This is just: "Don't invest what you aren't prepared to lose," which has been the advice for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for a decade at this point.
The headline makes it sound like they're threatening legal action or some sort of regulation, at least to me.
Anecdote: my credit union[1] went beyond caution and threatened to close down my account if I interacted with a crypto exchange. From a secured message in June 2017:
>>A transaction has posted to your account involving CoinBase.com (Bitcoin)[2]. Please be advised that in an effort to protect your credit union and all our members, A+FCU does not allow transactions involving CoinBase or any virtual currency. If you attempt to conduct any future transactions involving virtual currency, your account may be subject to closure.
>>Some of the reasons A+FCU has chosen to refuse virtual currency transactions are:
- Virtual currencies have a higher risk for fraud.
-Virtual currencies have no consumer protections.
-Virtual currencies are not backed by a government or central bank.
-Virtual currencies are targets for hackers, who have been able to breach sophisticated security systems in order to steal funds.
-Virtual currencies can cost you more to use than credit cards or even regular cash once you take exchange rate issues into consideration.
>>For more information regarding virtual currency, please refer to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) website at cfpb.gov or the National Credit Union Association (NCUA) website at ncua.gov.
>>If you have any questions regarding this matter, please contact us.
[1] A+ Federal Credit Union, yes, their official name has a plus symbol in it
[2] I never ended up using Coinbase, for unrelated reasons.
Yeah that was my reading of the title, and I highly doubt this nothingburger article would be upvoted to one of the top spots without the clickbait title. Flagged for waste of time.
(I’m not a cryptocurrency fan, and have a grand total of a couple hundred bucks in crypto. Well, maybe a grand now, I don’t know.)
- There are a lot of economic instabilities in the world right now (e.g. COVID, lockdowns) increasing poverty.
- Bitcoin increased by up to 400% in the past year, and about an order of magnitude since its lows in 2019.
There's obviously a temptation to invest more and more when the value keeps going up -- desperation latching onto volatility -- which can cause increase hardship to those who fail to adequately acknowledge the risk. Those who invested in Bitcoin yesterday lost 25% of their value today.
As long as most people think everyone else thinks BTC is the prettiest girl, it can have substantial value and the sky is the limit.
It's a pure speculation asset. You don't need bitcoins to pay taxes. The value has a very weak link anchored to anything in the real economy (limited number of coins and the energy is meaningless nominal detail in this context).
You can use it to exchange large values without traditional middleman.
Saying that BTC is just a hash, a virtual nothing and it has no intrinsic value is silly. Its not a tulip bulb.
Talking about pretty things, how come nobody gets railed up when a painting gets sold for millions and its a single color modernistic piece? Its literally just a hearsay that it has any value and no function apart from being expensive firestarter.
Bitcoin costs money to mine like it take money to mine gold. So there is 'work' involved creating it. It has built in mechanism for fighing inflation (finite source), and security for exchanging it. Try to liquidate 100k of gold.
Also its funny to me how people claim btc has no real value when over 20% of USD were printed last year. Out of thin air. Its all about confidence of people using it. If people were confident tulip bulbs have value of 100m per one we would be trading them to this day no matter how usless they are.
> The value has a very weak link anchored to anything in the real economy
I think it has a pretty strong link to the degree of fear in the real economy (just like gold at the margin) and more fundamentally the degree of loss of confidence in governing institutions.
In that way it's useful as a hedge, but within limits. If the economy and governing institutions totally collapse, Bitcoin won't be very useful because most of our modern large scale and complex society, including security, shared infrastructure, and the goods and services we consume are built on the foundation provided by those institutions.
Bitcoin has no answer for the needs provided by those (admittedly imperfect) institutions, and it seems to have the historical goal of deconstructing them. Indeed, it can only exist if those institutions exist.
I don't think fiat currency has terribly much more going for it, in terms of intrinsic value, other than you do need it day to day because there aren't alternatives for buying things and paying your taxes.
If here in Canada the US dollar became legal tender and I could use it for all my transactions, would the Canadian dollar hold its value? I don't think so.
