Posts by gibman70 18 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2011
"A shitload of profit? Because that's what a lot of people seem to have got out of it"
Only those who got in early fall into this category. You do realise this is a zero sum game, right? People can ONLY make a profit by dumping these onto someone else for a higher price than they paid (the so-called greater fool theory).
And when something like this happens, it's only the fools holding them...those who made 'a shitload of profit', as you put it, are long gone.
people who bought bitcoins as little as 18 months ago have seen them go up by over 100X... pretend currency or not (and I agree, they're ridiculous when stacked up against commodities such as gold or compared against the classic definitions of money), someone who bought a couple of thousand of them summer 2012 is now a millionaire - its relatively easy to shift a few thousand of these a day now on the exchanges or via localbitcoin etc.
(no, not me sadly to my eternal chagrin)
To the Bitcoin users who have just lost the shirts off their back with this (and those soon to be joining them), don't worry!
I have this new currency - its called TurdCoin. I'll only produce a few of them a day, so they MUST be valuable?! If we all pretend they're money then they're as good as the real thing right?!
One of the major flaws in these kind of stories is liquidity (or lack thereof) on the exchanges. Try selling anything more than a few 'coins' at once at these kind of prices and see the price fall. Mt Gox rate was halved in price briefly last week by the sale of ONE HUNDRED bitcoin. This $1000 thing is a false price, elevated as much by hoarding and lack of large scale trades as anything.
Lots of luck trying to cash in $4M worth, you'd bring the price down to single figures all by yourself before you were anywhere near.
And that's apart from the difficulties in getting out any real cash you've managed to trade BTC for. MT Gox are only allowing withdrawals in dribs and drabs, and they'll probably be regulated out of existence altogether before long. And in the UK, there's really no practical way to get out large amounts at all.
GO Bitcoin. To the Moon etc etc
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