Bitcoin

SALTburn64

Someone is trying to get me into bitcoins,  they are telling me I need two apps one  to buy and one to sell can anyone advise me if they are right in saying that.  I am totally new to this currency and I need to know a lot more about it ,  appreciate any help or advice thank you 

barnstar2077

You don't need to know a lot more about it.  I would say you would be better off if you knew nothing about it, and kept it that way! (other opinions are available).  Please make sure you have a good emergency fund, pension and some sound investments before you start gambling on bitcoin (preferably with a very small amount of money.)

bowlhead99

SALTburn64 said:

Someone is trying to get me into bitcoins,  they are telling me I need two apps one  to buy and one to sell can anyone advise me if they are right in saying that.  I am totally new to this currency and I need to know a lot more about it ,  appreciate any help or advice thank you 

No, you do not need any 'apps' at all, and although it's true that some exchanges are more efficient for buying than selling and vice versa, you do not need to use two of them. It is like saying that one gold merchant is slightly cheaper to buy from and a different one is slightly better to sell to, but you do not need to trek across town from one to the other with a cart full of gold if you just want to sell what you bought as quickly as possible.

If you don't fully understand everything there is to know about cryptocurrency it is quite reckless to allow someone else to start trying to 'get you into' it. One thing that could be quite educational is to look at a price chart of a few years ago and see how the price crashed from over $19000 to under $3500 in the space of a year from December 2017 to December 2018, and imagine how you would feel if you lost over 80% of your 'investment' in a short space of time. And some apps have much greater loss potential than that because they are designed to help you take big risks with the promises of big rewards that might not happen.

L0701738

If you want to read up about it there is a book written by Glen Goodman called The Crypto Trader. He was a news reporter for ITV and offers some good advice. A few tips:

Read a few books before you start
Practice using a dummy account
Only invest what you can afford to lose
You will not make incredible amounts of money until you can invest incredible amounts, if you invest £100 you could gain 10-100%+ but within a few hours you could also lose exactly the same or more. The same applies for investing thousands. Are you in a position to deal with that emotionally?

Expect to lose while you are learning, most people do so be very very careful. It’s not a quick way of making money if you don’t know what you are doing and if you don’t have a lot to invest. 

Be VERY careful and do your research. 

I did the research, earned around £100 lost a lot and eventually managed to get back to the amount I invested. I have given it a break for a few months as it isn’t as easy as people make out. Equally I have a friend who made £11k within a few weeks but he used some pretty risky strategies that I wasn’t prepared to do. 

Hope that helps a little! 

HansOndabush

BitCoin is just a hex number, not even worth $10, let alone $25000. The blockchain is a good public ledger but as it tracks everything that ever happens it is too cumbersome for BitCoin to be adopted as a currency for general use; throughput is about 7 transactions a second compared to Visa's 50,000.

Can anyone explain why they think BitCoin is worth anything at all other than what speculators are assigning to it? It seems like the Emporers New Clothes; there's nothing there except a number and when you see that you understand BitCoin is just a bubble or pyramid scheme with early adopters selling out after pump n' dump..

Alexland

SALTburn64 said:

Someone is trying to get me into bitcoins

Ask yourself why they are doing this? It might be nothing to do with bitcoins but an old fashioned scam. Even if you trust them consider they might be being scammed too.

patient_investor

Do not invest into something you don't understand. Your "friend" did a very poor job of explaining this to you. It's not true you need one app to buy one to sell. You may need to have one app to trade (exchange app) and one to hold your Bitcoin (a mobile wallet). But to you, as someone completely new to this, trading (buying and selling) is completely not recommend as you have no idea what you are doing. Buying and holding it duable with minimal knowledge, but not buying and selling using two unknown apps. Do not listen to that person it's most likely a scam.

Malthusian

Alexland said:

SALTburn64 said:

Someone is trying to get me into bitcoins

Ask yourself why they are doing this? It might be nothing to do with bitcoins but an old fashioned scam. Even if you trust them consider they might be being scammed too.

It is highly likely to be a scam. One possibility for the "two apps" confusion is that one app is for the OP to buy genuine Bitcoins, and the second app is the scam's app for them to transfer their Bitcoins to the scammers (including the OP's friend).

A lot of scams only accept Bitcoin to make money laundering easier, which means that most victims have to be coached into first buying Bitcoin before they transfer it to the scam.

csgohan4

general rule, not to invest if you don't understand, do your own research, 

Another_Saver

Since the forum doesn't like my copy and pasting my usual answer to these threads, I'll just link to the first page of the last one. 14 people agreed last time I checked so I'll let my post stand on its own merits: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6221770/bitcoin/p1

BananaRepublic

Another_Saver said:

Since the forum doesn't like my copy and pasting my usual answer to these threads, I'll just link to the first page of the last one. 14 people agreed last time I checked so I'll let my post stand on its own merits: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6221770/bitcoin/p1

I agree with the gist of your post. However you say "Firstly bitcoin is not an "investment" per se. It's a digital currency or commodity, ". Certainly Bitcoin supporters would have us believe that, but it practise almost no-one uses it as a currency, and in truth they use it as an investment. So I disgree with your claim.

And as I have said before, it is in my opinion fundamentally immoral due to the amount of energy required to mine Bitcoin, and carry out transactions. It is about as un green as it is possible to be, and I'm surprised that the blessed Norwegian gremlin isn't routinely ranting against it. If a transaction required the seller and/or buyer to cover the cost of the electricity required to carry out that transaction, it would be doomed for all but high value transactions.