by soysauce » Sat Dec 09, 2017 1:42 am
Yeah, essentially the only benefit is that you can hold and move money without going through the banking system, or fucking about with briefcases full of banknotes. Instead you get an incredibly complex online "coin" that takes up an awful lot of power but works remarkably well.
It's essentially a currency, but it lacks almost all the benefits that make investing in foreign currencies attractive. For one thing it's incredibly unstable, if you invest in Sterling or Dollars at least you know you're not going to lose everything in a couple of days, with Bitcoin they could be worthless by next friday. A lot of people ae sitting on a lot of bitcoins right now, a stupidly high percentage of them stil belong to whoever created the coin and his friends. Basically everyone who was even vaguely invovled in bitcoin pre 2011 is a potential millionare. At current values the creator of bitcoin is estimated to own $15 billion dollars worth of the things.
Assuming that they are still alive/still have access to their accounts they could just cash out en masse, make themselves stupidly wealthy in a couple of seconds. The value of Bitcoin would tank, every investor around would get scared and dump theirs too. In 5-10 minutes bitcoins are worthless, anyone who didn't cash out in time now looks pretty stupid, life goes on.
Also, Yes, I am bitter, When I first heard of these things they were worth £7 each and I nearly bought a few,