I own BTC. I bought it not as an investment but as a currency. Back in 2015 Greece froze up. There wasn’t a dollar to be had. No checks worked. Credit cards were frozen. If your money was in “the bank” you could go stand in line for 5 hours to be allowed to withdraw $50. I read a story about a guy who was vacationing in the Greek Islands. When he was ready to go home he couldn’t buy plane ticket. He was a rich guy with plenty of means, but his means were all tied up in banks and the banks all had the windows closed. He owned BTC. He used BTC to buy some Ouzo, some Gyros and a plane ticket home. I had just sold some penny stock at a good profit and used the proceeds to by my kids a car. What was left I split between BRK.B and BTC. I became intrigued at the idea of bank-less currency and true point to point transaction guaranteed by the block chain technology. Also I was intrigued by the fact BTC had an upper limit. It was infinitely divisible but there were only 21 million BTC that would ever exist. The limit guaranteed a bubble like the tulip bubble would not happen. Tulips are trashy flowers, easy to grow. BTC is VERY hard to mine, I know I tried my hand at it, and it becomes asymptotically harder with every BTC mined, so the BTC universe is capped at 21M. I bought my BTC at $275 a coin and went off and took a nap. A year or 18 mos later it became a speculation and doubled and doubled etc till it was worth $19,000 a coin, YIKES! I looked at the BTC charts and the volatility was +- 40% or an 80% spread. At $19000 if I lost 80% I’d still be way ahead about 1300% so I sold my initial stake and let the rest ride. This is called creating a free trade since all you own after the trade is profit as the principal was removed. I put the principal into BRK.B This was totally speculative money, I won’t even call it an investment, but by selling the principal my risk was zero. Worst that could happen is I’d loose my unrealized gains and not have to pay the taxes. As of today I’m 8800% ahead since I took the principal off the table. Wild ride.
What I like about BTC is there is no banking and governmental involvement. You can be a purse maker on a mountain top in Peru, get on the satellite phone and sell 50,000 purses to Nordstrom or Neiman, do the deal and have the BTC in your account by lunch. All you need now is logistics to get 50K purses to NYC. Logistics? Sounds like a job for Bezos! This opens the world to commerce. A form of this already exists in China where your account is linked to your cellphone and you can buy Bahn Mi with a tap of a button or a QR code. This is creative destruction at its finest! BTC was further legitimized as a currency when the options market was established so you could effective short BTC and hedge the risk and better control the volatility. My prediction was BTC would stabilize at 9000/coin and today its 8800.
Facebook backed by Visa and Mastercard is creating it’s own Crypto. Be very clear what is happening. Facebook has 2 billion users and God knows how many hold Visa and Mastercard. Elon Musk is launching a satellite network that will blanket the planet in wifi. I’ve participated in this kind of technology through my ham radio interest, it’s called LEO low earth orbit. The satellite plant is just down the road from me, and the launch pad is 13 miles southeast from my sun room. Amazon and Space-X are involved and its called project Kuiper. I can sit and watch the launch from my couch and hear the roar of the rockets as they leave then hear the roar as the boosters return 6 minutes later for reuse. This is happening folks world wide non governmental dominated commerce. The results are staggering. Imagine a currency where the USA is NOT the reserve currency. In the block chain value transfer is automatic and requires no middle man. If your not the reserve currency you can’t just print money.
That oughtta spice up your weekend
Congrats on a home run with Bitcoin.
Technology has been advancing at breakneck speeds. I can only imagine what it will be like 10 years from now.
I’m hoping that there will be robots that are capable of mowing my tricky property by the time I am getting in age where I can’t do it anymore. Husqvarana already has an automated robot lawn device that looks amazing, did a test trial with a dealer but it was unable to handle the slopes, rough terrain. But I’m thinking in 10 years time there has got to be some device created that would do a much better job than me (and that applies to everything, lawn, driving, and likely my profession)
Hey XRAY
You can bet there will be robots but they may not be some extension of smart lawn mowers. They may in fact be humanoid pushing lawn mowers or like those “dogs” that can handle difficult terrain. BTC was lucky since I didn’t buy it for speculation but its utility as a currency or source of bartering. I still think that’s its advantage, because it creatively destroys the bank/governments as gate keepers and all the skimming they do off the top resulting in a more efficient and productive commerce. I guess time will tell.