The Lemon Fool

Would be silly to sell 1.1 bitcoins I bought for £400+, I might start to get itchy when we get past $500k...

The crypto fund I still have a good few units left but I've forked out enough for HMRC this tax year so a respite until April will be welcome. I've been lucky to buy a new combi boiler, Fender Telecaster, ISA subsription, SIPP subscription etc etc and I can even afford to go to the dentist next year!

In essence, I have postponed going into drawdown for a good 2-3 years and am still able to continue adding funds to the "pension" pot.

JMN2 wrote:I've been lucky to buy a new combi boiler, Fender Telecaster, ISA subsription, SIPP subscription etc etc and I can even afford to go to the dentist next year!

Excellent numpty harvesting!

Your gain, their loss.

A Happy Christmas to you - from them.

Bitcoin train is backing up, Johnny-come-Latelies have a last chance of hopping on board before the journey continues - to the moon!

Perhaps I should buy a ticket to Alpha Centauri.

Backed up the truck and long and strong...

The Bagholder Express is leaving the station - All Aboard!

Choo Choo!!!

Bag-holder is old terminology. In the brave new world of crypto beliefs the word is ‘hodler’, i.e. those whom the high priests have convinced to take financial martyrdom for the cause. They are to be found huddled (hodled?) together for mutual support on Reddit.

A generation who have only seen central banks create money out of thin air with no apparent side effects (not realising that that the rampant inflation so created has been so far nullified by globalisation of production coupled with rapid automation) are very willing to believe that the likes of Bitcash has easily just performed the same trick.

Likewise, sadly, they will vote in comrade Corbyn to create endless free money to pay off their student loans, nationalise everything, fund 4 holidays a year and at the same time get them launched on the housing treadmill.

P.S. for those interested in the internal stresses in the Bitcon movement, try:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op ... yberspace/

Pay attention at the back! In-on-the-ground-floor Hodlers was done on Page 1.

Page 2 is bag-holding JCLs...

No "Shield Wall!!!" from these guys. They'll "yield" faster than a python generator because that's the script. We've read it before! Rinse repeat.

Je vous prie de croire, Madame, Monsieur, à mes sentiments les meilleurs,
NonRooky.

This site is constantly keeping up to date.

News.bitcoin.com

I suspect bitcoin price will keep on fluctuating keeping 13k as a temporary floor unless something drastic happens. Some air was taken out of it, it's now having a breather while assessing the new futures market, and being dampened by very negative press and news regarding bubbles, tulips, scams, floods, orphans, et al.

an article in IC recently states --

"bitcoin - and blockchains generally - use huge amounts of electricity "

DAK - for what ???

jackdaww wrote:an article in IC recently states --

"bitcoin - and blockchains generally - use huge amounts of electricity "

DAK - for what ???

I think to compute and verify that someone doesn't slip in some bogus bitcoins.

There are many good tutorials on the web.
Basically though the so-called miners consume the enormous amount of electricity, not just to power their specialist computers but also to cool them. Most mining is done in China, where there is local overcapacity of electricity production that can therefore be obtained cheaply at times. A cold climate also helps.

The miners are the distributed bookkeepers. They collect new transactions into a block of data but then have to find a hash that is deliberately made to be very difficult. The hash locks the block and includes the hash of the preceding block thereby locking the chain. Many computers are burning vast amounts of energy trying to be the first with a new block, 99% of this energy is wasted but is an inherent part of the system design. This can’t be reduced to a single computer (as with a bank) because the whole design is based on only trusting the majority vote of multiple independent bookkeepers. (If one actor corners 51% of the computer power in the network then he can take all). The first computer to find the hash for a new block gets paid by new coin (invented out of thin air), also gets any transaction fees that have been added to a transaction to get it ahead in the queue.
The vast electricity cost and the slowness of the process mean that (e.g.) Bitcoin cannot be a currency (i.e. for buying everyday things).
A good set of charts is here
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bi ... me.html#3m

and shows for BTC that block time is around 10 minutes and transaction fees around 30 dollars. (this doesn’t take into account the electricity as that is rewarded by new bitcoins generated by the protocol.)

