@curiousyellow, probably best to continue with your long term strategy. The only thing that needs to be regularly revised is your investment allocation, e.g. how much is btc, how much is in eth, how much in alts. That's where learning about the technology will pay off in investment terms, as a lot of coins are going to disappear over the next six months.
I think eth will surpass btc in market value this year.
Just because the Blockchain has a future, doesn't mean any of the current currencies do. I suspect 99% will vanish and one or two might survive in some regulated form, but at grossly diminished values.
Blockchain tech is 10 years old now. Bitcoin has turned out to be badly designed in terms of innovation. Eth now has the bigger developer economy and some apps are gaining traction.
I think btc will hang around as digital gold. Eth will develop smart contracts and replace the need for middle man corporations.
There will be a better version of bitcoin that ultimately wins the race.
And the markets bounce back a bit! Lambos to the moon people!
Wait... is it Tesla Roadsters to Mars now?
There will be a better version of bitcoin that ultimately wins the race
Agreed, I'm just hoping it's Ripple
I've been keeping my eyes on this thread for a while and have decided I'm going to have a dabble in the whole cryptocurrency thing. So I'm going to throw in a couple of hundred quid and see what happens (Well prepared to lose the lot).
I have signed up to Coinbase but haven't purchased anything yet as from what I've read it's actually next to impossible to get any money back out of it to a UK based bank account. So I've also been looking at blockchain.info. For those of you using this is it any easier to actually get any money out of it and back to GBP?
Thanks
You can get money back all ways.
Blockchain.info can come back to debit card no problem. You will have fees.
Cheapest method but most convoluted is:
Bank - revolut (euros) to coinbase then to gdax (coinbase's linked pro trading platform) fees are free then. Reverse to come back.
I have been all the way and it's worth time and effort plus revolut is so flexible and useful irrespective.
For beginners i would recommend blockchain.info - IF they accept your debit card.
Search on you tube for gdax free trading and watch the film.
Ask me any questions ive made all mistakes for everyone already. 🙂
Thanks, I'll have a look at that gdax free trading video later on. What are the actual fees like through Blockchain?
Off the top of my head for debit card they were 3% im sure. A bit less than coinbase.
I transferred from Coinbase to Revolut and then to my bank. Done this for both bitcoin and Ethereum. Bit of a pain to get it all set up but ok once all approved and working.
I transferred from Coinbase to Revolut and then to my bank
Did you buy with coinbase or gdax? Coinbase there is still a fee.
Bought with Coinbase as well. I bought some in November then sold half when they doubled to get my money back and now the plan is to leave them for a few years and see what happens.
Thanks lads. Gav in what way was it a pain getting the payments set up from Coinbase > Revolut > your bank?
And did you sell in Coinbase then transfer from your GBP wallet to Revolut?
It was just a pain researching it all, setting it up and then getting the accounts verified etc. Revolt > my bank was no problem. Like I said once it’s all up and running it’s fine. Also didnt help reading loads of articles about it not working or money going missing and at the time I was trying to get the money out asap but I’ve never had any issues with the few transactions i did.
Anyway I sold in Coinbase (but you have to sell in euros) then transferred to my euro account in Revolut (make sure you set up a euro and sterling account). Then transferred from euro Revolut account to sterling bank.
They make it easier to buy in Coinbase but a lot harder to get your money out!
If you get a Fidor bank account you can transfer to Kraken for a flat fee of £2.50 using a SEPA transfer. Your money shows up on Kraken as Euros.
Transfer back in from Kraken via SEPA to any bank that accepts them. Kraken charge .09 of a Euro for a transfer out in Euro. Your bank then applies whatever the exchange rate is for the money inbound.
verification on Coinbase was a pig, so I gave up after a while.
Thanks, I now feel slightly more confident about being able to get money out once I've put it in, even if it's a bit of a hassle at first 🙂
For sure.
I'd also suggest having a target for what you want the coins you buy to reach. This will keep you disciplined. Know what you want from it, and take profits as you get there. Know what you want your money to do for you.
Also, if you're going to buy and hold instead of actively day trade, then look at taking your coins off the exchange and holding them in an offline wallet. Exchanges get compromised all the time.
At the very minimum have 2FA setup.
Good luck.
You can use Vaults on Coinbase to add extra security for Buy and Hold.
The key is to remember all these Cryptos could be worth zero in a couple of months and trade accordingly, i.e. only put in what you can afford to lose and don't bet the house on it. There is a lot of misplaced anger in the sector - the idea that there is justice in the world, and that Crypto will reform a corrupt monetary system - which gets in the way of making good decisions.
