How do you decide which crypto currency to buy?

Buy the dip!

Doesn’t crypto currency have an awful environmental record in terms of carbon emissions and electronic component waste?

If so, should we be buying any of it?

I’ve been a critic of the ‘beer money brigade’ on here but I get that blockchain, web 3.0 and crypto has a massive future but I’ve been struggling to see investment opportunities. I started looking at investments that I can make inside a SIPP or ISA but the FCA have brought the shutters down on EFTs linked to crypto which leaves very little to go for:
1 a fund based on companies that hold significant bitcoin e.g. Microstrategy
2 Argo Blockchain – good mini series on the company on Youtube, and how they are getting into clean energy for mining and they also have some smart people in the company. But the Khazaks are doing massive mining with cheap electricity using chinese rigs which will hurt Argo.
3 Block aka Square run by Jack Dorsey. Share price is massively down and took another hit recently when apple started talking about taking payments on iphones where you go into a small shop and tap your credit card on the owners iphone so no need for the devices Block are pushing.

It seems a bit like the early days before the dot com bubble burst with companies like aol, yahoo etc that were huge at the time but are now bit players or bought up for buttons.

Any other areas to look at?

There’s also ARK etf run by Cathie Wood who is a massive proponent of Bitcoin, and has various holdings in things associated with crypto. It’s taken an absolute battering recently of course.

Does crypto actually have a massive future?
For the record I am a “beer money” dabbler in Cardano but have recently bought a bit of Etherium with a view to buying NFT’s. For something that is supposed to take over from traditional cash etc there are fees everywhere – buying it, selling it, sending it and finally “wrapping” it or “gas money” so that an actual purchase can be made.
It doesn’t fill me with confidence.

There’s also ARK etf run by Cathie Wood who is a massive proponent of Bitcoin, and has various holdings in things associated with crypto. It’s taken an absolute battering recently of course.

From what I can see you can’t buy these in a SIPP or ISA wrapper?

Doesn’t crypto currency have an awful environmental record in terms of carbon emissions and electronic component waste?

If so, should we be buying any of it?

yeah, didn’t occur to me until it was pointed out (wonder if the people who invented it considered this?) but when you think about it, it makes sense, given how it all works. A quick Google brings up the figure of 1000+ kWh from somewhere I guess fairly sensible/reputable (Fortune) which seems like a lot considering that’s per transaction, whether it’s for a thousand Bitcoin or just a cup of coffee!! I wonder if there’s any way around this (except faster, more energy efficient computer processors) or is it just going to get even worse?!

If you’re only dabbling with beer money then steer clear of Ethereum or any Ethereum based tokens because the fees are just too high to be able to make it worthwhile, you won’t be able to do anything with your tokens, and it will be a shit experience.

For beer money amounts, Osmosis and Keplr are brilliant. Very low fees, high interest, daily rewards, airdrops. Lots of gambly fun 😉

I wonder if there’s any way around this (except faster, more energy efficient computer processors) or is it just going to get even worse?!

This has been done elsewhere, but here’s a quick recap: The two main cryptos (Bitcoin and Ethereum) are ‘Proof of Work’. It’s a long story but basically more power use is considered better (more secure). They are designed in such a way that more efficient CPUs won’t really bring down the energy use.

There is an alternative called ‘Proof of Stake’. This basically removes 90% of the requirement to burn baby robins, and Ethereum has been planning to move to PoS since about 2015. Bitcoin will never move to it, and plenty of other smaller coins use it. It has various issues too, but energy use isn’t one.

The only thing that will dent bitcoin’s energy use is if the value falls below the cost of the electricity used in mining it, and all the miners start to sack it off. Unlikely in the shortterm, as the miners are all trundling round developing countries (and, er, Texas) to find the cheapest electricity they can.

No one is really using bitcoin on the bitcoin network to buy coffee. Fees more than the value of a coffee.

However they are buying coffee on the layer 2 bitcoin lightning network. That’s how El Salvador are doing it.

In this case, think of bitcoin on the bitcoin network as gold and bitcoin on the lighting network as cash (i.e.) gold that you can use day to day to buy coffee.

I know – cash is no longer pegged to gold so can be printed willy nilly by any government- And that is the entrance into the rabbit hole…..

No one is really using bitcoin on the bitcoin network to buy coffee. Fees more than the value of a coffee.

However they are buying coffee on the layer 2 bitcoin lightning network. That’s how El Salvador are doing it.

I could well be wrong, but my understanding of the lightning network is that it just secures a transaction before it can be made on the blockchain? The blockchain is the ledger for the transaction. The lightning network just allows it to happen in a practical time frame.

