Anyone else into Crypto currencies?

[S-Westerly]

I once googled bitcoin just to see what the hell it was about. Still haven't a clue and now my email is filled with bitcoin spammers.

[Steve_M]

Just now, S-Westerly said:

I once googled bitcoin just to see what the hell it was about. Still haven't a clue and now my email is filled with bitcoin spammers.

Nor me. It all seems a bit of a gamble… and I gave up gambling after a bad experience 50yrs ago. 

[PaulCa]

13 hours ago, Steve_M said:

Nor me. It all seems a bit of a gamble… and I gave up gambling after a bad experience 50yrs ago. 

 

Oh, make no doubt, Crypto is pure faith / hype.  They talk about "FIAT" currencies like they are evil, but fail to understand that crypto is more fiat than anything, depending on how you look at it.  They say move your money to crypto because your gubberment can devalue your money by printing more.  I'd roll that one around your mouth while watching the 5m interval candle stick chart for BTC.  The currency is up and down faster than a premier Paris hooker's knickers.

 

It's 100% speculation, gambling and 0% investing.  Yet they continue to call it "investing".  They aren't "investing" in anything, except the next bubble and when to buy in or get out.

 

True crypto does have purposes in a movement to free money from the hands of the states and their main banks, but not only does that come at similar risk to using cash, it's unregulated and mostly unsupervised, so scams are common, but a large percentage of people cannot handle gambling/risk/speculation without getting over excited, over comitted and losing a lot of their money.

This guy rips into the new crypto unicorn, Subhi Inu or some crap.

 

[Tiggie]

My boss lost 3 grand and his daughter lost 1000 investing in a "guaranteed" next big thing in cryptocurrency a couple of years ago. A family member talked big about it to them and how he had trebled his money in it.

 

I do wonder if he just scammed them and kept the money 

[PaulCa]

14 hours ago, S-Westerly said:

I once googled bitcoin just to see what the hell it was about. Still haven't a clue and now my email is filled with bitcoin spammers.

 

Technically.... it's a cryptographic mathematical approach to enforcing trackability and trust with anonymous transactions. 

 

Ledgers entries are produced, encrypted using "trap door mathematics" which are relatively easy to make, but next to impossible to modify without detection.  When a transaction takes place, new entries are encrypted into the ledgers.  However the ledgers are not private, they are public, via various mechanisms each ledger entry is effectively broadcast around other ledgers.  

So at a later date, if someone were to attempt to modify a transaction to commit fraud, they can't just modify their own ledger and try and spend their money twice.  Well, they can, but very, very quickly red flags will light up as the invalid blocks try to reconcile in other peoples ledger copies.  The fake transaction will be voided/deleted.  Of course if this happens to you, because a scammer did it, there is little to no recourse. 

[PaulCa]

1 hour ago, Tiggie said:

My boss lost 3 grand and his daughter lost 1000 investing in a "guaranteed" next big thing in cryptocurrency

 

Yep.  There are no guarantees.

 

Some of the newer coins and NFTs are pure junk which is nothing more than a ponzi/pyramid scheme, pump and dump scam.  They put out a huge amount of social media content, big it up, suggest everyone will make money.  Lots of people come along and throw money at it and it rises and rises and all the founders are early adapters who bought it with it cost £0.0000001 in it's hundreds of thousands, dump it all when it's worth £2, make a million or so and leg it.  That's the plan anyway.  It would be illegal on the "open" market, but crypto isn't regulated.... yet.

[PaulCa]

What appears to be happening though is that UK run crypto exchanges are becoming regulated.  Banks are rejecting transactions to and from crypto exchanges.  This is fine to try and lower the number of fools coming out with a handful of change on their life's savings.  I say, if you are that dumb, just give me your money and I'll save you the hassle of wasting it.

 

That does not stop you getting money into an off-shore crypto exchange, or buying some with regulations in a UK exchange and shifting the crypto out of the country to the caiman isles to an exchange there.  Nor does it stop "Real" crypto peer to peer transactions.  These are extremely risky for scams, as someone with savings in BTC could be scammed to pay a £10 bill with a round number of bitcoins or even a single digit error in the amount making it a £300 bill and no come back.

