Who owns cryptocurrency?

I wish i had mined bitcoins when you could still do it with a graphics card lol. I would have sold as soon as it hit like 8grand though, that shit is volatile as hell. Oh well

Nah I'm just making a joke when Jeff himself jokingly said Litecoin is the true Bitcoin or something like that

I have some ETH that I mined back when it was worth about $4. Not a lot mind you, but considering it's basically free money (I had free electricity at the time) I'm just going to hold onto it until it's either worth an absurd amount like Bitcoin, or it crashes and burns.

A lot of cryptocurrencies aren't trying to replace fiat money and are instead just tokens to use with their product; Ethereum for example is much more ogled for its cutting edge technology. MasterCard and Microsoft are getting their feet wet with it already. Although, you can indeed use Ethereum as a currency and I have a debit card that supports it.

It's a bit of a misconception that cryptocurrency is all about replacing fiat.

Bitcoin is worth whatever the exchanges have it priced at, at any time you can take your Bitcoin and cash them back out into your bank account as USD/EUR/GBP/Whatever.

Any comments regarding crime and cryptocurrency don't make a lot of sense to me, before cryptocurrency 100% of drugs were bought with cash, now only 99% are. What does it really matter? I agree Bitcoin was considered way sketchier a few years ago than it is now.

Ethereum is often speculated to overtake Bitcoin but whether that will happen or not remains to be seen. There's far more partnerships and businesses heading in Ethereum's direction and none of the sketchiness. Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum isn't slow and has more use cases than just being a currency... which Bitcoin isn't even good at being, it's too slow and has dire fees.

I wish Bitcoin was harmless idiocy people wasted their money on but the amount of pollution that stupid thing causes makes me actively pray for it to completely collapse and go away. I don't know about the environmental impact of other cryptocurrencies but I hope it is minimal at best.

Put $500 into various altcoins last week, up about 120% right now.

@bartok: A lot of cryptocurrencies are moving to staking, which means no more mining wasting electricity. Ethereum will change to this next year.

Bitcoin mining is a lot more environmentally friendly than gold mining, not really an apple to apples comparison though.

I've been mining ETH since june when my gaming pc isnt doing anything anyway when i leave it 24/7 and currently have 1.5 ETH. Mining ETN now though since the difficulty spike for ETH sucks for my R9 390 and im not buying a GPU at current prices.

"Can any of us really own cryptocurrency, man? It's all just ones and zeroes. Capitalism is a sham!" I shout as I'm carried away in handcuffs from a mountain of GeForce 1060s.

I put $10 into bitcoin earlier this year as an experiment. Now it's worth like $40. Neat to watch it all fluctuate, but it's a such a volatile thing that I feel like it would be foolish to pour any significant percentage of my money into. I'll probably buy a bit more soon, bummed I missed the 11k dip.

It's really not that different from gold, actually. If I offered to sell you 1 oz. gold in exchange for US dollars, how would you decide what a fair price is?

The correct answer is "dorks."

I invested quite a bit at the beginning of the year and have since made 20x or something and sold about half of it. I am extremely happy with what I have made, but just remember your gains are unrealized until you sell. Don't be afraid to cash out, the market is extremely volatile and I suspect the real crash is not too far into the future.

I mined a bit of Dogecoin and Vertcoin a couple of years ago, but never actually to the jump into investing some money into it. Was way to complicated and took to many steps to be able to get some from a none sketchy looking place.

Did you keep that Vertcoin? It went up in value a lot

Nope. In a moment of weakness I almost bought into the hype and decided to buy a couple thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin, but decided it'd be smarter to just dump that money into other investments. I'm glad some of you guys are able to make good returns, but just be careful with investing in cryto.

I had like 10 bitcoins from back when this thing just got started, and it was easier to mine. The wallet is lost forever though, I forgot about this nonsense and have no real clue as to how to recover it.

I just invested into Rocket Pool, which should hopefully be a huge success when Casper/Staking come into play.

Put 100e into Bitcoin, when it got to 220e I cashed 100 out into Steam credit (which you can't do anymore). The rest I'll let it ride up and down and eventually cash it out. No interest in heavy investments at all - that ship has sailed.

Has anyone sold any bitcoins back for cash yet? Not other forms of credit, specifically cash. I don’t mean in the entire world, I mean anyone in this thread with personal experience.

Yeah I have, it takes less than 5 minutes for me to sell to USD and transfer it to my bank, depending on what site you use (I used Coinbase). I made some money on a 'sell the news' trade, bought back in during a dip and took the profits back to my bank account.

So someone explain this to me. What is the actual process of converting a crypto currency into actual government backed fiat currency, and vice versa?

You need to have someone at the other end that has the money, willing to buy your bitcoin.

So for sums of money that are quite large. There's barely anyone that can afford it.

That's not true and you can buy as little or as much Bitcoin as desired, e.g. someone can buy 0.001 Bitcoin if they want to, or a full fat 1 Bitcoin.

I'm not really sure what your post means. People buy and sell billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin every day.

Try selling $5 million worth of bit coin.

Or tell me someone who's got that much invested.

I would assume it's just like the stock market where you don't have to find a singular buyer to buy all your shares. The market is your buyer.

Very interesting information in this thread. For me, buying bitcoin still falls under the idea that I can’t tell if you are crazy for doing it or crazy for not doing it.

the mall near my place has a bitcoin atm though I don't know if that's what you meant.

