs.  The argument is that it is an integral of this, however I would say it's a single point interval value and will trend towards 0 as well.  Unlike gold there is no use case for this that actually consumes the BTC except in a situation where someone loses their keys or dies without telling anyone how to get them.  
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Agree completely. I think they missed their chance (problem with no leadership/driver) to be widely used and adopted. There are so many ways to send and store money with your phone that have companies and marketing behind them that I see no good end game for bitcoin. 

 
stbugs said:
Agree completely. I think they missed their chance (problem with no leadership/driver) to be widely used and adopted. There are so many ways to send and store money with your phone that have companies and marketing behind them that I see no good end game for bitcoin. 
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The endgame is a very cheap to operate mining with nearly no/low cost, that people can use to transact currency across fiat boundaries quickly that has little chance to appreciate more than global inflation.   But greed is powerful

 
Juxtatarot said:
It's closer to tulip bulbs and Beanie Babies than gold, in my opinion.
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Not really. Digital money has been around for nearly 40 years. This is the next phase and “we” the masses can get in on this new gold. Miss out and be poor in the future. Doesn’t matter to me. 

 
Rhythmdoctor said:
Not really. Digital money has been around for nearly 40 years. This is the next phase and “we” the masses can get in on this new gold. Miss out and be poor in the future. Doesn’t matter to me. 
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Am I poor because I didn't get dollars in 1700?  I knew there had to be a reason.  

 
Walking Boot said:
The problem is that it was pitched/marketed/sold as "bitcoin can be like Visa", but, the blockchain is too flawed to ever deliver on that potential. The maximum the network can handle is 6 transactions per second. Visa does over 1500 per second. 

Plus Visa doesn't take 10% of your money when you get your card, another 10% when you use it, and another 10% when you pay your bill. Bitcoins decay every time you use them, which makes them a terrible store of value. In that case, even worse than gold... no pawn shop takes 10% of your gold bar just to weigh it. 
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what does this mean?

 
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Walking Boot said:
You take a ~10% hair cut when you convert cash to bitcoin, another ~10% when you use the bitcoins, etc. Any time they move you lose money, every transaction is lost value.
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No you don't.

Where are you getting this stuff? 

Yes, there are network fees (goes to pay the miners). No, they are not 10%.

 
The network computing power (hashrate) is over 110,000,000  tera hashes per second (trillions of hashes per second).

About 320K transactions a day are flowing through it. 

The network might not be worth trillions at this point, but it's certainly worth something. Kinda neat how the market has kept deciding what it's worth over the past 10 years.

 
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Rhythmdoctor said:
Not really. Digital money has been around for nearly 40 years. This is the next phase and “we” the masses can get in on this new gold. Miss out and be poor in the future. Doesn’t matter to me. 
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What are the limitations on the number of different digital currencies that could exist at some time in the distant future?

 
Juxtatarot said:
OK.  That's one big reason I don't agree with the comparison with gold.  There is a finite amount of gold in the world.  Even if you broaden that to all precious metals, there is still a finite amount.
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But that's kind of like looking at all commodities combined. Just like silver isn't gold and oil isn't corn, not every ####coin is created equal.

There's a finite amount of BTC. Just like gold, there is a "stock to flow" ratio. Of course, you could also copy BTC and create a new coin. But it would not have the value because it would not have many of the unique attributes of the original, like its genesis, its network, its longevity, its governance, etc. In effect, you'd end up with imitation gold. 

 
At the end of the day, the thing has been kicking around for 10+ years.

It has a value which is constantly being evaluated and derived by the marketplace. 

No one should sink their life savings into it. It's a very speculative asset class. That said, getting off zero should make sense to most. And given the entities and intellect being draw in by its gravity, I feel good about betting that it will continue to succeed in the short term, at least as a speculative store of value. 

God knows, I have made worse bets.

 
Juxtatarot said:
What are the limitations on the number of different digital currencies that could exist at some time in the distant future?
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There could be thousands but you were comparing btc to the tulip boom which isn’t a good comparison.  To your point, however, fed coin xould be the future or any number of digital currencies. 

