Comment by helf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by helf | Hacker News Reader

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Same. I’m one of those lucky few who had futzed with BTC in 2011 when it was almost brand new and then forgot about it till 2019 when it started spiking.

I spent two weeks digging through boxes and imaging hard drives before miraculously finding my wallet.dat from 2011 that I luckily hadn’t encrypted or even passworded lol.

Had 3.25btc in it (I remembered the .25. The extra 3 were a shock.). I ended up paying for my home down payment with it.

You shoulda seen my broker’s face when I showed up with almost entirely crypto to fund the mortgage. It took them several weeks to find a company who would be OK with crypto being fronted. I ended up having to come up with a way to prove it was mine which was fun. Had to back track through the blockchain tracking the history of the transactions, wallet address creation. Show I had the private keys etc. they finally accepted it as after a month of back and forth.

Then I didn’t cash out entirely when it spiked to $60k and now I am regretting that lol.

> shoulda seen my broker’s face...

That rigamarole could have been easily avoid by converting the crypto to cash, which is trivial to prove is yours.

Did they end up accepting the crypto directly, or as cash?

Edit: thanks for the clarification, I didn't realize the issue wasn't with possession so much as provenance.

> That rigamarole could have been easily avoid by converting the crypto to cash, which is trivial to prove is yours.

In US law this is a taxable event.

Paying for something with crypto is the same taxable event as converting it to cash. You can’t get out of that.

If it's within 30 days in the US, there will still be an issue with provenance of funds.

Exacty.

I did convert it to cash. The problem is in the US you can’t suddenly have thousands of unexplained dollars when getting a mortgage or similar.

I guess I should have clarified: I didn’t directly give them crypto. I was using it to cash out and pay cash with. But I had to prove ownership.

You can use unexplained cash for mortgage in the US if you let it “season” for 60 days on your bank account.

Yes, but then it’s not considered unexplained anymore :)

Also I didn’t have the luxury of waiting.

So you actually did get benefits of HODLing BTC, no? When it comes to crypto, I see people conflating 3 distinct buckets - a hard asset like BTC, legitimate projects like ETH and scams. Scams outnumber the first 2 buckets, but the first 2 buckets will provide more growth than stocks or bonds over the next 10 years.

Growth is a little bit of a weasel word here though and you'll be well advised to research the difference between multiple expansion and underlying growth.

In the world of stock, we don't like multiple expansion as it's a sign that prices go up on grounds that are hard to reason about. Things going up without reason tend to come down for the same reasons.

Crypto has _zero_ growth. Crypto companies, however, that's a different story.

But sure, I'm sure you'll be right about what you perceive to be growth. There are still millions of gullible and half smart people waiting to get on board.

To me, price increase is a good proxy for growth and I believe in both BTC and ETH to appreciate more than S&P500 over the next 10 years.

Why is it a good proxy for growth? What do you base that on?

Are you familiar with the term Deflationary Asset?

> Why is it a good proxy for growth? What do you base that on?

Because buyers are valuing them more and more and not just in words but by actually with their money?

> Are you familiar with the term Deflationary Asset?

Yes. I also believe BTC will outperform gold over the next 10 years (both of those are deflationary assets).

Right. They are paying more for the same thing. This is inflation and it's not something we like. You get less BTC for your money.

Where is the growth?

> You get less BTC for your money.

Or, you get more USD for your BTC.

> Where is the growth?

In the amount of USD one can purchase with their bitcoins? Literally, that's what this whole subthread is about where someone used their long held bitcoin to do a downpayment. The growth in USD price of a bitcoin is what helped them do that.

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