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I present, for your satisfaction, my comment from two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6829180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6829180 Alon

I present, for your satisfaction, my comment from two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6829180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6829180 Along with this gem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6858258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6858258 In summary, I invested $11k @ $1106/coin, predicting it'd rise to $1,500. Shazam! I've transmuted that $11k into... let's see ... $5,100. I feel pretty ill. Thought you'd all enjoy the schadenfreude, and perhaps learn from my example: "How to ignore Sam Altman and lose more than half your money." http://blog.samaltman.com/thoughts-on-bitcoin http://blog.samaltman.com/thoughts-on-bitcoin EDIT: I'm holding onto my coins. But, now that China is strongly incentivized not to invest in Bitcoin, it's going to be a very slow climb back to $1106. And at the end of that long road (I'd say at least several months, but what the hell do I know, right?) I get to look forward to: "Yay. I've lost $0. I've also gained $0." EDIT2: Oh, nope! It just fell from $520 to $500. So, at current market prices, my $11k is now $4,780. Of course, we've all seen bitcion dip and quickly rise again. It's just very... interesting... to me that within the timespan of writing a HN comment, I'm down another $320. Yes. Interesting. That's the word. I'm interested. In learning from my mistakes. FYI, that -$5,900 was enough to pay off my car loan in its entirety, or all of my (admittedly small, relatively speaking) credit card debt. Oh well. I'm going to go build a product and sell it now. EDIT3: The market rose from $500 to $540, so that means I've earned back $474! And since my last edit was an hour ago, that must mean I'm earning $474/hr writing HN comments in my pajamas! Why hold down a programming job when you can write HN comments fulltime for 4x the wage? Quit tomorrow, sell everything you own, and invest it all in bitcoin immediately!