In London they are advertising bitcoin on the side of buses and in the Underground with the slogan 'when you see bitcoin on the side of a bus, it's time to buy'.
I thought that was outrageous and actually was a sign to sell. I mentioned this to a foreign exchange trader friend and we even finished each other's sentence with the above!
There is a relevant quote apparently from the 1920s.
"Taxi drivers told you what to buy. The shoeshine boy could give you a summary of the day's financial news as he worked with rag and polish. An old beggar who regularly patrolled the street in front of my office now gave me tips and, I suppose, spent the money I and others gave him in the market. My cook had a brokerage account and followed the ticker closely. Her paper profits were quickly blown away in the gale of 1929."
With lockdowns I've been wondering when this tipping point was going to hit, it's been really hard to judge the 'taxi driver' phenomenon not going out often or being able to overhear conversations.
Makes it a lot harder to time any bubbles, which I honestly think may be contributing a bit to how high this one got.
I find this hilarious when many European banks have lost 98% of their market caps and individual stocks have just as much volatility in many cases. Maybe the investor warnings should be more even.
You're not wrong about stock volatility, but I think the point that there aren't any mechanisms for safety at all are fairly valid still:
"Investors who are out of pocket will not be able to rely on the Financial Ombudsman Service to settle complaints or order compensation from offending firms. Consumers are also unlikely to be covered under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which covers losses up to £85,000 on fully regulated accounts and investment products including pensions."
You also can't, say, sue BitCoin for securities fraud (or, more realistically, be part of a class-action lawsuit) like you could against a company that you own stock in[0].
Again, I'm not trying to say that stocks are "safe", but it's also true that you have more protections investing in them than you do with Bitcoin (at least for now).
In Europe one got MIFID II and MiFIR a few years back that makes it so that everyone wishing to buy certain investment stuff have to pass a small knowledge test beforehand or show that they have understand the risks etc. So here this goes for most financial instruments and not just Bitcoin. I'm allowed to buy mutual funds at my trader, but in order to buy options I have to complete this tutorial to unlock that, for instance.
At least in the UK bank deposits up to £85,000 are protected by a government scheme, so you can't lose all your money. I expect the FCA would offer the same "be prepared to lose all your money" advice to anyone who wanted to invest in a single stock too.
I've seen many claim that mathematically the stock market is more of a game of chance than a poker tournament, yet the latter is what is most often covered under gambling laws and the former is not.
Bitcoin has essentially no intrinsic value. If people only used it as a currency, not as a speculative "investment", the price would be orders of magnitude lower.
Stocks are much "safer" because the intrinsic value is often similar to the market price.
Gold and some stocks (Tesla) are somewhere in between. They have intrinsic value but people also buy it speculatively so the price is way higher than the intrinsic value.
This is incredibly frustrating, as, just before this massive spike in bitcoin’s value, I bought a significant amount of BTC using Coinbase. They took my money, then retroactively made it look like my (brand new) account had exactly the amount of debt that I had paid in, and now my account was at 0.
I sent in 2 support tickets and received no reply, so I resorted to a chargeback, presumably forfeiting any right to the BTC I purchased.
Just to add salt to the wounds, I now constantly see adverts for Coinbase
Consumers should be prepared to “lose all their money” if they invest in products that promise high returns from cryptoassets such as bitcoin, the City watchdog has warned.
The HN title is misleading, it is more a warning against all the Bitconnect like ponzi scams that will popup and promise huge return by mining or trading Bitcoin.
Is it fair game and legal to break into a wallet via cryptographic means alone? I mean without hacking someone's computer/storage to steal the private key that is.
I understand this is not realistic right now, but might be if someone has discovered new math or physics for example.
Since the only proof of owner ship is private key material. Yes. And in fact this has been done and demonstrated for certain ethereum or other systems.
edit: certain elliptical curve crypto systems use randomness as part of the encipherment process. If two uses of the same key have low quality randomness/no randomness, solving for the private key material essentially becomes a slightly tedious high school algebra math problem.
heres a paper from last year where they did such an analysis, found some weak keys, and then saw that those wallets had already been hacked/drained! (possibly by someone who did similar work, for profit rather than science) https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/023
Theoretically it could probably be labeled as hacking and / or theft in a court of law. Practically, you'd never find out who did it unless they admitted to it, happen to live in the same country, etc etc etc.
