Personal computing discussed
Moderators: askfranklin, renee, emkubed, Captain Ned
Glorious wrote:Bensam123 wrote:Bad place to ask about cryptocurrencies, pretty much anyone here will offer a 'anti-monopoly money' point of view with almost no idea of what they're talking about.
I absolutely know what I'm talking about.Bensam123 wrote:As far as altcoins being a good investment, there are a lot of possible 'good' investments, but that can sometimes be extremely random as even very promising coins can crash and burn.
Go gamble, because then, if you win against slight improbability, they're legally obligated to pay you.
Whereas you can make a "killing" in the crypto-space and still lose everything because the exchange you orchestrated your complicated trading scenario upon got "hacked", steals your money, disappears, announces bankruptcy, or no longer allows you to withdraw any USD from.
All the above happens multiple times a year, and that's independent of any number of user errors that can send you into penury: your hard-drive crashes, you lose your paper wallet, you fat finger the wrong address, download a wallet within a window in which it relied upon a bogus RNG, forget your password, get hacked yourself, etc...
People suffer major loses because of situations like that on a weekly basis.Bensam123 wrote:Yes, Ethereum is one of the biggest altcoins, there are a few other major ones. And yes they have very high impact markets. Ethereum had 482m in volume yesterday for instance. Here is the best place to locate rising and or big coins. Sort by volume: http://coinmarketcap.com/
Those volume numbers are highly dubious.Bensam123 wrote:Also if you want to learn about cryptos visit Bitcointalk, that is where the majority of any sort of meaningful discussion happens.
I read it all the time, and you must be joking.Bensam123 wrote:You'll have to read up on each coin to figure out whether or not they're worth your money. They'll eat your money if you aren't careful.
If anyone here thinks anything I say carries any weight then heed this above all else: Do not invest in crypto-currencies.
w76 wrote:I've been waiting for the hammer to fall on the investment side. Assets this risky typically require accredited investors, ie., net worth over 1 million or joint income over 300k. Certain forms of P2P lending require that, for example. A lot of brokerages won't allow clients to trade penny stocks, which are comparable in risk, even though it's legal. I still don't think FINRA/SEC/CFPB understands the risk to investors, or haven't had the time to devote to a strategy to tackle it.
NovusBogus wrote:there's not much functional difference between a college kid getting a few Mexican pesos at an airport exchange kiosk and George Soros getting a while lot of Mexican pesos directly on the spot market. Maybe George just wants to have one heck of a spring break party in Cabo.
Bensam123 wrote:Yeah you have no idea what you're talking about.
Bensam123 wrote:You can visit any of the larger exchanges and realize cryptos are legitimate.
Bensam123 wrote:You're quoting failed exchanges like Mt Gox and Cryptsy.
Bensam123 wrote:There are plenty of legitimate ways to get your money out of the 'system'. Bitstamp is popular for euros, I use Coinbase and make regular withdrawls.
Bensam123 wrote:And no, Mt Gox and Cryptsy don't happen 'multiple times a year'. Once again you have no idea what you're talking about.
Bensam123 wrote:You definitely don't regularly read bitcointalk.
Bensam123 wrote:You strike me as someone who read a article or two on cnn and forbes and is talking as if they participate in the community. You don't even think you can get money out of the system, although that wasn't directed exclusively at you.
Bensam123 wrote:BTC is probably the safest option for investment, but as I mentioned it's very easy to lose your money (as well as make money).
NovusBogus wrote:Plus they really wanted my real ID or a bank account, neither of which I particularly trust an exchange with. Little voyeurs would probably complain if the IP address matches a Tor exit node, too. Where's the fun in all that?
Captain Ned wrote:NovusBogus wrote:Plus they really wanted my real ID or a bank account, neither of which I particularly trust an exchange with. Little voyeurs would probably complain if the IP address matches a Tor exit node, too. Where's the fun in all that?
That's what us regulators required from exchanges in return for not forcing them out of the US.
DPete27 wrote:I wanna try this but I don't know where to start. Is Ethereum the best bet right now?
