The only people on here that have any chance at making REAL money are the first miners who basically got their coins for pennies. They know who they are and they are smart. They are the ones pimping and hyping the shit out of bitcoins. I have been rebuffed for used stocks as an example but it applies to bitcoins. The people who have gotten in on the big companies and made their millions and millions are the ones who got in for next to nothing. Coke, microsoft, apple etc the list goes on. Do you think an ordinary joe is going to get rich on Apple stock now? They missed the boat. Opportunities come around few times in a persons life and right now at $200 the boat is gone. even at $100 or $50 the boat is GONE! UNLESS you have a ton of money to begin with and my point is then mute. Can you imagine having 10000 bitcoins and you paid $100 in electricity to get them? Now you have people scraping $1000 together to buy 5 coins. Do you see what I mean?
Now I have a question for the naysayers. Tell me an investment past or present(not a stock) that costs $200 or less that anyone could buy that made that person a millionaire. The only caveat is that the investment had/has to be a fully disseminated idea that the world knows/knew about. So in other words the person got in AFTER THE FACT and made millions off of a $200 investment.
Nonsense.
I got in under a dollar. With $100 that I couldn't well afford at the time, on what looked like some ridiculous hair brained scheme. I rued the fact that I had seen it 6 months earlier and tried to set up a miner at that time but had been distracted.
At the time I bought in, for me the small possibility of making money, was far outweighed by the crazy percentage returns that started to become available to me (and improvement in my cash-flow, $100 was still a lot at that time. Business was struggling. I could barely pay the bills) as it first hit ~$6 then ~$9 then ~$15.
You simply cannot hold. If you are as old and wise as you say you are then you know those kind of returns absolutely compel you to take profits. History is replete with examples of people holding too long and losing it all. I've gambled in my time, I know all about that.
I watched in horror as it continued to rise through the 20s, but still that money was in my pocket. I was vindicated when it crashed hard from the 30s.
Then comes the dilemma, buy in or not, where is the bottom, how much can i really afford to risk, am I just going to lose everything I made.
I got back in tentatively in the teens, then a bit more in the single digits. Worried that everything I bought now might just end up as dead money. The bottom came in though, but at the time you don't know that, so many of my low bids were mostly missed as the price turned the corner.
As the price starts to rise your feel the relief that your underwater positions are starting to recover, but also start to regret how much you didn't buy when the price was 20% lower, and wrangle with yourself as to how much more to risk.
Time went by and I ended up with more then ten times my original outlay invested, but still only around 100 coins. I was a bit better off, but $1000 was a shit load of money to be effectively gambling with. It started to grow though, $2k then $3k this was insane amounts of money for me. I lost several hundred dollars in bitcoinica, but I was still up.
Was I to just hold. I had more money invested in bitcoin than I earned in a month! Why you would be insane not to take some profits. I did, several times, all the way up into the $200s (I was lucky enough to sell a few at $220 before the high at $266). Again I had that sinking feeling, everytime I sold the price kept rising. Thousands of dollars of potential profit up in smoke.
Still, I had money in my back pocket again. Then the price cashed, and I was vindicated.
But whats this, it stayed well above the previous all time high, I wasn't going to be buying back in (in some cases for more than I sold some of my coin). That just didn't make sense.
With hindsight of course, it would have made perfect sense
Now I'm in a situation where my BTC may soon be worth more than I have invested in everything else cumulatively (not including house). Yet my dollar cost average position is negative.
The pressure to cash out is insane. This is real serious amounts of money now. Not quite life changing, but certainly life-easing for the short term!
Suggesting someone (to whom $200 means something) can sit and watch that $200 investment turn into $1million, and at no point sell. Thats what's ridiculous.
And here I am trying to just that though
I have credit card debt with double digit APR, and I aint paying it off. I have a mortgage that is going to cost me double what I borrowed over its lifetime, and I ain't paying it off.
If I didn't believe that a $200 investment could make me a millionaire, you really think I'd be risking 5 figures on the ultimate meal ticket?
If I lose it all, then I will have plenty egg on my face for sure, but profit you never took was never profit in the first place, so I lost nothing. The profit I have taken, is actual profit.
So buy your $200 bitcoin, and thank me in ten years when you are a millionaire (not adjusted for inflation hehe). Provided you had the balls not to sell a single satoshi on the way...