optimiz3 13y ago
Have an upvote for your sorrows. It takes guts to admit that in public.
rdegges 13y ago
Sorry for your luck. If I were you, however, I'd hang onto the Bitcoin you have. If it continues to gain adoption, those coins will rise in price again (don't let temporary drops get to you too much). Good luck!
corin_ 13y ago
Who knows, maybe the example to learn from is not getting scared when you go from $11k to $5.1k and waiting for a month until it's up to $20k. On the other hand, maybe it's that you should sell having only lost $5.9k rather than wait until that $5.1k drops to $5.10.
- Fuxy 13y ago
  Depends on your wager. If you think bit-coin will never rise again sell now and walk away wounded. But that wager makes no sense at all since people accidentally delete there wallets all the time and there's a limited supply of bit-coins. If you factor in time bit-coin can only go up as long as people are still using it and i have confidence bit-coin will reach wide adoption.
  - Nursie 13y ago
    The wager makes perfect sense if you don't think BTC will rise again though...
  - Bockit 13y ago
    A case where it would make sense, if bitcoin ends up worth nothing. It doesn't matter if they're scarce when they're still worth nothing. I hope it doesn't end up so, luckily I'm not in a position where I need to try and work it out!
  - camus2 13y ago
    TLDR; you are gambling.
    - Fuxy 13y ago
      I find the odds on this a lot more favorable then a casino in Vegas.
- kybernetikos 13y ago
  You suggest that the lesson should be based on the outcome, but actually in the presence of significant random noise/unknowns, that's not always true. It's quite possible to make bad decisions that turn out well and good decisions that turn out badly. To learn the correct lessons, he needs to work out if his original plan was sensible given what he knew (or could reasonably find out) at the time and he's just unlucky, or if the decision to invest was reckless or based on inadequate or wrong information. Having said that, it's so easy to deceive ourselves, that I've heard people say that it's a good idea to work out what would falsify your assumptions before investing. The decision he made was either a good one or a bad one based on the information available to him at the time. That will be true regardless of whether he becomes a billionaire in the next month or goes entirely broke. The true lesson to be learned is not dependent on the outcome.
pontifier 13y ago
I anticipate your feelings being quite widespread. I only had $200 in them after cashing out, but I've still felt terrible when the price drops. It's rather odd. This is the first time I have ever participated in an actual exchange market with volatility and all. I built a trading bot, and was making a couple of dollars a day trading my 0.17 BTC. A few weeks ago I was feeling suicidal based on not buying some a couple of years ago when it was $10. My family has been having a rough time, and I kept thinking that I had missed my chance to pull us out of the hole we are in. This is a crazy and interesting time to live in, and I'm glad I'm still here even if Bitcoin didn't make me rich.
- eclipxe 13y ago
  U.S.A. Suicide Hotline 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Remember, it's just money.
  - tachion 13y ago
    I love when people just like that are assuming that everything has to happen in U.S.A. and that world around it doesnt exist ;)
    - pontifier 13y ago
      I'm truly annoyed when people latch onto a single word, and forget everything else you are saying.
    - pdx 13y ago
      Your comment is only valid because that's a 1-800 number. 1-800 numbers are free to call in the USA, which is why many people have them, but their downside is that you can't call them from outside the USA. Upon first discovering SIP addresses and that everybody on earth could have an email style phone number that would be free to call, I have been waiting and waiting for the world to transition to SIP addresses instead of phone numbers. If such a thing occurs, someday, then publishing a phone address from one country will not be a problem. I'm sure the folks at the suicide hotline would gladly take calls from anywhere in the world, if they could do so for free. Sadly, as things stand now, they could publish a SIP address, but nobody would know how to use it.
deleted 13y ago
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erikpukinskis 13y ago
You just have to pick a target. I feel confident that Bitcoin is worth $10k, so if I bought at any price below that, I should feel good about where I am. If you don't decide what you think something is worth, your subjective experience of investing in it will be a rollercoaster. If you do choose a price target, then you know where you stand at all times, and whether you should buy or sell.
- kybernetikos 13y ago
  > If you do choose a price target, then you know where you stand at all times, and whether you should buy or sell. As well as choosing a price target, you should choose a set of situations that will falsify your price target so you aren't committed to losing all your money on one bet if you're wrong.
Fuxy 13y ago
Give it time. Don't sell just now. Had a similar situation and just choose to wait. Made a nice profit a year later.
- chii 13y ago
  Or, the price could plummet even more. Money invested needs to be disposable, otherwise, it's just too risky an investment right now.
  - Fuxy 13y ago
    That goes without saying. If you want it safe keep it in a bank where inflation will most likely slowly devalue it. There's not a lot of options it's either risk it or watch your money slowly rot away.
sheetjs 13y ago
> learning from my mistakes. what was your rationale for investing in the first place? Was it following some person on the internet? Or was it because you believed in the bitcoin craze? Or was it because you believed that Chinese demand would drive up BTC? Or some other reason? The way to learn from your mistakes is to sit back and understand why you bought BTC in the first place, and then try to understand what went wrong (treat this like a scientific experiment)
tlrobinson 13y ago
Sorry, but if you didn't realize this was a strong possibility, you didn't do enough research. I'm cautiously optimistic about Bitcoin, but this has happened before and will happen again.
- alexeisadeski3 13y ago
  So say we all!
- Nursie 13y ago
  >> Sorry, but if you didn't realize this was a strong possibility, you didn't do enough research. I'm cautiously optimistic about Bitcoin, but this has happened before and will happen again. I agree entirely BUT I can see how someone might be misled by all the bitcoin cheerleading.
  - w0utert 13y ago
