Bitcoins

aardvaak

I just saw a link on Facebook about starting a Bitcoin account.

Does this work?

How does it work?

Has anyone here used it?

EachPenny

I would give anything relating to financial matters which appears as a link on Farcebook a very wide berth.

If you are interested in Bitcoin there is already reams of information about it on the internet just waiting to be researched.

ColdIron

You could Google it or look at the many threads here or maybe read this
https://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2017/11/30/invest-bitcoin-four-things-need-know/

bowlhead99

I just saw a link on Facebook about starting a Bitcoin account.

Does this work?

The last thing you should do is open some random account (bitcoin or other) you saw on Facebook. It could be a scam, or not.

How does it work?

How does what work? The specific service you saw on Facebook? Or buying, mining, storing and selling bitcoins in general? For the latter, you could probably get through a lot of research this weekend by googling.

Has anyone here used it?

A number of people have used accounts with bitcoin exchanges to buy and sell bitcoin, if that's what you mean. There is as thread on the front page of this board at the moment. If you use the search function you can find several other long threads from the last several years, so we don't have to repeat it all again

aroominyork

I wonder how much bitcoins were trading at when the first stream of threads started saying "I wish I'd invested in this ages ago... is it any good?" As and when they crash and burn (though of course they never will) I think they will need their own sub-Board; I won't want to see the tears.

Malthusian

Bitcoin already crashed. Between Wednesday and Thursday afternoon it fell by 20% - that's a crash, more than the UK stockmarket crashed on Black Wednesday. Now it's up again. It's a dead cat that's been embalmed in the material they use to make super bouncy balls.

frenchplonka

Personally I think its going to be crash rise crash bigger rise crash rise pretty much how its been since its inception I'm late to the party and its purely a punt on my part the question is are u silly enough to come for a ride up the wrong side of the dual carriage way!

I'm in the car and steadily moving forward will I lose I don't know am I putting in a lot of money no around 50 a week gamble what you can afford to lose any profits a bonus

Billco_2

Yeah it crashed....sure big crash.....

and now its worth more than it was before the crash?

Wake up will ya :rotfl:

Billco_2

Oh and to answer the OP.

There's hundreds of companies that offer bitcoin wallets. Perhaps one of the better known ones, that I use, is Coinbase.

Its a simple process to exchange pounds into bitcoin and then just sit on it to see what happens tot he value.

Other posters are dead right in what they are saying though, there are hundreds of companies out there more than willing to take your money for nothing in return.

But, I do believe there are alternatives that will actually give you something for you taking a chance on them.

Research research research before spending a penny. Thats my advice.

ChesterDog

Ó

Billco wrote: »

Yeah it crashed....sure big crash.....

and now its worth more than it was before the crash?

Wake up will ya :rotfl:

I think your post highlights the conflict between the views of crypto-fans and those of conventional investors.

Bitcoin (which I hold, incidentally) is behaving as a very volatile commodity with (as yet) a price driven by speculation, uninformed interest and straightforward gambling rather than utility. If it establishes itself as a currency with real utility and some stability of value, then the level at which that will occur is unknown.

Those are (quite properly) alarm bells to seasoned investors.

When people jump up and down excitedly about something and dismiss legitimate concerns as foolish, the wise people step well back from it. Not because it is defintely going to fail, but because there is no way to predict, judge or ascertain the prospects of it doing so or, indeed, of succeeding.

The fact that bitcoin's price crashed but then recovered so quickly reinforces the opposing views of both camps!

Short-term market predictions (in any market) are impossible: the fluctuations are too random. Longer-term forecasting is - I would say - equally impossible in this particular case, unlike more established investment instruments.

That means bitcoin is not an investment. It is a simple gamble.

Good luck to anyone who holds it. That is what's needed for success: luck, not skill, knowledge, insight or wisdom.

I am happy to hold some bitcoin, but it is on the basis that I have absolutely no idea at all what will happen to its value in the near or long term. The important thing is that if my holding falls to zero (as I tend to think it will), it will make no discernible difference to me financially; the value of my conventional investments rises and falls daily by the same amount that my bitcoin is currently worth.

BananaRepublic

What we have at the moment is a Ponzi scheme. The price goes up, so people buy, so the price goes up. Once the number of buyers has been exhausted, the price will collapse. Of course you could argue that it will merely stabilise, but since most buyers see it as an investment, once the growth stops, they'll sell up and move funds into the next big thing. At that point it will crash. After all, this is driven by herd instinct, and at present all the stories are buy buy buy. Once the stories become sell sell sell, people will sell en masse.