Bitcoins/Cryptocurrency

adindas wrote: »

Thanks but I think this thing could be overcome to some extents with exchange that back to Major currencies, as at least you could withdraw it using your debit card or spend it, or transfer it to your current account. This make it ismple id you want to speculate.

That sounds ridiculous as a solution to someone who wants to speculate on the changing price of crypto over time.

Let's say you have £5000-6000 or whatever the current price is, and want to buy and hold one bitcoin for a year in the hope of benefiting from the change in price of a bitcoin for a year because you think it's going to go up. Or you have £10,000 and want to buy and hold 2 coins for a year, or £1000 and want to buy and hold 0.2 coins for a year, whatever.

With a normal online exchange you buy the coin and can withdraw it, look aftter it yourself, so you know you will still have it in a year's time even if the exchange you bought it from goes bust, has fraud, etc.

As Qubit says, with Revolut you can't withdrsw the coins. You only 'virtually' own them - so you can transfer them to other people who have a Revolut account, or you can keep them in your own Revolut account, but you can't take them away and put them somewhere safe. Your interest in the coins is virtual and only Revolut have them - if they even bought them at all. They owe you the value of the coins at a point in time (less transaction fees). If the value of your £1000 or £10,000 investment goes up to £1500 or £15,000 but then Revolut fails, you could lose all that value (including the initial £1000 or £10000 you put in).

So the problem is, you cannot get your hands on the coins to look after them yourself safely or do what you want with them (give them to other people outside the Revolut network, move them to another exchange, etc).

You say this problem is 'overcome to some extents' by being able to convert the value to major currencies and withdraw that. But it isn't really, is it?

For example let's say:
- I put £5,000 into their platform today and use it to buy approximately one Bitcoin, and I want to own the Bitcoin for a year because I believe the £5,000-worth of Bitcoin which I bought at today's price will be worth £10,000 or even more in June 2019.

- But if I leave the Bitcoin amount in their virtual account, I could lose it to fraud or failure of the Revolut business.

- So I would like to withdraw my Bitcoins, for safekeeping during the one year while I'm waiting .

- But they don't allow it, because it's only a virtual account and I don't actually own the Bitcoin, just a share of its value.

- Your solution to overcome this problem is to exchange it back to major currencies: simply withdraw the £5000 as dollars or pounds or euro and then I have them in my pocket.

So OK I'll follow your solution and see if it fixes my problem. I buy the bitcoin today and then sell it tomorrow for about the same price, and if I withdraw the resulting cash, I will have cash back in my pocket. But I won't have any bitcoin. So if bitcoin goes up in value from £5000 to £10000 over the course of the year, I won't get any of that value. If I want to transfer bitcoin to a friend or a supplier or to my account at another bitcoin exchange, I can't do it because I don't have any bitcoins. I sold the bitcoin as part of getting the major currencies to put back in my pocket.

So the fact that you can sell your virtual bitcoins to get real currency and withdraw it, is not any kind of solution to someone wanting to buy and hold bitcoins to speculate on their price movement without having a major risk of losing all the bitcoins if the Revolut business collapses.

Also Revolut is UK company which need to follow UK regulation.

And they hopefully don't intend to suffer fraud or go bust. But pay attention to the risk warning at the bottom of the home page, which says, inter alia:

Funds received by us in relation to cryptocurrency transactions will not be safeguarded (under the UK Electronic Money Regulations 2011) or covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.