    >> I agree entirely BUT I can see how someone might be misled by all the bitcoin cheerleading. I don't. Every time I see the comments on BTC articles, I get the impression the groupthink among BTC optimists is so strong it effectively kills their ability to form an individual opinion. I mean, seriously, why on earth would anyone in their right mind ever think an 'asset' (which isn't even an asset) can rise 200x within a year and not be one gigantic bubble, just because the BTC echo chamber says it's 'the currency of the future', despite the fact that ~100 people hold over ~50% of all BTC, and not much more than 1% of BTC transfers are actually used for actual trades? I'm really lost for words when it comes to the naivity of people (still) holding BTC. But go ahead, buy the dip, hope for the best, I mean, Winklevoss says it will go to $40K :-/
    - tlrobinson 13y ago
      If you only get your investment advice from online commenters you're doing something wrong. Reddit has become particularly bad lately.
meritt 13y ago
BTC will hit ~$400 before it stabilizes and resumes upward progression.
- mcv 13y ago
  That sounds reasonable. I've got some money sitting here waiting for something to invest in. I didn't want to get into bitcoin at $1000, but $400 looks pretty reasonable considering past performance. Still, if China is really getting out of bitcoin, how much does that past performance still eman?
  - bendoernberg 13y ago
    China only got in this fall. The price had stabilized around $100; since then there has been a massive increase in merchant adoption, VC investment, popular awareness and userbase. In my opinion, the past two months has absolutely added value to the Bitcoin network, and so I expect it to remain significantly above $100.
- qq66 13y ago
  What's the reasoning behind that?
mtrimpe 13y ago
It's so cool to see you going the emotional roller coaster of your first big investment mistake. And it's even for an amount you can afford to lose in the long run! You're a lucky man. That's much better than betting the house after losing your job in your mid-life crisis. Just take the opportunity and pay very close attention to your emotions and what triggers them. Awareness of that is what will make you a better investor in the long run and, whether we invest time or money, we're all investors in the end.
SwellJoe 13y ago
For what it's worth, I'm looking at this as a buying opportunity. I put everything I had available into BTC during rise to $1000+ (I first invested early, so I'm just about breaking even right now, though if it drops any further, I'll be showing a loss). But, I've got a paycheck coming in soon, and it looks like prices are gonna be nice enough for me to buy a couple more BTC with that money. I'm longterm bullish on BTC, so a low price is an opportunity to buy, not a time to beat myself up for timing the market wrong. Of course, I could be wrong in my bullishness. It could all fall apart, or one of the other cryptocoins could prove to be "the one" (though I tend to think most are just also-rans and can and should be ignored). But, I'm absolutely confident a cryptocurrency, of some sort, is absolutely the future. It's one of those unstoppable forces, I think, and as long as the number of people preferring it to USD (or other fiat currencies) keeps rising, the real value (not the exchange value) of BTC is going to keep going up. I want as much of that future as I can afford.
- JumpCrisscross 13y ago
  >I put everything I had available into BTC Please don't do this. No matter how confident you are in your investment thesis it doesn't ever justify 100% allocation into a single asset - that implies infinite confidence.
  - SwellJoe 13y ago
    Sorry to mislead with that statement. I meant, "Cash on hand." I still hold GOOG and TSLA, as well as physical assets, and 48.5% stake in a business with significant value. I am only investing money I can afford to lose. I don't want to lose it, but I won't starve if I do.
    - walshemj 13y ago
      Aside from your business your only securities are two individual shares - thats a bit risky in its self id maybe think about some IT's or ETF's before speculating in bitcoin
- ejhong 13y ago
whywhywhy5 13y ago
If you believe in bitcoins, hold onto it. It's only a loss if you sell it now and never buy bitcoins again, or if this is the highest price bitcoins will ever reach.
andyhmltn 13y ago
You haven't lost anything until you sell. I'm confident it'll start going back up at some point (it's starting to get a lot of vendor attention) Just hang in there :)
wyager 13y ago
Wait a year.
skriticos2 13y ago
You need patience with Bitcoin. It does swings like this all the time. The last spike topped out at around 250 in spring this year and then dropped to 100 for some time. Then as you know it recently spiked at 1200 and now is down again. Hold it two years, and if you don't have a 10x increase, you can decide it was stupid. Deciding now is indeed stupid, so I would advise against it. Take a deep breath, see it as a risk investment and look what's coming ahead. And never judge based on a few weeks of data.
- deleted 13y ago
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RutZap 13y ago
Don't worry; it will rise again. It's already at $550. If you keep on to your BTCs, in a few months it will get back to $1100+. At which point I would suggest you sell some of it and get some money back; $11k seems like a lot of money; the first rule of trading would be to invest as much as you can afford to lose :D
n0mad01 13y ago
maybe this will cheer you up a bit: i bought after the last bubble burst, but still to high at a rate of 150$. BTC continued to fall and dumpled around 100$ for months, but i decided to hold on instead of selling with a loss. The decision has paid off, i sold at ~1000$.
BrandonY 13y ago
I'm not a financial expert, but I might suggest that paying off you credit card debt is probably the strongest investment you can make right now.
- nasmorn 13y ago
  Thats a sure return of 15% or something. I dont think any investment can get better ex ante.
hackerboos 13y ago
Forgive me but why would you save money in a mutual fund and not pay off a car loan. Surely the interest on the loan is much higher than the interest you were getting from the fund. Prior to buying the coins that is.
- Kliment 13y ago
  Also, the gain of paying off the loan is tax-free, whereas any gains from asset value fluctuation are subject to tax.
  - hackerboos 13y ago
    The only reason I can think of is that there might be penalties for paying off the car loan early. But there is no excuse for the credit card debt.
- Jtsummers 13y ago
  Can't speak to GP, but my car loan interest rate is below the annual return on my mutual funds for the past several years. Depending on the deal you can get on your interest rates it can make sense (1.49% APR, after the 3 years I'll have paid less than 1 extra car payment as interest, or 1/36th the value of the loan as interest; any fund that rode out this recent stock market increase well will easily beat that).
  - Jtsummers 13y ago
