BITCOIN

Aegis

silvercue said:

Aegis said:

which is why my ISA has an annual return of 22.4% and my SIPP has 10.9%.  

That is a decent return on the ISA, do you mind me asking who it is with?

Interactive Investor at the moment.  The non-pension is where I play a bit more freely, participating in IPOs and EIS-qualifying investments.  The two biggest contributors to returns have generated simple returns of 728% and 84% respectively - the first was an IPO that went really well, the second is my holding in Scottish Mortgage.

Of course, some of my investments have been absolute disasters - -89% for a company that looked like it might have a working lupus cure but which turned out to have no effect beyond that of a placebo.  If it had worked out, it would have surged in price, but sadly that's not how things developed.

Shocking_Blue

Adyinvestment said:

I did look at ETF's some time ago and could not see anything that interested me (there might be something better now)

I use MicroStrategy as a Bitcoin proxy which is now pretty much a pure Bitcoin share. I also chose Cleanspark over Hut8, although this is again Bitcoin based and not Crypto as a whole.

Thanks for this. I guess iWeb will have such ETFs available at some point. Might just go in with a bit on the above.

Scottex99

Shocking_Blue said:

Adyinvestment said:

I did look at ETF's some time ago and could not see anything that interested me (there might be something better now)

I use MicroStrategy as a Bitcoin proxy which is now pretty much a pure Bitcoin share. I also chose Cleanspark over Hut8, although this is again Bitcoin based and not Crypto as a whole.

Thanks for this. I guess iWeb will have such ETFs available at some point. Might just go in with a bit on the above.

Can't help on the ETF side of things (as I just buy the assets direct) but make sense that a proxy like Micro, Coinbase, Greyscasle etc would get you exposure. Maybe a change of broker needed too. GL

Thrugelmir

Been a while since the gullible fell for a major ponzi scheme. People never change.  Financial crises of the past are destined to repeat themselves. Markets are complex places and it's naive to think such events can ever be avoided.  Crises have a high degree of commonality: excessive exuberance, poor regulatory oversight, dodgy accounting, herd mentalities and often includes a sense of infallibility from investors. 

Scottex99

Do you understand that the way BTC was created and runs that it literally cannot be a ponzi?

[Deleted User]

Scottex99 said:

Do you understand that the way BTC was created and runs that it literally cannot be a ponzi?

I agree that Bitcoin isn't a ponzi scheme. It would be more accurate to call it a speculative bubble. Those who got in first are desperate to keep pushing it to new investors to push the value of their investment up, but at some point in the future it will stop finding new investors and the entire thing will collapse in value.

There's a paradox at the centre of Bitcoin because its long-term value is supposedly its capacity to act as a currency. For a currency to be viable, its price needs to be stable. Yet the reason most people have invested in Bitcoin in the last few years is precisely that its value isn't stable and because they've been sold on the promise of quick riches. It's tailor-made to collapse for that reason.

Of course people can't see that now because we're still knee deep in the bubble but in future I expect we'll look back at this and see it was obvious.

Scottex99

From the small sample size here where do you see people desperately pushing it to new investors? I bought BTC for less than $4k, I've bought it at $60k too. At no point have I thought oh I better go and shill to some forum or my friends to keep the price up. The ascent will be inevitable anyway, imo. "Bitcoin has no top because fiat has no bottom".

I'm not suggesting you go back and read 150 pages of debates/arguments but trust me when I say this currency thing has been covered 10 times already. If Satoshi could go back to 2009 he'd probably call it Digital Assets or something similar. A tiny fraction of people who hold and use BTC, expect to use it as a currency, ever. Yes you can buy stuff quickly using the lightning network but why would you when most expect the price to keep rising. Other than other coins, the only thing I ever bought with BTC was some degen crypto calendar that probably cost me $30 at the time and is now more like $300.

There's already stablecoins with huge market caps for daily use which are a straight swap for normal money in crypto platforms and would help you hedge the volatility of BTC and ETH if you wanted to.

You can expect what you want. I expect the opposite, that it's clear this is the future of money/finance in one form or the other and you'll be shaking your head wondering how you missed it when you come back here

silvercue

Seems opinions are divided around here!

Aegis

silvercue said:

Seems opinions are divided around here!

Indeed.  I am genuinely very open to investment opportunities, but I need to see where the value comes from, and just trading assets for an ever-increasing real return is just impossible from everything I know about investing. Obviously anyone can buy whatever they want with their money, but I'm still not convinced that this is anything other than a mania, and every time I ask for a way to calculate the "correct" value for each coin I get hugely conflicting responses, ranging from nothing (my guess) to millions of dollars per BTC (though such people are usually quick to add that this only works for BTC rather than any other crypto assets).

silvercue

Understood.  And I think it is wise to only buy into assets you trust. 

But then Gold has no real value other than the value we attribute to it.  There are similarities to be drawn there, yet gold has not collapsed (yet).