Last time I checked there is no justice in the world and never will be.
I'll be sure to have 2FA verification activated at least. It's just a bit of fun to be honest, I'll throw in £200 and see what happens, If I manage to double my initial input I'll remove what I've put in and then in theory it'll have cost me nothing but my time. I'm not expecting to retire on the proceeds 🙂
Just to be clear to take advantage of no fees you have to buy btc thorough gdax.
There's a kiosk in Moorgate (London) that buys and sells various crypto - bitcoin, ether and some others I think - guy at work sold £50 of bitcoin yesterday there - you get a receipt with a QR on it and then visit the kiosk again when it has confirmed to get the cash - waited about 16 minutes yesterday, Fees were around 10 percent.
Visit a kiosk and pay 10% fees? Wow this crypto really is everything it's cracked up to be 🙂
So when is Bitcoin going to hit $40K?
So, how are all the BC fanatics doing?
I do admire the optimism on the last page from some posters.
I wonder how much everyone lost in the end?
At least the buzz around blockchain is dying down as people realise it is actual hot garbage.
“The disconnect between the hype and the reality is significant -- I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Rajesh Kandaswamy, an analyst at Gartner Inc. “In terms of actual production use, it’s very rare.”
My mates talked about investing in Bitcoin 6 months ago saying “if you do your research it’s fine.”
Funnily enough they don’t talk about it anymore.
saying “if you do your research it’s fine.”
In fairness that was and is an accurate statement.
Bitcoin is causing a lot of heartbreak and suicides due to the speculative nature of it. It is hail mary money, only put in what you are happy to lose. Its best not to get involved at all for most people.
Millenials think it could be the answer to their problems but ultinately it is just a form of high stakes gambling.
A fool and their money are easily parted - or something like that....
There was a fascinating article in the FT a few weeks back analysing the complete BC block chain to see who owned what. Still completely dominated by a small number of whales who can control the price working together (as they own over 60%). The utopian ideal of democratised currency is a complete fallacy.
The Chainalysis data quantifies this distinct shift in the make-up of bitcoin owners from longer-term investors — those who held the asset for more than a year — to short-term investors who have traded more recently, by analysing how regularly coins have changed hands.
Last November — before December’s pricing peak — the amount of bitcoin held for investment was roughly three times that held by traders.
However, by April 2018, the data show the amount held by investors — about 6m bitcoin — was much closer to the amount held by short-term speculators, with 5.1m bitcoin.
Indeed, Chainalysis estimates that longer-term holders sold at least $30bn worth of bitcoin to new speculators over the December to April period, with half of this movement taking place in December alone.
“This was an exceptional transfer of wealth,” says Philip Gradwell, Chainalysis’ chief economist, who dubs the past six months as bitcoin’s “liquidity event”.
Mr Gradwell argues that this sudden injection of liquidity — the amount of bitcoin available for trading rose by close to 60 per cent over that period — has been a “fundamental driver” behind the recent price decline. At the same time, bitcoin trading volumes have now fallen in tandem with the prices, from close to $4bn daily in December to $1bn today.
So will the price of bitcoin ever surpass December’s peak? Part of the answer lies in who holds bitcoin now that the hype has died down.
Born in 2009 in the wake of the financial crisis, bitcoin is rooted in a libertarian quest for a means of exchange that is unshackled from the central banking system. Proponents — among them, computer experts and political activists — heralded the arrival of an alternative monetary system that could replace fiat currency.
But despite the recent crypto boom, there are few signs that this is happening. According to research published this month by Morgan Stanley, only four of the top 500 US e-commerce merchants accepted cryptocurrencies in the first quarter of 2018, compared with three at the beginning of 2017.
Chainalysis notes that the “vast majority” of transactions it analysed showed bitcoin being received from exchanges and rarely sent to merchant services to pay for goods or services.
Only a finite number of coin — 21m — can be created. Of this, about 4m are yet to be mined. Just as physical coins can be lost down the back of a sofa, so can bitcoins if users lose or forget the passwords needed to access their online wallets. The Chainalysis data separates out coins it deems to be lost or unused for years — which total 3.7m bitcoin, worth about $28bn.
The proportion of bitcoin it estimates to be held by groups such as exchanges or merchant services held steady between December and April at about 2.2m bitcoin.
