I know of a woman who bought 100 bitcoin when they were $1 to buy something online. The purchase never went through. When Bitcoin hit $30k, she posted to facebook, asking if anyone knew anything about it. I PM'd her and told her to delete the post and call her financial advisor and lawyer immediately. Never heard from her again. Some people have become fabulously wealthy from Bitcoin.
Bitcoin
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That's the thing with any Ponzi, or pyramid scheme. The founders and early members do well at the expense of the latter ones.
If you look at the Bitcoin historical value charts, there have been numerous opportunities to score big since that $30k milepost. It’s not something I would do, but maybe that’s why I’m not rich.
Bitcoin holds no real value, provides no useful service, represents no real beauty or artistry. One can say this about a lot of things that maintain value over time, but I think that the illusion of the value of cryptocurrency will evaporate … and so will a lot of people’s money.
I would only invest in bit coin with moneys I don't mind losing. It's that big of a risk in my mind. I'm not risk averse but, weighing the risks make it not worth the possible return. My brother, a very successful investor, once told me "Whales only get harpooned when the surface to spout." There is risk and there is risk.
And there have been numerous opportunities for people to lose their ass as well. Being that there's no intrinsic value or utility to the token, it fluctuates wildly. The blockchain was touted as being where the value was, but that went away as others made their own blockchains. So now there's no value to that either. On top of this, look at the broad spread chicanery and fraud in the institutions running this scam.
It's just gambling, since there are no fundamentals attached to the tokens. The pitch was that it was a measure of value, which has been proven to be bullshit by its wild fluctuations.
The lure is quick wealth. The reality is that wealth is overwhelming built over the long haul by patient investing, or by creating something very useful and necessary that didn't exist before. Bitcoin is the modern equivalent of the 17th century tulip market.
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My uncle, who was a self made billionaire in today's dollars, had a motto: Never invest what you can't afford to lose.
He was a geologist who went into oil exploration and decided that rather than make "others assholes rich" founded his own oil company. He had the gift for spotting where to drill.
He also owned his own boutique investment company, and was very blunt about the level of corruption on Wall Street, and in Congress, which he referred to as a "whore house where everyone could be bought". Colorful guy.
Did he specify if they could be bought with Bitcoin?
WWWFX is an option. I’d have to look again, but around 20% is in BTC. I personally think BTC will go extremely high, only because I’m in it for the long run, decades.
It’s good to watch for patterns.
Same with NRGU and NRGD with oil and COVID shut downs and wars.
Also been watching patterns in bankruptcy/fires for large utilities and how thier stock behaves. Quite a few similarities and accuracies in predictions.
Question: look at the trend in Bitcoin the last 14 years. How do you relate that to volatility? Longer yo-yo, steeper hill?
It’s good to watch for patterns.
Same with NRGU and NRGD with oil and COVID shut downs and wars.
Also been watching patterns in bankruptcy/fires for large utilities and how thier stock behaves. Quite a few similarities and accuracies in predictions.
Question: look at the trend in Bitcoin the last 14 years. How do you relate that to volatility? Longer yo-yo, steeper hill?
One of today's problems is politicians no longer stay bought. It's more a short term lease thing. 
Nvidia has been the big winner. People use many graphics cards that are poweful to process the stuff.
If I could do +100 likes I would. If you follow some of the "influencers" it's obvious that the masks have dropped for a long time now. The "technology" and "use case" bullshit arguments are rare nowadays, it's just become "th1s on3 is g0ing to the m00n".
Blockchain as a concept is literally thousands of years old, the thing is there wasn't a technology to take it global, but having a set of stamps/signatures required to get anything official done is in essence a blockchain where people verify something done at the previous step. Ancient Babylonians used to do it by putting information in clay pots and stamping them with stamps only state officials could carry, specifying when it was stamped and when it should be cracked open. Similar things were done in ancient China and Egypt. The blockchain as an IT/mathematical concept exists since at least the 70s, the ONLY difference between that and collecting 10 signatures from from various govt agencies is that today's blockchain is, in theory, accessible by anyone and immutable. Saying in theory because in practice it's neither.
And always "time in the market beats timing the market", I am a boring global ETF investor, in the long run it has the best risk/benefit ratio.
