What If Bitcoin – Shoot I didn't invest(whatifbitcoin.com) |
What If Bitcoin – Shoot I didn't invest(whatifbitcoin.com) |
I have been telling people for years that "I am sure Bitcoin will grow a lot. I probably should invest. I'm just too lazy to dabble with the tech.".
And I have not invested even though I thought it would be a great investment.
But what if I did? I would not have invested more then $10k. Because it's such a volatile asset. If I did that 3 years ago, I would have made $60k or so. Nice. But I made more with less volatile investments in the same time. Simply because I invested more.
So by not investing in BTC, I did not miss much.
(Unless you're really good at information security and very disciplined. I'd be very uncomfortable keeping a £10k investment on a PC in my house.)
Paper wallets are easy to make, and hardware wallets have been available for years.
There is just no way to securely create a secret key.
Because the algorithm is so complex, you have to trust somebody else's software to create the key. How do you know that software is neither malicious nor buggy?
* What if you lost it in Mt. Gox?
* What if you lost it in another of the roughly-monthly hacks of exchanges?
* What if you lost it on an accidentally thrown-away hard drive?
* What if you lost it to your own error?
* What if you lost it on one of the many scams the crypto space is absolutely suffused with?
For some reason these are never mentioned by people saying "but if you'd bought in 2011".
Look at all these coins you also didn't "invest" in! http://deadcoins.com/
Cryptos are gambling. Good luck if you won! But it's still not a sensible thing to recommend to others.
On the flipside I have no idea when or if I would have cashed out. When it hit $100? $1000? Impossible to say.
Anyone here comment "how well they did?" and if you've pulled out or are seriously thinking about pulling out?
I feel silly, but I'm still not going to put my hard earned cash in it any time soon... In fact, I wouldn't really know how.
The technology and ecosystem is very interesting in many ways, buying into it is probably a good way to kick start your interest -- nothing better than having your money on the line to keep you engaged -- but who knows where it's going to be in 10 years. Which would feel worse: buying Bitcoin now and having coins worth nothing in 10 years, or not buying Bitcoin now and in 10 years looking back and thinking "I had the perfect opportunity and I didn't take it, I'm an idiot!"? I imagine for most people they'd take the risk and buy in (hence the price growth) but for me personally it's too consuming and that's why I'm out.
Seems the only reasonable way to do it is with 'fuck money', pardon the term. You know, money you happened to have forgotten about or came about that you didn't budget for.
Also all this wealth is purely speculative. If everybody converted their bitcoins to fiat currency now the exchange rate would collapse quickly.
You can say the same about literally any asset or currency. If everyone sells, and no one is buying, then yes, the value drops to 0.
It's related to the distinction between investing and speculating. Investing is based on whether the intrinsic value is below or above the price, while speculating is just based on the price.
Or even better: it's nearly impossible to do that with fiat currency, because there are checks and balances in place.
For example, the federal reserve and legislators can manipulate the interest rates and the deficit to encourage people to hold or sell their USD.
http://www.swansontec.com/bitcoin-dice.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2s2w1r/generate_ad...
That is wrong. You can generate one relatively easily with dice (google for it).
> Because the algorithm is so complex, you have to trust somebody else's software to create the key.
You're conflating generating the key, which is just generating a random number in a certain range, with calculating the public address, which involves some operations on elliptic curves.
The algorithm is not that complex. Using a library like openssl/ec it is not that hard to generate the public address. It takes about 30 lines of C code using that library.
> How do you know that software is neither malicious nor buggy?
You can read the source code.
You can read the source code.
Here's some C code I used when I played around with it 5 years ago. No guarantees that it is bug-free or does anything useful (you still need a double sha256 and base58 encoding to get a string representation), but it gives you an idea of the complexity/simplicity.
void sha256_ripe160(uint8_t *bytes, size_t len, uint8_t result[RIPEMD160_DIGEST_LENGTH])
{
uint8_t buf[32];
CC_SHA256(bytes, len, buf);
RIPEMD160(buf, 32, result);
}
void privkey_to_pubsig_hash(uint8_t privkey[32], uint8_t pubsig[20])
{
static EC_GROUP *curve = 0;
if (!curve) {
curve = EC_GROUP_new_by_curve_name(NID_secp256k1);
}
assert(curve);
BIGNUM *priv_bn = BN_new();
priv_bn = BN_bin2bn(privkey, 32, priv_bn);
assert(priv_bn);
EC_POINT *pub_pt = EC_POINT_new(curve);
BN_CTX *ctx = BN_CTX_new();
int result = EC_POINT_mul(curve, pub_pt, priv_bn, NULL, NULL, ctx);
assert(result);
BN_free(priv_bn);
BIGNUM *pub_bn = BN_new();
EC_POINT_point2bn(curve, pub_pt, POINT_CONVERSION_UNCOMPRESSED, pub_bn, ctx);
EC_POINT_free(pub_pt);
BN_CTX_free(ctx);
assert(BN_num_bytes(pub_bn) == 65);
uint8_t pub_bytes[65];
BN_bn2bin(pub_bn, pub_bytes);
BN_free(pub_bn);
sha256_ripe160(pub_bytes, 65, pubsig);
}