The Rise and Fall in Bitcoin Value

Communications Center Out Of Pod Experience
1244

I believe it can, I theoretically purchased 1 BTC here at £15,788 about 20 days ago now. The current value is £17,591.85, my theoretical plan was to store it for a year and buy a car. So far it seems to have frozen the fiat value of £15,788 and made a small amount of profit.

I was giving you advice. everyone has read the “It’s a scam” statement. We are mostly grown adults here who like to read more than that, I’m sure many would like to read your reasoning behind your view. I think you don’t know any facts about Bitcoin, but I am happy to be proven wrong.

I see, so you’re just here to troll and not take part in an intelligent mature conversation.

1245

Not in the UK as far as I know. You are required to accept pounds (actual legal tender). In France I cannot run a (legal) business without accepting euro in one form or another.
But I guess you could run a business that also accepts Bitcoin but I would suggest you put a disclaimer clear around it that at any time you can refuse to accept BTC.

1246

I googled: can I start a Business that only accepts Bitcoin in the UK?

Answer: Yes, UK limited companies can invest in crypto like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero . HMRC has even given great clarity on how cryptocurrencies are taxed (more on that later).

So as you can see the UK government has already fully prepared for BTC and are ready to tax businesses dealing in it.

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1247

I also checked it but apparently in the UK Pokemon Cards can be the only form of payment your company accepts.

:smiley:

1248

So you googled a question, then used a totally unrelated answer.

The question was not whether a UK company can “invest” in crypto, or even in fact accept crypto as payment, the question was whether the business can ONLY accept crypto while denying all other forms of payment.

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1249

So crypto can be accepted as an only form of payment, but if disputes arise business and customer are both out of luck as crypto is not noted as “legal tender”. Crypto is on the level of bartering, nothing more. Yep, makes me want to use it even more. :laughing:

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1250

Yes, there are a number of ways to gain crypto, providing a service and requesting BTC as payment isn’t illegal.

Not really sure what you want me to say. Are you expecting me to convince you to use it?

Never say never, you might find in the future someone might offer you work where BTC is the payment. You will either accept the job and gain more or you can refuse and gain nothing, it will be your choice and no one will feel any different from you choosing either.

What if there is a car for sale you have fallen in love with and the seller only wants BTC because he wants to invest it? The seller has even agreed to pay the crypto exchange fees and adjust the price accordingly, Would you still have an issue with changing your fiat to BTC and then forwarding it to the seller?

You’ll have to accept BTC is regarded as a currency and there is nothing you can say or do to change that.

1251

Chickens and goats are currency in many places also. Doesn’t mean I’m stupid enough to believe I’m financially protected if I agree to such a transaction.

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1252

Ok, if that is your concern then I can understand, I order things from a few BTC only websites, before I ordered I checked the trustpilot reviews for the company and found they were ok.

I’ve been using BTC as a currency for some time now and I’ve not had any payment issues yet.

Even if someone sells a car by cash there is still a risk of being fleeced, You could send fiat money or BTC and still get fleeced. There could be 5 big men waiting to rob you when you go to pay for the car regardless of if you are paying BTC or Cash.

99.99% of the time if you send BTC to a valid address it will get there, it might get delayed, but it will get there.

1253

Meanwhile new young bitcoin adventurers embark on a new journey:

Classic crypto investor - YouTube :smiley:

That aside, I’m not sure why I would use BTC to buy anything. I cannot see the advantage.
Imagine I would like to buy an EVE Online poster, I can just order it and pay with bank transfer, imagine a site where I cannot, I check if the payment procesor is good, then I can use my credit card or debet card. Most, if not all sites use Paypal. Instant international transfer, probably faster than lightning but then again It’s not my problem even if a payment takes 7 days.

It would be like when CCP wanted to show that payment processor (I don’t remember the name) to force us to buy subscriptions (or through that. Typical CCP, then they tried to force NFT on us. Bleep that, why can’t they just focus on making some kind of a space game?

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1254

The issue is the people you’re referring to weren’t currency traders before Bitcoin became popular, real currency traders understand the market, they keep up to date with current affairs and they have a very good understanding of how the economy works. People must have been excited when they saw the price rise so high not knowing a few short months away a record number of people would seek to withdraw their BTC because times are hard and the money was needed to pay household/living bills.

