As someone that has been in since 2013, I don't even recognize the current scene. The only reason the vast majority of people are getting into it is to get rich. It seems totally unsustainable, but the only incentives for people on the inside are to loudly convince others to join them.

Last day I saw a magazine on cryptocurrencies in a kiosk in Germany (in German language). As Warrent Buffett used to say, "When everybody and your taxi driver talks about your stocks... it's time to sell".

It's impossible to predict. Anyway, I'm investing with a buy & hold philosophy.

Crypto currencies are the first investment where everybody and your taxi driver gets to buy before the institutional investors.

I agreed with your first sentence, but then was confused by sentences 2 and 3. That's exactly the scene I recognize from 2011 until now.

This looks promising to improve transaction speeds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a73Gz3Tvx3k

Looks very promising! For those that don't want to click on the video (uploaded today), I've copied the description below:

"In this video Laolu (co-founder of Lightning Labs) demonstrates a multi-hop payment on Bitcoin's mainnet which travels across the 3 major Lightning implementations. In the demo Laolu (a.k.a roasbeef) sends a payment from our Lightning desktop app (https://github.com/lightninglabs/ligh...) to Starblocks, a coffee payment demo."

"This payment marks the first multi-hop, cross-implementation payment on Bitcoin's mainnet. All transaction performed in the video were performed completely off-chain, instantly, and with virtually zero fees. Lightning allows instant, low-fee payments on Bitcoin, enabling the system to scale further for the next wave of adoption. Additionally, Lightning unlocks a new class of use cases for Bitcoin enabled by the ability to instantly send low-fee payments on the system."

I just bought some and I will sell when it reaches 5x if it ever does.

If you're buying in order to speculate, why not sell gradually into the gains? Your strategy seems like it is taking what is already a high-risk, and artificially making the risk higher than needed...

Also, the time to buy is almost never after/during a large boom, heh.

because if you sell gradually, it doesn't move as fast...

since this is getting downvoted, I will give a simple example... if you have $2 and it goes up 100% (two-fold incease), than you have $4... but if you cash half your money, then you have only $1 invested, and you are stuck with $3 instead of $4 ... and lost 25%. Not sure if my math is 100% right, but if you are betting on value going up, you lost money.

The "if" parts of your comment need more thought that you've given them.

It depends on your goals, but maybe... we'll see if I was too late in the game to make a quick profit.

That's the only way to win long-term in gambling. Cash out winnings over your stake.

buy high, sell low!

I tried to do that on coinbase and it won't let me

I'm gonna do the same but sell when it gets to 10x. Have fun being half as rich as me!

Amateur! True bitcoin maestros never sell for less than a 100x profit :P

we are already at 100% profits... let's wait a bit longer

that's fine, I just like to set a goal and stick to it... enjoy the extra cash (maybe).

Transaction times are slow because there are so many of them. What you're saying is sort of equivalent to "look at how much traffic there is at that mall, it's going to fail".

The number of transactions is close to nothing compared to credit card transactions. The current blockchain networks have to improve a lot.

To understand what's happening, you have to observe how things have evolved. Bitcoin was advertised as digital cash. Tons of nerds envisioned a future of the whole world buying coffee with Bitcoin. As it became clear that the current network could never fulfill that vision, the whole community evolved its belief system to support the value of the currency, and they did so without any leader to coordinate their actions. They were just led by incentivized memes—the more convincing the justification for high valuations, the better the ideas spread. Now, people don't pitch Bitcoin's value as a digital cash. They tell people it's digital gold and the transaction fees don't matter.

The beliefs of the community will continue to evolve as needed to support the value of their claims on our society's productive capacity.

> "Bitcoin was advertised as digital cash. Tons of nerds envisioned a future of the whole world buying coffee with Bitcoin. As it became clear that the current network could never fulfill that vision..."

There is an interesting historical tidbit: Initially Satoshi didn't have a fixed block size limit. That limit was only added after a DDoS attack where absurdly large blocks flooded the network. But that was a temporary fix, and satoshi had said that limit could easily be changed, maybe using some algorithm that increased size based on demand or that gradually increases with time. He had said large blocks is not a concern because network bandwidth increases exponentially. Unfortunately, the early developers did not proactively address the scaling problem, such as by allowing for increasing block sizes, so we are stuck where we are at today. [1]

Point being, bitcoin could have been a micro-transaction-capable digital cash, and it (or another crypto-currency) still could fix this scaling problem. Not everyone in the community has "evolved their beliefs" about bitcoin (or cryptocurrency in general). I personally feel that bitcoin was and still is experimental, but has simply been a victim of its own success, but that the scaling problems are not insurmountable.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1391350.0

I'm excited about digital money. What could the effect be of a boom and crash? If bitcoin had some kind of algorithmic central bank mechanism, low transaction costs, and didn't spew CO2, I'd be in love with it. I'm half in love with Ethereum, although something there doesn't quite feel right yet, either.

Lately I've been exposed to the meme that Bitcoin isn't money, ok, "Bitcoin is Bitcoin" -- another way of saying, "it's different this time."

There are several projects on track to improve blockchain speeds by several orders of magnitude. So, in other words, it's a solved problem. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network