When is a good time to buy BTC?

Communities Science, Engineering, & Security
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Gist of the question is I have a spare 5 bucks I can throw at this. It would actually be rather handy to have a blob of BTC but I never know when is good to buy TBH. That and I don’t see the point. So how do I track this? I know it all just crashed recently and tends to crash multiple times before it stabilizes, so do I wait? Mostly I want to see what everyone else is seeing with this and see where I can use it and if 5 bucks can turn into 50 then I have some fool around money to toy with it.

Side question is I know theres a lot of questionable exchanges. What are good ones and what are bad ones? What do I look for in them? I see a lot of talk about gdax on IRC but I question it, plus theres a multiplicate of them. I remember Mt Gox but that apparently died at some point.

Wat do?

Edit: Actually another Q because I’m relatively behind IMO, litecoin. I was playing with that and mining it a while back and have something like .00005 or something around that and that’s gone up from the crash. So do altcoins just gain more traction when BTC melts?

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with the way its behaving right now you will not get a 10x return

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Thats why I’m asking because I don’t know the general behaviour.

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go to coinbase
image

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Now, a years time, never.

It’s not something you can predict really, investing in companies, you can get more of a feel of where prices may go due to new product releases, market trend, competition, etc.

Bitcoin seems more like it is based on RNG.

For example, yesterday it dropped by around $800, which seems terrible, but it is up $2200 from a week ago.

The overall trend is still downwards, but it could change at any time, or continue to fall. All depends on the roll.

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I’d stay away from bitcoin entirely. It’s more than likely all down hill from here imo. The inherent problems with it are going to show in full force.

The main benefit of bitcoin was supposed to be decentralization, but afaik China has well over 51% of bitcoin, and it’s China. If they want to control something from the citizenry they will. There needed to be a mechanism to actually keep centralization from happening.

The power consumption is also through the roof for very little actual work. Even on the low end comparing it to something like Visa’s systems use 50,000 average US households power for around 350,000,000 transactions while bitcoin uses something along the line of 2,800,000 households with 350,000 transactions, and it only gets worse as it goes on.

As far as I see it the major use of bitcoin is as an investment platform. Just as baseless and empty as the current stock trading. Except even more imaginary.

If you really want to get in on it I would just buy bitcoin. Mining honestly isn’t worth the tiime investment. Don’t expect it to make any money either.

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The future of bitcoin is unknown. It could increase or decrease faster than the transaction can be processed.

The future is even more unknown with the fact that a difficulty increase is on the horizon so we could see a price hike with it being harder to mine or watch it die out as it becomes too hard to mine for profit

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Another thing on dificulty. Since everyone is working on the same blocks, you may not actually get a reward for the work you were doing. You have to be first. At least as far as I understand it.

With that it means that the higher the difficulty, the fewer people will actually be able to mine at all. making it even less decentralized than before.

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depends on how your mining. That is only the case if your mining solo or if your pool does not pay for work done

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Pools also centralize, soooooooo.

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So much miss information. Don’t come here looking for answers. Everyone is an expert without knowing a thing about bitcoin here.

For one, difficulty is set to drop, not rise.

Secondly, investing is all about putting money into something you think is worth more than it actually is. Asking for other people’s opinion, especially of a forum full of gamers salty about gpu prices is going to give you one side of the equation.

Go ask actual investors what they think rather than asking a forum full of people pretending to be experts. No one should ever invest in what other people say they should invest in. If someone supports one thing, they will tell you to buy it, but if that person’s best interests is for the thing to fail, then they will tell you not to invest.

My view is, excluding spam from the past year, mempool is empty. Transactions are cheap. Bitcoin is at its lowest in a few months but still higher than even October. Make your own call. Look into the technology rather than ask a bunch of people who spout nonsense.

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There is none, anyone who says otherwise is either a liar or a crazy person.

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As in any investment, you need to do your homework. So do some research. Personally I wouldn’t put any money into BTC unless i need it to pay for something.

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Oh are you the new salty person in the forum?
Tell me now which one was the salty gamer that set you ablaze?

Calm down no one here has said is a professional investor or whatever. However there are a bunch of people investing in crypto and also a few miners who can give some advice.

Rest of your post is valid an I appreciate it just please don’t be so negative about us the forum users.

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When is a good time to buy BTC?

The past.

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@Azulath might know.

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I’d love to hear why you say that, as everything I can find says the opposite.

You also really sound like you like bitcoin, I’d like to hear what you think about the centralization of bitcoin with big pools and demographically largely being based in China.

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Alright well its at a generally negative trend likewas said earlier so I’ll watch a couple coins and see what happens.

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The value of bitcoin is based almost entirely upon how many people want to invest vs bail there’s no solid source of value. I say avoid at all costs.

There’s better money in stocks at this point bitcoins time to shine is over until people actually use it.

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If and only if you have already made up your mind to invest in BTC in general, I’d say a good time is now. Or more precisely it was a few days ago. But, I don’t expect a rapid rise of a factor like 10, doubling should work though. In my opinion, BTC is still rather young and we will see yet higher prices in 2018. Recent news have also been on the positive side:

But there might still be some FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) coming along that ruins the price. As others have pointed out, the value of BTC is determined by the market alone.

As another aspect of good news: Coinbase (gdax) will implement Segwit which should dramatically speed up transaction time and reduce BTC’s overall backlog.

Concerning Altcoins: These coins are fueled by BTC, since in many cases you need BTC to buy most of them in the first place. (Although it is possible to buy them with ETH as well). However, many rise/fall faster than BTC, which is why many traders compare Altcoin prices to their BTC (satoshi) level and not to their dollar value. (Also, the technical analysis happens on the satoshi level). But be careful when buying small cap coins, they might be a pump and dump and you could lose your money rather quickly.

As an exchange to start with, I’d use Coinbase (gdax). If you want your coins to be perfectly secure put them in cold storage or transfer them to your own wallet. (Wait for the segwit implementation though, due to lower fees).

Even though we all love technical analysis, keep in mind that this analysis is oblivious towards news and is based on the assumption that the price can be predicted by the past behaviour of a certain asset. E.g. it is a nice feature, but do not rely 100% on it.

As a final note: Do yourself a favour and read BTC’s whitepaper. It is not that long, it is interesting and you should know what you are putting your money in. (5$ might not be much, but I am unaware of your financial situation).

Full disclosure: I bought BTC at 12k, 8k and 7k and I intend to hold it or trade it for some altcoin later on. I might have lost some money on the first buy, but I expect to profit in the end.

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