Apparently forgetting your bitcoin password is bad.

I guess it would be the equivalent of forgetting where you buried your gold!

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/tec...ssword/ar-BBH2NnC?li=BBnbfcN&ocid=mailsignout

I've often wondered just how many bitcoins were "lost" in this fashion. My understanding is that there is a (practically) finite amount of bitcoin that can be mined because of the math involved and the limitations of current computing technology. I expect that some small percentage of existing bitcoin is probably "lost" every year and that percentage will likely go up as bitcoin achieves wider use. Are we eventually going to see a middleman "vaulting" business (ie. bitcoin bank) where you open an account and they handle the actual bitcoin wallet/password for you?

I swear, I wish I had bought some when it was forty bucks or so. Like four grand worth. I'd be foookin retired today if I did. Who knew? I thought it was crazy back then.

ancona said:

... Who knew? ...

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I give DCRB credit for seeing the possibilities back in the day. He sent me .005 bitcoin back when he first started experimenting/playing with it. It was worth roughly $1 when he sent it to me. I guess it's worth about $20 now.

PMBug said:

It was worth roughly $1 when he sent it to me. I guess it's worth about $20 now.

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make that $14 :wave:

The only thing that has stopped me from having some exposure to crypto is the technical nature of the setting up and using of the wallet or whatever it is you need and the obvious need to keep the password to access it.

I have simply had too many techno fails in my lifetime and feel very vulnerable / exposed as a result.

And yet even now, if I could overcome this reluctance ( and Do Chen has offered to help me with a small bitcoin deposit if I do successfully create this electronic wallet thing ) I am drawn to various emerging crypto's that seem to have recognised the weakness in bitcoin and improved on it.

Monero appeals to me and clearly gets high approval by being linked to so many 'bad things'

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/monero-drug-dealers-cryptocurrency-choice-fire/

But Ive been watching Ripple and etherium for a while

Im not sure if cryptos could forseeably join together but if they could then it might be that a strong enough conglomerate could emerge that would really show fiat currencies the way to the history books.

rblong2us said:

make that $14 :wave:
...

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We were both way off... It's actually worth just shy of $75 as of this moment. Crazy.

I just signed up for a coinbase account this morning so I can dabble a bit with cryptos with "fun" funds.

If you are interested in doing the same you can use this link and we both get $10 of bitcoin after you transact $100 worth of crypto:

https://www.coinbase.com/join/5a54e7dee5fc3305c5c056d6

You are right. Do you still trust Bitcoin? That currency is in decline.

Did bitcoin just burst? How it compares with history's big bubbles.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/mar...ubbles/ar-AAuNGT0?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=mailsignout

Bitcoin is volatile - more so than silver. It's having (had?) a correction after an ... exhuberant ride recently. Coinbase has a nifty charting display for bitcoin that lets you change the scale from hourly to "all". Check this out:

...
JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. said they’re halting purchases of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on their credit cards. JPMorgan, enacting the ban Saturday, doesn’t want the credit risk associated with the transactions, company spokeswoman Mary Jane Rogers said.

Bank of America started declining credit card transactions with known crypto exchanges on Friday. The policy applies to all personal and business credit cards, according to a memo. It doesn’t affect debit cards, said company spokeswoman Betty Riess.

And late Friday, Citigroup said it too will halt purchases of cryptocurrencies on its credit cards. “We will continue to review our policy as this market evolves,” company spokeswoman Jennifer Bombardier said.
...

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...l-cryptocurrency-transactions-on-credit-cards

Is this a new thing? Credit card companies deciding what their customers can and cannot buy? Welcome to the age of digital money!

Yet people will continue to blather on how crypto currency is so much more reliable than fiat currency. Both are shite compared to real money. I still don't know how people can sit there with a straight face & tell you how crypto currencies are better than fiat currency. 90% of the time you have to convert it to fiat currency to use it. Not to mention if the interwebz is down, you can't use it. Power goes out, you can't access it either. It's most redeeming quality is that it has all the stability of nitroglycerin.

It looks like it's taking a steady plunge now. I was curious to see what it was trading at now & it's hovering around 7,400 at the time I posted this. Investors don't seem to eager to catch that falling knife, no matter how good of a value it should be.

https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/btc/overview/USD

I do not hold any crypto currency but I have been following the story for a long time.
I would contend that money is a form of stored energy and that the effort to create a bitcoin or an ounce of gold in your hand, makes more sense than a central bank creating a debt that must be paid in the future.

Clearly bitcoin and the crypto's in general have gotten waay ahead of themselves and this correction is essential to pull things back to a sensible rate of growth / uptake.
The recent madness has showed us a few interesting things that can happen when there are no regulations / regulators ( and I think I am broadly in favour of this level of freedom)
Its been a real winner for some, unlike the Iraqi Dinar - Zim - Dong nonsense that many have been believing would revalue at dollar face value and has caused many with not very much to go all in. These poor folk will likely be the bag holders ( hodlers ?) for the current sell off.
A recent article on ZH compared the current crypto sell off with previous excesses triggered by new tech and observed how each one took less time to go through the various stages -

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-03/welcome-bitcoins-trough-disillusionment

I think decentralized crypto and blockchain has a fantastic future as long as it can stay ahead of the controllers evil needs.

I think the selloff is likely a lot of profit taking in conjunction with no new money inflows in China/India (which are cracking down / banning cryptos). From what I can tell, the extraordinary run up was largely fueled (at least initially) by folks in China. It seems like it is essentially a game of musical chairs. The music stopped and the first ones out profited.