They're consistently on a cycle of booming and busting - Bitcoin's value has been slowly creeping up and up through these cycles. Others... not so sure. Bitcoin is a huge driver for the hype cycle in cryotocurrencies in general.

If you want to watch anything, watch what happens with Bitcoin between now and August 1st. It's a make or break time for whether that trend of slowly increasing value keeps going or blows up horribly.

Eh, I'm not really interested in "watching" it, I just see what comes my way by chance. That mostly seems to be scary emails from CoinBase[1] and snippets of news of "the community" having major arguments about the fundamental nature of its value. This is not confidence inspiring for the casual user. Maybe it'll settle down sometime and I'll re-evaluate, but for now I've officially moved into the "not interested" camp.

[1] """The User Activated Hard Fork (UAHF) is a proposal to increase the Bitcoin block size scheduled to activate on August 1. The UAHF is incompatible with the current Bitcoin ruleset and will create a separate blockchain. Should UAHF activate on August 1, Coinbase will not support the new blockchain or its associated coin.

The User Activated Soft Fork (UASF) is a proposal to adopt Segregated Witness on the Bitcoin blockchain and could result in network instability. It is scheduled to activate at the same time as the UAHF."""

>They're consistently on a cycle of booming and busting - Bitcoin's value has been slowly creeping up and up through these cycles

Have we even seen a single cycle yet? Bitcoin hit the mainstream, what, five years ago? The value certainly hasn't "crept up"; it's growing exponentially like every bubble in history.

> Have we even seen a single cycle yet?

I mean, just look at the data. Yes, there have been -- without any doubt! -- at least 3 cycles that I recall. And by cycle I mean Bitcoin losing at least 50% of its market capitalization suddenly (bust!) and then slowing crawling back up, then quickly shooting up (boom!). No one, not even Bitcoin's biggest detractors, doubts that it's been through numerous boom and bust cycles (and that's not even a good thing, for a store of value).

Definitely, we've seen several cycles - to name 2 I watched more closely, the $30 peak and the $1000 peak were both followed by extended months of much lower prices. After which the value tends to average out higher than it began, but remain quite distant from the peak for quite some time. This I call a cycle.

>I'll stick to real money, thanks.

By "real" money, you mean more established and widely used, correct?

yeah, none of that shit happens with real money

It does, sure, to a vague degree. (Fiat money is not exactly as easy to fork, so you don't get the scenario of economic system disputes leading to alternate currencies as much. The rest certainly apply, of course, even the huge amount of thefts -- see the 1MBD Malaysian scandal as an example..)

The main issue to be aware of with cryptocurrency at the moment is quite a bit more volatile than the most major currencies. For now, at least, I would classify cryptocurrency investment as "speculative". EG: I wouldn't recommend anyone put their life savings into a cryptocurrency, at the moment.