Crypto currencies

[slick]

I'm fcuking gutted.
She's been up and down for the last 6 months, good days, bad days, etc etc but the bad days were becoming more frequent, for the last few months I've probably never had more than five hrs solid sleep sometimes just 3 or 4.
In that 6 months I've tried every remedy going from normal medicine to homeopathy to herbs to Mongolian spiders webs, I've tried the lot and it cost me a small fortune.

3 or 4 times now we've arranged for the worst and everytime come the day she's right as rain, day or two after then she's back to whimpering and crying or even howling when she's left alone which has tied up all our lives.
If she could tolerate painkillers then she would still be here today but she had a dodgy liver and could only tolerate a fraction of a normal dose, half the time you didn't know whether she was in pain or reacting to the medicine hence me trying alternate routes.

So this time we decided to go through with it, after 4 hrs sleep last night she had me up again, I was quite pleased about that because it was reassuring the decision to have her put to sleep, thing is once she's up she won't go back to bed but wants to go downstairs and sleep on the sofa while whining at me on the opposite sofa lol.
Usually after about 20 mins she'll go to sleep again but as usual woke up 30 mins later whining again.

As it's her last day I gave her a treat of prime pork sausages and ketchup which she loves and a slither of paracetemol, you're not supposed to give dogs that but it's the only thing that seems to work.

By now I had made my mind up that I won't be cancelling the vets this time, then low and behold for the next 6 hrs she's normal, not a peep, it's like she knows the vets coming lol.

When the time came I couldn't face it because she's my dog and she loves me to bits but I know it's not fair on moans and the Daughter because they have to put up with her while I'm at work.
They were willing to see it through but I had to go out, I just couldn't see it through as she looked and was behaving like her old self, just looking at her was breaking my heart but I knew it was all for the best.

I gave her a big hug and a kiss and got in the car doing Santa duties dropping presents off for family to take my mind off it (not that it did) but insisted the vet sedate her first because I know how feisty and strong willed she is.

As it turned out the vet arrived with a nurse and the dog straight away went on the offensive barking and going for them, as she's a Jack Russel they gave her a normal shot of tranquiliser, which didn't touch the sides so she ended up having three of them over the next hr, then the final jab, by all accounts it was a peaceful end.

I'm riddled with guilt now because I wan't there at the end but I think part of me knows that If I was there and she looked and behaved normal I wouldn't have let them go through with it.

This morning I was thinking about all the things I can now do and concentrate upon when she's gone, but now it's happened It feels like a piece of me is missing and the things I was going to do and concentrate upon mean fcuk all.
Even go for a piss is strange because she'd follow me everywhere, somebody knocks on the door and there's no bark, somebody crinkling a packet of crisps or biscuits and she's not there within a millisecond to see what she can cadge.

It's not the first dog I've lost but certainly one of the closest, I'm sure she could read my mind and she used to bend me over her little claw.

RIP Lucy.

Come on Slick get a grip you soft sentimental sod.

 

[ONEDUNME]

Bless. Heartbreaking and, at the same time, the reason I've never had a pet since I left home. I'm just too chicken to deal with the heartbreak.

RIP

 

[slick]

Bless. Heartbreaking and, at the same time, the reason I've never had a pet since I left home. I'm just too chicken to deal with the heartbreak.

RIP

That's me all over mate for exactly the same reason.

I always insisted we never get a dog because I lost a dog when I was a young teenager and it took me years to get over, I didn't want my kids to suffer that but when we had that rodent problem all those years back, they talked me into getting a Jack Russel.

I don't regret one day with her, she had a better character than a lot of humans I know, and their love is true and endearing, it's just the fcuking heartbreak they bring when they have to pass.

 

[slick]

Another thing, here's how shite my vet is, we told the vets we want her cremating and they asked on her own or with other dogs

WTF's that all about?

 

[Seen]

Sad story Slick, but she's at peace now, and the fact that you don't regret one day with her even though you said you'd never get a dog shows how much joy she brought to your life.

Dogs are fucking great but it's terrible when they die

 

[slick]

Thanks for the link ODM, didn't know you could rap...

 

[ONEDUNME]

I decided (pissed in the pub) to jump in last night and bought some Bitcoin at £10,113

 

[ONEDUNME]

That song is actually quite good. Better than most of the shit in the music thread

 

[Seen]

https://www.ft.com/content/a72a61dc-e6f2-11e7-8b99-0191e45377ec

 

[ONEDUNME]

It's up over 10% since I jumped in so I'm not bothered about what happened during the week. It was a big decision whether or not to bother but it's going to go dramatically in one direction or the other so fuck it - better than sitting on shares for a year to find you've made 75 pence. Shit or bust for me but one of the factors in my mind was that I was willing to buy at £14,000 earlier in the week and would have done had it not been for the technical hitches so whatever happens happens. I can afford to lose a few hundred quid whereas I'd have to kill myself if I didn't do it and it ended up going up 1,000%

 

[Seen]

Could be plenty of drama to come...

