The real question is.. some of you crazy people who were ranting about it, and telling us how bitcoin was going to take off during the early days of it.. are any of you rich enough to retire and bankroll the rest of us yet?

The real question is.. some of you crazy people who were ranting about it, and telling us how bitcoin was going to take off during the early days of it.. are any of you rich enough to retire and bankroll the rest of us yet?

Stoic Joker? Did you sell off your entire stash for that motorcycle, or did you keep some of your BTC you spent so much time and effort (and USD) mining?

And also I'm curious if 40hz's opinion of BTC has changed at all over the years since this thread began.

Note: It was worth it.. 

Quote from: Deozaan on November 07, 2017, 06:24 PM

Quote from: Stoic Joker on November 07, 2017, 06:10 PM

Note: It was worth it.. 

I wish I had that problem  

I must have phrased it badly then... You see, it's not that I have invested $40,000 in the Alice project. The actual project cost is just a bit over $8,000 right now. It's that by selling off my holdings (early...) to cover a large-ish portion of her initial ($3,000) cost ... I've to date lost ~$40,000 based on the current value of BTC that I had sold...for just over $200 each (back then..).

So in hind sight from a strictly fiscal stand point, it's a pretty horrific loss over a ~2 year period ... But investments - as always - are a long game affair.

But the point of getting into BTC/crypto coin in general was equal parts Renegade's infectious enthusiasm, and my own interest in leveraging it as a means to an end. That end of course being Project Alice... So as anyone who has read the Alice Chronicles can surmise...the end result - and the fun had in the process - was ultimately (to me) worth it.

Psychologists have theorised that there seems to be in the human psyche an irrational fear of unrealised loss.
The reality is that one only realises a profit or a loss when something is actually sold.

In any speculative venture, managing to sell a tradeable asset at the highest market value/price point is likely to be largely a matter of chance. If one sells it at a profit, then, however one might attempt (and fail) to predict it, the market's perceived value of the asset could subsequently (of course) go down as well as up, post-sale.

However, if the asset was sold at an acceptable profit at the time, then, from an accounting perspective, it was a profitable investment, by definition. Barring fraud or market-rigging, the fact that the asset might have risen appreciably in market value after having been sold is kinda academic, and to consider its rise in value as, for example (say) a missed opportunity, or as a loss/cost, because the higher resale price was never realised, is a speculator's (gambler's) irrational nightmare.
It's an "If only I had a done such-and-such" event - a sort of needless self-recrimination, post fact.

One would arguably need to hoard and avoid selling any tradeable asset - once acquired - if one wanted to be sure of getting the highest possible potential future sale price, and thus one would never actually sell, and the objective would be forever unachievable, and the price would continue to fluctuate up or down, regardless. The unsold/hoarded tradeable asset would simply form part of one's estate on death.

A useful rule-of-thumb is probably:

Buy when everyone else is selling and hold until everyone else is buying. That's not just a catchy slogan. It's the very essence of successful investing.
- J. PAUL GETTY.
____________________________________________

I recall reading another another quote from Getty to the effect that:

"To avoid taxes, in life have all capital but no income; in death have all income but no capital."
____________________________________________

just send beer.

I'll drink one for you ;-)


mine is a pils actually - been a long day, snooker on the tele - sláinte!

Due to encouragement of the bitcoin evangelists here on DC I did eventually provide a bitcoin address for people who wanted to donate to DC via bitcoin, back in 2015.

There have been a total of 12 payments received in that 2 year period.

Total received from those 12 payments was 287mBTC which apparently is worth about $2,000 USD currently 

That's about $5 to send a transaction at current prices. And if you have a bunch of small amounts in different addresses, which is the recommended way to do it for privacy, transactions can easily be over 1,000 bytes (or over $20 in fees to send a transaction). And if you try to pay a lower fee, you could be waiting days before your transaction finally goes through, if it ever does.

it's ironic that it's so user-un-friendly, considering the opposite was the intention.
Was that covered here in this thread -- how that changed (I think it was, but I'm being a lazy beggar here - I mostly work on memory first, then search, but tonight I'm leaving out the search part...)

Quote from: mouser on November 08, 2017, 09:09 PM

Total received from those 12 payments was 287mBTC which apparently is worth about $2,000 USD currently 

wow, maybe it's time to cash in?
then again...

At least hold until after the SegWitx2 split on the 16th, then at least you get "free" coin - of questionable value - off the new fork.

At least hold until after the SegWitx2 split on the 16th, then at least you get "free" coin - of questionable value - off the new fork.

Segwit2X has been canceled.

IIUC the cost in satoshis per transaction hasn't changed. It's just that with the rise in the coins value the # of satoshis the transaction cost are worth more. So technically we've always paid the same...it's just more noticeable now.

That's not (entirely) correct. You could always customize the amount of satoshis per byte you paid with your transaction, and there used to be a time when you could set the fee to 0 and still get your transaction included within a few blocks because there was extra space for it. But now that blocks are full, you have to pay more satoshis per byte to get your transaction included or else risk having your transaction stuck in limbo for days.