Does crypto actually have a massive future?

Most probably. Nobody really knows what for yet. It might be nothing to do with money.

For beer money amounts, Osmosis and Keplr are brilliant. Very low fees, high interest, daily rewards, airdrops. Lots of gambly fun 😉

I’ve put some money in to find out a bit more about this. It reminds me of a roulette wheel in the casino which I guess is what you are saying?

So much going on in the crypto world. Ive sacrificed a fair wad of cash on Pulse x. Lets see if Richard Heart can work some magic.

I’ve put some money in to find out a bit more about this. It reminds me of a roulette wheel in the casino which I guess is what you are saying?

No just poking at the people saying crypto is nothing more than gambling. I don’t do gambling other than a lottery ticket here or there.

The fun for me is deciding how to distribute my ~$1 of daily rewards and when the price is down like it is now, imagining how it’s all going to add up across the year. The gambling is the will it or won’t it.

The other night there was something about crypto in a dream and on waking I couldn’t shake the emperors new clothes feeling. HUAHUA on Osmosis has an APY around 400%! It’s literally free money from code! Imagine if all that was required of the code was to take a numeric input, multiply it, and return the result. Nobody would accept that. Where is the line drawn for the digital currency being acceptable? Served to remind me I lack a good conceptual understanding of the whole thing.

Only 400%?

Them’s poxy trad-fi dirty fiat boomer numbers. Might as well stick it in a bank.

Wonderland is currently offering a very tidy 81,475.7% APY. https://app.wonderland.money/#/stake

Stake £1 today, and within about 40 months you’ll be richer than Jeff Bezos.

🚨🚨 DEFINITELY NOT A PONZI 🚨🚨

So how does that work then!?

On a tangent, I bought some eth a few years back and it’s now worth £2k. WTF do I do with it? Buy/sell/hold? I want to be a millionaire before next weekend and I’m happy to risk it all.

It actually is a Ponzi, and in fact it recently collapsed. Nobody* got 80000% and the associated token ($TIME) is down by 97% from recent highs.

It was run by someone who has already been to prison for fraud, and someone closely connected to Tether. The subreddit is now a fairly sad affair of people posting memes about how broke they are now.

It seems like offering hilariously high interest rates is a bit like those phishing emails with all the obvious spelling mistakes – designed to appeal only to the stupid and credulous.

*EDIT – except for the founders, of course, who appear to have cashed out over $50 million before the crash

On a tangent, I bought some eth a few years back and it’s now worth £2k. WTF do I do with it? Buy/sell/hold? I want to be a millionaire before next weekend and I’m happy to risk it all.

IMO, cash it out, buy your partner something nice, and stick the rest in your ISA. Or buy something bike related.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newswww.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-60289028

Or do what this guy has done…. Pretty amazing!

@sharkbait – broken link. Any clues to search?

Both the article and the related video have been deleted by the Beeb – guy claiming he turned £50 into $1000000 in a short space of time. Maybe it was bullsh*t / scammy?

Cached text

It would seem he started his own coin on the promise of giving money to charity, sold loads to randoms, then shut it down and ran off with the money (see this tweet and the following thread).

Which, if true, in many ways makes him an ideal poster boy for the brave new world of crypto

Soooo there's a puff piece on the BBC homepage about a 20-year-old who claims he turned £50 into £5.9m within nine months (a 11,799,900% return!). Also says he set up a crypto coin without mentioning it shut down in October? Many questions! https://t.co/wv70U53zXG

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) February 9, 2022

It would seem he started his own coin on the promise of giving money to charity, sold loads to randoms, then shut it down and ran off with the money

Ergo all crypto currencies are rugpulls…..

Why then draw loads of attention to yourself via the Beeb, which could now leave him/them under scrutiny if they’ve committed fraud etc? Make no sense.

There’s an awful lot of denial that goes along with crypto currency. Maybe he doesn’t feel he has done anything wrong.

here’s the company details: incorporated on 22 April

And here’s the coin price chart: his coin lost 97% of its value on 24 April. Currently trading at $0.00000000497358

Currently trading at $0.00000000497358

Buy in the dip. It can only go up from there 🙂

Why then draw loads of attention to yourself via the Beeb, which could now leave him/them under scrutiny if they’ve committed fraud etc? Make no sense.

You would think! But the crypto sector is a special place, full of very special people.

For instance, just yesterday, the story broke of two people laundering $3.6 BILLION of BTC. They’d had it since 2016.

