Topic: nrd525 Market Tracker - page 60. (Read 83024 times)

It's a pity they don't allow altcoin speculation in this subforums. I sold 70% of my Litecoins yesterday and bought Peercoins. LTC has nothing to offer and is suffering from stagnation while Peercoin has some really promising projects under development (PeerShares and PeerUnity).

Dogecoin has been mostly mined out.  Something like 85% mined.  So between the declining block reward and the ASICs, it is game over for what used to be very profitable mining.  I even mined a few Dogecoin with my GPU back in Jan/Feb.

A year or two ago, before they existed, I was worried that ASICs could cause havoc in Bitcoin by drastically decreasing the number of miners and by causing almost everyone mining to lose money.  I figured that a product with a high capital investment that had low marginal cost of production would cause the ASIC miners to get cheaper and cheaper.  Miners would continue to mine so long as the revenue was greater than the cost of electricity - but they wouldn't recuperate their investment.  Since miners were such a critical part of early Bitcoin, I thought that the economic loss to miners (and ASIC producers) could seriously impact the bitcoin economy.

Of course Bitcoin price went up by a factor of 50 to 100 and this wasn't a problem.

The early predictions of ASICs being 1000 times more efficient than GPUs are proving to be true.

a good deal of the appeal of these coins was that it was "ASIC resistant", not anymore...

The litecoin dump that recently happened was a little surprising. With all the scrypt miners that recently came out (as well as kncs litecoin miner coming in a few months) I thought scrypts might get more support (and higher price)

Dogecoin continues its fall.  Earlier I thought it might succeed due to the size, enthusiasm, and positivity of the community.  But the fact that it has fallen from 150 (or more) to as low as 31 satoshis is a good example of how difficult it is for alt-coins to succeed.

Normally I don't buy into technical analysis.  But I think that something is going on at around 666.

Not sure about
Icbit.se - you can buy a bitcoin now ($640), and sell it for 20% more in December ($769).  For the past month or so their October contract has been trading for 8-10% above market value, and the December one for 15-20%.

This seems great - it's a guaranteed return of 40% APR (minus any fees).  However I'm not sure I trust icbit.se.  I've got no experience dealing with them. They have been around for a year - so they might be worthy of trust.  Does anyone know?

I've been sticking with Bitfinex as they offer a roughly similar service and rate of return.

Current recommendations

1) Medium risk - loan swap USD at Bitfinex at the flash return rate.  Expected 20-40% APR.  The current APR is much higher (0.14%/day after the fee - is 66% APR).  But I expect the APR to fall to 20% (or less) unless there are price shocks.  There is a chance you will lose all the money - but the chance is worth it.  My risk assessment of Bitfinex is that they are more reliable than most other bitcoin corporations.

2) High risk - go long on Bitcoin.  Hold for a year or more.  Do not day trade.


Negative Recommendations
Do not loan BTC at Bitfinex.   2% APR is not worth the risk.

Do not invest in altcoins.  Bitcoin is 90% of the market and shows signs of a natural monopoly due to the network effect.

Do not invest in mining. I'm very unqualified to evaluate this - but by all accounts difficulty is skyrocketing (up 20% each period) and miners are likely to lose money.

Do not invest in any business that offers shares for bitcoins.

I'm starting a market tracker and advice thread.  I'm by no means an expert in investment (in crypto-currencies or other).  Some of my qualifications
-bachelors in economics
-invested in the stock market in high school (did fine - would have done great if Nortel Networks didn't collapse)
-fascinated with statistics for 25 years
-bought a house in 2012 - pretty much at 1-2% from the bottom of the local housing market (and for $20k less than the neighbors bought their house)
-been active since June 2011
-several days after learning about it I wrote a blog post on June 3, 2011: Bitcoin - Libertarians, Techies and the Coming Bubble (price was $18.45). It crashed a couple days later.
-Shorted bitcoin from $7 to $2 in 2011.
-lost $450 on bitcoinica due to the hack and liquidation.
-early critic of the Pirate ponzi
-bought a couple bitcoins in 2013 at $120 - sold at $700 while on the way up to $1150
-made a lot of interest on Bitfinex swaps in 2013 - maybe 100% APR
-Dec 2013 - greatly increased my lending out of Bitfinex swaps
-2014 - lost a small amount of money on Dogecoin. I thought the creativity and friendliness of the community was a great asset (as Bitcoin's value is based on the community of users - not the algorithm).  But so far I've been very wrong.  On the plus side, I was smart enough to only risk a couple hundred dollars.
-2014 - went long on Bitcoin at an average price of $540
-2014 - made $25/BTC arbitraging Coinbase and Bitfinex
-2014 - still making a killing on Bitfinex swaps (mostly using the Flash Return Rate)

My general strategy is conservative by bitcoin standards, though not by traditional investment ones.  I'm very skeptical of new projects.  For instance, I was a Bitcoin bear up until mid 2013.  After trying it out, I'm planning on staying away from day trading as it is too unpredictable and I'm hoping to hold my bitcoins for a year and pay the US long term capital gains tax rate (which is 19% or more lower in my area).

I'm providing opinions about the price of Bitcoin and trying to identify positive or negative developments (eg. facts) that should correlate with the price.

Moderated thread: off-topic posts will be deleted as will personal attacks.

Disclaimer: as of July 2015, I've lost money on my net total investment in crypto-currencies and swaps.

Update: as of Dec 2017, like most people who have got involved in bitcoin, I'm up by a lot.  This does NOT mean that you should invest in Bitcoin as we are currently in a massive bull market and the price could fall 95%.