 

[ONEDUNME]

Yeah a lot happened this week. There was an announcement due on Tuesday/Wednesday regarding Bitcoin cash and it turns out that someone started trading before that announcement was made which was what we were seeing the effects off in this thread

meanwhile bitcoin cash is up 40% in a day??. can u get any of those slick? if you can get a couple of hundred quids woth do it amd ill go halves with u. let me know ill hold off going to bed. im up for £200 each if u can get it

looks like we know where the people cashing out bitcoin are heading.

The way I see it, by the end of January Bitcoin is either going to sink like a stone or stabilise. I'm gambling that the profit taking and panicking is largely done with and it becomes a case of people analysing logically whether it will actually work or not. If they think it will serve the purpose then what follows is acceptance by more and more countries buying it legitimacy and making the price go up.

As I've been from the start, I'm more worried about the hacking etc. What a man can devise, another man can manipulate or destroy and that's the big worry for me.

Either way it's going to be an exciting ride for a few hundred quid - that's the way I see it

 

[Seen]

It's up over 10% since I jumped in so I'm not bothered about what happened during the week. It was a big decision whether or not to bother but it's going to go dramatically in one direction or the other so fuck it - better than sitting on shares for a year to find you've made 75 pence. Shit or bust for me but one of the factors in my mind was that I was willing to buy at £14,000 earlier in the week and would have done had it not been for the technical hitches so whatever happens happens. I can afford to lose a few hundred quid whereas I'd have to kill myself if I didn't do it and it ended up going up 1,000%

Which is precisely why I'm not getting involved - if it's basically a 50/50 guess as to which way it's gonna go, you may as well go to a casino and back black or red.

Good luck though

 

[ONEDUNME]

Which is precisely why I'm not getting involved - if it's basically a 50/50 guess as to which way it's gonna go, you may as well go to a casino and back black or red.

Good luck though

But backing black or red is even money (for a slightly less than evens chance) so the most you can make is the amount that your stake. I know what the potential loss is but nobody can predict what the potential upside could be. It could be massive, literally thousands of pounds profit.

My philosophy has always been to diversify. A bit in property, a bit in shares, a bit in premium bonds and I see this as a different strand that may pay off or may just disappear. Of course if we hit a 2008 scenario with a financial crash then everything's fucked (in which case the price of gold goes sky high).

 

[Seen]

But backing black or red is even money (for a slightly less than evens chance) so the most you can make is the amount that your stake. I know what the potential loss is but nobody can predict what the potential upside could be. It could be massive, literally thousands of pounds profit.

Fair point, black/red was a poor comparison.

 

[Seen]

This is quite an interesting read...

http://www.cetusnews.com/business/Authers’-Note--Bitcoinsternation.B1WHEIVjzM.html

Authers’ Note: Bitcoinsternation
11hr

We are in the presence of a good fat sell-off in bitcoin. This should surprise nobody. It should also tell us nothing about the long-term prospects for bitcoin itself, or for blockchain technology. Speculative bubbles lead to speculative crashes, and it is not yet even clear whether this is the crash. Here is today's action from bitcoin, in a Bloomberg screenshot:

Somehow, the currency of the future has managed to both fall by a third, and then regain a third, in less than 24 hours. This is absurd. Anyone who held it at the beginning of the year is still sitting on more than tenfold gains, but volatility like this is alarming, and should intensify the doubts about whether it can be used as a currency.

There has been an attempt by many mainstream researchers and brokers to subject the cryptocurrency world to the same forecasting techniques that they use for bonds and stocks. I think this should be abandoned. For an example, look at this headline from Fundstrat, a buy-side consultancy set up by a former JPMorgan equity strategist:

Imagine a reputable research house announcing their target for a large stock index for six months hence was rising from 11,500 to 20,000, and hedging by saying there might be a 40 per cent correction (equivalent to one of the half dozen worst bull markets ever in US stocks). Such things can only happen in a market that is immature and inefficient, and which has been in the grip of a speculative bubble. So I prefer this riposte, in a headline on a piece by the great Robert Shiller from last weekend's New York Times:

To be clear, before I get the usual clutch of angry emails telling me that I just don't get blockchain, it is perfectly possible for a technology with a great future to be in the grip of a speculative bubble. Indeed, it often happens. Take a look at this screenshot for the most recent and spectacular example:

For comparison, Amazon's share price fell 94 per cent in less than two years after its peak in late 1999; it would be another decade, until November 2009, before it broke through its 1999 peak for good; and yet if you had bought at the 1999 peak you would by now be sitting on a gain of more than 1,000 per cent, having made a return of more than 14 per cent per year. Amazon was in a speculative bubble in 1999. There were many better things to do with your money at the time. But that did not get in the way of its destiny to become one of the defining business successes of its era.

