Note: I believe there are several threads now for asking questions about getting into bitcoin, I’m quite keen to have one for talking about experiences of being in the market
Hi, so I got into BTC (bitcoin) in mid August which I thought was late but then it rose 5-fold before Christmas. It’s been crazy town.
Because I wanted to trade (part of the fun for me) and not just hold (HODL!), I’ve had a lot of ups and down since then, serious up and downs, like $tens of thousands. Right now, in terms of how much BTC I have, I am where I started, though it’s obv worth more.
Having done a lot and learned a lot I’m now settled on strategies that sit well with me, and I cant wait to see how the months ahead pan out Sure, it might be a bubble but take a little out as you go and I’m trying to spot the Amazon’s from the MySpace’s.
Fwiw, partly, I’m going to sit in SC / Siacoin probably until near the end of the month - depends a little on how things unfold. Right now it’s 500 satoshis on Bittrex, lets see how she goes
About a year ago i bought $500 worth of Bitcoin, since none of my credit cards will allow charges from out of the country. Seemed to be the easiest way to remove all those restrictions. I immediately spent about $200 worth of it. A few months later I spent another $200 worth. Again in a few more months, and then one more time recently. What I have left is worth about $2000 currently. I’ve been considering just buying a hot tub with the rest if it will get back up to the previous peak.
Where did you actually spend it - in general terms, not trying to be nosy. Do a lot of websites take it as direct payment, I have never paid much attention? Presumably they just use a third party to convert the bitcoin to real currency on the fly - how transparent and efficient is that conversion, given how volatile the price is?
I have two accounts for trading bitcoin but haven’t taken the plunge yet. It took me ages to get the accounts up and running because of Japan’s beuracracy and silly rules (Like none of my IDs match because the government has different ways to write my ID than the police do and the banks have another system - so if they need my drivers license and my passport the names will not be identical, which they need to be to open an account). Anyway. Right now might be a good point to jump in but I’m just now noticing a huge divergence in the prices quoted on different exchanges. BitFlyer says I can buy at 1775720 Yen (15892 USD @ .0089 exch. rate). A US site says the price right now is 13850.00 USD. What gives???
I bought into the market in November, mostly Eth, a little at first and then a lot more around Thanksgiving. I spent some time day trading within single currencies, I didn’t do terribly but I lost money overall doing that, and it was consuming a lot of time. I did make a few good trades jumping from currency to currency, moving between BTC/ETH/XRP, but despite how smart I feel about those trades it was probably just luck.
A couple weeks ago while I was laying in bed on Saturday morning, staring groggily at the price chart on GDAX like I’d done every morning for 6 weeks since I got in, I felt a pang of realization, like I was on a gameshow and I could take a small prize and walk away or roll the dice and possibly hit it big. I suddenly started thinking of that small prize as my money, and I started thinking of how much less stress I’d feel if my money was just sitting comfortably in a bank instead of a volatile market that I was checking constantly. So I cashed out and haven’t looked back.
FWIW we’re not talking big money, in total I put $3800 into various coins and walked away with double that. The day after I got out ETH started mooning again. In a sense, I “lost out” on many thousands of dollars by bailing when I did, even if ETH doesn’t go any higher than it did this week, but in a better sense, I realized that I’d never have been a bitcoin millionaire even if I’d bought in in 2012, because I would have cashed out long before 5000% profits.
I set up a server for mining in September with the expectation that it would pay for itself in about 9 months. Now, 4 months later, it has paid for itself assuming I cashed out today and after taxes. If, on the other hand, cryptocurrency tanks tomorrow, I won’t be out more than I was willing to lose and I’ll have some nice graphics cards to gift to some friends. My current plan is to continue mining and hold what BTC I have for at least a year to reduce the tax burden when I do cash out.
From what I can discern from googling, the market in Japan and Korea has traded at a huge premium (of the order of 10%) persistently. Evidently there is some high barrier to arbitrage, I don’t know nearly enough about how the market works to understand why.
Two economists are walking down the street and one says, “Hey, look, a $20 bill just lying there on the sidewalk!” The other one says, “Nah, ignore it, if it were really a $20 bill someone would have picked it up already.”
I’m not quite sure what the message of that aphorism is supposed to be, but I think it’s probably wrong. If you see an apparent significant mispricing in a market, you are foolish if you don’t first try to understand why that apparent mispricing exists before you try to exploit it.
Your note of the price difference in Asia compared to the US reminded me of the joke, that’s all. Whether the $20 bill is really there or not is impossible for me to say, only that just like in the joke, if you see what looks like a $20 bill lying on the ground it might be worthwhile to spend a second or two to look around for bear traps and dangling pianos.
Yes, that was what I was saying. Because the joke seemed to be saying the opposite of that, no? The joke seemed to be saying if you see something that looks like free money, don’t overthink it. But it depends on the context - it could just be a joke about markets not being as efficient as some economists think they are.