Critics argue that bitcoin’s volatility and a lack of fundamental underpinnings disqualifies it as a reliable store of value, and that this is unlikely to change. This leaves droves of new opportunists dabbling in what has been dubbed a “Wild West” marketplace, with regulators still weighing up how best to tackle the space.
“Speculation remains the primary use case for these digital assets; merchant or institutional adoption does not appear to be a primary driver of price,” says Preston Byrne, an English structured finance lawyer and cryptocurrency observer.
Given this breakdown in bitcoin owners, most market watchers do not rule out another rapid price run-up. However, they say this would likely be the random movement of pure speculation or market manipulation rather than anything else.
“It’s very important to stress, this is not in any sense a rational market,” says David Gerard, the author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain.
“It’s very thinly traded, very badly structured . . . and it’s stupendously manipulated,” he adds. “Anyone who goes in not realising just how manipulated the crypto markets are will get skinned.”
Some argue there is an art to trading bitcoin regardless — but it is a stressful business that takes nerves and can be addictive. Donnie, a.k.a bitcoin Dad, puts his successes down to careful research, “patience” and avoiding the trap of obsessive, leveraged day trading.
But others are unconvinced that bitcoin millionaires actually show investment nous, drawing parallels with gambling.
“It’s the luck of the draw, where everyone who won the draw seems to feel like they deserved it for being smarter,” Vitalik Buterin, the Russian-Canadian programmer who invented the smart-contract blockchain Ethereum, told the Financial Times recently.
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<h2>Whale watching</h2>
The Chainalysis data also show that the bitcoin marketplace is skewed in terms of wealth distribution. A small cluster of investors — known colloquially as “whales” — capture a hefty proportion of the market, which stands at odds with bitcoin’s mission to democratise finance. This brings its own risks.Overall, some 1,600 bitcoin wallets — managed by both speculators and investors — contained at least 1,000 bitcoin each in April, according to Chainalysis, collectively holding nearly 5m bitcoin, or close to a third of the available total.
Of those, just under 100 wallets owned by longer-term investors contained between 10,000 and 100,000 bitcoin — so between $75m and $750m at today’s prices.
“This concentration of wealth means that bitcoin is at risk of volatility, as the moves of a small number of people will have a large effect,” says Chainalysis’ Mr Gradwell.
However, the situation suggests bitcoin’s volatility is “of low risk to the wider financial system”, he adds, as “only a small number of people will face large changes in crypto wealth”.
Still, there are opportunities particularly for the larger players to engage in market manipulation, due to the dearth of regulation and existence of informal over-the-counter markets — and this leaves smaller players at a disadvantage.
“When you build up a big enough position in any asset you can move the price,” says Dr Garrick Hileman, head of research at Blockchain and co-founder of Mosaic.io, a platform for market intelligence on crypto. “A number of these larger holders do communicate with each other, they know [each other], they take stock of market activity.”
Analysts at Morgan Stanley echoed this concern in a note this month, saying that it was “noteworthy” that the more sophisticated investors were “willing to give up traditional investor rights for potentially faster liquidity”.
Nevertheless, some point out that the excitement and influx of fresh funds into the market has allowed its infrastructure to mature — albeit gradually — which could be a boon for those looking to trade bitcoin more safely in future.
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<h2>Trading places</h2>
Buying and selling bitcoin had traditionally been challenging for all but the most tech-savvy. As last year’s cryptocurrency frenzy heated up however, some consumer finance businesses rushed to capitalise on the zeitgeist and offer their customers access to digital coins through apps they were already familiar with using.Many exchanges have strengthened their due diligence processes in response to customer concerns and invested in bigger customer services teams. Transaction fees have come down as technology has improved — but hacks are still commonplace.
Institutions have also been making inroads. These include prominent US futures exchanges, such as the CME Group and Cboe Global Markets, which now offer bitcoin futures. Meanwhile, Nasdaq’s chief executive, Adena Friedman, said this year that the group would consider offering cryptocurrency exchange services in future.
Alternative funds are also muscling in. Morgan Stanley data show there is now more than $3.5bn in estimated assets under management across 250 dedicated crypto-funds, although the pace of the creation of new funds has slowed recently.
A more formalised over-the-counter market has started to develop, with players such as Cumberland, an arm of Chicago-based DRW, and Goldman Sachs-backed Circle growing rapidly.
Much of the future of bitcoin trading will depend on the approach that regulators take, experts say. There are stirrings across the world, though to date, little coherence. Asian financial centres such as Tokyo are now regulating crypto exchanges, while China has banned them outright. Meanwhile, the US Securities and Exchange Commission last month announced a criminal probe into potential bitcoin price manipulation.