I think the saying "it's only a crime if you get caught" is applicable in this case.
That said, you can get charged with tax evasion if you have crypto without reporting it. If they find out that is. I have some crypto stashed on an exchange, so I'm expecting them to report to my tax office at some point.
These HN bitcoin threads sure do garner a disproportionate amount of downvotes.
My opinion and advice would be to stop listening to opinions and advice on Bitcoin do your own research and follow the money. https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/explorer
You should be prepared to lose all your money in any investment.
This PSA is a pretty lame scare tactic. Sure, BTC seems riskier than say AAPL stock, but both can go to zero. So, a PSA like this one seems like propaganda more than level-headed investment protips.
This could really be said for any currency speculation. I expect crypto attracts more of this than other investment vehicles, but currency speculation and forex trading are insanely risky.
I put 2k in at one point and was up to 40k in a month trading alt coins. Then btc started to tumble. I realized it caused a massive amount of subconcious anxiety. I ended up walking away with a very generous ROI. My buddy told me to get in again at 10k. Id could have paid off my house last week if I did.
But thats how investing goes. If you could nail every investment you'd quickly become the wealthiest individual in the world.
I bought $100 worth in 2014 when it was $580. Now I wish I'd bought $1000. But of course I never would have, because it was a crazy risk at the time, and still is today.
I think it was around 2014/2015 but didn't remember exactly when. I was in a programming bootcamp there was someone in my cohort on a temporary visa to the US. He managed to stay in a decently expensive area near our bootcamp, paid the bootcamp fee, and other cost of living. We asked him how, he said he was selling bitcoin to fund it. He sold it at $500 each.
If I calculated correctly he probably sold more than 20 bitcoin lol. He could retire now if he kept it.
Imagine how he feels right now, lol. But as long as he made profit, that's all that matters. Hindsight always 20/20
I probably could have bought BTC at either $25 or $250 because I had a colleague who was really into it, but I shrugged because nobody can predict the future and it seemed dodgy as fuck. Eh, hindsight. In hindsight I should've bought google, apple, tesla etc as well.
I was trying to buy at 3K from a bitcoin machine last winter. There are several machines in Helsinki from different companies. They did not work. I decided this not a "free open market". These "banks" are only buying cheap and selling only when they themselves make a profit.
I have 0.75BTC locked away in an encrypted distributed Android wallet that I am unable to remember the password for.
I received this BTC from an amazing soul here on HN (again, THANK YOU so much for that blessing if you are reading this!) who, after I wrote up a blog post about how I was arrested without any probable cause in Las Vegas, so very generously sent it to me after asking if it could "be of use?."
BTW, the end result of the bullshit arrest was I was released with time served and the felony possession charge dropped due to the improper nature of the arrest, which was all caught on the officers bodycam.
So at the time I read the email, I was literally walking down Fremont Ave. wondering where I was going to sleep that night (remember I had just been released from Clark County Detention Center) as my 34 nights in jail had made me lose everything I owned in the weekly place I had been renting. I was asked for a wallet address, so I quickly jumped on the playstore and dl'ed the first app with a good rating and was highly "secure". At the time I thought he or she would send me $50-$100 TOPS, so imagine my surprise when 0.75 (at the time worth like $600) plopped into my wallet.
I must have fat-fingered the password entry, and of course I couldn't remember the 12-word phrase that the app author pleaded with me to "write-down and store in a safe, secure place"..no matter I thought at the time because of course there must be a password-reset email/text thing. right? RIGHT?
Well, no.
Alas, no happy ending here...I lost my very interesting and well-paying remote LAMP-development job working for a fast-growing company that was focused on lowering the overall cost to everyday people of filling drug prescriptions ( I know the irony of it all has not been lost on me ).
