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Betting on crypto with your credit card is a bad idea, full stop. But I remember in 2013, I read about someone who was planning on maxing out their credit card

Betting on crypto with your credit card is a bad idea, full stop. But I remember in 2013, I read about someone who was planning on maxing out their credit cards to buy Bitcoin at $90. I was exhorting them not do it... Ha. I wonder how they fared.

WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
Same as me when I wanted to buy $20,000 at $230. Did not become a millionare...
- asdfman123 8y ago
  The problem is you don't know when to sell it. A friend of mine got super lucky with crypto, though, because he lost his password. He bought Ethereum when it was being hyped on Kickstarter and mostly forgot about it. At the end of last year, he saw the price, freaked out, and figured out how to crack his own password. So, he ended up buying at the lowest point and selling at a very high point, like $700. I think he made a few million on it.
  - lozaning 8y ago
    $700 is closer to the midpoint of the historical price. Source: someone who should have sold at 1400 and joined the millionaire club.
  - nawitus 8y ago
    You can sell gradually.
    - oligopoly 8y ago
      Yeah that's the way you buy&sell stocks if you are investing. Not just gambling
      - bonestamp2 8y ago
        And buy gradually too for that matter. There's no way to time a peak/dip so this obviously spreads out your cost basis in case you're buying at the peak. You can also look at it as dollar cost averaging and continue to buy it as it goes down, again reducing your average cost.
    - notheguyouthink 8y ago
      Or you sell for what you need, when you need it. Ie, if I had the coin I was debating buying (~1k coins), I wouldn't remotely need to sell them all now. I could retire off a small amount of them, there's no need to sell them all. I'd sell what gets me retirement now, and hold onto the rest - see where it takes me.
      - lozaning 8y ago
        Im looking to dump most of what I have in favor of investing in multi family real-estate. I got big into mining eth starting back in the test net days. It's paid for some dumb stuff along the way to where I am now, chartered helicopters to Macau, laps around the Nürburgring, ect, but the price of all this shit has become so decoupled from the underlying technology and mostly scams at this point that I want to own something "real".
- prepend 8y ago
  Same as my neighbor when ve wanted to buy $20,000 at $20,000. (Just wanted to add an example where the based saved some people)
behringer 8y ago
I once aske my uncle his thoughts on investing in bitcoin in cash. Price was about 10 bucks a coin. We both regret talking ourselves out of it
- codetrotter 8y ago
  There is no point in regretting such things. You could not have known what would happen to the price of Bitcoin. You probably would’ve ended up selling it for a tiny profit and then you’d still be regretting your actions, or even you could’ve panicked at some point when it dipped a little bit and sold at a loss.
  - 456hdsaq234g 8y ago
    or lost em in mtgox.
- notheguyouthink 8y ago
  I was talking with my wife (then gf) about putting $1000 into BTC back when it hit $1. I don't let it eat me up though, I'm not a gambler, and it's quite likely that I would have sold at some point. Though.. if I had my wits, hopefully I'd be selling off chunks. Ie, at $18k/coin I wouldn't sell the whole thing.. though, at only $100/coin it would have been tempting. Ah, life.
  - charlesdm 8y ago
    But you'd likely be a lot better off. Putting $1,000 into something promising isn't gambling, it's smart. While no one likes throwing a grand away, it's also not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. So why not take a chance? It's not like you'll see 20 opportunities to invest money into something pop up every year. People in general are too conservative. You should allow yourself to take (calculated) risks once in a while.
    - behringer 8y ago
      At the time it seemed like gambling. Everyone thought it would come crashing down at any time. It was the forward thinkers and the heavy risk takers that invested. On top of that, only crazy people ever though it could hit 20k.
bitL 8y ago
They might hire you as one of their risk-averse financial advisers/asset managers next ;-)
- asdfman123 8y ago
  Pay off your debt and invest in low cost index funds, kids. Max out your Roth IRA and 401k if possible. Feel free to Venmo me consulting fees.
gwbas1c 8y ago
> Betting on crypto with your credit card is a bad idea, full stop. Because it's gambling, and a lot of the currencies won't work at scale, so it can be considered a 0-sum game. > But I remember in 2013, I read about someone who was planning on maxing out their credit cards to buy Bitcoin at $90. I was exhorting them not do it... Hindsight is always 20/20. If I could go back in time I'd run the earliest Bitcoin miner on my PC for as long as it generated coins, and then sell them at the height.
- 0xfeba 8y ago
  > Hindsight is always 20/20. If I could go back in time I'd run the earliest Bitcoin miner on my PC for as long as it generated coins, and then sell them at the height. I worked as the sole IT person in a big (~300 computer) university department. My predecessor had placed folding@home (IIRC) on many of the lab computers. This was around 2009-2012. I removed it; he didn't have a "team" assigned or anything so I didn't think much of it. I didn't hear about cryptocurrency until late 2012, but occasionally the "what if" pops in my head and I go -- I could have put a lot of miners at 50% load -- even just at night and made quite a bit had I waited till the first boom (~2014), or lots if I held till now. Highly illegal, but unlikely to get caught. But that's a lot of "what-ifs", and it's all easy in hindsight. Useless to dwell on it, but hard not to sometimes!
- userbinator 8y ago
  If I could go back in time I'd run the earliest Bitcoin miner on my PC for as long as it generated coins, and then sell them at the height. I know a few people who mined a few coins for "shits and giggles" and then lost/deleted them before the whole cryptocurrency thing really started going because they thought it would never happen. I might have had some at one point too.
cortesoft 8y ago
I don't think they were saying they would buy it on credit, just that they would use their credit card to make the transaction (and then pay off the credit card at the end of the month). They are using the fraud protection part of their credit card, not the loaning money part.
hangonhn 8y ago
I think that's the difficulty of being rational and prudent. A few lucky people will get lucky through chance alone. It doesn't mean the process was a good idea and the same is true of the reverse: you can have a great plan but sometimes chances get stacked against you. I loved the book "Fooled by Randomness". Well worth a read if you haven't. Your advice to your friend was sound. There's nothing to regret.
- doublethink2 8y ago
  Nothing to regret? If he bought $5k of btc at $90 it would be worth over 300k, even after the crash. Yall are throwing your conservative investment advice at everyone and backwards validating your risk-adverse behavior.
rconti 8y ago
shrug I bought my first Mac in 2002 as I was quitting my job to go back to college. It was immediately obvious to me that Apple was going places, and I was seriously tempted to buy as much Apple stock as I could swing. It would have paid off mightily. That said, I couldn't afford it. It was a bad decision for me then, so I'm glad I didn't make that decision. It was the right choice, even though it would have been very profitable.
- CodeCube 8y ago
  The beauty of hindsight ... it's 20/20, let us never forget that :)
steveeq1 8y ago
If you play russian roulette and "win", would you say that that was a good strategy? Would you do it again?
3pt14159 8y ago
I was broke in 2011 due to a founder flaking on a startup we were building. Discovered Bitcoin. Did the math, proved to myself it worked. Maxed the credit card with a cash advance, bought in person, then got a job to pay off the card. Just do the math. Don't listen to people and their hard and fast rules. If you think 200x or 1000x is possible just do it and make sure you take some off the table after it 4xes so you're always up.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  I honestly don't see a thing different between your story, and someone who maxed out their card to bet on roulette.
  - doublethink2 8y ago
    Because you haven't thought about bitcoin and cryptocurrency enough and instead let others think for you. It's pretty easy to tell the difference between roulette and crypto - including the existence of a house third party.
    - s73v3r_ 8y ago
      Yes, because everyone who doesn't share your unicorns and rainbows vision of crypto clearly has not thought about it. It couldn't possibly be that there are people who disagree with you.

WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago

Same as me when I wanted to buy $20,000 at $230. Did not become a millionare...

asdfman123 8y ago
The problem is you don't know when to sell it. A friend of mine got super lucky with crypto, though, because he lost his password. He bought Ethereum when it was being hyped on Kickstarter and mostly forgot about it. At the end of last year, he saw the price, freaked out, and figured out how to crack his own password. So, he ended up buying at the lowest point and selling at a very high point, like $700. I think he made a few million on it.
- lozaning 8y ago
  $700 is closer to the midpoint of the historical price. Source: someone who should have sold at 1400 and joined the millionaire club.
- nawitus 8y ago
  You can sell gradually.
  - oligopoly 8y ago
    Yeah that's the way you buy&sell stocks if you are investing. Not just gambling
    - bonestamp2 8y ago
      And buy gradually too for that matter. There's no way to time a peak/dip so this obviously spreads out your cost basis in case you're buying at the peak. You can also look at it as dollar cost averaging and continue to buy it as it goes down, again reducing your average cost.
  - notheguyouthink 8y ago
    Or you sell for what you need, when you need it. Ie, if I had the coin I was debating buying (~1k coins), I wouldn't remotely need to sell them all now. I could retire off a small amount of them, there's no need to sell them all. I'd sell what gets me retirement now, and hold onto the rest - see where it takes me.
    - lozaning 8y ago
      Im looking to dump most of what I have in favor of investing in multi family real-estate. I got big into mining eth starting back in the test net days. It's paid for some dumb stuff along the way to where I am now, chartered helicopters to Macau, laps around the Nürburgring, ect, but the price of all this shit has become so decoupled from the underlying technology and mostly scams at this point that I want to own something "real".
prepend 8y ago
Same as my neighbor when ve wanted to buy $20,000 at $20,000. (Just wanted to add an example where the based saved some people)

behringer 8y ago

I once aske my uncle his thoughts on investing in bitcoin in cash. Price was about 10 bucks a coin. We both regret talking ourselves out of it

