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Comment by jlebrech | Hacker News Reader

invest when it does. it's gonna keep going up and down.

Let's call "investing" in currencies what it is: speculating.

Is that not what investing is supposed to be, in most parts; or entirely?

While it's not black-and-white, investment implies low-risk where speculation implies high-risk. Betting that bitcoin will increase or decrease relative to the USD is very risky. Its own volatility is proof enough.

I thought the difference was Investment is intended to improve the company's situation so that it performs better and kicks back some of the improvement to you.

Speculation is just betting.

Not according to Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing:

An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative

You may be confusing investing with "trading". Subtle but important difference.

Anyone who has ever purchased bitcoin and held on to it before this past month is sitting on some amazing gains. If you purchased bitcoin at the top of the bubble in 2013, despite being down for years, today you would be up around 100%.

I'd hesitate to call it investing. More like speculating.

Has the bubble burst when it hits $100? Or has the bubble burst when it hits $1?

always keep money in reserve for when the bubble further crashes.

bitcoin has been rising to 400% and then falling to 50% in a pretty solid rhythm for a long time, and i'm kicking myself hard for not buying back when it was at 100 and then crashed to 50

Might have lost it all due to an exchange going belly up.

I was thinking the same thing. Short of DIY cold storage, there's quite a bit of holding risk.

Even cold storage has the risk of being held at gunpoint to transfer it over. It's akin to having a bunch of cash/gold buried under your basement. If anybody knows it's there, you better be ready!

Or you just have a HD die on you. Or it gets lost in a move.

> and I'm kicking myself hard

Please don't do this. Don't look at two points on a chart, the low and high, and think your the one in a million person who would have traded at those points. That type of thinking fuels bubbles.

With a speculative and volatile investment, you either get out immediately when it starts tanking or you take your 2-3X return and consider yourself smart and disciplined.

I remember back when it was trading for pennies and you could reasonably mine with an AMD GPU. I thought it was all one big scam and would collapse any time now. I hadn't considered that drug dealers would keep the market going. I did correctly identify that most of the exchanges are incompetent and/or corrupt though.

I wonder how much Satoshi is worth these days in BTC? Didn't he mine up a whole ton of coins back when it was trivial?

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