Oh, I was talking about the mining part.The Annoyed Man wrote:Just like with your bank account.....and it doesn’t matter if you have online banking or not, their servers can be hacked. I don’t worry about the risk of hacking with crypto-currencies as a general thing.....and if you read up on blockchains, you’ll see why. Here is a quick article covering some of the myths and facts about blockchains, which are the underpinning of crypto-currencies: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/fi ... lockchain/.Dave2 wrote:The (well, "a") problem with crypto-currencies is that their value will go to $0 as soon as someone figures out how to hack them (if you say "it's hack-proof", well, that's what they say about everything until someone figures out how to hack it).
AndyC was over to my house the other day, and showed me how it works. I’m by no means an expert, but I was convinced enough by (A) the security factor, and (B) by the phenomenal rate of growth (ROI) AndyC himself experienced to decide to check it out for myself. He “showed me the books”, so to speak. My plan is to put in maybe $500-$1,000 and just play with it. If I can successfully grow it, then great. If I lose every penny I put in, I won’t lose my shirt. Now that I’m retired, I have time on my hands; and due to an injury last spring, I’m not about to take up running or hoops. So it might be fun to do a little bit of day-trading every day and see how I do.
One thing.... if you bank with a smaller community bank like I do (LegacyTexas Bank, formerly known as Viewpoint Bank), there is a possibility that they will not let you link your bank account to your crypto-currency exchange account. Yesterday, I made several attempts to connect my CoinBase account to my LegacyTexas account, and the bank rejected the connection attempt each time. CoinBase offers you an alternative of using a credit/debit card to make the purchase, although it limits the size of the transaction to $750. Well, I wasn’t going to buy with a credit card, and pay interest to offset any profits I might make, but that amount was in the ballpark of what I was thinking - so I went ahead and tried to buy $500 worth of Etherium using my LegacyTexas debit card. Not only did LegacyTexas reject that transaction, but it locked up my Bankcard, which I found out today much to my regret as I was paying for groceries at my local Costco.
So, since I really do want to try this out, I’m going to open a separate bank account at Chase or BofA - both of which do allow a connection to CoinBase - and that way it will completely sequester any of that activity from my other banking. So even if it somehow got hacked, and the hackers were able to drain my account, they’d only be draining that small account. And if I collect any profits and deposit them as dollars in that checking account, I can then pay myself a check and deposit that into my LegacyTexas accounts. So, in a way, my crypto-currency activities will be “air-gapped” so to speak from my other banking activities.
I think it is worth a shot. And if it doesn’t gain me much, at least I had fun playing with it.
I don’t necessarily disagree that it’s worth a shot, though. I just expect it to all come crashing down (and well before anything significant happens to the USD). It’s a matter of managing risk v reward, same as the stock market. If you can successfully predict/guess when the jig is up, it’s a fantastic opportunity (my personal “jigometer” is so broken that it gets worse the harder I try, so I have no plans to join in on the experiment, though).