Why would you deliberately devalue your investment by selling in a dip? The long-term trend has always been up!
Bitcoin is perfectly usable as a currency. Venezuelans and other people living in failed states, are using it in their daily lives.
Agreed, there are constraints on the protocol that are leading to bottlenecks and slightly higher than desired transaction fees, but The Lightning Network should bridge the gap there.
I’ve personally used Bitcoin to buy everyday things & it’s painless and trivial to do.
I can’t give you citations, but less than 2% of Bitcoin activities are shady.
I’d much prefer my spare cash be in my cryptocurrency wallet than being in the bank, eroding via QE & inflation. That’s the biggest draw, for me.
The scarcity of it, is what is causing the price to keep rising & despite a maximum of 21 million BTC that will ever exist, that number is likely more like 8-14 million, as in the early years, people lost their keys, or physically lost their coins.
The pressure on all large-cap businesses to join the party, will drive the price of BTC to the moon, which is why I took out a £14k loan, so I could buy a single Bitcoin & I will be HODLing like a mofo, while the still fairly early adopters start to pile in/on, increasing the pressure on the supply and hence the price.
Even if it fails, Bitcoin is an excellent hedge against a failing Fiat currency, so that if you put in 5% of your net worth (but no more than you can stand to lose), your hedge may come to nothing, but it may be what saved you, as the excrement hits the fan.
Cryptocurrencies are so volatile there’s no guarantee that your money will be better off in Bitcoin than a bank. You may lose a few % in a year to inflation but you can lose 25% to a sudden drop in price overnight
So how does this work in real life? What happened during the dips?
On 20/1 BTC was £25,972. Work pay me 1/12 BTC and I got paid £2,164. Wonderful and amazing. I can afford my bills, I can afford to eat and this is wonderful.
On 21/1 BTC was £22,475. So now my money is only worth £1,873.
I guess these fluctuations work if this is the only currency you just have and everything/where/one takes this method of payment.
Braver man than me! Wow!
Brave, or…?
Never invest money you can’t afford to lose and if you are taking a loan out, I don’t think you can…
I mean I was trying to word it delicately…
But at this point, you could pay the loan off and have £20k in profit. Rather than hoping it goes ‘to the moon’. Even buy 2/3rd or whatever and then you’ve got some and zero debt.
As with a loan, that is costing a few hundred quid a month too.
Very true. It’s the kind of r/WSB mentality that many a Redditor fell victim of with their latest shenanigans
Yeah, so i found this, which I thought was interesting - “Crypto assets can be either useful hedges or useful forms of payment — but not both.” It’s basically saying that a good currency is a stable currency, but all these people expecting huge returns on their investments clearly don’t think it’s a stable currency.
Ok, but why would I want to use Bitcoin and my primary currency?
Are people in failed states at risk of internet and power disconnections separating them from their money?
Lol, I feel like I’m reading WallStreetBets! Well done on the return though. As @Revels suggests, it might be wise to recover your initial investment now so you can clear that debt, so you’re then just playing with profit?
I just remembered I had a coin base account that had some bitcoin in so I went to check it out.
I bought £120 in on 1st Jan 2018… And then on the 3rd Jan decided that was a bad idea (to be fair I was still heavily in credit card debt then…).
That would be worth about £450 now apparently.
My current balance is 0.00000033 BTC though. 
I do remember back somewhere around 2010 while bored at work. I just remember having the hardest time figuring out how to buy stuff. So I didnt buy any… If I did, and just put $10 in there and left it… That would be worth $9M today.
Think of all the Farrow & Ball paint you could buy…
What Bitcoin wallets do people here use, out of interest? Cold, hot, keep it in the exchange platform?
I use Exodus which is a software wallet. It’s pretty nice, metadata syncs across devices using their platform but private keys are always kept on-device (you recover them with one of those 12-word seeds).
I’m very much of the opinion that you should never gamble more than you could stand to lose, but I hold (“hodl” ?) about £170s worth of Bitcoin at present, via Revolut and Ziglu (which means I don’t hold any Bitcoin directly in reality, but still).
A bit back, I bought about £30s worth of Bitcoin on Revolut (yes, I am the ultimate “cautious investor”), and then saw its value plummet to around £18. Figuring that the worse that could happen was that I would lose the lot, I "hodl"ed my investment, and it slowly began to grow and that particular investment is worth around £150 at the moment (if I chose to sell). I’ve added into this small amounts of Etherium, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple (that was a fairground ride) and Litecoin since then on both platforms. I fully expect it to crash again at some point. Or Revolut/Ziglu to collapse and take it all with them. Or I might go out for a slap up meal post lockdown and blow it all on that.
Some of the optimists out there foresee a prince of $200,000 per coin in the next year. This I doubt very much, but if it did, my £150 would be worth £720. A tidy sum, but not life changing.
I use Ledger. It has the advantage of being a discreet device that you’re unlikely to throw out by accident. A bit annoying to set up and use though, but you can do most things on a proper device, once it’s up and running. They try and sell you them in pairs, for the paranoid among us…
Originated as a typo on a crypto forum, but is now often used to mean ‘Hold On for Dear Life’
Very commonly used on WSB, as you can imagine!
First documented use of it: I AM HODLING
Bit more about what MasterCard’s press release could entail in reality. To sum it up, who knows 
When I was at uni in 2012 I exchanged a birthday gift of £100 premium bonds for roughly 15 bitcoin. At the time I told myself to forget about them and check back in the future to see if they were worth anything.
I actually managed to forget about them until 2013 when they spiked (relatively speaking) in value - at the time I remember thinking it was a massive bubble and I cashed out. I came out of uni debt free and pretty chuffed. Not long after that, Mt. Gox (pretty much the only exchange back then) went down, and I couldn’t believe how close I had become to losing them entirely.
Of course if I had held them until now, I could pay off my mortgage!
I thought I’d get more feedback than this… am I to take it that only one person here uses Bitcoin for day to day transactions? On which basis, it doesn’t seem like it’s the currency of the future 