Edited November 12, 2021 by PaulCa

[Bianco2564]

I think the people at the top of these crypto currencies rely on enticing naive investors plowing real money into these smoke and mirrors schemes. I'd imagine for every "investor" who makes money another 5 have lost, just like betting on a horse race.

 

[PaulCa]

1 hour ago, Bianco2564 said:

I think the people at the top of these crypto currencies rely on enticing naive investors plowing real money into these smoke and mirrors schemes. I'd imagine for every "investor" who makes money another 5 have lost, just like betting on a horse race.

 

Some of them yes.  They are just ponzi schemes.  The larger ones are different though.  There is just too much volume and too much liquidity for anyone, really, to force it to go much of one way or the other.  Thought they are subject to trends and syndicate short term manupulations and persistent curves up or down caused by "the herd's" momentum.   I'm sure investment banks milk small time "investors" as they have the trade volumes to move the price about hour to hour in small amounts to algo trade off the volatility.

 

The adage that, for every person that makes £100, 10 people lose £10.... doesn't really work.  It's easier to explain with things with inherent value.  Like a motorcycle.  If you early adapt an electric bike for example.  You might pay £10k for it.  A few years later when you want to sell it, you are disappointed to find they are selling brand new for £5k now.  So your asset has lost value, not just through depreciation, but through it's inherent value to the market falling, most likely driven by great adoption in manufacturing and production scaling up, increasing supply.  

 

So you sulk for a while.  Luckily however you don't sell the bike when it's worth much less than you expected, but you just sulk.  A year later, new restrictions come into play regarding fees and tax on petrol vehicles, including bikes and the demand for electric motorcycles goes straight towards the moon.  The market price for an electric bike rapidly rises as demand out strips stock piles and shops are emptied.  Suddenly the market value rises to £15k and your second hand bike can be sold for the same price you bought it.

 

Now, nobody lost money, but you just netted the whole depreciation drop on your asset. Where did that money come from?  The answer is people.  They increased the value of the asset you had, because it became more appealing to own one.  You could agrue that the guy who bought your SH bike for £10k lost money, but from his perspective he paid market value for it.  If when supply catches up it drops to £5k again, he loses out.  Antique collectors and car restorers have been doing this for many decades.

 

With crypto, there is no inherent value, it's worthless "bits" of information.  The entire value of the items in it's subjective extrinsic value.... ie.  Simple what people will pay for it, or accept for it.

Edited November 12, 2021 by PaulCa

[Bianco2564]

@paulc your last sentence sums it up for me, you get nothing tangible for your money, just something with a perceived value. At least with a bike, car ,oil painting you can see and hold what you have bought, I don't think I could give real money over to a website in exchange for an e-mail to say you now own 10 "youvebeensuckeredcoins".

Maybe I'm missing out on making some money but I can live with that.

[PaulCa]

19 minutes ago, Bianco2564 said:

@paulc your last sentence sums it up for me, you get nothing tangible for your money, just something with a perceived value. At least with a bike, car ,oil painting you can see and hold what you have bought, I don't think I could give real money over to a website in exchange for an e-mail to say you now own 10 "youvebeensuckeredcoins".

Maybe I'm missing out on making some money but I can live with that.

 

Fair, fair.

 

Remember the story of the guy who got into bit coin mining right at the start when it was easy.  He had managed to mine 100 coins of something.  Of course they were worth a tiny fraction of a penny each.

 

A number of years later, when BitCoin was exchanging at over $10k each, he realised he had long ago dumped the bit coin wallet with a box of household garbage.   Over a millions worth in a landfill.  Today it's 40k-50k per bitcoin.

 

Investors even fronted cash to excavate the dump, but never found the wallet.

Edited November 12, 2021 by PaulCa

[Bianco2564]

Yes I read that and some bloke who bought a load of pizza with bitcoin, if he had kept them he would be a multi millionaire.

[PaulCa]

The thing is.  To me, it provides a vehicle to play with real markets and real strategies.  As I said I've been "in the industry" for a while.  So for example, I have been involved in writing software which created the resilient shared memory for an exchange matching engine's order book.  I've been involved in writing an order book simulator, trade simulator and exchange simulators.  I've analysed giga bytes of trading logs for exchanges to extract sequences of trades and verify thousands and thousands of trades against the customer spreadsheet to uncover a bug in calculations.  Yet I've never sat at a market terminal and never been able to actually trade.  Of course doing so on the actual markets is heavily restricted for me, for obvious reasons.