    ADDENDUM: I didn't state that very clearly. Start with a loan of $7200, split over 3 years of monthly payments it's $200/month. Go with the rate I actually have (1.49%) and the loan payment is $204.63/month. It works out to $166.59 in interest spent over those 36 months. I found a 3 year CD with an APY of 0.91%. If you invest that same $7200 it will be worth $7398.35 after the 3 year period. A profit of about $32. And that's with an ordinary CD, less conservative investments have a much higher potential yield. Of course you pay tax on those earnings, so the CD may not actually be profitable in this scenario, but a higher yield account almost certainly would be. [1] Missed the edit window by this much.
seppo0010 13y ago
Think that Bitcoin is a zero-sum game. For anyone to gain a dollar, somebody has to lose it. So it's a risky business.
aayushranaut 13y ago
Mint sharing what are you building?
qq66 13y ago
One problem I notice in looking at your linked comment is that your $1,500 prediction was based on no rationale whatsoever. That makes it more of a wish than a prediction.
flexie 13y ago
Sorry to hear that you lost money. Bitcoins are up against some really big competitors called nation states and supranational unions. It's almost like trying to run a private army. Once you get big enough to impose a threat you will be outlawed, one way or the other. There is no power, no legislature behind bitcoins, so bitcoin holders will lose the regulatory game. Nation states use their traditional currencies in monetary policies and they depend on their currencies for tax revenues. Not being able to control the amount of bitcoins and not being able to tax them effectively because they flow outside of institutions that can be controlled and because transactions are encrypted means that the bitcoin is a threat to nation states. Danish tax authorities are currently looking into how bitcoins should be taxed and I think they will follow the Norwegian example and tax them as assets. Most important governments will eventually make life hard on bitcoins either by outlawing them flat out, by out-taxing them or in other ways.
- deleted 13y ago
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wouaouw 13y ago
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1460ztgSzbgBza1gSMAzm1g10za2gSMAzm2g120zi1gRSIzvzl http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1460ztgSzbgBza1gS... How did you expect the price to keep climbing ? Now you need to wait a few weeks/month until we go back to the normal trend.
ronaldx 13y ago
The fact that you're interested in minute-to-minute changes probably illustrates that this quantity of Bitcoin is too risky an asset for you to hold. Good luck.
ra 13y ago
Stop watching the price, make sure your private key is backed up somewhere safe, and forget about BTC for a few months / years. The worst thing you can do is sell now. BTC is extremely volatile, it might go down to $100, but one day it'll be $1,000 again.
- mdemare 13y ago
  You don't know that.
  - kappaknight 13y ago
    We just need to get more businesses to accept it. If Amazon accepted Bitcoin, HELLO BUBBLE 2!
option_greek 13y ago
The main problem with Bitcoin is the lack of hedging opportunities. Without real derivatives (priced in dollars), it is difficult to protect one self from loss in the event of adverse movement in price. This is also the difference between a established currency and an amateur one.
dgregd 13y ago
Newton's niece Catherine Conduitt reported that he "lost twenty thousand pounds. Of this, however, he never much liked to hear…" This was a fortune at the time (equivalent to about £2.4 million in present day terms So you're in good company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company#Quotations_prompted_by_the_collapse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company#Quotations_pr...
tokenadult 13y ago
The market rose from $500 to $540, so that means I've earned back $474! And since my last edit was an hour ago, that must mean I'm earning $474/hr writing HN comments in my pajamas! Your sense of humor is worth its weight in gold. I've just bookmarked your comment as a reminder of "survivorship bias," how people can look back at any arbitrarily chosen period of their lives as evidence of their successful reasoning and planning. Yeah, being a bit older than most participants here and remembering earlier gold booms and busts, and earlier technology stock booms and busts, and so on, means that I'm a bit less excited at each new Best New Hack Ever™ that comes along. Hot-blooded younger people will continue to ignore me, but that too has happened often enough in the past that I don't let it get to me. Good luck in building your product. I'll be glad to buy new products built by young people as they gain wisdom. To all our friends here: "Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent"[1] is still good investment advice. [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes#Attributed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes#Attributed
- JumpCrisscross 13y ago
  >remembering earlier gold booms and busts, and earlier technology stock booms and busts A favourite pass-time of mine is reading old business and financial newspapers. I remember vividly the bubbling joy and aching pain I felt as the EU and European Monetary Union came together, as in the shining future The Economist saw for the citizens of 1920. That juxtaposition of exuberant optimism and the knowledge of cold reality has been a good template for walking through possible outcomes as if they are known eventualities. The process tends to leave one considerably soberer than at the start.
kappaknight 13y ago
You're probably not a good candidate for day trading. I'm in a similar boat as you though so... dem feels.
dobbsbob 13y ago
You're not supposed to 'invest' in bitcoin. I just use it to buy/sell goods and services online and cash them out immediately. Btw your coins are worth 2-3x the USD price in Argentina so go there on vacation.
dirtyaura 13y ago
Don't sweat about your mistake. Money comes, money goes. Lessons learned: timing investments is really hard. Trying to buy from the bottom can be equally stupid. Personal story: I got a bit of play money when we were acquired. Naive me thought that I understand how the world works. The first months of finance crisis had just happened. In US and selected European countries real estate prices had dropped, but in Finland market hadn't crashed. I reasoned that they eventually will, and it's a bad time to buy an apartment, but a good time to invest to finance stocks because they had already crashed. Among other investments I bought some Citibank stocks -"they are the largest, thus probably the safest". Boy I was naive. Real estate prices in Finland never crashed, Citibank's free fall had just only started.
vinceguidry 13y ago
Or you could buy another $10K worth of bitcoins now, then when you break even on the first set, you'll be up $10K. But can you stomach the possibility of throwing good money after bad? After all, other states could start following China's example.

