NOTE: if you live in New York State, you cannot own, use, or transfer Bitcoins because of the BitLicense law enacted this year! So ignore this post completely.
I have been using Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies since 2009 and would like to share my experiences. I no longer mine coins as it is not profitable. Enough said.
Yes, Bitcoin can have issues just like regular (AKA Fiat) currency. Some person that left $32,000 in cash at a restaurant recently.
Just like losing your wallet.
The hard drive guy mentioned above bought his bitcoins when they cost 0.0005 cents per coin. He tossed his drive and was crying about it when a bitcoin was $400. :eyeroll:
The FBI agent was tracked because the FBI had the 'private' keys for the wallet. Without the sending and receiving private keys, they never would have been able to prove their case. You can track money via the public keys or via an IP address. Several of the programmers are working on ways to get around the IP address thing.
Yes I have both lost and made serious amounts of money with bitcoin. I am still on the PLUS side of this equation by a large margin. :smile:
Normally it will cost you 1% of the dollar amount to convert to bitcoin, and 1% to convert back to fiat. There are ways around these costs if you want to convert a significant amount. For example, your rocket budget for the past year. :wink:
So you buy BTC and spend 1%, you pay 0.001-0.001 to send transaction (between 4.5 and 45 cents) to a vendor or store, your vendor accepts the transaction, your vendor pays 1% to convert back to fiat.
As a vendor, compare that to the 3% your credit card charges, your costs for doing business was 1% to convert back to fiat. The buyer paid the transaction fee.
As a buyer, you can make or lose money on the current valuation. I bought a large amount of BTC at $110 and at $200 per coin. They are now worth $435 today. I got the bright idea of selling coins as the price increased and took the profits. Conversely I bought some coins at $450 when China was in the mix and were buying bitcoins like candy, eventually pushing the price well over $600 USD. I lost a huge chunk of money when the Chinese govt banned bitcoins and the price crashed to $200. I held on to the 'damaged' coins and bought more when the price was low and have since recovered my losses.
Treat cryptocurrencies like the stock market or a commodity like gold or silver, and you will come out ahead.
For local security issues, by far the best wallet is Bitcoin Armory. There are too many features to go into but the creator of the product is more than a little paranoid about security! The wallet includes a virtual keyboard so keyloggers cannot grab your keystrokes, printable privacy keys in case you delete/destroy/forget your password to your wallet. You can rebuild the wallet as long as you have these keys.
One of the cryptos I am involved with is called DASH.
Several of the benefits of this coin are Darksend (sends all of your transactions as 1.0, 0.1, 0.001, from varying routes through the network destroyed and recreated at each node) This renders your transaction as untraceable. InstantX which has a small extra fee but transmits your coins anywhere within 1 second. Also, you can be a Masternode which pays you 9% a year for transmitting data. DASH's transaction costs are 0.0001 or 2/10 of a cent for sending money.
Additionally, I have been involved with Bitfinex from Hong Kong. They are an exchange/trading house for Bitcoin and Litecoin. I have had a large amount of money there for several years and have been paid 8-10% a year in interest payments. They lend my cash to traders etc. The money is insured by them and has $22-24 Million USD loaned out. I take my profits out every 3 months, just in case. remember the stock market thing?
I have purchased Dell computers, shopped at Overstock.com, and purchased gold/silver, and paid some personal debts with Bitcoin. Along with other stores that accept Bitcoin, this is how you can spend the profits without paying the 1% conversion fee to convert to cash.
Please note there has to be something to Bitcoin and blockchain technology as several major US banks are developing internal databases and products based on it. Specifically, CHASE bank has formed a new department internally to improve transaction security and speed delivery ALA InstantX noted above. If the databases don't agree on a transaction, it is discarded. So you cannot 'go back in time' and add cash to an account. (I have heard that argument more often than I care to think about).
A real life example, my girlfriend called in the middle of the night from the Philippines and her purse had been stolen. She borrowed a girlfriend's phone, downloaded a wallet (3 minutes to install), I sent her coins, she found someone locally that would convert the coins to cash and had pocket money within an hour. Western Union is closed at 2am, and my cost to send was 45 cents.
In closing, love it or hate it, Bitcoin and some of the variants have uses and certainly not nefarious ones like Silk Road. One of the Scandinavian countries went to all virtual currency recently and no longer prints money. :y:
