Sold of My Entire Bullion Collection In Order To Purchase BitCoins

I'm interested in what you have to say and I assume others are as well
why not share your experiences w/ the group?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

Bitcoin surges to $13,500 in Zimbabwe after military coup

https://www.rt.com/business/409933-zimbabwe-bitcoin-price-coup/

 

It was 7818 a little while ago.
Current:
1 Bitcoin equals
7805.41 US Dollar

 

"Bitcoin surges to $13,500 in Zimbabwe after military coup & shortage of hard currency"

 

Fair enough. He did PM me, I will respond here instead of privately.

 

I'll start by saying the following disclaimer.

I hold a more-than-nominal amount of Bitcoin and other crypto "assets" (I won't call them currencies). I am bullish on the idea of crypto, and think that it has found a place in modern digital age usage. I made my initial bitcoin by mining them, and I have a zero-sum game right now, where I've cleared my initial spend and anything I do now is a net positive - so the only stake I have in it, I can not "lose".

The crypto environment is interesting. There are plenty of scams to be found, plenty of pump-and-dump "coins", plenty of shady "ICO"s. There are plenty of ways to lose your money, quickly. Although I think some of the posts in this thread are a little over the top and made from an angle of fear - what you don't know or understand is usually met with skepticism - there is truth to some of those statements, at least from my view, so it does pay to be cautious if you do want to put a toe in the water.

However, I do believe that, like anything else, if you do your homework and spend time learning about the ecosystem, it's not as concerning. I also believe that in general, crypto is here for the longer term, and learning about it and embracing it could be profitable. It certainly has been for me.

I'm not a blind disciple. I'm a proponent, so I will be biased, but I can see the other side and realize it's not all roses.

Ask away, and I'll be happy to give you my viewpoints on any topic.

 

Now to BMan's question - how to get Bitcoin.

There's 3 ways - buying from someone selling privately, mining, or exchanging (which leads to trading).

1) you can look for someone on something like localbitcoins.com - there's plenty of people worldwide who are willing to meet in person and transfer their coins for cash. You come prepared with a public wallet address and cash, they digitally transfer the coins to your wallet, and after the confirmations, you hand over the cash and walk out.
1a) there are also other websites (bitcointalk.org is one) that has a "for sale" section where you can buy "physical" bitcoins.

2) mining them - this is highly unprofitable for the general person anymore, you're better off buying them. It would take an investment of tens of thousands to make it profitable, you can't do it as a hobby anymore.

3) using an exchange - this is the most common way. You can find any number of exchanges - kraken, hitbtc, bitfinex to name a few. You create an account (and for those in the US you do have to pony up your personal information and ID to exchange - that's the IRS hook) and then you can fund your account from a bank or credit card, go to the exchange, and trade your USD for bitcoins (or any other crypto) There are also a number of exchanges outside the US where you can go with which have less restrictions on giving in your personal info, and there's ways to do that.

Please, never, ever (ever) go to eBay to buy any crypto. Just a bad idea in general.

So, the first part of this is getting a wallet. For the beginner, you can go to somewhere like btc.com and setup a wallet in minutes online. This is easy, but obviously you have to trust the provider to not get hacked or you will lose your coin.

 

I wondered what the secret was. Thanks for sharing very useful information.

 

I just figured I generally have diarrhea of the keyboard so if y'all didn't want to read through pages of dribble, it'd be easier for me to just converse in private.

 

So, in general, not a bad statement and somewhat true.

The difference is that there's profit taking going on all the time - I don't believe there will be "the big one" or rather a single large profit taking by everyone at once which drives the cost down to nothing.

The crypto market right now is very similar to the stock market - in function, not in fundamentals. Every day there's money moving into and out of bitcoin, some to other cryptos because the trade ratio is profitable, and some to people cashing out some.

This here is the $64k question. Thing is, this is uncharted territory and there's really nothing that says there is, or should be, a ceiling and the thought is that it could be unlimited.

The main crux to bitcoin (which is not shared by most of the others) is that there is a specific restricted supply of them of 21 million, which each can be split into 1 million fractions. That might seem like a lot, but really it isn't when you consider how many people there are who might want to own a few fractions. That's where the pricing aspect is. Where it'll stop, who knows.

