I am curious to know if any of you are into trading them! It seems like a lot of smart and tech-savvy people I run into are dabbling in it!
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Nope! I got $10 for free for having a .edu email a few years ago but thatās the sum of my involvement. There was a really interesting lecture on Bitcoin in 6.824, but it didnāt inspire me to dig deeper.
A friend of mine is heavily into it, though. I think they were working at an Ethereum startup (or something) for a while.
I myself dont have any money involved but my friend is buying a large amount of miners and renting a facility. I just configurd a few Chinese miners for him last week. They currently make about $50 USD in BTC per day per machineā¦ Those numbers will change though. In my little bit of research I still find it very risky so Iām staying out but Iāll be helping him with his place because I do think itās interesting. As time goes on it might be tempting to jump in since I can basically store and run machines with free electricityā¦but I do feel like itās totally insane.
Funny:
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Can you actually trade bitcoin et al. for currency?
Random thought: Why do you believe the hypervisors on those machines arenāt stealing the proof-of-work information that grants your friend access to the Bitcoin earned?
You can import them into coinbase (or other similar services) and get cash from your existing bitcoins 
That was actually one of the first things I said to the friends that are getting in to it. The response was that some pools are sketchier than others, maybe even the manufacturer of the machines could be skimming too. Either way they move the money made daily so they just take what they get and try to pick the best pools to join.
The bitmain S9 used to be $1400 I believe, now they are $2800 from the manufacturer, which u basically cannot get at all, and like 5000 to 6000 scalped on eBay. At $1400 a piece I might have considered taking a chance, but at current prices you really are putting out a lot of money if you expect to make any real money back.
Haha for some reason I feel like this sounds like one of those my āfriendā is doingā¦but no I myself am really not getting in to it
Iāve heard gold is heavily underpriced (up to a factor 25) (real physical gold, not paper gold). Gold seems more secure to invest in, however - it is not secure to store at home, so thats a big caveat.
Is it true you could walk into a bank in the US and exchange a dollars to 1.5g gold until 1900ās? The difference should define how much extra money the government printed? (40 times)
Thats probably the strength of bitcoin? You canāt make up more bitcoins from thin air (but you could invent another cryptocurrencyā¦)
Thats why I probably would invest in physical gold. You canāt make up new gold yet.
I know itās just an example, but a quick note for anyone reading: coinbase owns gdax. If you use your coinbase login at gdax there is less or even no fees. Coinbase itself has large fees
Instead of computers, Iām going to invest in nuclear reactors and make gold.
My youngest brother (early 20ās) is into cryptocurrencies and has some money invested in about 4 different ones. He only started a year or two ago but has made enough at least for a nice pair of new boots and some bragging rights 
I never got into it myself, mostly because when originally started thinking about it, Bitcoin was under a dollar. And if I didnāt do it then, itās already too late. I was expecting it to crash out then, and that thought hasnāt left me since. But the current state of cryptocurrency was certainly not something I expected to see. Even if it did catch on, this level of inflation seems just ridiculous.
Besides, I started slowly picking up some Adobe stock through work when it was in the teens, and its at 195 as of today, so thatās good enough for me :beam:
Regarding crypto, I recently happened by āactionscript .orgā to see if it was still down. Its back surprisingly and cleaned up some from the spam takeover. But I did notice a comment posted that the site was now actively crypto mining, not sure if true but perhaps thats why its back or maybe other dubious reasons?
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UFC was using visitors computers to mine too. When pointed out they were likeā¦uh, I didnāt put that there
Nice, I wish I had the thought to pick up some adobe stock back in the day.
I had mentioned this in another thread, but Canadian legal marijuana stocks are in a similar hype mania to crypto right now. Itās most likely already way over inflated but the volatility is completely insane day to day. Itās for sure dangerous and Iām an idiot so Iām not recommending it, but I jumped in about 5 weeks ago and Iāve already had multiple stocks go over 100% one of them up 300% ā¦ Only to come crashing back down before I took any profit (trying to play the long game). I was worried over the weekend that itās on a death dive and I could go negativeā¦ (Which it very much still might do).
Just as my panic set in today this happened. These % gains are just today alone. I thought I could stomach it but even with only a few k bouncing around I feel like Iām gonna throw up some days. Gambling is not for me, but day traders are all over this stuff right now
Donāt try to build the reactors in your kitchen!
āI had it under control, it was not so dangerous,ā he told the BBC.
But he added: āIt was pretty stupid.ā
This is how I feel. I canāt have anything I depend on in this stuff (despite retirement plans being largely in the stock market) so all I deal with is some stock I get through work and let it sit without caring too much about it. Iāve seen people in my family get invested and spend too much of their time watching CNBC, or whatever, fretting about ups and downs, gains and losses and not really doing anything else. I canāt handle that kind of stress.
For me it was all about the time I bit a coin and broke a tooth. So when this bitcoin thing came about it just brought back dreaded memories. So I invested in sand instead, through a nice Nigerian gentleman.
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Haha, they shouldnāt have been tricking us with chocolate wrapped currencies all these years
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I bought a sliver of bitcoin a month ago, and have been watching it plummet, hah.
I tried my hand at mining hempcoin, but the pool was sketchy, and there was just no real feedback from the organization behind it; itās a shame because they aim to go beyond just transactions between consumers and dispensaries, but rather support the agriculture side as well, which includes uses beyond recreational use.
Since then, Iāve been mining Monero, somewhat successfully with my machine running two 980Tis. Iāve made $50 in four weeks, haha, but Iāve likely spent double that in electricity. Now, a machine running 4 1080Tis, or even 6 would be making some serious Monero a day. Enough that it would surely cover the utility costs.
I prefer proof of work, because itās something you can fire and forget. The various exchanges (Bitrex, Binance, etc.) have these weird requests for all this personally identifiable information that really gives me pause at using their services to trade real money for crypto, and the using bitcoin through Binance gets you with the transactions fees!