optimiz3 13y ago

Have an upvote for your sorrows. It takes guts to admit that in public.

rdegges 13y ago

Sorry for your luck. If I were you, however, I'd hang onto the Bitcoin you have. If it continues to gain adoption, those coins will rise in price again (don't let temporary drops get to you too much). Good luck!

corin_ 13y ago

Who knows, maybe the example to learn from is not getting scared when you go from $11k to $5.1k and waiting for a month until it's up to $20k. On the other hand, maybe it's that you should sell having only lost $5.9k rather than wait until that $5.1k drops to $5.10.

Fuxy 13y ago
Depends on your wager. If you think bit-coin will never rise again sell now and walk away wounded. But that wager makes no sense at all since people accidentally delete there wallets all the time and there's a limited supply of bit-coins. If you factor in time bit-coin can only go up as long as people are still using it and i have confidence bit-coin will reach wide adoption.
- Nursie 13y ago
  The wager makes perfect sense if you don't think BTC will rise again though...
- Bockit 13y ago
  A case where it would make sense, if bitcoin ends up worth nothing. It doesn't matter if they're scarce when they're still worth nothing. I hope it doesn't end up so, luckily I'm not in a position where I need to try and work it out!
- camus2 13y ago
  TLDR; you are gambling.
  - Fuxy 13y ago
    I find the odds on this a lot more favorable then a casino in Vegas.
kybernetikos 13y ago
You suggest that the lesson should be based on the outcome, but actually in the presence of significant random noise/unknowns, that's not always true. It's quite possible to make bad decisions that turn out well and good decisions that turn out badly. To learn the correct lessons, he needs to work out if his original plan was sensible given what he knew (or could reasonably find out) at the time and he's just unlucky, or if the decision to invest was reckless or based on inadequate or wrong information. Having said that, it's so easy to deceive ourselves, that I've heard people say that it's a good idea to work out what would falsify your assumptions before investing. The decision he made was either a good one or a bad one based on the information available to him at the time. That will be true regardless of whether he becomes a billionaire in the next month or goes entirely broke. The true lesson to be learned is not dependent on the outcome.

pontifier 13y ago

I anticipate your feelings being quite widespread. I only had $200 in them after cashing out, but I've still felt terrible when the price drops. It's rather odd. This is the first time I have ever participated in an actual exchange market with volatility and all. I built a trading bot, and was making a couple of dollars a day trading my 0.17 BTC. A few weeks ago I was feeling suicidal based on not buying some a couple of years ago when it was $10. My family has been having a rough time, and I kept thinking that I had missed my chance to pull us out of the hole we are in. This is a crazy and interesting time to live in, and I'm glad I'm still here even if Bitcoin didn't make me rich.

eclipxe 13y ago
U.S.A. Suicide Hotline 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Remember, it's just money.
- tachion 13y ago
  I love when people just like that are assuming that everything has to happen in U.S.A. and that world around it doesnt exist ;)
  - pontifier 13y ago
    I'm truly annoyed when people latch onto a single word, and forget everything else you are saying.
  - pdx 13y ago
    Your comment is only valid because that's a 1-800 number. 1-800 numbers are free to call in the USA, which is why many people have them, but their downside is that you can't call them from outside the USA. Upon first discovering SIP addresses and that everybody on earth could have an email style phone number that would be free to call, I have been waiting and waiting for the world to transition to SIP addresses instead of phone numbers. If such a thing occurs, someday, then publishing a phone address from one country will not be a problem. I'm sure the folks at the suicide hotline would gladly take calls from anywhere in the world, if they could do so for free. Sadly, as things stand now, they could publish a SIP address, but nobody would know how to use it.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

erikpukinskis 13y ago

You just have to pick a target. I feel confident that Bitcoin is worth $10k, so if I bought at any price below that, I should feel good about where I am. If you don't decide what you think something is worth, your subjective experience of investing in it will be a rollercoaster. If you do choose a price target, then you know where you stand at all times, and whether you should buy or sell.

kybernetikos 13y ago
> If you do choose a price target, then you know where you stand at all times, and whether you should buy or sell. As well as choosing a price target, you should choose a set of situations that will falsify your price target so you aren't committed to losing all your money on one bet if you're wrong.