You did a good thing, what she did was begging to be kidnapped. What this tells us though is that she also had ZERO understanding of crypto, so chances are she lost her address/unlocking sentences, and her BTC with it. If she didn't then indeed she could be fabulously wealthy. I knew a guy who used to mine BTC at home back in 2010 or so, this means there's a good chance he's rich. What's sure is he's fallen off the face of the earth, he's nowhere on social media and old email address/phone number I had are deactivated.
When I was doing my PhD I was offered BTC in a tech entrepreneurship conference, I didn't take it because I felt it's meaningless. Even if I had taken the free BTC (about 10 or so, can't recall), chances are I'd have sold it for $100 and feel good about it, realistically even higher chance that I'd have lost the key. It's tempting to think back at "what if", but ultimately it's mental masturbation.
As a side note, the three lads who made Angry Birds were in that conference too, and demonstrating their app. My own mobile phone at the time was a potato, even for the time (2009), demonstrating my ignorance I thought "who would pay money for this bullshit", then Angry Birds went on to make tens of millions of dollars in 12 months, then hundreds of millions per year and still going strong... Personally I am ok with accepting global market risk and global market returns, lets me sleep very well. Anything more risky, leveraged, debt, single stocks other than BRK.B, crypto etc wouldn't so I stay away. The key is systematic saving and investing anyway, and avoiding emotional pitfalls, and feeding the beast with time.
Everyone who ever invest misses some seriouly prime schemes...there are no crystal balls. I could have gotten rich on the things I didnt buy. Im pretty sure I could have also gotten really poor on some I thought were good but still passed up. Its like vegas and the house always wins. So far Ive done ok though.
I bought nVidia at 200 and sold at 400, I also predicted most of the companies who could get a COVID-19 vaccine in the market (I am a biochemist working for pharma for 10 years, so pharma is perhaps the only industry I have some ability to understand). I also was totally right in thinking Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly would explode in value, and they did, yet I still didn't buy much, and sold with good gains because it was making me nervous. That's the issue, whenever I get outsized returns from an investment I get very nervous about it, so I switched to passive index investing and am happy with that. It's all about using risk as a currency of sorts, concentration increases it along with the chance of outsized returns, diversification dilutes it. It's about risk-adjusted returns, that's the other component of long-term investing.
I missed the Nvidia ride. I did grab Amazon when it got the crap beat out of it. A lot of high flying companies got beat up because the artificial high profits during covid and the subsequent drops when life returned closer to normal. Post covid drops were a good shopping opportunity. Its nice to get a great gain but I focus more on the slow and steady.
Absolutely, I missed the covid drop but caught the 2022 drop, they really are shopping opportunities! There’re a few good axioms like “buy when there’s blood in the streets, even it is your own”, and “money is made in bull markets, fortunes are made in bear markets”
Edit: got a colleague who bought nVidia at $22, and is still holding it. That's being too greedy in my opinion. His dream is that it goes to a 1:4 stock split at $1000, and then rides back up to $1000. I tell him that this is TOO GREEDY and to sell the damn thing to lock in nearly 50x gains and buy a broad index fund.
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My situation is good because Im retired from my mental health career (but too young to collect retirement) and I work part time making handmade sax mouthpieces. I never touch assets, the business covers my expense and I dont really plan on ever completely stopping work. I enjoy what I do, I work at home, and Id probably go nuts and drive my wife crazy if I didnt keep myself busy.
That's pretty damn cool! My dream/goal is to get a good pot of money in investments and let it ride, and using dividends to fund expenses (as dividends get very good tax treatment in Greece - though not in Switzerland) until pensions etc kick in, and spend the rest of the time learning a craft like woodworking, blacksmithing, perhaps some sort of liquor/food preparation (though all food prep has very stringent and complicated health regulations so it's probably not a great idea to do for profit).
I'm fully retired, went at 61 because my declining health was preventing me from delivering my skills (very frustrating); as things stand, I ain't rich and I ain't poor, and that's fine by me.
Would have loved to apply myself to something completely new - how long have you made sax mouthpieces? Does this influence your choice of pipe??
I started making pieces over 20 years ago and created my own brand that has grown through the years. I cant say It influences my pipe choices. Like a lot of guys, I prefer the feel of Ebonite but the ease of Acrylic. Most my pipes are acrylic stems. Skills of moutpiece work do help in fixing up estates and maintaining pipes.
My site www.Phil-tone.com
My site www.Phil-tone.com