Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Crypto currency adviice

Historically gold and silver are for persevering personal wealth. If you fear the future economy or the stability of fiat currencies. Buy good and silver and store it in your home.

Or a really smart hacker or group of hackers. Perhaps working for a criminal organization or foreign government?

Darkside hacked Colonial pipeline. Got 75 bitcoin in ransom. US DOJ "retrieved" 63.7 of them after the payment. FBI got the wallet key and grabbed it. If things go TU and BTC becomes what people believe it to be - expect more to be "retrieved" by those with the most to lose - government.

Like the stock market crypto is manipulated to go up and down. So it is possible to buy low and sell high.

Or buy high and watch it tank like I did.

The BTC ledger is public by design, so it is easy to trace. But those traces show only which wallet addresses received or sent what quantity of BTC to other wallet addresses, they don't identify who owned that wallet. Crooks who ask for ransoms in BTC get busted because their exchange gives them up when presented with a warrant, which they should rather than risk their business.

There are countries with few to no regulation of crypto exchanges and there are people who will trade crypto outside of exchanges using their own nodes. A person who was really motived to avoid associating their identity with a wallet could send and receive BTC through those methods and while it would be easy to know what the wallet was doing, no one would know who was doing it. Of course that depends on other people not being rats, or part of a sting, and they are going to take a very large cut, but it is within the realm of possibility.

Even if it works the trouble is at the end points. If you want to turn any of that BTC into fiat you will either need to deal with people who are even shadier than the ones above, but you would have to be extremely careful about letting it touch the banking system anywhere.

Probably more trouble than it is worth for the most of us.

No I don't think so. Stopping the entire BTC network would require stopping every node, or at least a huge number of them.

Nodes get cracked all the time but not enough to even affect processing times. Exchanges get cracked, people get their wallets broken into, etc. but none of it happens on a large enough scale to make much difference. The motivation is there. Satoshi Nakamoto's wallets are still sitting out there waiting to be robbed of their ~$75,000,000,000 but no one has gotten them yet.

"Not your keys, not your coins" is something my kids know the meaning of. Well not the little one yet but he will.

The FBI got the keys because the exchange gave them up when presented with a warrant. If they'd moved the remaining 63.7 off to a wallet where they held the keys that would not have been possible.

Yes, very chinky behavior.

I did my taxes a couple weeks ago with TurboTax and there was a topic I hadn’t seen before. It was something like, “did you have any transactions in any cryptocurrency?” and it made me wonder why the interest all of a sudden?

That question has been on the 1040 for a few years, but the IRS added it to more forms for the 2023 tax season.

They are interested in collecting taxes and their interest grows along with the crypto market.

If it has value, Uncle Sam wants to know about it and tax it. Simple as that. In the minds of Washington, what is yours is theirs.

There are way to establish crypto trading accounts out of the purview of government entities. (I'll leave it at that)

In regards to crypto security, get a cold wallet and move most of your coins off exchanges. I keep a balance on one exchange for quick trades, but 90% is sitting in a cold wallet. I use KeepKey but there are plenty of options.

While it may all seem very mystical, crypto trading is like all other trading. It's just a different horse.

I wish I would have bought bitcoin back about 10 years ago when my friend tried to talk me into it. It has as much or more value than dollars. They're both worth something because people believe they are.

I just have always had bad luck with technology in general. All my hard drives have pretty much gone bad and so have my thumb drives. Those were the fears that kept me out. Had I known you could print your codes and keep hard copies I'd have probably bought in.

I feel like I missed the opportunity now and there's too much potential to move either way so I'm still not in it. There seemed to be much more potential upside when it was cheaper. I don't see it going up 10 or 100 times again but who knows. I spent most of my extra money on gold the last few years. It's moved up some but nothing like crypto.

Bb

You're gold will always have value, it is money not currency.

Gold is cool and all, but walk into a store and attempt to buy something with it. Gold is an asset, it is not money or currency used to pay for goods and services. Assets are tangible and intangible measures of value that earn money.

The crypto market is currently valued at $2.4 Trillion. It is currency that can be easily converted to any other currency and more and more business around the globe accept it as a cash payment. Bitcoin ATMs are popping up everywhere making it simple to convert crypto into USD anytime. But I would advise against it due to the processing fees. Selling crypto through an exchange is simple enough and the funds can be deposited into a bank account anywhere in the world within minutes.

Cryptocurrency is here to stay.

While peanuts to some, I turned about $4,000 into $16,000 a few years ago, right after my divorce. That was a PILE of money to me at the time, and I felt pretty good about it. However, that same $16,000 would have been over $100,000, but I wasnt greedy and sold my Dogecoin when I had something like 300% return.