Bitcoins

[Tony]

I don't know nearly enough to get involved in something like bitcoin and I'm left wondering if any normal people have made anything of note. I always imagined that the use case you both have is what most people do, so it effectively fritters away any value   through normal domestic use.

This 1994 piece  I read by Roger Scruton highlighted the destruction of value / increase in price over time (see the price of a Rutland estate / Venician palace) enough to see if I'd piqued anyone's attention. I'm still not convinced I'd be able to keep hold of them if I'd ever bought bitcoin and I'm with your dad on lotteries.


http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/property-if-you-could-live-anywhere-roger-scruton-philosopher-owns-a-small-farm-in-wiltshire-where-1372134.html

[Oblomov]

At least you're not that Welsh bloke who had a ton of bitcoin, before it was worth anything. When it hit the $1000 mark, he remembered that the BTC was on an old computer of his that had recently gone to the tip. Cue pics of him vainly searching through landfill.

I bet he's really kicking himself now.

Here we go - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-25134289

Now worth £32,331,814.52p

Roger Scruton is probably the very last person I expected to get a mention in this thread!

[Tony]

Prof Scruton is always handy to make you realise that we're probably all dim at most things. Speaking of which, I'm kicking myself for ignoring you all by not buying bitcoin way back, and selling it now, in a perfectly timed Gecko style financial hit.

Speaking of which, there's this.
https://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2017/11/greater-fool-theory-0

The Economist  is usually gloomy on anything non traditional but that article makes it sound more like a Ponzi scheme than a bubble. I've seen a few spectacularly unqualified people offering their services in bitcoin investment in the last few weeks, usually on Twitter.

Got to say though, I'm enjoying the vicarious pleasure of you guys making a few Bob from it. Genuinely pleased while kicking myself.

[Oblomov]

Seriously Tony, I spent all of my BTC, every last bit down to the 4th decimal place.

Doesn't bother me, much... If I'd kept it all, I'd probably have 20-30BTC which, if I could liquidate it without knocking the price of its perch, would net me £165,000 at this evening's price.
--edit--
Now £166,650...

[Oblomov]

On the other hand, if you fancy a flutter, and treat it like a horse race - you could punt £100 now and collect maybe 60% in one month, £1 invested 12 months ago would get you over £800 today.

I might wait a few more weeks until the price crashes a bit before I do anything though. As Alastair says, it's incredibly high risk - think of it as a new Casino game, "Price Crash Chicken". The longer you leave your investment in, the better your dividend. But it will crash, and no-one knows how low or how long for.

[Alastair]

I had about £16 of Bitcoins in an account, last used in June.

I just took a look - £140 now 

[Oblomov]

Those 32 remaining bitcoins, if you still have them will soon be worth £32,000... as the price edges ever closer to £1000/BTC

Sorry, I meant cruising past £10,000/BTC

[Oblomov]

My remaining 0.1865 mBTC is now worth slightly over 2 quid.

I'll hang on to them.

[Alastair]

I just blew mine

[Oblomov]

It's crashing pretty fast at the moment, headed south of £7000/BTC over the last few days, down from £14k a month or two ago.

[Tony]

It's a whopping 19869.03 Aruban Florins today though.

[splodge]

You can mostly ignore this. I'm only posting cos I want to read it, but the paranoid tech company I work for means that github and personal email sites like live.com are blocked

https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin/blob/master/doc/intro.md

[splodge]

This one is quite interesting tho. It's all about the fundamental problem with the cryptocurrency "protocol": The more computing power used to "mine" blocks, the more arbitrarily difficult said mining is made, to keep the rate-of-new-block-generation essentially consistent; and therefore the more it costs to mine a block (in electricity usage).

https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-02-06/bitcoin-crash-sees-miners-fried-in-this-game-of-chicken

[Oblomov]

Eventually, all the world resources will be diverted to produce electricity to power computers to do "Proof of work" calculations to encrypt the billions of blockchains that all the idiots promoted as the solution for everything from ticketing to haemmorhoids.