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Post by DryCreek on Dec 21, 2017 13:53:12 GMT -5
Any takers among this crowd?
Aside from the current mania, anyone here been in for the long run? Favorites?
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Post by petrushka on Dec 21, 2017 16:07:35 GMT -5
Tulips - buy tulips. Morgage your house, spend all your life savings and buy tulips. You will be a billionaire in no time at all.
Yupp, yupp.
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Post by tamara68 on Dec 21, 2017 18:53:28 GMT -5
Tulips - buy tulips. Morgage your house, spend all your life savings and buy tulips. You will be a billionaire in no time at all. Yupp, yupp. I see an opportunity here  |
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Post by worksforme2 on Dec 22, 2017 7:39:07 GMT -5
Tulips - buy tulips. Morgage your house, spend all your life savings and buy tulips. You will be a billionaire in no time at all. Yupp, yupp. I've been investing for over 40yrs. Some of it speculative to be sure. But for the life of me I cannot phantom how one could get caught up in the "tulip" futures market. But then again I didn't get in on the dot com craze either. |
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Post by wewbwb on Dec 22, 2017 8:15:48 GMT -5
 I have a bitcoin for sale. |
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Post by tamara68 on Dec 22, 2017 8:41:42 GMT -5
Tulips - buy tulips. Morgage your house, spend all your life savings and buy tulips. You will be a billionaire in no time at all. Yupp, yupp. I've been investing for over 40yrs. Some of it speculative to be sure. But for the life of me I cannot phantom how one could get caught up in the "tulip" futures market. But then again I didn't get in on the dot com craze either. It has been done before: |
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Post by wewbwb on Dec 22, 2017 10:59:57 GMT -5
I've been investing for over 40yrs. Some of it speculative to be sure. But for the life of me I cannot phantom how one could get caught up in the "tulip" futures market. But then again I didn't get in on the dot com craze either. It has been done before: My tulips would like to meet your tulips.... (See what I did there?) |
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Post by tamara68 on Dec 22, 2017 11:05:48 GMT -5
wewbwb Our tulips would florish 
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Post by petrushka on Dec 22, 2017 16:00:00 GMT -5
I have a bitcoin for sale. Makes space invader noises. |
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Post by petrushka on Dec 22, 2017 16:26:12 GMT -5
Seriously, I've been involved in the farming sector for some 35 years. I've seen it come and go many times.
Certain cattle breeds become 'fashionable' and suddenly people borrow money, rush in, buy at twice real world value
or more.
Around 1986 goat farming became fashionable. My goats that I had bought for $15 were suddenly worth $350. I did not
sell, I wanted them to breed and clear the blackberry off my farm. People were paying $60,000 - $120,000 for a single
Angora goat buck. 3 years later, after the craze had passed, they were opening the back gate to the farm and chasing
them off into the bush.
The ostrich farming craze. People paying $10,000 for a single egg .... to get an animal that would be worth $120 as meat
and feathers ... (that died out too, after a short while, but bank managers were lending money to fools to do this).
The deer farming craze (actually deer farming persists, they are selling the velvet of the male animals to the Koreans
to make wonder-medicines with (Korean viagra). The meat and skins are a by-product, believe it or not. Very hard to find
venison to buy here, even <shakes head>. But again, at the height, people were buying helicopters to go and throw nets on
wild deer to take them home to their farms.
The fitch farming craze ... PETA put paid to that with their anti fur lobbying. As a consequence, a lot of fitches got away and
are wreaking havoc on our native bird life. Again, lots of money turned into stardust.
ETC ETC get-rich-quick schemes trigger greed and good sense goes out the window.
Yes, had I bought some bitcoin when they were first sold for Real Money, I could be grinning now. But, you may remember (or not) how some millions' worth of bitcoin just 'disappeared' inexplicably from some Australian 'depository'. I decided at that time that I did not consider bitcoin a remotely safe investment, and I had no gambling money lying around.
The whole cryptocurrency thing - never mind how sound or unsound the technology behind it is - seems much like a house of cards to me at this point, built on nothing but thin air. Once a real economy builds around it, I expect that values will actually reflect something in terms of Real Money exchange rates. But without any Real World (tm) equity (the current state) ....
Incidentally, you'd be boggling at the amount of electricity that goes into mining a single bitcoin. The cost in electricity alone (never mind the hardware) far exceeds the return even in the current speculative market! Flaming heck <shakes head>. I think we need to impose environmental levies on bitcoin mining or the California bush fires will burn ever hotter (while the Orange One fiddles on Twitter)!
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Post by DryCreek on Dec 23, 2017 0:02:17 GMT -5
I've been investing for over 40yrs. Some of it speculative to be sure. But for the life of me I cannot phantom how one could get caught up in the "tulip" futures market. But then again I didn't get in on the dot com craze either. The worst is yet to come. Bitcoin is volatile, but it has at least been tempered by the fact that it is very hard for US citizens to complete the know-your-customer screening process on a new trading account, and then successfully get money wired to the exchange (though Coinbase's niche is making the funding easier). So, one has had to be pretty determined to get into the game. In their zest to jump on the bandwagon, the stock exchanges are going to start allowing futures trading against Bitcoin. This might actually be the beginning of the next market crash... gambling against the value of something which is itself a gamble, whose price fluctuates violently on a whim because it has no point of reference in the real world (not even as sound as tulip bulbs) - so it can be neither over-priced nor under-priced. To me, this is where Joe Investor will get fleeced, betting on something that's probably riskier than junk bonds. And to petrushka's comment about power, the amount of energy wasted in the mining competition is directly proportional to the price of Bitcoin. Miners take their rigs offline when it becomes unprofitable, so the mining becomes easier; when the price goes up, more miners jump back in, and the difficulty automatically increases to compensate, which requires them to burn more power. It's a brilliant scheme, but the environmental impact was not considered in the design, and the work produced isn't doing anything productive like searching for the cure to cancer. (Other coins are trying to tackle these elements.) I've dabbled in it for ~5 years. If only I'd bought and held all this time! Originally it appealed to me as a digital version of gold, immune to the instabilities of government-issued currencies and their attempts to control money flow. And it is. Unfortunately, there's nothing to prevent people using it for speculation, and that has completely overshadowed the original intent. |
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Post by M2G on Dec 23, 2017 8:38:23 GMT -5
Tulips - buy tulips. Morgage your house, spend all your life savings and buy tulips. You will be a billionaire in no time at all. Yupp, yupp. Heh heh - blast from the pas there but very good illustration of why I don;t touch this stuff - right now looks like it (at least temporarily) starting to shit the bed. |
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