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Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers

theguardian.com

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Re: Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers

#41

Post by prionassembly »

WhoCaresLies wrote: post #20
trident5000 wrote: post #2

I find this hilarious when many European banks have lost 98% of their market caps and individual stocks have just as much volatility in many cases. Maybe the investor warnings should be more even.

buy bitcoin then, go ahead, you can buy everything with bitcoin right?

If it appreciates indefinitely in value, yes.

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?

Re: Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers

#42

Post by nabla9 »

Bitcoin speculation is an almost pure Keynesian beauty contest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

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).

Re: Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers

#43

Post by trident5000 »

grey-area wrote: post #34
trident5000 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you're saying but this is still a bit ridiculous. You sue a company when malpractice occurs, that is not possible with btc. It simply exists. Its like saying you dont have investor protections when you buy oil or corn (unless we are talking about the exchange, and by the article I'm not sure what they're getting at).

Here are some possibilities for malpractice with Bitcoin: Exchanges lying about transactions, pricing, Exchanges refusing to allow or unable to allow extracting wealth stored in bitcoin, Exchanges front-running, Exchanges stealing money, 51% attack by miners, Governments expropriating wealth 10 years later claiming back taxes for undeclared earnings, Developers changing the rules of the currency (which are encoded in…

Theres a lot of inaccuracies in here and it just kind of looks like things being thrown at a wall and hoping they stick. For instance front running is done by HFT in the equity markets so I see a double standard there. "exchanges lying about transactions" - what? 51% attack by miners, do you actually know what that is? What the impact is and how much it would cost to carry and sustain that?

Nursie: Oh sure, I thought he was talking about like your trades on the exchanges being misrepresented or something. Weve known about the wash trading for probably 6 years now. Theres aggregators that eliminate the wash trading volumes. Its mostly asian exchanges that are competing for business. theres still a lot of organic volume. Yup theres going to be bad actors that occurs all over finance.

Re: Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers

#44

Post by vsareto »

bena wrote: post #33
cableshaft wrote: post #10

This is just: "Don't invest what you aren't prepared to lose," which has been the advice for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for a decade at this point. The headline makes it sound like they're threatening legal action or some sort of regulation, at least to me.

That's good advice for investing in general.

It's not really though. That amount of risk aversion would keep people out of the market who would be better served by keeping it in a lazy portfolio for extended amounts of time.

Re: Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers

#45

Post by melenaboija »

danhak wrote: post #15
trident5000 wrote: post #2

I find this hilarious when many European banks have lost 98% of their market caps and individual stocks have just as much volatility in many cases. Maybe the investor warnings should be more even.

Why are you comparing individual stocks to a currency?

I guess for the same reason you implicitly compare BTC to USD or EUR, it needs to be compared to something to give it a value as it does not have an underlying one

Re: Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers

#47

Post by agumonkey »

tebbers wrote: post #40

In London they are advertising bitcoin on the side of buses and in the Underground with the slogan 'when you see bitcoin on the side of a bus, it's time to buy'. 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!

It's a sad possibility that people are actively getting newcomers to join the game at the worst of times.

Re: Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers

#48

Post by eloff »

nabla9 wrote: post #42

Bitcoin speculation is an almost pure Keynesian beauty contest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest 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 an…

I don't think fiat currency has terribly much more going for it, in terms of intrinsic value, other than you do need it day to day because there aren't alternatives for buying things and paying your taxes.

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.

Re: Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers

#49

Post by RivieraKid »

trident5000 wrote: post #32
RivieraKid wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin has essentially no intrinsic value. If people only used it as a currency, not as a speculative "investment", the price would be orders of magnitude lower. 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 val…

People use Bitcoin as a form of gold 2.0. Thats why the MC is where it is. Nobody in their right mind is making a cash flow case for btc unless you include lending which actually makes a decent return.

It's true that people use it as gold 2.0 and it's the bull case. But, the value is approximately 100% speculative. If people for some reason decided they will only use it for transactions and not as investment, most of the value would disappear.

Re: Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers

#50

Post by janmo »

Consumers should be prepared to “lose all their money” if they invest in products that promise high returns from cryptoassets such as bitcoin, the City watchdog has warned.

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.

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