Captain Ned wrote:DPete27 wrote:I wanna try this but I don't know where to start. Is Ethereum the best bet right now?
Well, it looks like the adjustment to the BitCoin complexity measure has further driven BTC mining to the massive warehouses of ASICs in China getting state-provided power (when I did a presentation on BTC in May 2016 at FRB-Chicago the best stats I could find were from late 2015 and even then, before the complexity shift, the network consumed somewhere between 175MW and 300MW steady-state draw, meaning that even the best ASICs couldn't mine profitably at US electricity prices). I predicted a price rise when the mining rate went down, but never expected anything like this.
I don't know enough about Etherium, but it looks like they've tweaked their algo to let vid cards back in the business for a while. Not sure what/where you can spend/exchange Etherium, so caveat emptor.
Also, always keep an eye on this: https://coinmarketcap.com/
Captain Ned wrote:DPete27 wrote:I don't know enough about Etherium, but it looks like they've tweaked their algo to let vid cards back in the business for a while. Not sure what/where you can spend/exchange Etherium, so caveat emptor.I wanna try this but I don't know where to start. Is Ethereum the best bet right now?
Also, always keep an eye on this: https://coinmarketcap.com/
NovusBogus wrote:Pretty much all of the altcoins switched to very memory-heavy hashing algorithms to keep those ASIC farms in check.
Hawkwing74 wrote:My coworker is "up" on paper with Ethereum and BTC about $38k. I would sell, but I would have sold long back anyway.
I think he's likely to get burned sometime but he isn't going to take advice from me.
whm1974 wrote:I would at least cash some of it out every so often to avoid getting burned, or at least buy legal goods that I can use anyway.
Hawkwing74 wrote:He cashed out 1/3 of his original investment. As people said above, I agree he should cash out the other 2/3 of the original. But he is more of a gambler.
Captain Ned wrote:
Captain Ned wrote:I hope he paid his capital gains taxes.
DPete27 wrote:Captain Ned wrote:I hope he paid his capital gains taxes.
How many TR Gerbils claim their unpaid sales taxes from newegg purchases?
Captain Ned wrote:I hope he paid his capital gains taxes.
Glorious wrote:Captain Ned wrote:I hope he paid his capital gains taxes.
I read a Tax Notes article that cited this affadavit from an IRS agent in the Coinbase Summons Case in which the IRS said that, in 2015, only *802* individuals filed a 8949 mentioning bitcoin in 2015.
The article (which I believe was from either January or February this year) further alludes, albeit briefly, to previous IRS enforcement efforts in other circumstances, like Switzerland ~8-10 years ago.
Captain Ned knows, but that was when US tax enforcement went to war with the concept of private/secret Swiss banking and wink-nod tax evasion, and boy, did we ever take home some scalps. We completely reversed Swiss laws & customs and even annihilated a world-famous centuries-old bank (Wegelin) just to make the lesson clear.
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I won't allude: The IRS is indeed at war with these exchanges. The US is why bitfinex hasn't been able to move a dollar for nearly 3 months now, and that's just our direct involvement: We clearly started indirectly pressuring China mid-late last year for them to put their indisputably mainland chinese exchanges on notice. And this is just the beginning.
Why? Because these clowns DON'T pay their taxes, and while slow, the US government is inexorable. Sure, blah blah blah BLOCKCHAIN, but while no one is even pretending to seriously advocate bitcoin acceptance anymore, the exchanges remain the obvious problem that I have been pointing out since the beginning.
So, if we could beat Switzerland into submission, an unconquered country fighting for its hundreds of years of tradition, gee. How do you feel about the chances of a bunch of shady exchanges that constantly collapse, get hacked, rob their customers, and suffer mysterious spikes of "DDoS" whenever the BTC price plummets 500-700 USD in day (like, ha, yesterday when btc-e and coinbase had numerous publicly acknowledged "problems" when the price went from ~3000 to ~2400)?
whm1974 wrote:I have heard that the IRS gets really nasty toward US citizens who don't pay capital gains taxes and treats those cheaters far worse then those who cheat on income taxes.