The owner was someone I really respected and was smart enough to know his systems needed a total re-design for security and performance reasons, and to be honest years later I still have not recovered, work-wise and economically, from that night I was illegally (not my opinion, the actual criminal court finding and its' legal outcome) arrest. I still hate the feeling I get in the pit of my stomach I get when I think of the bind I put him in...ugghhhhhhh.
So anyway...I still have the wallet safely stored away on an unencrypted USB (kind of late for that) that is physically locked away. I did contact the app author and fortunately for me, his app code was FOSS on github and I have the archive. Another fortunate item here is that I know I only used lowercase letters and the password was 12 char long.
At approx. $30k in value, it's getting to the point where a concerted effort at cracking the damn thing is in order...however, I am personally very optimistic on the FV of BTC in particular and think I will hold off my attempts at cracking it until 1BTC=$100kUSD.
Finally...the main reason I wrote this up this long post was to ask the community if anyone here knows of any reputable services that crack wallets such as mine for a reasonable fee and that I can feel secure that they will not just steal the BTC if they do manage to open it?
I'm sorry but what makes you think that cracking a BTC wallet is as easy as contracting a reputable service? The fact that you think this is the way to go makes me believe that you did not bother to read up on crypto/BTC, even after you got burnt badly by misplacing your password.
cableshaft|5 years ago
The headline makes it sound like they're threatening legal action or some sort of regulation, at least to me.
SilasX|5 years ago
>>A transaction has posted to your account involving CoinBase.com (Bitcoin)[2]. Please be advised that in an effort to protect your credit union and all our members, A+FCU does not allow transactions involving CoinBase or any virtual currency. If you attempt to conduct any future transactions involving virtual currency, your account may be subject to closure.
>>Some of the reasons A+FCU has chosen to refuse virtual currency transactions are: - Virtual currencies have a higher risk for fraud. -Virtual currencies have no consumer protections. -Virtual currencies are not backed by a government or central bank. -Virtual currencies are targets for hackers, who have been able to breach sophisticated security systems in order to steal funds. -Virtual currencies can cost you more to use than credit cards or even regular cash once you take exchange rate issues into consideration.
>>For more information regarding virtual currency, please refer to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) website at cfpb.gov or the National Credit Union Association (NCUA) website at ncua.gov.
>>If you have any questions regarding this matter, please contact us.
[1] A+ Federal Credit Union, yes, their official name has a plus symbol in it
[2] I never ended up using Coinbase, for unrelated reasons.
oefrha|5 years ago
(I’m not a cryptocurrency fan, and have a grand total of a couple hundred bucks in crypto. Well, maybe a grand now, I don’t know.)
anthony_romeo|5 years ago
- There are a lot of economic instabilities in the world right now (e.g. COVID, lockdowns) increasing poverty.
- Bitcoin increased by up to 400% in the past year, and about an order of magnitude since its lows in 2019.
There's obviously a temptation to invest more and more when the value keeps going up -- desperation latching onto volatility -- which can cause increase hardship to those who fail to adequately acknowledge the risk. Those who invested in Bitcoin yesterday lost 25% of their value today.
SoSoRoCoCo|5 years ago
bena|5 years ago
nabla9|5 years ago
As long as most people think everyone else thinks BTC is the prettiest girl, it can have substantial value and the sky is the limit.
It's a pure speculation asset. You don't need bitcoins to pay taxes. The value has a very weak link anchored to anything in the real economy (limited number of coins and the energy is meaningless nominal detail in this context).
me_me_me|5 years ago
You can use it to exchange large values without traditional middleman.
Saying that BTC is just a hash, a virtual nothing and it has no intrinsic value is silly. Its not a tulip bulb.
Talking about pretty things, how come nobody gets railed up when a painting gets sold for millions and its a single color modernistic piece? Its literally just a hearsay that it has any value and no function apart from being expensive firestarter.
Bitcoin costs money to mine like it take money to mine gold. So there is 'work' involved creating it. It has built in mechanism for fighing inflation (finite source), and security for exchanging it. Try to liquidate 100k of gold.
