The headline makes it sound like they're threatening legal action or some sort of regulation, at least to me.
>>A transaction has posted to your account involving CoinBase.com (Bitcoin)[2]. Please be advised that in an effort to protect your credit union and all our members, A+FCU does not allow transactions involving CoinBase or any virtual currency. If you attempt to conduct any future transactions involving virtual currency, your account may be subject to closure.
>>Some of the reasons A+FCU has chosen to refuse virtual currency transactions are: - Virtual currencies have a higher risk for fraud. -Virtual currencies have no consumer protections. -Virtual currencies are not backed by a government or central bank. -Virtual currencies are targets for hackers, who have been able to breach sophisticated security systems in order to steal funds. -Virtual currencies can cost you more to use than credit cards or even regular cash once you take exchange rate issues into consideration.
>>For more information regarding virtual currency, please refer to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) website at cfpb.gov or the National Credit Union Association (NCUA) website at ncua.gov.
>>If you have any questions regarding this matter, please contact us.
[1] A+ Federal Credit Union, yes, their official name has a plus symbol in it
[2] I never ended up using Coinbase, for unrelated reasons.
(I’m not a cryptocurrency fan, and have a grand total of a couple hundred bucks in crypto. Well, maybe a grand now, I don’t know.)
- There are a lot of economic instabilities in the world right now (e.g. COVID, lockdowns) increasing poverty.
- Bitcoin increased by up to 400% in the past year, and about an order of magnitude since its lows in 2019.
There's obviously a temptation to invest more and more when the value keeps going up -- desperation latching onto volatility -- which can cause increase hardship to those who fail to adequately acknowledge the risk. Those who invested in Bitcoin yesterday lost 25% of their value today.
I've been through this rodeo twice before, I've been checking the price regularly since at least 2014. I haven't lost any money because I didn't sell during downturns (although it's been tempting to do so for sure).
It's hard to say for sure if this is just shaking out weak hands and institutions will jump back in and it will start climbing again, or if we're at the start of a 2+ year constant downtrend again. I really hope it's not that, that was annoying, and we just climbed out of that in the past year, but we'll see (although it allowed me to keep buying a increasingly larger slivers of bitcoin every month all the way down to its low of $3500 last year).
It's fine that this article exists for the people that could use the reminder, I just don't like how the headline was worded. It made me think for a moment that there was going to be a major crackdown and we were definitely heading into a major drop in prices (way beyond what it has so far).
As long as most people think everyone else thinks BTC is the prettiest girl, it can have substantial value and the sky is the limit.
It's a pure speculation asset. You don't need bitcoins to pay taxes. The value has a very weak link anchored to anything in the real economy (limited number of coins and the energy is meaningless nominal detail in this context).
You can use it to exchange large values without traditional middleman.
Saying that BTC is just a hash, a virtual nothing and it has no intrinsic value is silly. Its not a tulip bulb.
Talking about pretty things, how come nobody gets railed up when a painting gets sold for millions and its a single color modernistic piece? Its literally just a hearsay that it has any value and no function apart from being expensive firestarter.
Bitcoin costs money to mine like it take money to mine gold. So there is 'work' involved creating it. It has built in mechanism for fighing inflation (finite source), and security for exchanging it. Try to liquidate 100k of gold.
Also its funny to me how people claim btc has no real value when over 20% of USD were printed last year. Out of thin air. Its all about confidence of people using it. If people were confident tulip bulbs have value of 100m per one we would be trading them to this day no matter how usless they are.
I've also made a list of people who own the different bits of air in the hole. I'm using pencil and paper, but it works. If you give me some money I can write your name on there and you can "store value". Later if you tell me to write someone else's name, I can rub yours out and you can "exchange large values".
If you or your friends want the money back later, I can give it to you. Probably... mostly. But don't ask me for more money than you gave me in the first place, because I won't have it.
p.s. I lied when I said I dug the hole by myself. I really dug up a billion tonnes of coal and used it to power a microscopic spaghetti noodle which dug the hole. For some reason this gave a lot of people confidence that my hole is the One True Hole.
TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities) are good value store. You neither lose nor gain.
I think it has a pretty strong link to the degree of fear in the real economy (just like gold at the margin) and more fundamentally the degree of loss of confidence in governing institutions.
In that way it's useful as a hedge, but within limits. If the economy and governing institutions totally collapse, Bitcoin won't be very useful because most of our modern large scale and complex society, including security, shared infrastructure, and the goods and services we consume are built on the foundation provided by those institutions.
Bitcoin has no answer for the needs provided by those (admittedly imperfect) institutions, and it seems to have the historical goal of deconstructing them. Indeed, it can only exist if those institutions exist.
If here in Canada the US dollar became legal tender and I could use it for all my transactions, would the Canadian dollar hold its value? I don't think so.
Bitcoin is like water tower where you can move water level (price) up or down by adding or removing 10-20 cubic meters of water. Fiat money is like a big lake or a sea. You can take or put 100 cubic meters per second and it's not visibly moving.
Once BTC price rises to the level that enough people feel rich and start buying things, the price will drop suddenly. Panic hits the markets and the price drops like a stone.
2. No one expects fiat currency to be an investment asset!
Why anyone expects the value of bitcoin to increase like stock ownership of a corporation is beyond me. And it has no intrinsic value like gold.
> The value has very weak link anchored to anything in real economy
So like dollars but without the big-ass nukes backing it?
BTW kids, dont invest on bitcoin, or for that matter on any crypto-anything.
I thought that was outrageous and actually was a sign to sell. I mentioned this to a foreign exchange trader friend and we even finished each other's sentence with the above!
"Taxi drivers told you what to buy. The shoeshine boy could give you a summary of the day's financial news as he worked with rag and polish. An old beggar who regularly patrolled the street in front of my office now gave me tips and, I suppose, spent the money I and others gave him in the market. My cook had a brokerage account and followed the ticker closely. Her paper profits were quickly blown away in the gale of 1929."
https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...
Last week it has become my best investment so far
Although now I wonder if I should sell them
Makes it a lot harder to time any bubbles, which I honestly think may be contributing a bit to how high this one got.
What can we do to improve financial literacy so that nobody ever takes investing advice from a bus ad?
The media has spent years teaching people about what happens in countries with high inflation, and people are now rightfully scared it's coming to their countries too.
"Investors who are out of pocket will not be able to rely on the Financial Ombudsman Service to settle complaints or order compensation from offending firms. Consumers are also unlikely to be covered under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which covers losses up to £85,000 on fully regulated accounts and investment products including pensions."
You also can't, say, sue BitCoin for securities fraud (or, more realistically, be part of a class-action lawsuit) like you could against a company that you own stock in[0].
Again, I'm not trying to say that stocks are "safe", but it's also true that you have more protections investing in them than you do with Bitcoin (at least for now).
[0]:https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
I can't find a single source for this claim. All Eurobank market caps look fine, even in COVID, for the past 5 years.
Can you explain this statement?
People who have bought e.g. a pizza with bitcoin are examples of what NOT to do with Bitcoin. The very fact that Bitcoin holders expect it to rise in value makes it unsuitable as a medium of exchange.
I have a huge box full of precious photography film. Slide stock, Kodak Portra, beautiful B&W by Ilford... I should store it in a freezer but that would make holding costs high, and there's a going market for good and bad film at any condition (there's CVS-brand film on ebay)...
These rolls have the capacity to produce beautiful imagery in my incapable hands, and I know them to have great value -- my 120 format Portras smoke anything in your digital quiver when it comes to displaying beautiful people in outdoor-sized frames.
I can pretty much sell a handful of Ilfords in 2-3 weeks and buy my wife a nice steak dinner. Is it money?
Stocks are much "safer" because the intrinsic value is often similar to the market price.
Gold and some stocks (Tesla) are somewhere in between. They have intrinsic value but people also buy it speculatively so the price is way higher than the intrinsic value.
I sent in 2 support tickets and received no reply, so I resorted to a chargeback, presumably forfeiting any right to the BTC I purchased.
