Betting on crypto with your credit card is a bad idea, full stop.
But I remember in 2013, I read about someone who was planning on maxing out their credit cards to buy Bitcoin at $90. I was exhorting them not do it...
Ha. I wonder how they fared.
But I remember in 2013, I read about someone who was planning on maxing out their credit cards to buy Bitcoin at $90. I was exhorting them not do it...
Ha. I wonder how they fared.
Yall are throwing your conservative investment advice at everyone and backwards validating your risk-adverse behavior.
Because it's gambling, and a lot of the currencies won't work at scale, so it can be considered a 0-sum game.
> But I remember in 2013, I read about someone who was planning on maxing out their credit cards to buy Bitcoin at $90. I was exhorting them not do it...
Hindsight is always 20/20. If I could go back in time I'd run the earliest Bitcoin miner on my PC for as long as it generated coins, and then sell them at the height.
I worked as the sole IT person in a big (~300 computer) university department. My predecessor had placed folding@home (IIRC) on many of the lab computers. This was around 2009-2012. I removed it; he didn't have a "team" assigned or anything so I didn't think much of it.
I didn't hear about cryptocurrency until late 2012, but occasionally the "what if" pops in my head and I go -- I could have put a lot of miners at 50% load -- even just at night and made quite a bit had I waited till the first boom (~2014), or lots if I held till now. Highly illegal, but unlikely to get caught.
But that's a lot of "what-ifs", and it's all easy in hindsight. Useless to dwell on it, but hard not to sometimes!
I know a few people who mined a few coins for "shits and giggles" and then lost/deleted them before the whole cryptocurrency thing really started going because they thought it would never happen. I might have had some at one point too.
They are using the fraud protection part of their credit card, not the loaning money part.
It would have paid off mightily.
That said, I couldn't afford it. It was a bad decision for me then, so I'm glad I didn't make that decision. It was the right choice, even though it would have been very profitable.
Just do the math. Don't listen to people and their hard and fast rules. If you think 200x or 1000x is possible just do it and make sure you take some off the table after it 4xes so you're always up.
Though.. if I had my wits, hopefully I'd be selling off chunks. Ie, at $18k/coin I wouldn't sell the whole thing.. though, at only $100/coin it would have been tempting.
Ah, life.
While no one likes throwing a grand away, it's also not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. So why not take a chance? It's not like you'll see 20 opportunities to invest money into something pop up every year.
People in general are too conservative. You should allow yourself to take (calculated) risks once in a while.
And even then, holding a corner on supply of an untested asset is still no guarantee it will perform. Sergey Brin and Larry Page tried to sell Google to excite.com for a paltry $5MM ... and Excite turned them down. Even they, who of all people should have had the utmost confidence in the future (and control over supply)of their own brainchild asset, didn't fully understand the significance of what they were sitting on.
Did not become a millionare...
A friend of mine got super lucky with crypto, though, because he lost his password.
He bought Ethereum when it was being hyped on Kickstarter and mostly forgot about it. At the end of last year, he saw the price, freaked out, and figured out how to crack his own password.
So, he ended up buying at the lowest point and selling at a very high point, like $700. I think he made a few million on it.
Source: someone who should have sold at 1400 and joined the millionaire club.
I'd sell what gets me retirement now, and hold onto the rest - see where it takes me.
It's paid for some dumb stuff along the way to where I am now, chartered helicopters to Macau, laps around the Nürburgring, ect, but the price of all this shit has become so decoupled from the underlying technology and mostly scams at this point that I want to own something "real".
(Just wanted to add an example where the based saved some people)
Feel free to Venmo me consulting fees.