[Romins]

Originally Posted by am1m

(Just playing devil's advocate here, I still wouldn't invest in something I don't understand and I still don't understand crypto- but that could apply to any asset class! And there are certainly several who understand those.)

For the same reason, I don't invest in mutual funds or shares. I would rather stay poor with minimal returns on my FDs, than lose all my money during a pandemic. I have to admit my ignorance, beyond a certain point I don't understand the stock market.

[androdev]

Great post. I opened this thread wondering why a new thread on this topic and I am glad I did. Even though it's written about bitcoin which doesn't interest me at all, it makes a great read and captures the essence of how a lot of things operate in today's world.

Your analysis of Nigerian prince emails and how they are designed to target a specific set of people is spot on. This is evident in politics, religion and business as we observe so many logic-defying phenomena successfully orchestrated by evangelization of some sort, amplified by social media. You can hype up people to buy crypto, mass volunteer for a trip to mars or undergo weird medical procedures.

I don't mean everyone is investing in crypto because they have been hyped up or brainwashed. There are some really smart people who really understand the game, treat it as a diversification technique and possibly are also lucky to have timed things perfectly.

Originally Posted by RiderZone

... Fear of poverty combined with jealousy of friends and a pinch of intense greed is not ideal as far as investment motivations go...

Well said. Not just investment but also applies to career choices and many important decisions in life.

Don't waste your time on jealousy;
sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind.
The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself

[srini1785]

Man how much heartening it is to know that i am not the only one who does not understand a thing about this Bitcoin business. Being a Non IT guy, i thought all IT guys are doing it but it seems to me now that i was wrong.

If the creators were perpetrating a scam at least they could have kept the jargons real and based it on some better collateral. What Jargons they thought of : "Mining", "Dogecoin", "Non fungible Token". Put me off the first time i heard it. The only Fungi i know grow on trees , the only mining i know is done under the ground and only Dogie that i know wag their tail. They were never going to get some layman like me to invest with such schemes. Not that i had too much to invest either.

[DrCar]

I have a complete opposite view of crypto. Please note that I don't advice investing in such assets without understanding the amount of risk one is able to take.

Crypto boom started way back in 2008. Remember stock market and real estate crash that happened during those times. Coincidence?
People realized that they need some better mode of investment to fight inflation. Crypto was promising then.
It had given massive returns to those who invested during those times. Maybe some of them would have retired as well by now.

Now, people start saying crypto is a scam with no fundamentals in it. These are the same people who missed out on potential gains they could have had if they would have taken a slight risk earlier.

If crypto is a scam then one should not ignore share market scams like Zomato IPO. Where were the fundamentals in such companies when SEBI approved it?

Your real estate prices are under the mercy of government regulations, even the gold that you bought are not useful when government demands you to return it to fight recession,even your bank savings accounts aren't foolproof if banks decide to do a scam, scams within mutual funds are in news now a days, cash in hand can anytime be made illegal overnight. So what is safe then?

Blaming crypto is easy because it is faceless, nameless and government wants to somehow tackle it as they are missing out on potential tax opportunities for them.

One would argue that crypto is used potentially for terrorism, drug trafficking, etc.
My question to all is weren't those things happening before crypto era began?

Tulip mania, crypto mania, etc will come and go. One has to keep eyes and ears open to identify such things beforehand. One has to take adequate risks to gain success to be in top 5% of population. Remember, Ambani, Adani, Tata, Mahindra always took some business risks throughout their life to consistently stay in the position that they are now.

Please note that this is not a personal message to any member. Many of members are writing that they were ignorant about investment and crypto. Ignorance won't lead to financial freedom. I would say, be opposite; learn, analyze and research the potential opportunities around. Use your professional skills and knowledge to find out what is the unfulfilled, unmet demand of humans.
In Teambhp language - Are we all ignorant about details of the vehicle we are about to purchase before investing our hard earned money on them?

[satishv1987]

What many of the cryptobros often gloss over is that the State's sovereignty is predicated on its ability to control the supply of fiat money. Cryptos will never replace fiat money. Why will any State willingly cede control of a crucial aspect of its own existence?

Crypto enthusiasts behave like a cult. They pick on anyone that is critical of cryptos and the toxic positivity is nauseating. It often feels like they are trying to convince themselves that they made the right decision to by investing their hard earned money on cryptos.

[Neo18]

There are 2 non-negotiable rights of a state.
1. Right to arms.(USA and few other countries are an exception to this)
2. Right to print currency.

Who, in their right minds would give up this right to print currency, no matter how noble the intentions of the crypto tech community is, and how wonderful the underlying blockchain technology is? This fundamental aspect of how countries are run is forgotten by the Crypto community. Also, the on ramp and off ramp to this Crypto universe has to be through the traditional Financial institutions who run a fractional reserve system unlike Cryptos. Hence its only a matter of time that countries will ban or put a tight leash around this crypto ecosystem. The technology underlying crypto (block chain) will have its second innings, embedded within the framework of traditional Finance, making it more robust/efficient and resilient to scams and malpractices.