Too many people thought they could skip over the learning part of currency trading and multiply their money quickly. This is the biggest part of the problem, a lot of these new Bitcoin Investors could not see the recession coming due to lack of experience, Where did they think the money was coming from to pay them during lockdown? How come real currency traders expected a recession after covid and the new investors didn’t?

Many will learn the hard way, only invest what you can afford to lose.

So I’m sorry I can’t buy into your Bitcoin is a scam narrative as it’s not based on anything but a large group of inexperienced people who thought they could double or triple their money.

I can’t lie, I was sucked in myself by the hype. But I can say that if I could see into the future when I brought my first mining rig and I could see what was happening now…guess what…I still would have purchased my mining rig and not done anything different.

The reason I’m not panicking is that I know there will be plenty of time to regain the rest of my initial investment into mining rigs, I know graphics cards, I know AMD hardware lasts for a long time, I know how to diagnose and fix problems with any computer or laptop, my knowledge on what I’m doing is solid and very well practiced and maintained, to top it off I’ve developed a good level of patience. I know the fiat money printed and loaned in a crisis will be paid back and then burned. The economy will somewhat recover, losses will be heavy but it will recover.

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1255

Bitcoin in my opinion doesn’t really have a good enough use. I tried it a long time ago and was glad to have gotten out with a pizza. I saw it’s community grow with a large amount of bad individuals. They did not change the whitepaper, they did change the use of it. And that changed when the Silk Road was taken down by the evil government that want to be evil against poor and innocent scammers, weapons salesmen, illegal substance salesmen, human traffickers. Was there also pizza and other non criminal use for it? Yes, but the extreme fast implementation of it in bad circles worried me.

“OMG BUY BITCOIN NOAW, FIAT WILL COLLAPSE!”, a few months later;

ROFL;

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1256

You see! this is bad and his assets should be seized. Stop listening to these people they are never ever going to do anything that will benefit you.

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1257

I suppose the reason why you know about it is because the criminals were arrested and convicted, using BTC won’t stop law enforcement infiltrating a criminal group, the weird thing is other criminals might be employed to do the infiltrating.

Also if we take a look at casino’s they could be a haven for money laundering where the casino acts as a kind of middle man. A person buying drugs may agree to attend a casino one evening and “lose” 2 million, the person selling the drugs can also attend the same casino a few days later and happen to “win” 2 million. Either party can then say “look, it’s not a crime to gamble!” and there might not be much police can do. A few weeks later delivery is arranged and the transaction is complete.

On top of that the criminals can do the casino exchange in small increments, they can use criminals with no criminal record, they can use multiple people to do the exchange so they remain under the radar. I hope you can see criminals are actually tricky and sometime elaborate and hard to detect. Using BTC for their criminal antics won’t change much.

So a currency is just that, a currency. It’s impossible to control who it’s given to, You have to catch them in the act and find strong evidence which will be presented to a jury who will find them guilty beyond reasonable doubt,

Also with scammers, lets say they do the youtube BTC/ETH doubling scam, they still have to hack a youtube account and upload a fake video which will leave a trail a skilled analyst can follow if they are bothered. I have a feeling Youtube are just deleting the video and closing the case and logging it Not actually investigating it.

I hope you can see crime is about more than what currency is being used. even if BTC wasn’t here it would still be easy for them to operate.

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1258

@Aedaxus There are very strong arguments to close casinos, I think they are a blatant scam the majority of their customers have already lost their money just by going in there which props up the one or two winners.

People do take a gamble with BTC, but you should understand there is a difference between that and properly researched investing.

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1259

This is actually quite fitting since BTC backers are well conditioned to ignore glaring long term downsides… BTC is basically perched at the bottom of a “volcano” that erupts proportionally to BTC use.

Until/unless the scalability issue is actually addressed, BTC will never be viable as a widely used currency.

Sure, we can imagine what it looks like for some entity to deal in BTC (exclusively or not), but we can’t (realistically) imagine all entities doing this because it simply won’t work from a technical perspective. The more it is used, the more it fails to be useful.

