Regulator warns Bitcoin buyers: Be ready to lose all your money | Hacker News Reader

Regulator warns Bitcoin buyers: Be ready to lose all your money

bbc.co.uk

27 pointsdberhane17 comments

The headline sounds like a threat: "we might take your money through regulatory action". The statement was actually that the value of cryptocurrency is volatile and it's risky as an investment or store of value.

This is sound advice for someone who doesn't know much about it and is only interested because they've heard about people making huge profits. It's not news at all to most of the HN audience.

Well there's nothing new here.

Also, such poor headline. "Be ready to lose all your money" sounds like a threat. He really said "be prepared to lose all your money", which sounds more like sound advice.

Those sound the same to me

Title: "The US Army: prepare to die! buahahhahahaha"

Article: The US Army says if you're facing imminent death due to natural or unnatural causes, the US Army is under no obligation to mobilize itself and somehow find the cure to cancer or perform other miracles to cure you.

This seems pretty late in the game. BTC was whitepapered in 2008 and implemented (in code and network) the same year.

If the intention of central banks is to "protect peoples' investments", they should have warned about these concerns earlier.

At the risk of using Trump's favorite "ism", Wall Street and central banks don't exactly have a great reputation for "protecting peoples' investments" either. In fact, the EU and the US federal government are enablers of the same crappy behaviors that encourage financial swindling and speculation.

Granted, they have been warning about it since early days.

I think your two points explain each other- there’s just so much general reckless malarkey going on in finance already, that banks don’t see the point in even thinking about a risk that involves less than half a trillion dollars.

Bitcoin isn’t any more volatile than it was, but the potential bust has gotten big enough to garner attention.

I only have the pure profits that I've made off bitcoin invested in bitcoin nowadays.

This is a common investing fallacy. It doesn't matter "where" you get your money from, money is money.

If you have $30,000 today, be it from BTC or from Work, it doesn't matter. If you lose it all tomorrow to a crash, you lost $30,000.

If you have $50,000 in BTC, it doesn't matter if you "only spent $1000" a few years ago. Its $50,000 (minus capital gains taxes).

What he is saying is that he is investing only so much that a financial crisis (total loss) doesn't result in a personal crisis (divorce, can't pay rent, etc)

Yes but if I invested $1000 and sold 1/2 for ($1000 + any taxes/fees that might apply) some time later, if it crashes to 0 I am not at a net loss.

You can call it a fallacy all you want, it's one I'm more than happy to indulge.

Really, it's only $50,000 if they realize the gains. In gambling what OP is referring to is "free rolling".

Hoping to see a public statement about the uncertainty surrounding the foundational math of cryptographic hash functions instead it's the same volatility argument where the response is 'that's why I'm interested!'

Have you got any reference links for this? I can't find anything matching this cryptographic uncertainty

In a broadly abstracted sense: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem

Thanks, well I guess if these encryption problems can be solved efficiently, then most of the modern world would collapse.

shrug, please get in the queue.

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