Fuxy 13y ago

Give it time. Don't sell just now. Had a similar situation and just choose to wait. Made a nice profit a year later.

chii 13y ago
Or, the price could plummet even more. Money invested needs to be disposable, otherwise, it's just too risky an investment right now.
- Fuxy 13y ago
  That goes without saying. If you want it safe keep it in a bank where inflation will most likely slowly devalue it. There's not a lot of options it's either risk it or watch your money slowly rot away.

sheetjs 13y ago

> learning from my mistakes. what was your rationale for investing in the first place? Was it following some person on the internet? Or was it because you believed in the bitcoin craze? Or was it because you believed that Chinese demand would drive up BTC? Or some other reason? The way to learn from your mistakes is to sit back and understand why you bought BTC in the first place, and then try to understand what went wrong (treat this like a scientific experiment)

tlrobinson 13y ago

Sorry, but if you didn't realize this was a strong possibility, you didn't do enough research. I'm cautiously optimistic about Bitcoin, but this has happened before and will happen again.

alexeisadeski3 13y ago
So say we all!
Nursie 13y ago
>> Sorry, but if you didn't realize this was a strong possibility, you didn't do enough research. I'm cautiously optimistic about Bitcoin, but this has happened before and will happen again. I agree entirely BUT I can see how someone might be misled by all the bitcoin cheerleading.
- w0utert 13y ago
  >> I agree entirely BUT I can see how someone might be misled by all the bitcoin cheerleading. I don't. Every time I see the comments on BTC articles, I get the impression the groupthink among BTC optimists is so strong it effectively kills their ability to form an individual opinion. I mean, seriously, why on earth would anyone in their right mind ever think an 'asset' (which isn't even an asset) can rise 200x within a year and not be one gigantic bubble, just because the BTC echo chamber says it's 'the currency of the future', despite the fact that ~100 people hold over ~50% of all BTC, and not much more than 1% of BTC transfers are actually used for actual trades? I'm really lost for words when it comes to the naivity of people (still) holding BTC. But go ahead, buy the dip, hope for the best, I mean, Winklevoss says it will go to $40K :-/
  - tlrobinson 13y ago
    If you only get your investment advice from online commenters you're doing something wrong. Reddit has become particularly bad lately.

meritt 13y ago

BTC will hit ~$400 before it stabilizes and resumes upward progression.

mcv 13y ago
That sounds reasonable. I've got some money sitting here waiting for something to invest in. I didn't want to get into bitcoin at $1000, but $400 looks pretty reasonable considering past performance. Still, if China is really getting out of bitcoin, how much does that past performance still eman?
- bendoernberg 13y ago
  China only got in this fall. The price had stabilized around $100; since then there has been a massive increase in merchant adoption, VC investment, popular awareness and userbase. In my opinion, the past two months has absolutely added value to the Bitcoin network, and so I expect it to remain significantly above $100.
qq66 13y ago
What's the reasoning behind that?

mtrimpe 13y ago

It's so cool to see you going the emotional roller coaster of your first big investment mistake. And it's even for an amount you can afford to lose in the long run! You're a lucky man. That's much better than betting the house after losing your job in your mid-life crisis. Just take the opportunity and pay very close attention to your emotions and what triggers them. Awareness of that is what will make you a better investor in the long run and, whether we invest time or money, we're all investors in the end.

SwellJoe 13y ago

For what it's worth, I'm looking at this as a buying opportunity. I put everything I had available into BTC during rise to $1000+ (I first invested early, so I'm just about breaking even right now, though if it drops any further, I'll be showing a loss). But, I've got a paycheck coming in soon, and it looks like prices are gonna be nice enough for me to buy a couple more BTC with that money. I'm longterm bullish on BTC, so a low price is an opportunity to buy, not a time to beat myself up for timing the market wrong. Of course, I could be wrong in my bullishness. It could all fall apart, or one of the other cryptocoins could prove to be "the one" (though I tend to think most are just also-rans and can and should be ignored). But, I'm absolutely confident a cryptocurrency, of some sort, is absolutely the future. It's one of those unstoppable forces, I think, and as long as the number of people preferring it to USD (or other fiat currencies) keeps rising, the real value (not the exchange value) of BTC is going to keep going up. I want as much of that future as I can afford.

