I was wondering who it would be. I’d say @Ambrose_McNulty @TreatyStones and @Julio_Geordio are kicking themselves right now.
This is a great article.
There’s already another thread running on this.
There have been a number of hacks recently, the majority though don’t actually hack the currency themselves and mostly just trick systems & users to divert money to a different destination than was intended.
The most recent one, a company was planning an ICO (initial coin offering). They had their mailing list, crm systems and website hacked. The hackers sent an email to all their clients offering a “pre-release” batch of coins but had the purchases diverted to their own wallet. They got away with 500k.
I’d much rather get into the bitcoin hacking business than the bitcoin buying business.
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It’s not far off this
My take on it is blockchain will revolutionise the payments industry and if you could invest in that then I’d be all for it. The crypto-currencies themselves I’m not so sure. Seems to be a new one every week and they can’t all last. Some people will make huge amounts of money on them and some people will lose their bollox.
We are at the start/middle of a cryptocurrency bubble. The amount of people who ask me about them or tell me they’ve invested in them (and when I ask them why) haven’t a clue other than they heard you can make good money in them is unbelievable. See tech stocks in a previous generation.
When you start buying something in the belief that it’s value will rise for no intrinsic reason, other than the value has risen previously, you know you are in trouble. See previous in; Tulips, South Sea Shares, Railway shares, Internet shares, Irish property etc. etc. etc.
Similar to internet stocks, people could see the internet was obviously going to be a game changer but you couldn’t invest in “The Internet” so you had to buy stocks. Similarly blockchain will be a game changer but you can’t invest in blockchain as such. Maybe a handful of crypto-currencies will survive and thrive, but we’ll see.
Anyway all that said if you want to have a punt with a bit of money you can afford to lose go mad, be good craic anyway. Just remember to get out at the top 
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I read something recently but can’t really remember the details. But the gist was that as the number of coins in any particularly cryptocurrency increase the cost associated with mining new coins also grows and that eventually the costs of mining the new coins outweighs the value of the coin. So once a currency peaks, people quickly move onto a new currency (e.g. the move from Bitcoin to Ethereum). I could have that arseways.
Apparently bitcoin mining is marginal at best now with the costs of electricity etc. you need a huge scale of operation to remain in the business. Like anything really if there’s money to be made people will do it, if there isn’t they won’t.
Goodman, covered all the bases there.
Well you can only tell how big a bubble will get once it’s over. If it was that easy there wouldn’t be a bubble in the first place.
Bitcoin mining? Is this the process of generating new coins? Htf can that be that expensive?
Computer processing power costs money.
Servers use a lot of electricity and generate a lot of heat.
Also @Julio_Geordio what is the value of bitcoin based on? Pure speculation or growing amounts of people using it as a currency? And if I was to be paid in it would the value of what I had automatically go down as they mint more coins? And what are you having for dinner tonight?
It’s like any currency except the value fluctuates much more wildly.
Recently got involved in Crypto so here’s some info which should get you started:
Get an account set up on https://www.coinbase.com. They have an app also. Verify it and you can buy some bitcoin using your card or you can also pay using bank transfer.
If you want to trade in other cryptos then you should set up an account on an exchange such as https://bittrex.com. This is the one I’m using at the moment. What you do is send you bitcoin from Coinbase to Bittrex and then you can use the Bitcoin to trade.
I’m currently invested in Ethereum and FunFair.
Blockfolio is an app I use to keep track of my portfolio. I input the info about by market positions and it monitors if I investment is currently down or up. The markets are extremely volatile!
I recommend https://coinmarketcap.com/ for monitoring prices.
Id advise you to bookmark them links as there are some bogus links appearing which may lead to your various accounts being compromised.
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Bitcoin Has almost doubled in value over last month.
Smart and ballsy guys are all over bitcoin
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