 

Your statements are very helpful.

 

It may be 13,500 in Zimbabwe but that's not the global exchange rate. That's just
black market profiteers taking advantage of the political unrest.

 

?????? That's exactly what the article is about.

 

I would also add a 4th way. Bitcoin ATM. As an experiment I bought $20.00 worth of Bitcoin on a Mycelium Wallet last Monday. The exchange was fine but the fees of 13% would hurt if I bought a lot more. So I am kind of stuck here. I am not happy about giving all my personal data to an online exchange. I am not happy about meeting someone in person and doing a transaction with lots of cash. Mining out of the question. Bitcoin ATM too high of fees. So I need to find what works best for me as far as obtaining BTC. It's not easy right now and I might be over analyzing. @Prime Mover

What ways have you purchased BTC? What was the lesser of 4 evils for you?

 

Possibly. There's always someone looking to make a profit on misfortune.

However, exchange rates will vary country to country. For example, in the US, most of the exchanges will have BTC at around $7700 (current time around 11PM EST). Some Korean exchanges have BTC at $8600 at the same time. Most of the other exchanges implement a local restriction on currency types you can use (for example you have to trade in Korean Won on those exchanges, you can't use USD), which account for some of the differences.

The rest of the crypto on the Zimbabwe exchange are also about 2x their USD counterpart, so although high, it's linear. And you have to live there and have a bank account there to be able to exchange money there, so you don't have many others outside the country trying to profit from it too much.

 

Mining back in 2013 was the lesser of the evils

If you live in a place where you have a need for heat, you can always buy a miner or three and use them instead of your furnace, and you'd get the side effect of some crypto back in exchange for it. No joking, I did that for my garage in the winter time once.

The ATM is an interesting thing, however that 13% fee is killer... I wouldn't want to pay that on any regular basis.

One avenue I'd tell you to explore is that if you have PM's, there's usually always someone looking to spend crypto for them. I'd suggest a look here for one example - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=217.0 - there's always stuff for sale, and most silver and gold bullion goes quick, so you could sell what you have for BTC.

Other than that, you're sadly pretty much out of options other than going the verified exchange route. The larger ones are fairly safe, and to be honest, I'd put more faith in them then I would most banks and traditional institutions with regards to security these days (*cough* Equifax *cough*).

I do day-trade cryptos and have verified accounts on a couple exchanges. Some of them make you do that in order to add any funds or be able to trade, so no way around it. I have yet to put any cash in or take any out, but at some point in the future I will want to cash some out, so I'll have to have them. And, I'll have to claim the proceeds on my taxes as capital gains just like I would with stocks or PM sales - the IRS considers crypto as a similar "asset" at the moment.

 

@Prime Mover

Thanks for letting us know how it goes as far as buying. Any more info on selling? I should have asked this question first. It may be just the reverse of what you said you have to do to buy.

 

Depends on what you want to sell for.

Yes, the main answer is “the reverse of buying”, go to an exchange and sell the crypto for US and make a transfer to your bank.

However, if you want to buy stuff with it, there’s a lot more places these days accepting bitcoin and some others, where you can buy everyday things. This is one recent list (October 2017) of retailers who accept bitcoin (online purchases mostly, but some in store like Subway):
https://99bitcoins.com/who-accepts-bitcoins-payment-companies-stores-take-bitcoins/

Back to the PM’s tho, places like APMex and others will accept Bitcoin (and some others) to purchase PM’s. The pricing is somewhere between bank wire and credit card, so you’ll pay a little more premium, but it can be done and its a nice way to bring some price stability to your original funds when you decide to cash out. Plus, at least in my view, it’s an asset to asset purchase, so the taxes are delayed until you convert it back to cash. But, that’s the way I look at it, and I might be wrong in the eyes of the IRS, I won’t find out for a while tho.

 

I really like the dump to PM Option. Which brings me to another question. Say I am on one of the pm sites and select the Bitcoin Pay option. I have a wallet on my phone with a scanner built into the app. Do I scan a bar code that the site gives? I youtubed this and wasn't clear how it worked. @Prime Mover

 

1 Bitcoin equals
8038.99 US Dollar