codetrotter 8y ago
There is no point in regretting such things. You could not have known what would happen to the price of Bitcoin. You probably would’ve ended up selling it for a tiny profit and then you’d still be regretting your actions, or even you could’ve panicked at some point when it dipped a little bit and sold at a loss.
- 456hdsaq234g 8y ago
  or lost em in mtgox.
notheguyouthink 8y ago
I was talking with my wife (then gf) about putting $1000 into BTC back when it hit $1. I don't let it eat me up though, I'm not a gambler, and it's quite likely that I would have sold at some point. Though.. if I had my wits, hopefully I'd be selling off chunks. Ie, at $18k/coin I wouldn't sell the whole thing.. though, at only $100/coin it would have been tempting. Ah, life.
- charlesdm 8y ago
  But you'd likely be a lot better off. Putting $1,000 into something promising isn't gambling, it's smart. While no one likes throwing a grand away, it's also not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. So why not take a chance? It's not like you'll see 20 opportunities to invest money into something pop up every year. People in general are too conservative. You should allow yourself to take (calculated) risks once in a while.
  - behringer 8y ago
    At the time it seemed like gambling. Everyone thought it would come crashing down at any time. It was the forward thinkers and the heavy risk takers that invested. On top of that, only crazy people ever though it could hit 20k.

bitL 8y ago

They might hire you as one of their risk-averse financial advisers/asset managers next ;-)

asdfman123 8y ago
Pay off your debt and invest in low cost index funds, kids. Max out your Roth IRA and 401k if possible. Feel free to Venmo me consulting fees.

gwbas1c 8y ago

> Betting on crypto with your credit card is a bad idea, full stop. Because it's gambling, and a lot of the currencies won't work at scale, so it can be considered a 0-sum game. > But I remember in 2013, I read about someone who was planning on maxing out their credit cards to buy Bitcoin at $90. I was exhorting them not do it... Hindsight is always 20/20. If I could go back in time I'd run the earliest Bitcoin miner on my PC for as long as it generated coins, and then sell them at the height.

0xfeba 8y ago
> Hindsight is always 20/20. If I could go back in time I'd run the earliest Bitcoin miner on my PC for as long as it generated coins, and then sell them at the height. I worked as the sole IT person in a big (~300 computer) university department. My predecessor had placed folding@home (IIRC) on many of the lab computers. This was around 2009-2012. I removed it; he didn't have a "team" assigned or anything so I didn't think much of it. I didn't hear about cryptocurrency until late 2012, but occasionally the "what if" pops in my head and I go -- I could have put a lot of miners at 50% load -- even just at night and made quite a bit had I waited till the first boom (~2014), or lots if I held till now. Highly illegal, but unlikely to get caught. But that's a lot of "what-ifs", and it's all easy in hindsight. Useless to dwell on it, but hard not to sometimes!
userbinator 8y ago
If I could go back in time I'd run the earliest Bitcoin miner on my PC for as long as it generated coins, and then sell them at the height. I know a few people who mined a few coins for "shits and giggles" and then lost/deleted them before the whole cryptocurrency thing really started going because they thought it would never happen. I might have had some at one point too.

cortesoft 8y ago

I don't think they were saying they would buy it on credit, just that they would use their credit card to make the transaction (and then pay off the credit card at the end of the month). They are using the fraud protection part of their credit card, not the loaning money part.

hangonhn 8y ago

I think that's the difficulty of being rational and prudent. A few lucky people will get lucky through chance alone. It doesn't mean the process was a good idea and the same is true of the reverse: you can have a great plan but sometimes chances get stacked against you. I loved the book "Fooled by Randomness". Well worth a read if you haven't. Your advice to your friend was sound. There's nothing to regret.

doublethink2 8y ago
Nothing to regret? If he bought $5k of btc at $90 it would be worth over 300k, even after the crash. Yall are throwing your conservative investment advice at everyone and backwards validating your risk-adverse behavior.

rconti 8y ago

shrug I bought my first Mac in 2002 as I was quitting my job to go back to college. It was immediately obvious to me that Apple was going places, and I was seriously tempted to buy as much Apple stock as I could swing. It would have paid off mightily. That said, I couldn't afford it. It was a bad decision for me then, so I'm glad I didn't make that decision. It was the right choice, even though it would have been very profitable.

CodeCube 8y ago
The beauty of hindsight ... it's 20/20, let us never forget that :)

steveeq1 8y ago

If you play russian roulette and "win", would you say that that was a good strategy? Would you do it again?

3pt14159 8y ago

I was broke in 2011 due to a founder flaking on a startup we were building. Discovered Bitcoin. Did the math, proved to myself it worked. Maxed the credit card with a cash advance, bought in person, then got a job to pay off the card. Just do the math. Don't listen to people and their hard and fast rules. If you think 200x or 1000x is possible just do it and make sure you take some off the table after it 4xes so you're always up.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
I honestly don't see a thing different between your story, and someone who maxed out their card to bet on roulette.
- doublethink2 8y ago
  Because you haven't thought about bitcoin and cryptocurrency enough and instead let others think for you. It's pretty easy to tell the difference between roulette and crypto - including the existence of a house third party.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    Yes, because everyone who doesn't share your unicorns and rainbows vision of crypto clearly has not thought about it. It couldn't possibly be that there are people who disagree with you.