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It really depends on how much time you have to invest. On the low effort end, you can put some money into coinbase and speculate that way. On the high effort

It really depends on how much time you have to invest. On the low effort end, you can put some money into coinbase and speculate that way. On the high effort side, you could mine the "up and coming" alt coins on a box. Personally, I'm telling a lot of my friends to put a few hundred bucks (money they won't mind losing) into coinbase and evaluate afterwards. At the least, it's an interesting tech/story so having some money involved makes it fun. There's also speculative upside, though idk if we're past the "easy money" stage or not. I still think "investing" in bitcoin is a gamble and I'm not convinced it should have a place in your portfolio. Not only because of the speculative risk, but the added risks of forks, hacks, etc. I'm really concerned about how liquid the market is and should an event happen, the little liquidity that exists will dry up.

panarky 9y ago
> I still think "investing" in bitcoin is a gamble Maybe there's more to be gained than an increasing exchange rate. I've gained a lot of knowledge by running Bitcoin Core on testnet, grabbing some free test coins from a faucet, and learning how to use the API. There's a lot to learn! Not only sending and receiving, but also importing and exporting private keys, signing and verifying messages, M-of-N multisig transactions, paper wallets, brainwallets, etc. And there are now several implementations of the Lightning Network for instant and very low cost transactions which make micropayments feasible that you can learn using the testnet. Then once you understand the fundamentals of Bitcoin, you might do the same for Ethereum and its smart contracts, solidity, and ERC20 tokens.
AznHisoka 9y ago
true but then again if you wait until the liquidity is similar to that of the stock market, bitcoin will likely be 20 times its current price. thats the other side of huge risk: huge reward.

panarky 9y ago

> I still think "investing" in bitcoin is a gamble Maybe there's more to be gained than an increasing exchange rate. I've gained a lot of knowledge by running Bitcoin Core on testnet, grabbing some free test coins from a faucet, and learning how to use the API. There's a lot to learn! Not only sending and receiving, but also importing and exporting private keys, signing and verifying messages, M-of-N multisig transactions, paper wallets, brainwallets, etc. And there are now several implementations of the Lightning Network for instant and very low cost transactions which make micropayments feasible that you can learn using the testnet. Then once you understand the fundamentals of Bitcoin, you might do the same for Ethereum and its smart contracts, solidity, and ERC20 tokens.

AznHisoka 9y ago

true but then again if you wait until the liquidity is similar to that of the stock market, bitcoin will likely be 20 times its current price. thats the other side of huge risk: huge reward.