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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

#71

Post by Nursie »

trident5000 wrote: post #43
grey-area wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "exchanges lying about transactions" - what?

The volumes on many exchanges (particularly the less reputable ones) have been faked a lot. Also exchanges have several times been found not to have the reserves to actually cover the customer accounts (i.e quadriga).

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

#72

Post by graeme »

eloff wrote: post #48
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.

1. You can use dollars to pay taxes. Big difference from bitcoin

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.

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

#73

Post by kolbe »

cambalache wrote: post #67
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…

> It's pure speculation asset. > 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.

Those big ass nukes have a lot of power to extract value. Hence the value of the dollars they create to make you pay taxes with.

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

#75

Post by kolbe »

You should be prepared to lose all your money in any investment.

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.

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

#76

Post by [deleted] »

permo-w wrote: post #70

This is incredibly frustrating, as, just before this massive spike in bitcoin’s value, I bought a significant amount of BTC using Coinbase. They took my money, then retroactively made it look like my (brand new) account had exactly the amount of debt that I had paid in, and now my account was at 0. I sent in 2 support tickets and received no reply, so I resorted to a chargeback, presumably forfeiting any right to the…

[deleted]

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

#77

Post by cableshaft »

anthony_romeo wrote: post #62
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.

True, but it's a good reminder given that: - 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 hards…

They only lost if they sell it now. If they're not planning to sell for a couple of years when they invested then it doesn't matter that it dropped >20% in the last 48 hours.

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).

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

#78

Post by zorbash »

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!

I've seen that, it's so scammy. I feed bad for people who'll fall for it.

What can we do to improve financial literacy so that nobody ever takes investing advice from a bus ad?

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

#79

Post by Cthulhu_ »

farseer wrote: post #6

Is it fair game and legal to break into a wallet via cryptographic means alone? I mean without hacking someone's computer/storage to steal the private key that is. I understand this is not realistic right now, but might be if someone has discovered new math or physics for example.

Theoretically it could probably be labeled as hacking and / or theft in a court of law. Practically, you'd never find out who did it unless they admitted to it, happen to live in the same country, etc etc etc.

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.

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

#80

Post by xorcist »

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…

That's true, but it's true for gold and a whole lot of other things too.
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