Goldman Sachs Is Setting Up a Cryptocurrency Trading Desk

"for me at least it is an opportunity to keep my own wealth. "

This is a really poor reason to use BTC.

A) BTC is supposed to be a currency - generally, a currency is not where you should be storing wealth. Currencies are not designed to be 'stores of value' - they are there to facilitate economic activity and transactions.

If you want to 'store wealth' - put it in real estate, bonds or equities. Commodities. Other currencies. A broad mix/basket of many of them.

B) There's no reason at all to think that BTC will necessarily be worth more/less than another currency. Why do you think BTC will 'always go up'? Much of the BTC hype may have already been had.

C) By simply keeping your currency in a trivial savings account, will roughly protect it from inflation.

In addition - most bank accounts are Federally insured - in case something goes wrong, you get up to $200K back etc..

D) Risk. BTC could go to zero tomorrow. Probably not - but possibly. It's extremely volatile = bad store of value.

People have this really odd view that 'currency = value' ... it's not ... currency is just a 'medium of exchange' - so you only need to hold it when you want to transact with someone else in a common/liquid way.

Over any reasonable length of time, currency is generally not a good place to hold value, and it's not designed for that.

If you have lot's of currency, trade it for something else, spread it out.

There will never, ever be a currency or any other magical currency store of value that will provide what you are kind of implying. Never. This is because the ratio of 'things people need' and the 'amount of currency they need to transact for' is constantly in flux, ergo, a 'fixed' currency constantly in flux relative to that.

Nit, but an interesting subtle one:

bitcoin-core can double the amount of bitcoin overnight. They can commit new code which does that and shows up in the next client.

But, that would presumably be noticed: either in the oss repo, or in the blockchain itself.

So I think more accurately, it's sort of in between a fiat currency and a commodity. It's a fiat currency whose operation is completely transparent.

It can be an equalizer, no doubt about that. Probably the biggest reason I hope it works its way into our culture the way credit and bank card transactions have. That and privacy, which these exchanges have none of.

Ok, look, it's a pyramid scheme no different than the stock market.... coke heads at Goldman love this sh_t

There's a cryptocurrency called RaiBlocks that is working to be the best at transfer of value. The protocol uses new cryptocurrency concepts evolved over the years and I believe it can be quite revolutionary. In my opinion, bitcoin is one of the worst cryptocurrencies at the moment, and to be honest I hope to see it die soon.

Create a wallet using this site https://raiwallet.com/, paste your address here and I'll send you some raiblocks. The transaction time is about ~5 seconds and there are no fees, so it's almost on par with a credit card, except you don't depend on a bank or a credit card company.

Also, check out this link to google trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=raiblocks. You'll see that the country with the most interest in raiblocks is Venezuela, which coincidentally is going through hyperinflation. Bitcoins used to be quite big there as a way of avoiding the loss in value of the national currency, but as the country became poorer and the cryptocurrency networks more congested, the fees became prohibitively expensive. Raiblocks could be a good alternative to cash, or at least help some of the most technically savvy people.

What I'm aiming at is, give the technology a chance. As the top poster says, it might be a big bubble, but it might also be a revolutionary technology (or both, just like the internet).

EDIT: Sorry folks I have to go so you'll have to wait until I check my account again. Still I'll do my best to keep sending as long as people keep asking.