All I'm hearing is buy, buy, and buy. Crypto is not for the weak at heart. It swings wildly. Best to get it and forget it.

I prefer diversity I'm not all that old. I have learned from some people that have done very well in their lifetimes. I'm definitely going to be buying this week I am just waiting to see if it can go down some more. For those of you that just shake your head at crypto there were millionaires made overnight that were likely told the same thing just a few short years ago. I don't put anything in one basket but if there's an opportunity to make some money I'm in. I've been investing in silver/gold for at least 10 years, I have a balanced 401k that looks very promising for my future who knows what will happen by the time I retire, and I am now supplementing that with crypto. I've had days where I've made 6-7 times my money. That isn't going to happen with a dollar bill in your pocket or buried in the yard.

What gives crypto currency value? The dollar is backed by U.S. military might.

Scarcity, well except for doge, and application is what gives cryptos value.

Cryptos rebounding in the last hour...

At least you didn't say gold I've gotten into some of the platforms and links within crypto. Everyone has been focused on the coins themselves. With a little research there's a lot of money to be made outside the coins. Take MATIC for example. I was going to buy in up to $0.50 a share and waited till it dipped to $0.33 and bought 6,000 shares. Today it's at $2.17. My $2,000 investment is over $13,000. Not a bad profit for 3 weeks of patience.

i dont understand it at all

A simple, overgeneralized way to think of cryptos is that they are payment processors similar to credit card/merchant service companies.

Decoy I won't quibble your point but last I heard the military is still voluntary.

If one is interested in 'investing' in Bitcoin, there are other, and IMO better, ways to go about it other than buying bitcoin. You can still gain exposure to the btc market but with less volatility and greater safety.

Thanks for the discount Elon!

Bitcoin's value comes from its utility. It's wealth that you can fully control. Wealth that you can verify the supply of now or in future. Wealth that is completely separate from any governing entity. Wealth you can store in your brain as you cross a border. You could say Bitcoins value come the ability to use it as a tool to be more self sovereign. IMO its a tool that will be extremely necessary in the coming future.

Bitcoin is not backed by anything and that is what's makes it great. It creates no 3rd party liabilities. Things that are "backed" require storage, security and worst of all trust in a persons or group not to debase the supply. If Bitcoin was "backed" it would not have any of the utility described above.

I never said it wasn't

The millions of "cryptos" may be trying to do this but this is definitely NOT what Bitcoin is at all. Way too narrow thinking. If I had make a comparison to something it would be to think of the Bitcoin network as a new internet. An internet of money. There will be many layers built upon the Bitcoin network just as there are many layers to the internet (email, websites, forums, streaming video, cloud databases, ect, ect) and its constantly evolving. One of those layers will offer instant transaction settlement, ie a "payment processor".

who invented crypto? somebody already wealthy or somebody who has since accumulated great wealth. Was it really as simple as saying this IS money. computer money?????

FWIW the Emperor of the fairy tale really was naked.

What stops the bitcoin "bank" from being hacked? When it is are there any insurance plans?

I hate the word "crypto", it makes me cringe. It's short for cryptography which is a computer privacy tool. Most "cryptos" are scams and were created to steal from who don't understand Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was created by a person or group under the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto". Here is the WHITEPAPER if you'd like to read it but its kinda technical. He/she/they mined a lot of early coins as they helped to bootstrap the network with many other cryptographers and computer nerds. It had no value for the first ~2 years until a few people started trading goods/services for coins. This Saturday celebrates one of the first Bitcoin transactions when a guy named Laszlo traded 10,000 BTC for 2 Papa Johns Pizzas, now known as "Bitcoin Pizza Day". Satoshi stepped away from the project as the network gained traction and decentralized with 100's of developers from around the world working on it and running the network nodes. None of those early coins owned by Satoshi have ever moved (the Bitcoin ledger is fully transparent and its easy to tell which coins where Satoshis in the very early days).

is "mining" a euphemism for creating out of thin air?

All you need to "hack" Bitcoin is to overpower it with more computing power than currently secures it (miners).

Therefore basically you'd need enough electricity to power a medium size country along with $$$Billions of dollars worth of specially designed computers. You'd have to build these new Power Plants and computers covertly without anyone figuring it out. All that work would get you a few minutes to create a few 'double spends" which could hurt the network temporarily. It has gotten to the point where this is not even a realistic possibility. Most of the other "cryptos" are not even remotely this robust and could easily be attacked. This system I just described is called "Proof of Work" (POW). Its very hard to create new digital coins and even harder to create counterfeits. Gold and gold mining is basically POW. Hard to create, hard to forge. This is why gold is/was a decent store of value.

There are no "insurance plans", ie no bailouts in Bitcoin. Other "cryptos" have had bailouts (transactions reversed) because they have centralized control.



Bitcoin mining takes extraordinary amounts of electricity and super specialized computing equipment. Not exactly "thin air" but you can call it what you want.