Did I fuck up? & holdings in BTC

I finally got around to actually reading up on crypto currency, making a wallet, and putting a little money into it.

>he's too late
>fell for the meme
>FUCKING ETHHHHHH
>NIG NOG COINZ

I made an account with Coinbase and have been doing shit through that because it seemed simple, easy and trustworthy; but as I've been doing my reading I feel like I've been getting more and more jipped.

The whole idea of a cryptocurrency is that it's decentralised, that you can do what you want with your money, your communication is p2p with you and whoever you're making a transaction with.

However, Coinbase required proof of identity, and all this extra shit before I could even just get my hands on some currency. It made sense, with all the shifty shit that goes on within crypto currency; just trying to cover their asses I guess.

But they've imposed a fucking limit on my trading, I can only put in $300 a week? That means it'll take me roughly 3 months just to get my hands on one BTC, and who knows what would've happened to the price since then?

I have money just sitting in a bank account and I'd like to move a little of it into BTC; not because I think of it as an investment opportunity (although it would be nice). Purely because I have more trust in a P2P type monetary system compared to a Slave-Master monetary system that the banks (muh sigz guriilian) have got going on now.

Is there anyway to fuck this limit off? Or just go through a seperate, trusted, service and make my transaction, without a limit, into that same BTC wallet? Have I fucked up?

Also, let's get some general discussion about holding money in BTC. Good idea, bad idea? Advantages, disadvantages? Are we guaranteed the value will hold? Is it a better guarantee than any current conventional bank? What major factors are influencing the BTC value? Supply, demand, general curiosity/popularity, vested interest, blind speculation?

About the $300 limit, are you talking about Instant purchases or the bank transfers that take 3-4 days for your btc to arrive?

In my experience it isn't that hard to increase your limits.

Ahhhhh, that makes sense. I think it's because it's coming straight from a debit card (which has a limit itself), and not a 3-4 day actual bank transfer. I'll add another payment method now; cheers.

What are your thoughts on BTC's demand? Do you feel like it's only going to go up and up as more people are exposed to it? Do you think governments might step in and legislate against BTC in an effort to protect fiat?

Just realised they only accept credit/debit cards as a payment method for Australians so I guess I'm stuck with that $300 limit?

You can buy fractions of a bitcoin, so you don't have to wait until you can afford a whole One to get started

Buying in is the trickiest and most pain in the ass part of the whole process desu

As for what btc is going to do? No idea. I wouldn't recommend putting all your eggs into that basket, for that reason.

Ouch, I didn't know that.
This past month I've been maxing my weekly buy and slowly gathering some strong alt positions. I'm not chasing pumps but buying up cheap coins that I think will be big in a year or longer. While everyone is losing their shit over ETH there's tons of people trying to find the next ETH.

Yeah, I've already bought some fractions already. It's just I have a set amount that I'm comfortable, and willing to put into BTC at the moment. And due to the varying nature of the price of a BTC I sort of want to get it all in ASAP, and then either be happy with my gains, or sad with my losses.

I don't really want to be slowly going in, little by little, as the price rises slowly every week; forcing me to pay more for a lesser fraction of a BTC; if that all makes sense?

And yeah of course, me going into this in the first place is just spreading my eggs from one basket to another; not going balls deep.

I'm sort of hopefully speculating though. BTC is gaining exposure but, I'd say, it's yet to shed it's 'shady' stereotypes and everyone sort of just sees it as a more complicated form of what their credit card already does.

As more people notice it's benefits, it drives a higher demand, and hopefully raises the price. The most prevalent hurdle I see is if it starts snowballing and instead of banks adapting they put a lot of force into fighting it; could really fuck things up in my mind.

Idk, I'm sort of new to this whole thing though, there's probably a thousand more hurdles; it's just nice to live optimistic sometimes
Does Coinbase facilitate just jumping on a new currency? Or do you sort of have to have a different vender for all these different currencies, I'd imagine that's how it would be due to how different they all are?

I feel like I need a better grasp on all the different things ETH can do before I go looking for 'the next ETH.' Like from what I've seen people are making cryptocurrencies on top of ETH, or that's the whole idea of it or something? Got any decent looking blockchain type things I should have a look into? Or any 'currencies' you're hopeful for atm?

I hate this MUH DECENTRALIZATION meme, all that means is that it can be manipulated by any organization or country (China) with enough money, which has already been happening.
Yeah, the Fed isn't great, but at least the USD can only be manipulated by them.

I guess you're right, China investing $2.3B back in the day definitely 'manipulated' the currency, by changing its value and driving interest. But I don't necessarily think this comes as a disadvantage, unless you're talking about something else?

The thing that's nice about BTC is that everyone can see all the transactions, so the vast majority of people have equally as much information as to who's doing what.

I don't know, it just feels to me that being able to see everyones' transactions, despite not necessarily knowing who is who, gives a much greater sense of accountability than a few select institutions or what have you knowing 99.9% of the information about a transaction; and then only letting certain people know what they see fit.

I guess I legitimately am curious on how you think big players putting big money into BTC makes the currency 'manipulated' and destroys decentralization?

if you had asked me any time in the last 3-5 years if this was a good bet i'd say yes, but there is currently a faction war going on in btc between miners and devs and no one knows how it's going to turn out. if you want to read more look up UASF and bip148, although it will be a lot to take in. honestly you might want to wait a couple months before putting a lot in.