Just to add salt to the wounds, I now constantly see adverts for Coinbase
Avoid Coinbase like the Covid
The HN title is misleading, it is more a warning against all the Bitconnect like ponzi scams that will popup and promise huge return by mining or trading Bitcoin.
I understand this is not realistic right now, but might be if someone has discovered new math or physics for example.
edit: certain elliptical curve crypto systems use randomness as part of the encipherment process. If two uses of the same key have low quality randomness/no randomness, solving for the private key material essentially becomes a slightly tedious high school algebra math problem.
heres a paper from last year where they did such an analysis, found some weak keys, and then saw that those wallets had already been hacked/drained! (possibly by someone who did similar work, for profit rather than science) https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/023
I think the saying "it's only a crime if you get caught" is applicable in this case.
That said, you can get charged with tax evasion if you have crypto without reporting it. If they find out that is. I have some crypto stashed on an exchange, so I'm expecting them to report to my tax office at some point.
This PSA is a pretty lame scare tactic. Sure, BTC seems riskier than say AAPL stock, but both can go to zero. So, a PSA like this one seems like propaganda more than level-headed investment protips.
But thats how investing goes. If you could nail every investment you'd quickly become the wealthiest individual in the world.
How so? The bigger it gets and the longer it lasts, the more it's derisked. It was more risky 10 years ago (i.e., odds of going to 0, finding a critical problem, lack of adoption, would've been easier for governments to ban it).
If I calculated correctly he probably sold more than 20 bitcoin lol. He could retire now if he kept it.
Imagine how he feels right now, lol. But as long as he made profit, that's all that matters. Hindsight always 20/20
"I made my money by selling too soon." ...Bernard Baruch
I received this BTC from an amazing soul here on HN (again, THANK YOU so much for that blessing if you are reading this!) who, after I wrote up a blog post about how I was arrested without any probable cause in Las Vegas, so very generously sent it to me after asking if it could "be of use?."
BTW, the end result of the bullshit arrest was I was released with time served and the felony possession charge dropped due to the improper nature of the arrest, which was all caught on the officers bodycam.
So at the time I read the email, I was literally walking down Fremont Ave. wondering where I was going to sleep that night (remember I had just been released from Clark County Detention Center) as my 34 nights in jail had made me lose everything I owned in the weekly place I had been renting. I was asked for a wallet address, so I quickly jumped on the playstore and dl'ed the first app with a good rating and was highly "secure". At the time I thought he or she would send me $50-$100 TOPS, so imagine my surprise when 0.75 (at the time worth like $600) plopped into my wallet.
I must have fat-fingered the password entry, and of course I couldn't remember the 12-word phrase that the app author pleaded with me to "write-down and store in a safe, secure place"..no matter I thought at the time because of course there must be a password-reset email/text thing. right? RIGHT?
Well, no.
Alas, no happy ending here...I lost my very interesting and well-paying remote LAMP-development job working for a fast-growing company that was focused on lowering the overall cost to everyday people of filling drug prescriptions ( I know the irony of it all has not been lost on me ).
The owner was someone I really respected and was smart enough to know his systems needed a total re-design for security and performance reasons, and to be honest years later I still have not recovered, work-wise and economically, from that night I was illegally (not my opinion, the actual criminal court finding and its' legal outcome) arrest. I still hate the feeling I get in the pit of my stomach I get when I think of the bind I put him in...ugghhhhhhh.
So anyway...I still have the wallet safely stored away on an unencrypted USB (kind of late for that) that is physically locked away. I did contact the app author and fortunately for me, his app code was FOSS on github and I have the archive. Another fortunate item here is that I know I only used lowercase letters and the password was 12 char long.
At approx. $30k in value, it's getting to the point where a concerted effort at cracking the damn thing is in order...however, I am personally very optimistic on the FV of BTC in particular and think I will hold off my attempts at cracking it until 1BTC=$100kUSD.
Finally...the main reason I wrote this up this long post was to ask the community if anyone here knows of any reputable services that crack wallets such as mine for a reasonable fee and that I can feel secure that they will not just steal the BTC if they do manage to open it?
It was ~ 18 k then. I didn't leave much on the table.
