A year and a half ago I wanted to put appx 20k into something. The consensus here on e4 was crypto and the majority recommended ethereum. The price was well over 1000 at the time.
I wanted to know who to thank lol. Fortunately I took a wait and see.
How have you all done with your CC?
On advice of my son 
I bought on June 13 2017 ETH with a value of $5510. Dec 14 2017 I bought OMG with a value of $1194.
At their top , Jan 13 2018 , the combined total value was $22132.
At current the total value is $3365. 
ETH= $3023 , OMG= $342
Lucky both me and my son are longterm runners and can effort to hold or take the loss.
I put $1k each into BTC and ETH and shortly after another $1k into a mixed basket in early-mid 2017. At their peak they were worth about $25k and today if I had all of them originally bought they would be worth about $10k. I sold a bit off to extract my initial $3k investment not at the peak, but at a solid price and so I have about $8k value remaining today.
Throughout 2017 I also built a few mining rigs that have nearly completely paid themselves off from the coins I have sold. Fun little experiment and now that we are in heating season I’ll be mining ethereum for nearly free since the heat generated offsets natural gas usage.
I plan to sell them all when they’ll pay off my house. Whether I am making a final payment of $500 or $50,000 I have no idea but again it will have been a fun ride.
X R P…
Crypto is still happening?
With 20k you should’ve bought like 4-5 psa 9 zards. 
Zard prices have sustained compared to ether lmao
Pay attention. Big things coming…
To the tune of billions a day in trade volume and $100B + market cap, so yes.
Don’t tell me you are turning your nose up at actual public sales numbers as you remind people not to do with private Pokemon card sales. I can’t say I fully get it either and I won’t hazard a guess as to where it will be in any amount of time, but it really is happening every day and from when I first saw it at $8 (BTC) I wasn’t sure of it’s long term possibilities. I’m sure a lot of people active in crypto would wonder how folks are trading 5 and 6 figures of cash for cardboard too.
Isn’t ehtereum one of the more established currencies? If so then yes this is a god awful investment. Literally nothing comparable in any other outlet has had that much of a pitfall. Not to mention this all occurred in the record bull market.
Let me know when they recover to their previous prices. I’ll change my mind then.
Just buy high sell low thank me later.
*Just a disclaimer up front that I’m not trying to sell anyone on crypto*.
I do hold some that as I mentioned above I have zero cost basis in and I have no plans to buy any more, just to continue mining ETH as long as it is profitable. I just found it funny you’d dismiss all of it so quickly with your statement. In my mind it reminded me of the issue you take with people not believing real sale values (though private) of certain Pokemon cards. Not the same thing at all I know, but that is what it made me think of as the similarity in both cases is that the sales are really happening whether or not someone is aware or believes in/agrees with them.
To your question ETH is #2-3 in market cap lately so yeah it is one of the more established ones though it too is relatively new. Released in July of 2015 we are only a few years into it. Was it in a bubble late last year? Yeah it was obviously over inflated as it has currently lost about 85% of it’s value from peak. BTC has a history of cycles where it goes up orders of magnitude only to fall 80% or more before making its next peak. Obviously that is no indicator of future prices and it can’t and won’t do that indefinitely but it’s hard to say where it will end up. BTC is “only” down about 2/3 from it’s peak. Both 85% and 67% losses are not unheard of in other prices at various points in history all the way from gold, silver to an entire broad market loss of 54% in 2008. Surely several of those companies lost 70% and still are around today much higher than pre crash.
Just wanted to throw in my own quote from that “litecoin” thread from DEC 2017.
@gottaketchumall Mining is definitely different than buying, I am only speaking to buying outright. Every crypto conversation is the same: long drawn out explanation for why things aren’t working out. The fluctuation in collectibles is discernible. In crypto it is always cryptic.
As for dismissing, I am not saying you can’t possibly make money or that crypto prices don’t exist. The people in pokemon who go full retard say sales aren’t real. That is hugely different.
Regardless, collectibles and crypto are not the same. A collectible is tangible, limited and has emotional value. Crypto is modern sports saturation on steroids. Crypto has an endless amount of “currencies” (rookie cards). Hell probably during me typing this response another was created.
Ultimately they are both non-productive assets, but pokemon is more contained and organic.
The fluctuations in crypto are actually very easily explained.
IT is An immature and undeveloped market with a lot of potential and just as many problems, which means it hasnt reached fair market value yet and wont for a while.(wheter thats up or down there Will be huge fluctuations).
Even tho I lost a huge amount of possible profit I am still very Positive about the future of crypto. And I love Pokémon cards a lot but comparing Pokémon to crypto is a little bit funny, crypto is a whole new asset class with quite a complicated set of mechanics and even more problems due to lack of regulations so I can understand why its difficult to explain to the average person.
My point here is that several here recommended I invest the 20,000.00 in ETH. It was at about 1200.00? Today it’s nearing 200.00. Had I listened I would have lost nearly everything:(
Yeah you can find a lot of bad advice on the internet. About crypto, about Pokemon and anything for life in general.
In comparison to the dotcom era, there is a huge simmilarity in terms of unexperienced speculators buying into projects without any fundaments (wheter most projects Will be viable remains to be seen) and thinking to make a quick buck, then getting destroyed by seasoned traders or market makers. I dont see this pullback as the big “crypto bubble” bursting, there will be a bigger bubble later down the road when People start to separate the working projects from the scam projects.
That is a very good point! I had the exact impression when the crypto hype peaked. The problem with crypto is the market is so newborn and open ended that seasoned traders are not really a thing. Compounded by the elephant in the room, a ton of funding is drug money. Not saying that doesn’t exist in other markets, but this market specifically is heavily propped by illegal funds. Its a layered speculation cake with speculation icing.
Its all about perspective; if you bought 2000 bitcoin at 40 dollar each 5 years ago your bitcoin value would easily exceed the value of your Pokémon collection that you worked on for almost 20 years.
Im always fascinated that People who dont know anything about stocks buy when everything went up a huge amount and have no exit Strategy so in the end they go from +20% to -50%. But when the markets are down 50 percent they are scared to buy an undervalued stock.
Thats both the beauty and curse of privacy coins, nobody can shut iT down even if they find a way to destroy bitcoin Some other coin Will emerge. I would really recommend any sceptic to read and try to understand what blockchain can do for the world.
This Goes much deeper than illicit activities.The market is young, regulations are non-existentant, there are governments developing in favor of blockchain (S-Korea for example). In general theres a lot of room to change the public perception.
I give an oversimplified example now; Why do People not use encyclopedias or telephone books anymore, because they became Obsolete. Why would a company hire an employee to validatie transactions when a blockchain does the same thing flawless and way faster. Its how the world evolves. Please dont be naive about what the media feeds you and do your own research.
Also there are quite a lot of traders in crypto, its a very good market to make money on due to volatilty and liquidity.