Leaving aside blockchain technology — which is very interesting — what can we say about the prospects for bitcoin itself? It is a putative currency, and any currency needs stability if it is to be used as a medium of exchange. Thus its behaviour in the last month shows that it is still a way away from supplanting gold or the main fiat currency:

What can we say beyond that? It could easily double from here before it falls, but the long-term prospects for bitcoin as a currency do not look great, irrespective of the future for blockchain. The bitcoin price is ultimately dependent on human psychology and animal spirits, and not on anything economically measurable. This is Shiller's conclusion in the New York Times:

The views of Bert Ely, a longstanding authority on banking regulation, who has been writing a string of op-eds on bitcoin for The Hill, are stronger and more pungent:

The greater liquidity — the ability to buy and sell large amounts of a cryptocoin without materially affecting its price — of bitcoin and other coins with large amounts in circulation does not constitute real value because the coins themselves have no substantive value. That is, being able to easily buy or sell large quantities of nothing hardly represents economic value.


Ponzi schemes inevitably crash when incoming cash from investors is no longer sufficient to cash out earlier investors and pay them a “profit,” too. Usually, the crash occurs when enough nervous investors suddenly try to cash in their investments, sucking out all of the operator’s cash. Once the operator begins to default on making payments upon demand or when promised, the game is over and that Ponzi scheme is no more.

The emphasis is mine, because I wish I had said that. Another outlook comes from Steven Englander at Rafiki, who while at Citi was one of the first analysts to make a heroic valuation of bitcoin, in 2013. I think this is the best analysis I have read of this, so I will quote at length:

There is a fundamental problem in trying to pick a bottom for Bitcoin. When a stock plunges sharply, you can ask what price the expected future profits stream justifies, and that will ultimately set some kind of floor. Similarly bond prices can't fall permanently if there is a steady stream of payments underpinning them. The fundamental value of Bitcoin only depends on what the next buyer is willing to play. One can make all sorts of analogies to Bitcoin and gold, but if you say the relevant comparison is between the total potential supply of cryptocurrencies (which is basically infinite, although possibly limited at some point by the environmental damage they cause) and of gold, the equilibrium relative price is very low.

Two way liquidity looks to be extremely poor. The rapidity both of the rise and of the fall suggests that a small imbalance in directional buying and selling can have a disproportionate impact on price. Hence, it is very important for existing owners that retail keep buying. There looks to be a fair amount of swapping from one wallet into another, but that just boosts activity numbers.

Once you have your Bitcoin there is not much you can do with it. The time it takes to verify a transaction is very long so your pizza will get cold by the time your ownership of the coin is verified and the pizzamaker is paid. So maybe you can buy a house, but it's not likely you will buy a newspaper. Given the volatility, the seller of the house had better be careful to cash in his Bitcoin. This disadvantage may be offsetting Bitcoin's initial mover advantage.

The competition is getting stronger. My chief concern is that the supply of cryptocurrency is infinitely elastic at a very low marginal cost. The nice thing about starting a new cryptocurrency is that you get a huge share of the associated seignorage. This is more important than issuers are willing to admit. Most cryptocurrencies have a pretty concentrated ownership pool, and there are estimates that 50% of Bitcoin is held by 1% of owners. So it is much more tempting to get in early or issue a new currency than to get in late. This creates a natural market churn.

Existing large Bitcoin owners will likely buy once prices stabilize. I don't think this is the end of Bitcoin. Individuals with a big ownership stake are not likely to watch their paper wealth disappear. Many of them are pretty sophisticated traders. Once the weak hands have sold, it will not take much buying to get the price running up again. The key for current owners is to create a 'buy the dip' mentality to offset the high downside risk mentality that will emerge if prices keep falling or even stabilize 30% above the high, with a bunch of embittered investors on the sidelines. The lesson for existing owners may be to hope that the next upswing is powerful enough to let then cash out quietly.

I remain sceptical. You need another global financial crisis to convince households and investors that there is a real need for distributed ledgers and private cryptocurrencies. In the meantime, there is too much supply, too few uses and too much temptation for governments to get in the game. The market cap of all cryptocurrencies has gone from about $18bn at the beginning of the year to $420bn today, even with the price drop — that is seignorage that governments could have collected. It would replace about 30% of the revenue losses from the recent tax bill. So there is too much temptation for governments to resist.

I doubt this is over, but I feel sorrier than I did for anyone who tries to buy bitcoin now. If they're very lucky they will escape with more than they started with, but it is unlikely. Ultimately, they are on a road to nowhere.

 

[ONEDUNME]

Ultimately, they are on a road to nowhere.

The lesson for existing owners may be to hope that the next upswing is powerful enough to let then cash out quietly.



I could cash out now for £100 profit less than a day after I bought. No doubt I will end up regretting not doing that but with all the warnings everywhere around the internet, this thing still defies any logic.

The most spot-on thing I've read over the last week is "If investors get their fingers burnt, it will not be for the lack of a warning"

It's true and yet people don't seem to be able to resist the lure of the potential profit.

 

[ONEDUNME]

Back on the slide again- here we go, hold on tight

 

[ONEDUNME]

Down 12% so far today

 

[slick]

Good, I was thinking about buying some more but thought I'd missed the ripple.
Now do I wait a little bit longer