Oh dear!

https://twitter.com/tenxwallet/status/9 ... 1477022725

#TenX advisory: Following an urgent communication from our card issuer WaveCrest, payments on the TenX card will be unavailable. We are working on a solution and will let you know further details as soon as we have them. We apologise for the inconvenience.


As touted on this forum:

viewtopic.php?f=78&t=5326&p=100261&hilit=crypto+debit#p100261
It helps that I have a crypto debit card in my wallet with Bitcoin loaded onto it that I can spend just like I would any other money.


Hmm, well that didn't last long! Ironic that a service aiming to free users from evil financial services providers is utterly dependent upon them.


More details here:

https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/01/05/ ... r-setback/


Caveat emptor.

GS

GS - They are not the only one. CEX.IO who I used to use have announced withdrawing money will now take up to 60 days!!! I think we are getting very close to the house of cards collapsing. I wish I had the cajones to go short but I suppose another massive spike up isn't out of the question.


Surerera

Surerera wrote:GS - They are not the only one. CEX.IO who I used to use have announced withdrawing money will now take up to 60 days!!! I think we are getting very close to the house of cards collapsing. I wish I had the cajones to go short but I suppose another massive spike up isn't out of the question.


Surerera

FWIW, for a bit of fun, I went short with IG about half an hour ago at 15004.34. Stop at 20000, limit 14000. Only in for the minimum bet, £0.25 per point. Curiously IG does not currently allow long bets!

If it rolls over to tomorrow I get should get paid about £5 interest. Closes at 8 though and I am slightly in the money, so may close out instead.

hiriskpaul wrote:

Surerera wrote:GS - They are not the only one. CEX.IO who I used to use have announced withdrawing money will now take up to 60 days!!! I think we are getting very close to the house of cards collapsing. I wish I had the cajones to go short but I suppose another massive spike up isn't out of the question.


Surerera

FWIW, for a bit of fun, I went short with IG about half an hour ago at 15004.34. Stop at 20000, limit 14000. Only in for the minimum bet, £0.25 per point. Curiously IG does not currently allow long bets!

If it rolls over to tomorrow I get should get paid about £5 interest. Closes at 8 though and I am slightly in the money, so may close out instead.

I was wrong about this closing at 8pm - I misread the sheet. I closed out shortly after 8 at about 14800 for a £50 credit. An interesting exercise and probably a good way to short as the spread is only about 0.8% and you get a daily credit for shorting. I might look at this again once I get back from holiday. I have little doubt the price will collapse at some point as BTC is essentially worthless, but it could be a very painful journey for shorters due to hysteria and the madness of crowds.

I see that IG now facilitate spreadbetting on all the following:
Bitcoin
Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin Gold
Ether
Litecoin
Ripple
One could build a portfolio.

langley59 wrote:I see that IG now facilitate spreadbetting on all the following:
Bitcoin
Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin Gold
Ether
Litecoin
Ripple
One could build a portfolio.

Only a short portfolio at present. IG do not allow long positions in cryptos. They have posted up daily funding costs for going long though, so perhaps they may allow it soon, but the costs are really high, only really applicable to someone intending to go long for a few days at a time.

hiriskpaul wrote:Only a short portfolio at present. IG do not allow long positions in cryptos.

As I understand it the position changes from time to time depending on their book exposure.
(They show as unlongable at the time of posting.)

Presumably this means that they only allow new long or short positions which offset the existing client positions. I wondered how they hedged their net exposure on these given that aside from Bitcoin there are no futures and even there futures have only just started (and IG do not offer quarterly spreadbets based on these futures). Presumably also they must initially allow a certain client book size to build up unhedged otherwise they would not be able to launch a new crypto currency spreadbet product.