I fear Bitcoin is going to turn out to become a game for the rich. Who are either the lucky first adopters who didn't delete their wallet.dat or the likes of the Winklevii who were already rich and could afford to diversify into
BTC. You can only make money with money. Just like in the current financial system.
The Average Joe will just have to sweat to get scraps from the tables of the wealthy. Same as it ever was.
Youre wrong. I found bitcoins 2 years ago and i looked at it the same way. The early adopters got rich, they have miners and can make money. But mining wasnt worth it anymore at that time. Buying hardware wouldnt turn into profit.
But i thought bitcoins will rise. I bought some for 75€ and... mtgox was hacked... bitcoin fell to the bottom.
Then i checked out how good i could mine with my hardware and found that its not worth it. Buying hardware for it was not effective either. So i stopped the time investment into bitcoin for the moment. Others already had the needed miners and buying with bitcoins was something very unusual.
Then i came back and invested again some € in bitcoins because it looked like a good investment on its own. I thought that i could not only raise the worth by keeping it but i could invest them and earn even more when i have more bitcoins at the end. I checked out the free trading at bitcoin24com and created a bot to trade there. It was moderate successful through scalping. But i tended more to GLBSE. An exchange. I made a calc with all shares there, calculated the dividends and the prices to find the best investments and found that the mining investments bring income, but at the same time the share price lose value, so you dont really earn more really.
I made some bad investments at glbse too (pirate passthrough, ...) but were lucky not to lose much. The only remaining interesting thing was Asicminer. I investigated and wrote some pm with friedcat and i found not a single doubt about the project. (I only invest now anymore in things i dont have a single doubt or bad feeling.) And friedcat looked like a complete honest person. So without finding a doubt i decided to invest some hundred €. I set the buying to 0.1BTC per share since i found that ocassionally someone filled all bid-orders up to that price. I dont understand the reason till now. But i sold bought shares a couple of times for 0.11 and higher and could buy more shares this way by buying again at 0.1btc.
Then glbse collapsed. I found friedcat behaved professional again and finally nefario gave out the share details. So my shares were safe.
And what should i say... the investment was very much worth it. The bitcoinprice was way lower back then and the asicminer share price got up even more. I quit my job (i hear already the outcry
), i would have searched another one anyway, and i now live officially from bitcoins i get from that asicminer investment. I pay tax on it, but in some months i dont even need that anymore because of the investment law in my country. I checked this with my tax accountant.
So dont tell me its not possible to earn money with bitcoins anymore. When i found bitcoins i felt like the game was already over, mining wasnt worth it anymore and all others than me had made a fortune. You most probably will be an early adopter for the people coming in 10 years. Simple as that.
My roommate was interested when i told her the outcome of all. She gave me 450€ to invest. Of course it cant be so much outcome like i got but till now her shares are worth 16 times of her investment. Over 7k€ She got more than her investment back in euros already and invested in burnin miners too. The invested amount of money of course is much money but not unbelievable much money no one can afford in live.
Ok, i could have said the same like you 2 years ago, especially with bitcoins crashing. But if you think bitcoin is not at the end already you should rethink your statement.
Are you familiar with the phrase "past performance does not guarantee future return"? The important word here is "guarantee". The observation that Bitcoin did well in the past does not serve as a reasonable argument for why it will continue to increase in value in the future.