 

I'm playing with £20.  Already I can see how easy it is to make mistakes and how unforgiving it is when you do.  The value of ETH was falling, so I moved slowly into everything in BTC.  Then, basically while I was still slightly at a loss for not selling fast enough, ETH started to shoot up and by the time I noticed it (real life and all), it would be a loss to buy back in.  However in my head I remember the advice that if you wait for when to get in on a rising market, you are already too late.  So I switched 100% back to ETH at a loss.... hoping it would continue to rise.  It didn't, it dropped all last night and now I hold ETH I bought for 0.07322 BTC, when it's trading down at 0.7202 and I don't have anymore BTC to buy in on the bounce.  So... Without upping the stakes, all I can do is hold the ETH until it recovers to more than I bought it for.    Ironically, yesterdays trades turned out to be exactly right, but about 180* out of phase with the markets, so on record the trades look like the exactly opposite of what you should do.  Need to learn more analysis techniques and get faster with the timing.  That or put more in and spread it out more and systematically place wide orders to take advantage or stop loss.

Alternatively I could switch over to ETH and another coin for a while, but the lesser coins have less real margins on their volatility and are far more dice rolls long term.

 

So I'm not investing.  I'm gambling.  I'm moving my tiny pot around to try and take advantage of both sides of the market.  It's not easy and there is a lot to learn.  I have sat through umpteen lectures on trading strategies and markets quantitively analysis, but  without actually being able to try it, I forgot it all.  Maybe now I can go back, understand more, try things out, make mistakes and lose my £20.  Or, I could keep playing, get good at it and turn that £20 into £200 and see from there.

 

Trading back and forward between pairs of cryptos is safer for me, as I'm not allowed to play with Forex.

 

Edited November 12, 2021 by PaulCa

[PaulCa]

59 minutes ago, Bianco2564 said:

@paulc your last sentence sums it up for me, you get nothing tangible for your money, just something with a perceived value. At least with a bike, car ,oil painting you can see and hold what you have bought, I don't think I could give real money over to a website in exchange for an e-mail to say you now own 10 "youvebeensuckeredcoins".

 

I suppose it's only fair to mention the original ethos or purpose of crypto-currency, in contrast to it's current hype and media attention on exchanges.

 

The thing is, regardless of where you put your cash, it's cash.  It itself has a perceived value too.  Not only can that fluctuate in real terms, it is stacked against cash, as our western economies are all standard inflationary economies, that inflation is controlled, in part by the central bank and interest rates, etc.  So cash WILL lose value over time.  Unless we start into deflation and negative interest rabbit hole.  Banks don't even offer covering rates of interest on cash these days.  So even in a cash deposit account it will lose money.

 

I'm not going to tell you where to put your cash, i'm only highlighting that Sterling, Dollars or Yen are all worthless bits of paper and the coins are usually not worth their value.  Pennies and coppers are now made of copper plated steal.  Becuase copped is worth more or likely to be worth more than 1p per 5 grams.  The notes are literally worthless IOU's.  They have no inherent value and you can't eat them.  If people don't want to take pounds in international trade tomorrow, the value of the pound will plummet.

 

So bit coin, et. al. are pretty much the same on those terms.

 

The real motivation behind crypto is in creating a reliable, trustable, private, anonymous mechanism of exchanging value without a centralised middle man, like a bank.  There is no central control, nobody can manipulate the value without getting in on it too.

 

If two freedom of speech lobbyists need to exchange money in Saudi Arabia they might not want to do it via a bank.  Granted this allows criminals to do the same.  Adding to BitCoin's shadey image.

 

On the grander scheme of things, if the USA's latest economical experiment with printing money en mass goes tits up as we expect, bit coin will not necessarily be effected by the same inflation.  Nobody can simply "print" bitcoin to cause inflation.

 

When the 6.2% inflation report for 20/21 was reported on Tues/Weds?, bit coin and Ethereum soared as more and more people moved their cash out of the dollar into BTC.

[PaulCa]

I found this funny.  I haven't looked at his other content, but I found this as I hope it's intended, as satire and funny.  The loch ness monster on the options strategy chart is hilarious. 