JumpCrisscross 13y ago
>I put everything I had available into BTC Please don't do this. No matter how confident you are in your investment thesis it doesn't ever justify 100% allocation into a single asset - that implies infinite confidence.
- SwellJoe 13y ago
  Sorry to mislead with that statement. I meant, "Cash on hand." I still hold GOOG and TSLA, as well as physical assets, and 48.5% stake in a business with significant value. I am only investing money I can afford to lose. I don't want to lose it, but I won't starve if I do.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    Aside from your business your only securities are two individual shares - thats a bit risky in its self id maybe think about some IT's or ETF's before speculating in bitcoin
ejhong 13y ago

whywhywhy5 13y ago

If you believe in bitcoins, hold onto it. It's only a loss if you sell it now and never buy bitcoins again, or if this is the highest price bitcoins will ever reach.

andyhmltn 13y ago

You haven't lost anything until you sell. I'm confident it'll start going back up at some point (it's starting to get a lot of vendor attention) Just hang in there :)

wyager 13y ago

Wait a year.

skriticos2 13y ago

You need patience with Bitcoin. It does swings like this all the time. The last spike topped out at around 250 in spring this year and then dropped to 100 for some time. Then as you know it recently spiked at 1200 and now is down again. Hold it two years, and if you don't have a 10x increase, you can decide it was stupid. Deciding now is indeed stupid, so I would advise against it. Take a deep breath, see it as a risk investment and look what's coming ahead. And never judge based on a few weeks of data.

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RutZap 13y ago

Don't worry; it will rise again. It's already at $550. If you keep on to your BTCs, in a few months it will get back to $1100+. At which point I would suggest you sell some of it and get some money back; $11k seems like a lot of money; the first rule of trading would be to invest as much as you can afford to lose :D

n0mad01 13y ago

maybe this will cheer you up a bit: i bought after the last bubble burst, but still to high at a rate of 150$. BTC continued to fall and dumpled around 100$ for months, but i decided to hold on instead of selling with a loss. The decision has paid off, i sold at ~1000$.

BrandonY 13y ago

I'm not a financial expert, but I might suggest that paying off you credit card debt is probably the strongest investment you can make right now.

nasmorn 13y ago
Thats a sure return of 15% or something. I dont think any investment can get better ex ante.

hackerboos 13y ago

Forgive me but why would you save money in a mutual fund and not pay off a car loan. Surely the interest on the loan is much higher than the interest you were getting from the fund. Prior to buying the coins that is.

Kliment 13y ago
Also, the gain of paying off the loan is tax-free, whereas any gains from asset value fluctuation are subject to tax.
- hackerboos 13y ago
  The only reason I can think of is that there might be penalties for paying off the car loan early. But there is no excuse for the credit card debt.
Jtsummers 13y ago
Can't speak to GP, but my car loan interest rate is below the annual return on my mutual funds for the past several years. Depending on the deal you can get on your interest rates it can make sense (1.49% APR, after the 3 years I'll have paid less than 1 extra car payment as interest, or 1/36th the value of the loan as interest; any fund that rode out this recent stock market increase well will easily beat that).
- Jtsummers 13y ago
  ADDENDUM: I didn't state that very clearly. Start with a loan of $7200, split over 3 years of monthly payments it's $200/month. Go with the rate I actually have (1.49%) and the loan payment is $204.63/month. It works out to $166.59 in interest spent over those 36 months. I found a 3 year CD with an APY of 0.91%. If you invest that same $7200 it will be worth $7398.35 after the 3 year period. A profit of about $32. And that's with an ordinary CD, less conservative investments have a much higher potential yield. Of course you pay tax on those earnings, so the CD may not actually be profitable in this scenario, but a higher yield account almost certainly would be. [1] Missed the edit window by this much.

seppo0010 13y ago

Think that Bitcoin is a zero-sum game. For anyone to gain a dollar, somebody has to lose it. So it's a risky business.

aayushranaut 13y ago

Mint sharing what are you building?

qq66 13y ago

One problem I notice in looking at your linked comment is that your $1,500 prediction was based on no rationale whatsoever. That makes it more of a wish than a prediction.

flexie 13y ago

Sorry to hear that you lost money. Bitcoins are up against some really big competitors called nation states and supranational unions. It's almost like trying to run a private army. Once you get big enough to impose a threat you will be outlawed, one way or the other. There is no power, no legislature behind bitcoins, so bitcoin holders will lose the regulatory game. Nation states use their traditional currencies in monetary policies and they depend on their currencies for tax revenues. Not being able to control the amount of bitcoins and not being able to tax them effectively because they flow outside of institutions that can be controlled and because transactions are encrypted means that the bitcoin is a threat to nation states. Danish tax authorities are currently looking into how bitcoins should be taxed and I think they will follow the Norwegian example and tax them as assets. Most important governments will eventually make life hard on bitcoins either by outlawing them flat out, by out-taxing them or in other ways.