I have no idea how any of it works but my partner has some... I don't know, some other kind. I wish they'd have better names. Why have none of them just called themselves credits??? goddamn stop wasting the opportunity

I own some Eth. I'd like to own more but it's too expensive now... so looking for another coin. Thinking about LTC or Ripple. Any suggestions?

Let’s say I want to jump on the cryptocurrency train, short term. Which currencies should I look at?

So has anyone here actually bought something with a crypto currency or has your crypto investment been about speculation and eventual exchange for money that people actually accept? Because the number of legitimate businesses that accept random cryptocurrencies seems really limited.

A lot of cryptocurrencies aren't for use as payment (though could technically be used as one). You can use BTC in a surprising amount of places online, especially for buying mining hardware - but it's just not a good currency due to fees and delays.

Also, HOLY FUCKING SHIT YOU GUYS. Ethereum is over $1200.

Ethereum, OmiseGo, Ripple

imo

@darlingdixie: Okay, so it's basically just a commodity you're trading with no regulation around it rather than an actual currency that you spend. Enjoy the free money while the getting is good I guess.

I used to use bitcoin before the transaction costs went insane.

I moved from europe to south america a few years ago, and travel to the USA a few times per year for work. This has meant that the recent consoles I've bought since moving were US versions (wii u, xbox one), and I've been using the USA eshop and xbox marketplace on them. However, I don't have a USA credit card. One of the workarounds available for Xbox used to be that you could go to account.microsoft.com and use Bitcoin to add a specified amount to your balance, and then use that to buy games in the xbox marketplace. However, since the transactions costs have gone up so much, I haven't been able to do that since November (and it looks like Microsoft just turned it off entirely today).

Anyway, I also realized the Xbox One and Nintendo Switch marketplaces are not as annoying with regions as their predecessors. It looks like with both of them I can just buy games from the dutch eshop/marketplace with my dutch credit card with the same account I use for USA purchased digital codes or points cards. It *seems* a single account can have games attached to it from multiple regions, though I haven't tested that too thoroughly yet.

Cryptocurrencies are basically just stocks, with more volatility because it's so early on in this space.

There are a lot of people who do want to see this stuff succeed as a currency, but as for me I am putting money in places I see being useful or having value in the future for more than just "screw the banks".

I don't believe in Bitcoin at all, the tech is slow and the manipulation miners (the big groups) can pull with the price defeats the point of it being decentralised to a large extent. The infighting surrounding the future of Bitcoin is also disheartening, it's already split 2 times now with Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Cash with more on the way no doubt.

Well, no. There's a certain amount of volatility based on market speculation in equities, but ultimately the stocks you're buying are backed by companies with actual assets and profits. Cryptocurrencies are straight-up gambling.

Simply false and reductive. Gambling is lose or win, with cryptocurrency you might lose some money only to have it surge back up.

Sure, if you buy random coins with people of questionable stature behind them you're taking a big risk. Otherwise, not so much. Ethereum already has Microsoft, MasterCard and a host of others sniffing around them.

It all depends on where you're putting your money in.

Comparing cryptocurrencies to stocks is just as false for the reason I gave. You can compare cryptocurrency "investing" to speculation in fiat currencies if you like, and I won't say that's unfair... but you're kidding yourself if you think you can accurately assess risk at this point. They haven't been around long and and the regulatory environment isn't nearly mature enough to make any such judgements.

I bought some XRP back when it launched around 25 cents a share because my brother told me it’d be worth it. I put $64 into it and it finally went up last month which made me excited. I’m currently at $800 but a week ago, I had $1,050. So I’m annoyed it dropped but I know it’ll go up again before long so I’m looking forward to it. I might put money into something else next week.

I have been in crypto for over a year now and although I'm not an expert in any way I feel that I have some insight in the current state of the market. Don't take anything I'm about to write as investment advice but just my personal opinion.

The first thing you need to understand about crypto currencies is that there are basically two kinds of coins. Firstly there are the Bitcoin-like currencies that aim to be a form of online money. The big selling point here is that you don't need central banks to transfer money. This sounds like a great idea as it could put that economic power into the hands of the individual. The biggest hurdle here is the volatility however. At this point it is almost impossible to use any BTC-like coin as intended. Why would you accept a coin that is worth 200$ one minute and 180$ the next? Bitcoin has started futures trading in an attempt to "tame" this volatility recently but it is too soon to see if this will result in a stable value. I personally think that we will see BTC trade with wild swings around 10k to 20k this year until a equilibrium is found. There will be a sell-off of long term holders causing a lot of downward pressure. If you want to put money in BTC I would not advice a long term hold. Observe the market for a while and buy in low, wait for the upswing and get out. The same goes for other BTC-like coins.

Secondly there are the coins that are used to power blockchain applications such as Ethereum. These coins are meant to create decentralized systems that have a myriad of applications. The basic idea is that the coins are used as an insensitive for the network to act in a trustworthy manner. This can create systems that can be used to secure data, facilitate contracts, audits and many other things that require trust between parties. The value of the token should be in balance with the usage of the system. At this point the value of most coins of this ilk is mainly a result of exuberant speculation however. Still this is the area were block chain technology has the most chance to be adopted by big companies as it can save them huge amounts of money.

Never invest more money then you are willing to loose and stay informed about the coin you are looking to invest in. It is still a wild west out there and there still are opportunities to be had.

You mean penny stocks. Real stock from real companies with real products to sell actually mean something.

The only interest I have is in waiting for the inevitable bubble burst and the bloodbath that occurs afterwards but right now it definitely seems like the grifters are doing a good job talking it up to drag in enough normies to keep it going for a while yet. Maybe it'll go pop in 2019 but who knows?