Fivedollargold buys Bitcoin via an exchange traded fund. Ticker symbol GBTC.

Just like as in AS, shrug jobs are still full-time!

I am envious in the fact that I am still pre-shrug... Soon though!

While I can retire at 50, I am very happy in my "shrug" job of being a university professor.

Interesting. Thank you.

Ha, thank you, I just wish I would have bought a lot more than I did... I was like you, in that I was skeptical. My investment was pretty minimal, but it was so cheap back then that it worked out in the long run. I still to this day am nervous all the time because of what it has grown to. I have a weekly struggle with "should I sell and call it a day" or keep on letting it ride. I have always realized the risk, but I still believe the reward will be dramatically higher than it is today.

And congrats to you on 50! That was (and still is) my ultimate retirement goal. My "wants" still exceed my means enough to just give it up right now, so 50 is where I have penciled in now.

Congratulations! My retirement is also set at age 50, although if I had invested in Bitcoin, I would be able to fund my own company, rather than just buy my own equipment.

While Bitcoin is in its infancy, I do think it is finally past the point where exchanges are going to just disappear like they did from 2011-2013. It was a little too risky for me at that point in my life. Once again, congratulations!

I am not sure that one can actually "create" wealth. If wealth is something that can be measured then it must be finite in some way. Accumulating any amount of something that is not finite will never generate a significant amount of anything. With that being said, for something you accumulate to be called wealth, it must be acquired, not created. We use the term "created" in a sense that, in America, we have the ability to trade our efforts and talents for an accumulation of "wealth" in money or possessions. Many countries greatly restrict the ability to do that. We have virtually no limits to the amount of wealth we can accumulate here in the U.S. Bitcoin gives a "collector of wealth" the ability to properly measure and hold his wealth in a truly capitalistic way. If we store our acquired wealth in the Dollar, we take a bigger risk of men in power devaluing our wealth in any way they deem fit.

Francisco saw money as a tool. The fed destroys the life's savings of millions of people by inflating the currency to their own advantage. Bitcoin is a tool for trade. How man uses it or manipulates it is yet to be seen. It's not a fixed pool either. More bitcoins are created every day via investment of capital in hardware and electric power. It can't be done on a whim (or to increase their own power and wealth like the fed does.) The banksters and government entities they manipulate are the biggest threat to bitcoin, imo.

(I just re-read that part of AS a few days ago, so I couldn't resist relating its source;^)

Actually I did invest very early on, and watched the value drop considerably. I got plenty of ridicule and advice to sell it and take my lumps. I knew it was the infancy of the technology, so I let it ride. Obviously that has worked out quite nicely and my retirement is all but set at 44 years old.

What people don't realize is that Bitcoin is STILL in it's infancy. It has a few technological upgrades happening that need to continue to happen before it can replace Visa as a regular means of purchasing everything. It is still slow and clunky as a means of daily payment. Once it is able to be used as a daily payment device, it is going to make these prices seem extraordinarily cheap.

As stated above, I almost invested in Bitcoin back in 2011, but I just didn't have the stomach for it. I still have yet to go to a web site that I bought something from that advertised that it accepts Bitcoin as tender.

The GDP of a nation provides solidity to currency, even if gold isn't the standard (and gold seems to be reasserting itself now). While the stock market is subject to consumer confidence and fears, the productivity of a nation is a very real, solid valuable commodity.

Current bitcoin transaction times are taking 1400 minutes... LOL, 23.3 hours, and in the volatility it has, that could jump up and down $800 in value.

many other crypto currencies that are not as volatile.

But the anonymity of its creator and the limitation of its number of "shares" (21 million) creates the exact same consolidation of wealth that Rand opposed in her statement (about what she though distinctive about America and Americans) - have's and have-not's fighting over the same fixed pool of wealth. When this bubble goes bust, and it eventually will, anyone with holdings will be screwed without any hope of recompense. The ingenuity to develop something of his nature isn't lost on me. However strong the algorithmic encryption, any of them no matter how many bits it is, it will be cracked in in time and so will its replacement; thats the nature of technology and hackers.

Reminder: those doing the cracking are less than honest.

I knew I had seen it recently... the California market goes legal on Jan 1, and that explains the rise.

If that works for someone's self-identifying group - so be it, but would absolutely be a target for criminal investigation at some point I would think - just a huge risk in my mind.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...

Reason Magazine had an excellent, and very thorough, discussion of Bitcoin about a year ago.

I like the idea of Bitcoin. It is quite similar to what you would expect in Galt's Gulch. However, I have yet to pay for a service that advertised Bitcoin as a payment method, and I have been on the Internet since 1985 - long before it was popular.

I heard about Bitcoin before most of you, back in 2011, and was very near to investing in it. If I had invested in it then, I would have lost 90% of my investment in the next few months. That's a little too volatile for me.

No, you can't eat bullets, but you can use them as a source of barter for food. They will be worth much more than a silver coin if food is scarce. And of course you can hunt with them, and in a truly desperate starvation situation you can use them to acquire food by "less than rational" means.
As far as a mob goes, I have enough guns, bullets, and friends/relatives to fire them that I could stop a pretty decent sized mob. I live out in the country, so I can set up perimeters.... City folk are screwed though, that's why they need to be prepared to bug-out.

It correlates closely to the rise of legalization of recreational pot actually... there are over 1000 medical dispensaries in LA for example, more than the number of coffee shops. Once recreational becomes legal, they need a better medium of transfer (for safety) than cash-only. They can't really use a bank account, it's illegal under federal law and assets can be seized.

The technologist that I am sees the fragility of it, if you lose your bitcoin file, your assets kind of disappear with it.

It is no different than any other currency in the world. There is nothing backing any of it except the value we place on it and the use in purchasing stuff.

I live in the middle of Wyoming. There are no mobs.

Well, there might be on the 21st, Eclipse day. We are in one of the best places and every hotel, motel, RV park has been booked for many months, one RV park has reservations from New Zealand and Germany.

When that happens you are screwed anyway. Even bullets are not going to help much. You can't eat bullets and you cannot shot them fast enough if a mob wants your food.

The same is true of gold

-1 The real value of it is a store of value that the government cannot screw with.. If governments were not inflating their money and stealing other people's money then there would be no point for bitcoin.

AJ you fail to recognize the incredible intellectual achievement that it took to create bitcoin. And unlike the technology growth in the 90s, which created a lot of real value, the government cannot screw it up.

True! Thanks for that thought...makes my day. Imagine the frustration of bureaucrats finding themselves incapable of stealing wealth for a change. Now, if we can avoid being like Thailand...