 

[Liveware Problem]

On 11/11/2021 at 19:02, Bianco2564 said:

Read about a Squid game crypto scam, people buying into it, couldn't get their money out and the organisers dissapearing into the sunset with the money.

Very common, lots of these new cryptocurencies popping up but many are just pyramid schemes on steroids.

 

(Or so it seems to me)

[PaulCa]

3 hours ago, Liveware Problem said:

Very common, lots of these new cryptocurencies popping up but many are just pyramid schemes on steroids.

 

(Or so it seems to me)

 

Yep.  But people do scams with real money too, I mean, if you are a scammer, why not scam people in crypto?   It's as anonymous as "Gift cards" so less laundry.  It asks the question, if people are dumb enough to hand over a fortune on a bet from a YT video... or on a shady call with an random phone call.... especially if they want to "fix your pc"...  how in hell did they make a fortune in the first place?  A small part of me is not sympathetic.

 

I see crypto like the matrix screen.  I have no idea what those numbers really mean, but I understand ratios, trends and predicting human behaviour.  

 

Seems it would also be handy if you wanted to pay someone "off the radar" for work done without lifting a basket of cash.

 

I follow a local chap who plays their game better than them.

NOTE:  This has nothing to do with trading anything.  It's about scams.

https://www.youtube.com/c/JimBrowning

 

Edited November 18, 2021 by PaulCa

[Mississippi Bullfrog]

I think I will stick with a piggy bank. I can understand that.

[Essem]

>…. tangible for your money, just something-with a perceived value. 
 

money itself has no tangible value. 

[Throttled]

I considered bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and have a friend who knows his stuff. I did not bother because the returns for a small investor (less than £1000) are negligible and all you are really doing is making money for the currency sites and larger investors. Buying a means to keep your currency safe wipes out at least a years possible profit.

[Gerontious]

what happened to @Joeman did he become a bitcoin bilionaire and retire to the Virgin Islands?

 

[PaulCa]

18 hours ago, Throttled said:

I considered bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and have a friend who knows his stuff. I did not bother because the returns for a small investor (less than £1000) are negligible and all you are really doing is making money for the currency sites and larger investors. Buying a means to keep your currency safe wipes out at least a years possible profit.

 

Yea, for those purposes, crypto isn't really suitable.  That's the problem, people getting scammed into thinking it's a sure thing investment.  It just a "cash" holding, all people are hoping for is that demand continues to outstrip the supply of bitcoin, et. al and the prices rise.  They can also completely crash the next week, which leads to problem no. 2.  Dumping at a 2% loss in panic and watching it recover 10% a week later while you have no holdings.

 

Gambling, speculating and "playing the lottery" are more suited to crypto.  Betting on the market.  Buying coins when the media is harrassing them, selling when they are celebrating them.  Flipping coins back and forth across a pair while the market is unstable.  Buying £5 worth of lots of different "new" coins.  It only takes one to take off and go from £0.0001 to £1000.  About as likely as winning £1000 on the lottery.

[Stu]

23 hours ago, Gerontious said:

what happened to @Joeman did he become a bitcoin bilionaire and retire to the Virgin Islands?

 

 

No! 

 

I sent him this link on twitter and questioned him! 

 

He has made a little but not a lot! 

[Mickly]

On 18/11/2021 at 19:24, PaulCa said:

 

Yep.  But people do scams with real money too, I mean, if you are a scammer, why not scam people in crypto?   It's as anonymous as "Gift cards" so less laundry.  It asks the question, if people are dumb enough to hand over a fortune on a bet from a YT video... or on a shady call with an random phone call.... especially if they want to "fix your pc"...  how in hell did they make a fortune in the first place?  A small part of me is not sympathetic.

 

I see crypto like the matrix screen.  I have no idea what those numbers really mean, but I understand ratios, trends and predicting human behaviour.  

 

Seems it would also be handy if you wanted to pay someone "off the radar" for work done without lifting a basket of cash.

 

I follow a local chap who plays their game better than them.

NOTE:  This has nothing to do with trading anything.  It's about scams.

https://www.youtube.com/c/JimBrowning

 

I’ve been listening to the ‘ Dark Net Diaries ‘ Pod cast - as far as scams go, it seems that crypto currency’s not only enable a huge amount  of scams but are also responsible for them.

[Tiggie]

Just saw this in my spam folder and made me laugh.

 

The last one is a corker as well