Must confess I don’t know much about Bitcoin. I’ve read a little bit but I still don’t get it.
Warren Buffet doesn’t like it. Not that I’m a big Buffet fan boy, but you can’t deny his track record.
I don’t know why that article is pretending that everybody is confused. “Stable” currencies aren’t something you buy and expect to rise significantly enough to make substantial profit from without financial instruments, but fluctuating currencies like the ruble at the moment have been stellar investments and remain ways to pay for things at the same time. Same with any war/targeted currency in smaller countries.
Bitcoin is handy for international payments, I do think it’s doomed though looking at CBDCs on the horizon because of what Buffet said about govs allowing competition to their scam currency.
I have some fractions “stuck” in a couple of accounts and have noodled over the years so am not a Bitcoin batman or anything.
That’s the part I don’t get, how it all works.
I can see where government would like to go to a digital currency so that all financial transactions are online insuring they get their bite out of every dollar or pound spent. And I can see where financial institutions would like it from not having the costs associated with handling all that paper money. But beyond that, I still don’t get it.
Probably something not easily explained to someone like me, but I’m still curious about how it all works. Is there a “Dummies Guide To Bitcoin” out there somewhere that might explain things a little better?
You’re a technical guy so maybe it’s the detail you need to understand it is the problem. I kind of know what’s going on to a certain level, but nowhere near being able to explain ever step of the process.
- Have public/private key pair. Public key is your address.
- New blocks of transactions from one address to another are verified by computers competing with each other in a hashing war to hash a specific number and get a specific type of result.
- The blockchain file, a sort of “linked list”, then gets another block added to it and shared with the network.
- Any funny business and >50% of the network needs to agree what the correct version of the blockchain is.
I don’t know what decides the number in the block that the hashing war is started for. I know that the result of the hash must have a certain predetermined number of leading zeros to be correct.
I don’t know exactly how a new transaction is sent into the ether to form part of a block either. It’s with your crypto exchange or app but beyond that I dunno.
If you find a guide with the right level of detail I’d like to see it. There are a lot of extremely excited crypto people out there pumping it all though so you might need to wade through some turds to find one!
Probably won’t devote a great deal of time to it, but if I do come across something, I’ll post it.
Cheers, same here. I’m constantly getting crypto recommends on tech channels so might stumble across something suitable.
I might have gotten me some ‘crypto’ but I couldn’t figure out what it actually was.
I don’t (fully) understand how it works, and my general rule of thumb is to not put any money in something you don’t understand. Stupid and simple maybe, but that works for me.
Maybe the biggest issue for me is that it allows anonymous financial transactions worldwide. Some people might say “that is great, no more big banks dictating me and charging me all kinds of fees”, which is fair enough. But it also is an ideal tool for terrorists and criminals worldwide to hide their financial transactions from authorities.
And after watching “Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto-King” on Netflix … thanks but no thanks.
Gotta watch out for them crypto terrorists, that’s for sure.
With single mothers in Canada getting their bank accounts and cards frozen by the government for supporting protesters, ordinary Russian citizens living there and elsewhere facing similar action and other oppressive regimes around the world enforcing their own dictatorial rules, it’s good to have alternatives. Customers lost their money when Barings Bank and the Icelandic banks collapsed, for example, and there is limited protection when retail banks fail so the Crypto King losing a couple of hundred million is small potatoes in the big scam (sic) of things.
Re terrorists, they are free to drag truck drivers out of their vehicles and drive into crowds any time they like. I can think of lots of other free terrorist attacks that are better than bombs and I’m not a terrorist master villian. The conclusion seems to be that the terrorists who do exist these days are more like mercenaries who follow Five Eyes money, so there’s no point clamping down on payment systems.
Criminals can use money laundering operations and the general corruption in the banking system like they always have. Bitcoin has its uses there but it’s only pseudoanonymous so transactions are traceable without laundering.
You tell that to the guy who lost his entire savings overnight, lol.
Yes, people have lost money when banks went belly up. In the US you’re protected up to $100k by the federal reserve so you are not totally out in the cold.
It’s actually not impossible for eg the FBI to track criminals, apparently. Given that all transactions are public, once they figure out who is behind certain transactions they can trace their entire history on bitcoin.
People get investments wiped out all the time, particularly risky ones. I’d hope that nobody had all their savings in one kind of crypto, held in one exchange because that would be pretty daft.
It’s similar in the UK for retail banks, not private banks that aren’t regulated in the same way. £85k typical balance and up to £1m for a temporary balance (eg sell the house and bank goes bust the next day).
Yeah, it’s not completely anonymous. You need to launder it like you do ordinary bank money.
Actually that’s very sound advice.
I did pretty good with Compaq back in the day. I didn’t buy in after the IPO, I waited a while, let things settle down a bit. Then I was able to get out early because I could see what was happening with all the other manufactures flooding the market with cheap boxes.
It turns out that the legendary 3Blue1Brown has made a video about it. He’s a mathematician who uses his own custom Python animation software to explain concepts:
Thanks.
That was well done and it all makes a little more sense now.
It’s not something that I would do, but I can see the potential for others much more inclined than I am.
He has a great way of explaining things, that filled in some blanks for me too.
Looks like the Cryptos are taking a bath along with Wall Street.
Still a very volatile investment it would seem.
I’m sure it will come back, but still interesting to see it go up and down with the stock market.
And that’s the problem. It’s just so volatile, many people are blinded by the ‘billionaire stories’, not fully understanding the risks. There is no ‘get rich quick’ scheme.
If you want to own any crypto, lately is a good time for it, assuming that you can sit on it a while. Slim chance that anyone who doesn’t already have a pile of money is going to get rich on it, but it will go back up.
Actually, something to look into right now is Apple.
They’ve taken a bit of a hit lately with the rest of the tech stocks, but a lot of analysts are expecting big things from this 5G iPhone they’re getting ready to release.
I cashed out a few years back because I was always a long term investor, it worked well for me. At my age, I don’t have any long term left anymore. 