>I guess I legitimately am curious on how you think big players putting big money into BTC makes the currency 'manipulated' and destroys decentralization?

so mining has become extremely expensive and only works in places wth cheap energy that utilize an economy of scale. mining operations have become largely centralized in places like china.

problem is that miners actually have different incentives than regular users. miners /want/ high fees while everyone else obviously doesn't. you'd hope that everyone could reach a consensus for the good of the ecosystem but that hasn't been happening which is currently an existential threat for the entirety of the network.

Once you buy your btc you can trade it for any other currency once you're inside the exchange. The original buy in should be the only time you'll have to deal with coinbase

Definitely a lot to take in but I'll give it a good look and try my best. Is it really detrimental to the technology depending on how the split is handled though? I mean it might cause some sudden spikes up and down in value, but as long as it doesn't utterly fuck up the whole concept of BTC the value should still hold at least a little bit of an upward trend, right?
Ahh, this answers quite a few questions. Hm.

So the problem is sort of that the difficulty is increasing, with not a large enough payout for the raw amount of computing power required to get the payout to begin with?

And China is just approaching with pure brute force in order to gain a large amount of the BTCs in circulation? And then everyone else would sort of counteract by innovating in the compute space in order to beat the brute force with a little more efficiency.

But the big players becoming the only ones with the necessary power/capital to be able to gain BTC at a decent rate sort of defeats the whole decentralised nature of the coin to begin with?

Fuck me dead, that's a toughy
Ah, that does make a lot of sense. How do you can 'inside the exchange?' Does each currency have their own exchange, or is there some larger exchanges that list up and comers, sort of like a penny stock exchange?

Also, don't have to give away your gems, but have you got a couple decent looking underdogs I could have a look at?

it would be in everyone's best interest to soften their positions so that we could make the necessary upgrades and not lose market share to alts, but the chinese are insisting on stalling progress so they can squeeze some more shekels out in fees meanwhile eth continues a meteoric rise as the darling of people who have no idea what they're doing in this space. it's a pretty sad state of affairs.

Is this just the nature of all things decentralised; they move too slowly? People are willing to accept tolerable centralised institutions purely because they just werk, and you don't have to think much about them?

Maybe a poor example, but the whole Linux/GNU space is used and enjoyed by the people who understand it, agree with it, and can utilise the things it brings to the table. Where as the large majority just wants something they'll know how to use, it's convenient, and it's more well understood.

Is anyone working on solutions to large interest, with large capital, being able to heavily influence the mining space/economy as a whole? I'm not an economics guy so how does it work in the real world, would it sort of be similar to companies having monopolies on a sector?

I am also looking into crypto atm.
Wouldnt gdax be better than coinbase for getting in? Much lower fees when buying with fiat

When someone pointed me to GDAX and I tried to signup it actually was just a wrapper around Coinbase's signup

AKA you're making a Coinbase account either way you approach it, unless I was doing something wrong

i've been thinking about that too. we received this mysterious gift of bitcoin/blockchain but perhaps decentralization is simply at odds with human nature. we already see cartels forming in mining and centralization happening in alts as everyone bandwagons around vitalik.

as for solutions i don't think there are any easy ones in regards to bitcoin, what is happening is i guess inevitable due to the incentives at play. some alts are trying to fix these issues by distributing power of the network more uniformly (decred for instance) but that doesn't do much for people who have huge stakes in btc.

I could see that, but i thought coinbase visa fees was much higher ( 3%) while gdax being the same company had 1 % or even lower fees

dumb newcoiners, when will they learn?

I guess in this instance of a 'decentalised' network, it can always actually be centralised by someone holding a majority stake in either production or just pure capital. Maybe that's just at the root of all networks.

As soon as we assign value to something there's an inherent amount of power that goes along with that value. So as long as it's necessary to exchange one valuable thing, for another valuable thing; and as long as most stable things remain equally valued; then someone/body/thing who's already rich (and therefore powerful), will always stay that way.

Not sure if that made any sense but it got me a little depressed even thinking about it, fuck
Makes sense, I just haven't got around to GDAX because they've asked me for a second form of identification. I felt sketch sending my drivers licence across the web, but my passport as well?! Don't know about that.
tyvm vetren coiner if I'm not being memed, I'll give it a look now.

It's possible to just add your current wallets to Gemini from Coinbase right? Or have I already fucked myself?

Did a little more pondering, maybe that's the whole point though. We can never be completely, 'nicely' decentralised without full consensus and agreement, equal participation, etc, etc (pretty much unachievable). But at least this network provides accountability and acts in such a way to at least attempt to try split up the centralisation a little bit.

Maybe by putting a lot of fucking money and effort into the system China is reaping some rewards, but isn't that somewhat fair considering they're getting rewarded proportionately for the amount of effort they're having to sink in?

And, although unlikely considering the scale of money we're dealing with here, they technically can be 'dethroned' by anyone willing to compete.

I guess decentralisation never really promised equity, did it?

>It's possible to just add your current wallets to Gemini from Coinbase right? Or have I already fucked myself?

if you mean your coins, then just transfer them to your gemini wallet. if you mean transferring the wallets themselves, then you need to do a shitton more studying up on crypto

"We're sorry Gemini isn't available in your country"

fuuuuuuuuuu