Good time to sell and buy back at lower value.

Cryptocurrency growth has not been sustainable. Get rich quick will fail and normalize eventually. If you want to get rich, get out when the time is right.

The growth was not sustainable. It is also bad for our economy and bad for our society. Ride the wave, if you dare. But don't go too deep. The Bitcoin Foundation's lead engineer says that Bitcoin is a failed experiment, that it has no long-term future, and not to invest any more than you are willing to throw away. Other cyrptocurrencies are better without crippling problems, but there are so many and you have to get lucky to guess which one will survive. And then the problem of potentially being used to fund crimes and create tax shelters makes it very questionable whether any of these unregulated currencies will be allowed to exist. Warning. Warning. Take heed. Hardly any get rich quick money scheme works out for the majority. Especially one which requires so little effort and is so destructive to the environment, economy, and society. When we are all fat millionaires, who is going to get off their fat millionaire butt and make our million dollar loaves of bread? Think of it like entropy. Once it has distributed itself among all who want it, what value will it maintain? No one will use it as a real currency for the majority of their purchases, waiting half a day to pay for their 10 gallons of gas or pack of gum. Cryptocurrency literally takes energy, converts it to heat waste, and then we assign a value to that waste. Insanity.

ty_ger07
The growth was not sustainable. It is also bad for our economy and bad for our society. Ride the wave, if you dare. But don't go too deep. The Bitcoin Foundation's lead engineer says that Bitcoin is a failed experiment, that it has no long-term future, and not to invest any more than you are willing to throw away. Other cyrptocurrencies are better without crippling problems, but there are so many and you have to get lucky to guess which one will survive. And then the problem of potentially being used to fund crimes and create tax shelters makes it very questionable whether any of these unregulated currencies will be allowed to exist. Warning. Warning. Take heed. Hardly any get rich quick money scheme works out for the majority. Especially one which requires so little effort and is so destructive to the environment, economy, and society. When we are all fat millionaires, who is going to get off their fat millionaire butt and make our million dollar loaves of bread? Think of it like entropy. Once it has distributed itself among all who want it, what value will it maintain? No one will use it as a real currency for the majority of their purchases, waiting half a day to pay for their 10 gallons of gas or pack of gum. Cryptocurrency literally takes energy, converts it to heat waste, and then we assign a value to that waste. Insanity.

There's nothing in that statement that can't be applied to money.

ty_ger07
Ha! Right.... Doee it take half a day for you to pull cash out of your pocket and ATM?

Yes Bitcoin is slow and expensive to move, but many other cryptocurrencies are extremely fast and cheap. As an example, Raiblocks (XRB) is in the seconds timeframe.
 
Also, cash can be extremely slow as well, it takes 3-10 days for cash to move through the ACH when making transfers. Both cryptocurrency and cash have (different) issues.
 
I agree "mining" is a bad thing as it does waste power/resources but cryptocurrency is a very real thing that has real value.

ty_ger07
In order to validate transactions, mining will have to never cease; whether you get "paid" to do it or not. It will remain wasteful for as long as it continues. "Mining" is the cryptocurrency backbone and therefore cryptocurrency is wasteful.

This can literally be said for any form of currency transfer. It costs electricity, manpower, computers, etc. to move around USD. It's not free for VISA to do a transaction in USD.
 

ty_ger07
When all the coins are "mined", who will support, for free, the ongoing calculations needed to keep the currency going? Even if you are able to charge a fee for your work, will the fees charged be lucrative enough to keep the majority of the miners mining for you? If not, that is another nail in the coffin; since the transaction times would then reach an extremely slow pace.

This is a very entertaining and informative discussion:
https://youtu.be/1d5NfOYV9lg

The coins will 'never' all be mined (for BTC). The mining rewards get halved every so often such that it slows down dramatically towards the last few coins.
 
Second point is that there is no need to have huge datacenters mining to support the chain. The chain doesn't need all that computational power to function, it's just that the block rewards (and fees) are hugely profitable right now.
 
The chain auto-adjusts the difficulty so that 1 block is mined every 10 minutes. If the hashpower of the network dropped to 100 people using raspberry pis, the network would still run just fine, after the difficulty adjusted. The problem with that scenario, is that someone with a GPU could blow away all those raspberry pis and receive all the mining rewards. So what happens is what you see now, an arms race to see who can provide the most computational power to get the most mining rewards.
 
This is only in reference to BTC, other coins do not work the same way. I agree that BTC will have to change to be useful, or it will be replaced by other better coins.

https://cryptocoinmastery.com/what-happens-when-all-bitcoins-have-been-mined/


Estimated time when all are mined is 2140 due to the halving. Things will change before that matters.
 
Cryptography is not difficult for a computer. The difficulty adjustment built into BTC is what makes it artificially difficult.
 
Fees are the cut you're talking about, and won't go away. Mining rewards are different.

I see it crashing and losing a lot of value. The problem is the coins where $887 less then a year ago. Now they are more  then ten times that less then a year later. I can see value increases but really that kind of a climb is unrealistic and when the crash does happen a lot of people will abandon it.

If Paul Chou a dual major in computer science and math that graduated at MIT is willing to leave a lucrative position at Goldman Sachs to start LedgerX as CEO then I am confident cryptocurrency is not headed for failure.

boylerya
If Paul Chou a dual major in computer science and math that graduated at MIT is willing to leave a lucrative position at Goldman Sachs to start LedgerX as CEO then I am confident cryptocurrency is not headed for failure.

1) The majority must fail or be consolidated at the least.
2) Leaving one job of growth for another job of greater growth does not prove anything. He has money to cover the risk and is smart enough to always find money somewhere else if the venture fails.

ty_ger07
Ha! Right.... Does it take half a day for you to pull cash out of your pocket and ATM? Start with that statement and then compare the others one by one. You see that majority of what I said are unique problems related to cryptocurrency which can't be said about our current, stable, regulated cash alternatives.

In order to believe what you typed you have to ignore the history and evolution of our current currency.
 
Silver standard, gold standard, etc...
 
And you must surely be aware that even in modern times it took a lot more energy and effort to deposit and/or withdraw money not that long ago.
 
You'll also notice a trend. Whenever there's a downward trend in value of crypto, CNBC, our local liberal spindle news media outlet posts paragraphs of drivel about its toxicity and capability to ruin lives. They'll have bankers providing negative insight to prevent, as much as they can, a drift from our "stable" currency of which they will be unable to rob you, should you have decided to stash it away from their banks and in a crypto vault which they have no control of just yet.