Banks in particular have been reticent to engage with cryptocurrencies and the companies that handle them, partly due to the difficulty of conducting anti-money laundering checks on transactions.
“Bank compliance officers really, really hate cryptos . . . be prepared to demonstrate the provenance of every penny from every crypto,” says Mr Gerard.
Mr Hileman predicts that one day there will be a “legitimate regulated retail investment market” in bitcoin, although not anytime soon. “We’re talking years,” he predicts.
Any more widespread adoption of bitcoin would need regulators, central banks and tax regulators to allow the transfer of wealth movement from the current financial system into the new one, says Gavin Brown, senior lecturer in financial economics at Manchester Metropolitan University and director of cryptocurrency hedge fund Blockchain Capital.
Nevertheless, there are those who still hold unwavering faith in bitcoin.
Sunnie, who has been investing in bitcoin since she started working for a crypto exchange back in 2014, did not cash out in December, burnt by a previous experience in 2016 when she sold thinking the price was high.
With 50 per cent of her assets currently in 10 bitcoin — bought initially at $3,000 a piece — she believes in its potential as the first project that uses burgeoning blockchain technology.
“If bitcoin can survive under such a high rollercoaster period, I have faith in it,” she adds. “When I reach six figures I’m probably going to cash out what I have and completely retire. The price will go to the moon again — maybe higher.”
In fairness that was and is an accurate statement.
Really, can I have a go on your crystal ball please.
I'm still in. Don't mind talking about the losses.
I don't think it's over at all. If it was it would be way way down now.
Who knows.
You have to be able to deal with it
It's not down because the exchanges manipulate the price.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mystery-behind-tether-the-crypto-worlds-digital-dollar-1534089601
I hope it tanks into oblivion and we never hear from it again. Nothing personal, I just don't understand what the hell all this is and I'm hoping I never need to learn.
somafunk
Aye, she's a right piece of work. If you see her name attached to something, run a mile.
Crypto-currency won't die but it's good the hype around it is dying away, it was a crazy bubble that was always going to burst so only a muppet would invest life savings etc. I'm sure it will rise again, possibly not just as fast (unless everyone forgets in 5 years or convinces themselves this time it will be different...). The ICOs and sheer number to different crypto-currencies that emerged didn't help either. I'm sure there will still be a need for a block-chain based non-government controlled currency in the future though but lack of regulation is also it's Achilles heel.
It’s an interesting concept for sure, and has proven itself to be a minimal player in the wider Currency trade sector.
Its constraints are limited to those who own the most and those that accept it as a viable payment receipt system.
As is I know of three friends who are all in for £30k plus and are looking to continue to invest, but my mates are traders so will wait for some more volidity before buying more.
Thier motivation, as with any new scheme, is to make money. They’re experienced traders who understand Risk, one hopes to use it as a University funding model for his daughter... the other two will probably buy a car or two with it if they all manage to capitalise at the right time.
An experienced trader who understands risk with his daughter's university fund in cryptocurrency. That's certainly different.
A colleague waxed lyrical about it. Told me I was wrong about every opposing arguement I gave.
He lost $40k of his own cash plus all his "earnings" on paper he was mortgage free if the daft gype hadn't got greedy. We all told him to cash out before bubble burst - he said it was only a blip and it was going to rise to the sky and he wanted to be a millionaire .
Right from the start we had pointed out tthat history generally says quick gains are quickly lost and sure as shit history repeated it's self
Last new year was a bit shit as I was stuck in Angola with a lad who was damn near suicidal at his loss.
Really, can I have a go on your crystal ball please.
You don't need a crystal ball to see through all the BS.
Read the FT article above; with such a skewed holding it's always going to be speculative instrument rather than a currency of any merit. The data has always been there for anyone to look at, just no one did as the fools were too busy jumping on the bandwagon to ask where was it heading before hand....
Blockchain will end up being used in various places, but the BC currencies will all disappear into obscurity over the next few years.
I suspect it will go the way of all those .com internet businesses.
I believe in Bitcoin! I am doing it. I'll keep you posted!
(Last time I decided not to take a risk is when Steve Jobs rejoined Apple. I had 5 grand saved, and decided to keep it for a house deposit instead of stocking up on Apple.)
I saw an interview with Bill Gates (not that I respect him...) and he reckon crypto ccys had an exciting application in aid payments - aid could be paid directly to those organisation that need it rather than being filtered through 'corrupt' governments.