1260

There are solutions which can be implemented. When you use you debit or credit card it’s just a company who verifies and guarantees your payment to the retailer, the actual money does not physically arrive in the retailers bank for some time, the retailer is able to include the money in their takings as it has been verified by a legal company with the highest possible credit rating.

Something similar could be done with BTC one day, what we may find is that VISA or Mastercard may create such a system which interfaces with the blockchain. As long as the retailers are happy that a payment is received in fiat I don’t think they will care that it is coming from someone using BTC where in the background someone is giving them fiat for the customers BTC.

I think anyone who doesn’t need BTC should just leave it alone and only use it if they want to order a special item from a retailer who only accepts bitcoin. If someone wants to freeze the value of say £2,000 then store it as BTC. The person who wants to put their life savings into BTC in order to double or triple their money should not bother.

If you’re doing a money transfer to another country BTC might be a quick and cheap way to do this as the money will only be BTC for a very short time before being exchanged back into fiat money, so the value of BTC shouldn’t affect a money transfer too badly.

We can already see that BTC was designed to be an addition to fiat currency NOT a replacement, there is a huge massive emphasis on what BTC is worth compared to many countries fiat money, so anyone talking about they wont use BTC because it will never replace fiat is talking rubbish because it was never meant for that.

As I said to Aedaxus, never say never, you might find an item for sale which you or your family need or want for sentimental or any other reason, if you find the retailer only accepts BTC then you will buy some BTC equal to the fiat value of the item and send it to the retailer after doing your usual review reading/trustpilot on the retailer. This seems to be how life works sometimes and some things can be unavoidable.

For example, I buy a special kind of CBD oil which I use to make tea, (CDB is legal in the UK) I get it from a company who has purchased a domain name on the TOR network and I pay them BTC. I have tried to make my tea with a standard CBD oil from a high street retailer but it doesn’t feel the same and I end up with a headache. So even If I hated BTC and thought it was a scam I would still have to use it because I wouldn’t get my CBD oil.

Perhaps my retailer doesn’t have the right licences to grow CBD flowers, I don’t know but they have opted for a secretive way of doing it and their product is 100%, maybe they are trying hard to avoid UK tax so I’m not committing an offence ordering from them, they are committing tax offences which has nothing to do with me. If I am caught by police with a legal item there is nothing they can do to me and I would suggest they take up the issue directly with the retailer.

1261

Well it is a fact that I have theoretically frozen £15,788 fiat value for a good 20 days now, I’d say that is a good use, the value could drop lower which is the risk you run, one will have to keep an eye on the economy themselves and there maybe a long wait if the value does drop. Investing small amounts like £1,000 appeals to lots of people, there are many who like to analyse the economy and making small investments as a hobby, it might be time to just leave BTC to this type of trader.

Alternatively I could have kept the money in a bank, I would be concerned that more pounds would be needed if I were to buy a car a year later for example.

As far as I can see the world is having a serious look at Bitcoin and I expect lots of changes financially in many places, retailers do try to cater to everyone and will most likely provide a method of using BTC at some point in the future.

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1262

So your solution to the scalability issue is to use already too-big-to-fail financial institutions to process nearly all transactions off chain, with fiat on either or both ends of each transaction?

I guess you are correct - not using BTC is a viable (user based) solution to the BTC scalability issue.

This is the most easily highlighted contradiction in your rambling reply, but it is far from the only one (particularly in the context of your other posts). Just more rambling in circles…

@Aaron :
PLEASE …
read and think more, talk/write less.

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1263

Yes, it’s a possible solution. the too big to fail would collect BTC from users who wish to use it in retail shops. and then guarantee a fiat payment to the retailer. The BTC user should be comfortable with the too big to fail holding a small amount of their BTC credit A payment card or phone app would be needed which would interface with current card payment machines.

Not really, there could eventually be a need for BTC to Fiat transactions, adding some sort of resource to the existing system which exchanges BTC to fiat and forwards it to the retailer is a valid solution. There may not even be an issue to solve (BTC to Fiat) retailers might become comfortable with collecting raw BTC and either invest or exchange as and when they please. This will mean retailers would just need to implement something like lightning.

Not so long ago Amazon recruited people with crypto expertise, There’s speculation they are designing a way for crypto holders to buy goods directly.