They spent their time, not quietly living on a luxury yacht in a faraway state, but, er, trying to get as much publicity as possible on tiktok with their crummy rap videos. They had known they were under investigation by the US authorities for some months. He was a Russian national, with a legit Russian passport. They did not flee. Instead they posted some more shite on social media and got arrested. Because they left the keys to their BTC wallet in Dropbox and the FBI cracked the encryption.

This “rapper” with an alias of RAZZLEKHAN aka Heather Morgan was charged today in NYC, with being part of money laundering scheme that involved Billions worth of Bitcoin.

I believe she should have already been in prison for life for whatever this is. pic.twitter.com/CwHVH4kf7y

— Letting Go (@ProvideContext) February 8, 2022

A lad I work with, early 30’s, wife and two kids, had an unconventional start to work which has resulted in him having no pension provision to speak of. So he has gone down the route of Crypto to provide for him in the future, with the intention to “cash-out” at 40. He puts in around £300 a month.

I find it fascinating and bewildering in equal measures. He says he mines etherium, this gives him free money. He also gets 90% interest rates on “AXS”…nope, no idea how that works. On NORD he gets 60% interest.

Is this all just baloney, ponzi, just someone typing numbers on a website. He seems reluctant to cash out now, and is happy to leave it for the six years or so until he wants to cash out. Maybe I’m too much of a luddite, and just don’t want to accept this. He even mentioned spending £130 on some aerial that you stick on your house that then creates a bitcoin network and simply for doing that, you earn money! Good for him if he can retire at 40 but it just seems too volatile/sketchy.

I did nearly buy £50 of etherium through paypal for interest, and a degree of legitimacy, but he said it won’t ever get high enough for me to retire. Haven’t bought it.

He even mentioned spending £130 on some aerial that you stick on your house that then creates a bitcoin network and simply for doing that, you earn money!

Sounds like Helium/HNT, it uses less power than an LED lightbulb and is creating a network for the IOT, fundamentals are about as solid as it gets, boxes are much more than £130 but I’m looking for hosts to “borrow” one of my boxes in exchange for 35% of the profit, free money….

I’m looking in to it. node coverage is just about right by me I could hit 3 maybe 4 other nodes from my place. But the actual location let’s me down for traffic. I need to see how much return the near by ones are getting.
I should have done it last year. Doh.
I dipper into the piggy bank and made quick killing on Shiba not bad for a joke coin.
Xrp is moving nicely too

Oh yeah hodl

He also gets 90% interest rates on “AXS”…nope, no idea how that works

AXS is pretty dodgy IMO. Binance are offering suspiciously high interest rates on it – but there’s a minimum term of 60 days. And in the last 3 months, AXS has fallen in value by nearly 60%. So if you locked up £100 worth 2 months ago, you’d probably have about £70 quid now, even with the interest.

But there’s another way to make money from it. AXS is the token associated with Axie Infinity – a ‘play to earn’ game, popular in poor countries (in particular the Phillipines), where people can make money by playing it. Only thing is, you need to pay real money for the good characters. So if you’re a rich westerner, you can use your AXS to buy the characters, and basically rent them out to a poor person that wouldn’t be able to afford it. Then they play the game and give you a cut of your earnings. It’s kind of like being a landlord I guess. Ultimately it’s still basically a ponzi. You can read more about Axie Infinity here if you want to go into depth – it seems to be collapsing somewhat, which is partly why the value of AXS has crashed so much recently.

What do you think about that?

I think you joined yesterday and are spamming the same shite across different threads.

@doris5000 – I won’t bother reading your hysteria as you can’t differentiate between an actual crypto and <insert whatever bullcrap system here> someone’s built around it.

You’re saying “the dollar is a ponsi scheme” not “the ponsi scheme is a ponsi scheme”.

I can point out lots of scams which use fiat money. For example, since we magiced the euro out of thin air in the 90’s every single scam, every single ponzi, every single fraud that’s run (perfectly freely) through our financial system has been based on the euro.

Do you want to ban the Euro?

You’re saying “the dollar is a ponsi scheme” not “the ponsi scheme is a ponsi scheme”.

Not true.

I said that Wonderland was a Ponzi, Orfano was a pump & dump/ rugpull, and Axie Infinity is dodgy. (And a Ponzi).

If you’d like to explain why you don’t think those statements are correct, be my guest.

For example, since we magiced the euro out of thin air in the 90’s

Except we didn’t. It was based on the FX rates of the participating countries at the time of inception.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/feb/20/credit-suisse-secrets-leak-unmasks-criminals-fraudsters-corrupt-politicians

If you don’t understand why this is hugely relevant, you don’t understand the potential of an openly readable ledger.

Mate has multiple types of antenna on his house. He’s getting £300-400 a month out of them