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wouaouw 13y ago

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1460ztgSzbgBza1gSMAzm1g10za2gSMAzm2g120zi1gRSIzvzl http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1460ztgSzbgBza1gS... How did you expect the price to keep climbing ? Now you need to wait a few weeks/month until we go back to the normal trend.

ronaldx 13y ago

The fact that you're interested in minute-to-minute changes probably illustrates that this quantity of Bitcoin is too risky an asset for you to hold. Good luck.

ra 13y ago

Stop watching the price, make sure your private key is backed up somewhere safe, and forget about BTC for a few months / years. The worst thing you can do is sell now. BTC is extremely volatile, it might go down to $100, but one day it'll be $1,000 again.

mdemare 13y ago
You don't know that.
- kappaknight 13y ago
  We just need to get more businesses to accept it. If Amazon accepted Bitcoin, HELLO BUBBLE 2!

option_greek 13y ago

The main problem with Bitcoin is the lack of hedging opportunities. Without real derivatives (priced in dollars), it is difficult to protect one self from loss in the event of adverse movement in price. This is also the difference between a established currency and an amateur one.

dgregd 13y ago

Newton's niece Catherine Conduitt reported that he "lost twenty thousand pounds. Of this, however, he never much liked to hear…" This was a fortune at the time (equivalent to about £2.4 million in present day terms So you're in good company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company#Quotations_prompted_by_the_collapse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company#Quotations_pr...

tokenadult 13y ago

The market rose from $500 to $540, so that means I've earned back $474! And since my last edit was an hour ago, that must mean I'm earning $474/hr writing HN comments in my pajamas! Your sense of humor is worth its weight in gold. I've just bookmarked your comment as a reminder of "survivorship bias," how people can look back at any arbitrarily chosen period of their lives as evidence of their successful reasoning and planning. Yeah, being a bit older than most participants here and remembering earlier gold booms and busts, and earlier technology stock booms and busts, and so on, means that I'm a bit less excited at each new Best New Hack Ever™ that comes along. Hot-blooded younger people will continue to ignore me, but that too has happened often enough in the past that I don't let it get to me. Good luck in building your product. I'll be glad to buy new products built by young people as they gain wisdom. To all our friends here: "Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent"[1] is still good investment advice. [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes#Attributed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes#Attributed

JumpCrisscross 13y ago
>remembering earlier gold booms and busts, and earlier technology stock booms and busts A favourite pass-time of mine is reading old business and financial newspapers. I remember vividly the bubbling joy and aching pain I felt as the EU and European Monetary Union came together, as in the shining future The Economist saw for the citizens of 1920. That juxtaposition of exuberant optimism and the knowledge of cold reality has been a good template for walking through possible outcomes as if they are known eventualities. The process tends to leave one considerably soberer than at the start.

kappaknight 13y ago

You're probably not a good candidate for day trading. I'm in a similar boat as you though so... dem feels.

dobbsbob 13y ago

You're not supposed to 'invest' in bitcoin. I just use it to buy/sell goods and services online and cash them out immediately. Btw your coins are worth 2-3x the USD price in Argentina so go there on vacation.

dirtyaura 13y ago

Don't sweat about your mistake. Money comes, money goes. Lessons learned: timing investments is really hard. Trying to buy from the bottom can be equally stupid. Personal story: I got a bit of play money when we were acquired. Naive me thought that I understand how the world works. The first months of finance crisis had just happened. In US and selected European countries real estate prices had dropped, but in Finland market hadn't crashed. I reasoned that they eventually will, and it's a bad time to buy an apartment, but a good time to invest to finance stocks because they had already crashed. Among other investments I bought some Citibank stocks -"they are the largest, thus probably the safest". Boy I was naive. Real estate prices in Finland never crashed, Citibank's free fall had just only started.

vinceguidry 13y ago

Or you could buy another $10K worth of bitcoins now, then when you break even on the first set, you'll be up $10K. But can you stomach the possibility of throwing good money after bad? After all, other states could start following China's example.