 
Walking Boot said:
The problem is that it was pitched/marketed/sold as "bitcoin can be like Visa", but, the blockchain is too flawed to ever deliver on that potential. The maximum the network can handle is 6 transactions per second. Visa does over 1500 per second. 

Plus Visa doesn't take 10% of your money when you get your card, another 10% when you use it, and another 10% when you pay your bill. Bitcoins decay every time you use them, which makes them a terrible store of value. In that case, even worse than gold... no pawn shop takes 10% of your gold bar just to weigh it. 
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Lol. That would be funny. Especially if you say, this looks less than what I gave you. Hold, we’ll weigh it again for you and so on.

Problem now is that there’s already a bunch of new “cash” apps that compete with Visa so bitcoin is just sitting around watching all that.

 
JerseyToughGuys said:
But that's kind of like looking at all commodities combined. Just like silver isn't gold and oil isn't corn, not every ####coin is created equal.

There's a finite amount of BTC. Just like gold, there is a "stock to flow" ratio. Of course, you could also copy BTC and create a new coin. But it would not have the value because it would not have many of the unique attributes of the original, like its genesis, its network, its longevity, its governance, etc. In effect, you'd end up with imitation gold. 
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OK, but if you have gold, you have a shiny metal you can make stuff out of. Silver too. There are also practical uses of corn and oil and every other commodity.  That's not the same as a flopped digital currency.

 
Walking Boot said:
I'm rounding, but there are fees on both ends in and out. If you had a $20 bill in your wallet, and you wanted to send it to me, you'd load the $20 into a btc wallet, losing about 5-8% on the transaction depending on the method you use (ACH, Bitcoin ATM, etc). Then you'd transfer it to my wallet and lose maybe another 5%, then I'd want to cash it out and lose the 5-8% again in that transaction. I'd end up with maybe $16.

No one accepts those kind of fees when using credit cards, usually, people get 1-2% cash back from Visa.
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you are way way way off on these fees my friend. Like, not even close. 

The fees were briefly crazy when people were competing for block space and fast confirmations. But even back then you could have paid the minimum and waited it out.

 
stbugs said:
Lol. That would be funny. Especially if you say, this looks less than what I gave you. Hold, we’ll weigh it again for you and so on.

Problem now is that there’s already a bunch of new “cash” apps that compete with Visa so bitcoin is just sitting around watching all that.
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Incidentally, the Cash App has BTC.

 
Juxtatarot said:
OK, but if you have gold, you have a shiny metal you can make stuff out of. Silver too. There are also practical uses of corn and oil and every other commodity.  That's not the same as a flopped digital currency.
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That's intrinsic value. Gold and silver and other commodities have it.

The BTC network has intrinsic value, but it's certainly not tangible like gold. That's absolutely true. 

 
Walking Boot said:
Those aren't the only fees, dude.

How much does a bitcoin ATM charge? How much does an ACH to coinbase take out? There are fees just to buy in and fees to cash out, plus fees to transfer. That's three bites of the apple at least.
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:lmao:

a bitcoin ATM? wtf

Here's an example transaction from Coinbase:

$1000 worth of BTC

$14.69 fee

That's the entire fee. 

 
Walking Boot said:
Those aren't the only fees, dude.

How much does a bitcoin ATM charge? How much does an ACH to coinbase take out? There are fees just to buy in and fees to cash out, plus fees to transfer. That's three bites of the apple at least.
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careful boot, he's not just a tough guy but a Jersey tough guy.

JTG> HI :hifive:   I'm getting my ### kicked with BTC lately but I'm holding on

 
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Walking Boot said:
You're saying that if I have $200 in my checking account, and decide I want that in bitcoin, and ACH it in to my account, I'm going to have exactly $200 worth of bitcoin in my wallet and that Coinbase isn't going to take a fee for the conversion? That's an outright lie.
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No. where did I say that? I have literally linked to both the miner fees and the coinbase fees now.

Can you point me to 10% fees?

 
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