[d.j]

Well, I am not an avid crypto investor, did lose some money trying my hands on, knew the risk, won’t consider it as an investment for now but definitely in time to come, guess when its more structured, regulated organized and filtered out of unnecessary volatility.

Most of us don’t see things coming in from time ahead, my take is (sure most would) technology disruption is inevitable, be it any part of human existence, could be in good or bad form. Fiat currency wont collapse soon but eventually will be replaced by cryptos or something other, we are talking in time of going extra-terrestrial and physical formats of money or investments won’t make there. May be 50-100 years from now, if not some sort of cryptos, then its possibly the barter coming back.

in today’s time, its max worth the extra money one wont regret losing, someone who has to still build for himself/herself from scratch I think best advice is pls fill in for roti,kapda, makan then look this side if one wish to.

[am1m]

Originally Posted by DrCar

I have a complete opposite view of crypto.

That's good and thanks for posting!

I'm crypto ignorant too and don't think I'll ever invest. But I don't see how much value a thread will have if it's just a bunch of guys (me included) all sitting around posting and patting ourselves on the back for not investing in something. (Plus we already have a thread for general crypto info: https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/shift...ft-thread.html (The Cryptocurrency & NFT Thread)).

What would help is if people who have made some money, or even lost money (because that is learning too) would post their personal experiences and learning.

[aashishnb]

Originally Posted by bhairavp

I had mined about 28 bitcoins in 2013, on my personal computer at home.
Exchanged them for about 1200USD worth Amazon vouchers, got a brand new camera.

If I had held on till 2020, would have been able to buy a new house in South Mumbai with the proceeds. Oh well.

I would like to understand more how to mine bitcoins.
In the gold rush, the people who made money are the ones who provides the shovels!!

[Lalvaz]

Originally Posted by bhairavp

I had mined about 28 bitcoins in 2013, on my personal computer at home.
Exchanged them for about 1200USD worth Amazon vouchers, got a brand new camera.

If I had held on till 2020, would have been able to buy a new house in South Mumbai with the proceeds. Oh well.

Could you share the process of mining? Is it possible on a personal computer even now. Curious why you stopped mining.

[mayukh42]

Originally Posted by Lalvaz

Is it possible on a personal computer even now.

No. At least not efficiently anymore.

Some years back, it was much easier to mine coins. You'd need a GPU, and even cards like GTX 970 (2014) had good hashrates. BTC and ETH (later) were on GPU based algos.

Mining would be done by a server that connects to the coin network and creates next hash of an existing one, using parallel computing cores of a GPU (like CUDA of Nvidia).

The catch is that the effort required to mine a coin increases with number of transactions. More the coins are used, more will be effort to get the next hash. In the last couple of years, especially during the lockdown when crypto interests skyrocketed, the hashrates kept decreasing and return of investment is now in years.

A high end card like RX 6800 XT or RTX 3080 Ti is also not good enough as the only card to give returns. So a farm of GPUs is needed, which adds to electricity consumption. (The latter IMO is the death knell for bitcoins in general. They are not environment-wise sustainable. We do not have enough energy supply to waste in fancy algorithms, but that is another discussion.)

BTC and ETH have moved away from GPU algos now. To mine those, you'd need a mining hardware like these.

And even for those coins on GPU, you need N cards with at least 8 GB memory each.

[ppc_rgs]

Excellent thread, RiderZone. T-BHP is a treasure trove of information.

I never fully understood crypto currencies at all. No offence to anyone, but to me it felt like a new age version of pyramid scheme. If i miss the bus, so be it.

[charanreddy]

Agree with this post. Crypto is at best speculation and at worst gambling. We do hear a few folks over social media who claim to have made millions and drive flashy cars, but this looks a lot like those pyramid schemes - Greater fool theory in action.

I gamed upto INR 50K to test the waters and lost a little bit of that amount, especially when the Indian exchanges got taken down by the govt. this is not going to have a sizeable weight in my portfolio in the future.

[warp_10]

Not sucked by the crypto/NFT FOMO and will stick with conventional investments.

Reminds me of the statement Warren Buffet made in his BRK quarterly meeting. They definitely have a strong point of an underlying asset value.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVm7Pfb0ilY

[arjyamaj]

Former capital markets lawyer - now turned prof here.

If you think about it, every security that we buy or sell on any market, whether its shares, mutual find units, money market instruments, calls, puts, ETFs, commodities, REIT units etc, all of them have an underlying asset class.

What is the underlying asset class for Bitcoin? Or most cryptocurrencies for that matter?

There is none.

Offering a counter-argument, just for the sake of it. The rupee has value because the Reserve Bank of India says that it does. The RBI gets this power from the RBI Act, which gets its power from Parliament, which gets its power from the Constitution of India. The Constitution of India gets its power from the first three words in the Preamble - "We the People". From a purely democratic and legal standpoint - if enough people believe that Bitcoin has value, then it does. Democracy works in weird ways.