Also its funny to me how people claim btc has no real value when over 20% of USD were printed last year. Out of thin air. Its all about confidence of people using it. If people were confident tulip bulbs have value of 100m per one we would be trading them to this day no matter how usless they are.
danans|5 years ago
I think it has a pretty strong link to the degree of fear in the real economy (just like gold at the margin) and more fundamentally the degree of loss of confidence in governing institutions.
In that way it's useful as a hedge, but within limits. If the economy and governing institutions totally collapse, Bitcoin won't be very useful because most of our modern large scale and complex society, including security, shared infrastructure, and the goods and services we consume are built on the foundation provided by those institutions.
Bitcoin has no answer for the needs provided by those (admittedly imperfect) institutions, and it seems to have the historical goal of deconstructing them. Indeed, it can only exist if those institutions exist.
xorcist|5 years ago
eloff|5 years ago
If here in Canada the US dollar became legal tender and I could use it for all my transactions, would the Canadian dollar hold its value? I don't think so.
octocop|5 years ago
cambalache|5 years ago
> The value has very weak link anchored to anything in real economy
So like dollars but without the big-ass nukes backing it?
BTW kids, dont invest on bitcoin, or for that matter on any crypto-anything.
tebbers|5 years ago
I thought that was outrageous and actually was a sign to sell. I mentioned this to a foreign exchange trader friend and we even finished each other's sentence with the above!
thekyle|5 years ago
"Taxi drivers told you what to buy. The shoeshine boy could give you a summary of the day's financial news as he worked with rag and polish. An old beggar who regularly patrolled the street in front of my office now gave me tips and, I suppose, spent the money I and others gave him in the market. My cook had a brokerage account and followed the ticker closely. Her paper profits were quickly blown away in the gale of 1929."
https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...
agumonkey|5 years ago
phil21|5 years ago
Makes it a lot harder to time any bubbles, which I honestly think may be contributing a bit to how high this one got.
zorbash|5 years ago
What can we do to improve financial literacy so that nobody ever takes investing advice from a bus ad?
trident5000|5 years ago
bichiliad|5 years ago
"Investors who are out of pocket will not be able to rely on the Financial Ombudsman Service to settle complaints or order compensation from offending firms. Consumers are also unlikely to be covered under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which covers losses up to £85,000 on fully regulated accounts and investment products including pensions."
You also can't, say, sue BitCoin for securities fraud (or, more realistically, be part of a class-action lawsuit) like you could against a company that you own stock in[0].
Again, I'm not trying to say that stocks are "safe", but it's also true that you have more protections investing in them than you do with Bitcoin (at least for now).
[0]:https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
SoSoRoCoCo|5 years ago
I can't find a single source for this claim. All Eurobank market caps look fine, even in COVID, for the past 5 years.
Can you explain this statement?
matsemann|5 years ago
mcintyre1994|5 years ago
danhak|5 years ago
WhoCaresLies|5 years ago
Blikkentrekker|5 years ago
RivieraKid|5 years ago
Stocks are much "safer" because the intrinsic value is often similar to the market price.
Gold and some stocks (Tesla) are somewhere in between. They have intrinsic value but people also buy it speculatively so the price is way higher than the intrinsic value.
0xmarcin|5 years ago
andai|5 years ago
permo-w|5 years ago
I sent in 2 support tickets and received no reply, so I resorted to a chargeback, presumably forfeiting any right to the BTC I purchased.
Just to add salt to the wounds, I now constantly see adverts for Coinbase
Avoid Coinbase like the Covid
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
basdftrewq|5 years ago
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg
janmo|5 years ago
The HN title is misleading, it is more a warning against all the Bitconnect like ponzi scams that will popup and promise huge return by mining or trading Bitcoin.
farseer|5 years ago
I understand this is not realistic right now, but might be if someone has discovered new math or physics for example.
carterschonwald|5 years ago
edit: certain elliptical curve crypto systems use randomness as part of the encipherment process. If two uses of the same key have low quality randomness/no randomness, solving for the private key material essentially becomes a slightly tedious high school algebra math problem.
heres a paper from last year where they did such an analysis, found some weak keys, and then saw that those wallets had already been hacked/drained! (possibly by someone who did similar work, for profit rather than science) https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/023
Cthulhu_|5 years ago
I think the saying "it's only a crime if you get caught" is applicable in this case.