That said, it is true that the increasing value of each BTC is making the fees more noticable in USD amounts. Even if you only paid 1 satoshi per byte on a regular ~220 byte transaction, that's still about 1.5 cents at today's current price.

Back when I first got into Bitcoin toward the end of 2015, I sent a test transaction to Renegade after he sent me what was then just a few dollars worth of BTC (now worth almost $200! Wish I had kept it...). I paid 5 sat/byte for that transaction, which at the time was less than 1 cent. But now the recommended fee is 300 sat/byte to get your transaction included quickly.

To further illustrate the point: Just for fun back in 2015 I gave a friend $1 worth of BTC for Christmas (the low value was an inside joke) to try to get him interested in cryptocurrency. It failed to pique his interest. With the value of BTC going up so much this year (by my calculations that $1 gift is now worth about $22.50), he has finally taken an interest in crypto, and asked me how to access the funds I gave him. But it would cost ~$5 in transaction fees for him to do anything with it so I've told him not to bother.

Quote from: Deozaan on November 08, 2017, 08:55 PM

That's about $5 to send a transaction at current prices. And if you have a bunch of small amounts in different addresses, which is the recommended way to do it for privacy, transactions can easily be over 1,000 bytes (or over $20 in fees to send a transaction). And if you try to pay a lower fee, you could be waiting days before your transaction finally goes through, if it ever does.

it's ironic that it's so user-un-friendly, considering the opposite was the intention.
Was that covered here in this thread -- how that changed

Yes.

http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=32392.msg394988#msg394988

In a nutshell: The Bitcoin "Core" developers refuse to increase the blocksize limit from 1MB to anything larger even though people and developers and businesses have been clamoring for an increase for years. So the blocks are at full capacity. Which means if you want your transaction included in the blockchain, you need to compete with others for the limited space in each block. The only way to incentivize a miner to include your transaction over others is by paying higher fees than others. But everyone else is also trying to pay higher fees than everyone else so they can get their transaction included, so the fees just go higher and higher. Meanwhile more and more transactions are being added to the backlog. So if you intentionally try to get away with paying a low fee, you could be waiting days for your transaction to clear (the backlog tends to catch up over the weekend). And even if you pay what your software deems a decent fee, but for some reason fees skyrocket due to sudden increased demand (making miners consider your fee to be a comparatively "low" fee), then you could be waiting days for your transaction to clear anyway.

Quote from: Stoic Joker on Today at 04:54

PMIIUC the cost in satoshis per transaction hasn't changed. It's just that with the rise in the coins value the # of satoshis the transaction cost are worth more. So technically we've always paid the same...it's just more noticeable now.That's not (entirely) correct. You could always customize the amount of satoshis per byte you paid with your transaction, and there used to be a time when you could set the fee to 0 and still get your transaction included within a few blocks because there was extra space for it. But now that blocks are full, you have to pay more satoshis per byte to get your transaction included or else risk having your transaction stuck in limbo for days.That said, it is true that the increasing value of each BTC is making the fees more noticable in USD amounts. Even if you only paid 1 satoshi per byte on a regular ~220 byte transaction, that's still about 1.5 cents at today's current price.Back when I first got into Bitcoin toward the end of 2015, I sent a test transaction to Renegade after he sent me what was then just a few dollars worth of BTC (now worth almost $200! Wish I had kept it...). I paid 5 sat/byte for that transaction, which at the time was less than 1 cent. But now the recommended fee is 300 sat/byte to get your transaction included quickly.

Well that makes sense ... Now that you mention it. I do recall it being stated that certain pools were starting to pay out (to the miners) for the transaction fees. Because as the coin per block drops (which it has drastically) the transaction fees are the only incentive the miners get/have to continue mining. Which is important due to the fact that if they stop mining there is no more network for the coin to travel across. The hashing power that keeps the network strong/resilient/decentralized comes from the miners.

0.62 BTC is a pretty good haul at current prices.

Kinda, but it seems a bit low (to me) for the 6 months the (11.5TH) S9 has been running.

I'm toying with switching pools...I'm just not sure which one to jump to.

Quote from: Deozaan on November 08, 2017, 10:43 PM

But now the recommended fee is 300 sat/byte to get your transaction included quickly.

Since I wrote this, I just went back to that tab to close it and the recommended fee has increased to 310 sat/byte.

1 satoshi/byte is about 1.7 cents per 226 byte transaction at current prices, or about 7.7 cents per kilobyte. Imagine if your ISP charged you 7.7 cents for every kB you transferred. That's ~$78.64/MB, or ~$80,530.64/GB, or ~$82,463,372.08 per TB.

Hm... Yeah, I gotta switch pools to get in on that action me thinks..

one question - does that fee go up exponentially -- if someone wants to transfer more bitcoin, will it cost proportionally more?

Not exactly. It depends more on how many coin fragments are involved in the transaction. Much like the difference in paying for a $10 with a 10 dollar bill vs. paying for the same $10 item with a huge pile of unrolled change. The pile of change - representing the various fragments of BTC making the total - will take much more work (e.g. larger transaction size) and will therefore "cost" more to get done.

...It once took me almost 4 weeks to get a pile of mining dust transferred to an exchange, because of all the tiny ("sub") transactions/confirmations involved in getting it there.