Here's a really scary stat. Bitcoin was at $16,954.78 on January 4th. Now just 30 days later, it's currently at $8,340.00 or so. That means it lost over HALF of it's value in one month. Doesn't take much imagination to see it going to zip in less than six months at that pace.
Here's an even scarier stat: Bitcoin was priced at $0.08 in 2010. It would have to tank a whole lot more before it could even be reasonably compared to conventional stocks in terms of gains over time. To put that in perspective, had you invested $0.80 back in 2010, you'd be able to sell now for around $72k while it's apparently tanking. Or you could let it ride for a few more days, as it will likely be back in the teens by then.
Not that any of that matters, though - when you focus on a small enough window, any investment can be made to look bad. What will Bitcoin be worth next week? Next year? You speak as if it has never dipped and recovered before, like it has already done several times in the last month. Here we are a mere 13 hours later and it's above $9k, which actually means nothing in terms of where it will be in six months.
Attempting to predict what a crypto currency (or a stock) is going to do is impossible to do 100% accurately, but it becomes a whole lot more difficult (and much less precise) when the analysis focuses on an unreasonably small period of time. Basing a long term prediction on one month for something that's been around for over a decade may not result in an accurate result.
Yup, that's really sad. And it can happen with ANY of these so-called "currencies". It's a grim reminder to never invest more money than you can afford to lose.
Replace "currencies" with "investments" and I can agree with that statement.
And learn the difference between an investment and a gamble.
Every investment is a gamble. Some are safer than others, but there's always some degree of risk.
Never bet all your chips against the house!
Who is the house here?
Hard lessons learned but there's a sucker born every minute. Don't be a sucker!
See my comments above.
I own no BTC and have no interest in doing so, but let's play a little game and pretend that I'm interested, and I buy one BTC right now. ($9174.) I don't want to sit on this for over a year, so when I cash out, I'm looking at short term capital gains taxes, which means that Uncle Sam will want 22% of what I make, meaning that I'll have to make $11,192.28 just to break even. I'm in this for fast gains though, so I want to make at least a grand or so for the minute or so of button pushing that it will take me to buy this. As I don't like weird numbers, we'll just call this $13k. I've bought my BTC and I've placed my sell limit at $13k. How long will I have to wait to make $1800 on my $9000 investment after taxes?
I predict no more than a month, probably less than two weeks. Let's see if I'm close.