That said, you can get charged with tax evasion if you have crypto without reporting it. If they find out that is. I have some crypto stashed on an exchange, so I'm expecting them to report to my tax office at some point.
dartharva|5 years ago
Jimmc414|5 years ago
kolbe|5 years ago
This PSA is a pretty lame scare tactic. Sure, BTC seems riskier than say AAPL stock, but both can go to zero. So, a PSA like this one seems like propaganda more than level-headed investment protips.
lupinglade|5 years ago
stinkytaco|5 years ago
Triv888|5 years ago
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK|5 years ago
coldcode|5 years ago
jordan801|5 years ago
But thats how investing goes. If you could nail every investment you'd quickly become the wealthiest individual in the world.
wpietri|5 years ago
afavour|5 years ago
christiansakai|5 years ago
If I calculated correctly he probably sold more than 20 bitcoin lol. He could retire now if he kept it.
Imagine how he feels right now, lol. But as long as he made profit, that's all that matters. Hindsight always 20/20
herodotus|5 years ago
"I made my money by selling too soon." ...Bernard Baruch
Cthulhu_|5 years ago
jetpackjoe|5 years ago
timonoko|5 years ago
isthispermanent|5 years ago
octocop|5 years ago
OGWhales|5 years ago
cubano|5 years ago
I received this BTC from an amazing soul here on HN (again, THANK YOU so much for that blessing if you are reading this!) who, after I wrote up a blog post about how I was arrested without any probable cause in Las Vegas, so very generously sent it to me after asking if it could "be of use?."
BTW, the end result of the bullshit arrest was I was released with time served and the felony possession charge dropped due to the improper nature of the arrest, which was all caught on the officers bodycam.
So at the time I read the email, I was literally walking down Fremont Ave. wondering where I was going to sleep that night (remember I had just been released from Clark County Detention Center) as my 34 nights in jail had made me lose everything I owned in the weekly place I had been renting. I was asked for a wallet address, so I quickly jumped on the playstore and dl'ed the first app with a good rating and was highly "secure". At the time I thought he or she would send me $50-$100 TOPS, so imagine my surprise when 0.75 (at the time worth like $600) plopped into my wallet.
I must have fat-fingered the password entry, and of course I couldn't remember the 12-word phrase that the app author pleaded with me to "write-down and store in a safe, secure place"..no matter I thought at the time because of course there must be a password-reset email/text thing. right? RIGHT?
Well, no.
Alas, no happy ending here...I lost my very interesting and well-paying remote LAMP-development job working for a fast-growing company that was focused on lowering the overall cost to everyday people of filling drug prescriptions ( I know the irony of it all has not been lost on me ).
The owner was someone I really respected and was smart enough to know his systems needed a total re-design for security and performance reasons, and to be honest years later I still have not recovered, work-wise and economically, from that night I was illegally (not my opinion, the actual criminal court finding and its' legal outcome) arrest. I still hate the feeling I get in the pit of my stomach I get when I think of the bind I put him in...ugghhhhhhh.
So anyway...I still have the wallet safely stored away on an unencrypted USB (kind of late for that) that is physically locked away. I did contact the app author and fortunately for me, his app code was FOSS on github and I have the archive. Another fortunate item here is that I know I only used lowercase letters and the password was 12 char long.
At approx. $30k in value, it's getting to the point where a concerted effort at cracking the damn thing is in order...however, I am personally very optimistic on the FV of BTC in particular and think I will hold off my attempts at cracking it until 1BTC=$100kUSD.
Finally...the main reason I wrote this up this long post was to ask the community if anyone here knows of any reputable services that crack wallets such as mine for a reasonable fee and that I can feel secure that they will not just steal the BTC if they do manage to open it?
tommit|5 years ago
NicoJuicy|5 years ago
It was ~ 18 k then. I didn't leave much on the table.
cryptopia|5 years ago