What should someone who has made millions from BTC do?

Brendan Burgess said:
That is the problem with shares as well.
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I think that's a very good point. One of the stand out items with crypto is that it has been a retail phenomenon. Some folks seem to be appalled at a lack of investor savvy from retail-based market participants. Why is this such a surprise? Retail, whether in stocks or digital assets are not going to have the same approach as professional investors or institutional investors. Many (myself included) didn't have any direct involvement with equities prior to getting involved with crypto. If one is to look at it positively, its an opportunity to bring folks further towards a saving and investing mindset - and to learn the basics along the way. And I'll just add that market participants include the complete spectrum. That may include the entirely reckless - but it's neither reasonable nor accurate to assume they all sit at this extreme end of that spectrum.
 
Not just digital assets and equities either. Since property is the investment of choice for the Irish 'retail' investor you've a whole slew of people who have no idea what they're doing, and are doing it with leverage too. In my experience they have no idea how much they're actually paying for their property since they've no idea of what the total interest over the mortgage lifetime will be and don't even know how to calculate their profit since they don't know the difference between cash flow and profit.
 

I agree, but I do think that there’s a generational thing whereby younger people have high conviction that “this time it’s different” whereas more seasoned investors think about things like sizing and stop-losses.

With large gains on Bitcoin, or anything, it’s about risk/reward. To answer the question posed by the thread, maybe look at becoming non-resident or sell a portion of the holding to de-risk?

The problem is that most BTC investors think these concepts are archaic.
 
Good forbid they sell, live the life of a millionaire but lose out on the chance to have paper wealth of €27m while still being a PAYE wage monkey.
 
What I'd say to this guy. Is the Dunning-Kruger effect is one of the most important aspects of investing and I would point any person who's experienced a windfall type return in a speculative investment where on foot of that windfall they feel some level of expertise has been achieved...maybe it has or maybe it hasn't:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

The difference between a professional investor and a amateur one - is not how much money one can make when they are right (or lucky) but rather how much they lose when they are wrong (or unlucky). The math of losing money is a brutal - you experience a 50% permanent loss of capital you now require an alternative investment to double in value just to get back to break even. Finding doubles where you are not exposing yourself to large amounts of risk are very hard to find. Perhaps an index fund might, might return 10% p/a...but good luck....your now waiting 7yrs to get back to zero.

The world is full of investors, crypto and otherwise, who were lucky three times or even four times in a row and got killed on their fifth outing. Zero by way of a hundred is very common outcome for a retail investor who thinks they know what they're doing for a while precisely because they don't know, what they don't know.

Investing in the very short run is a mixture of luck and skill over the long pull it tilts aggressively to skill. Some are smart, realize their good fortune and have a Dunning-Kruger epiphany and do the hard work of acquiring the skill of investing, risk management, knowing where you have an edge or where you do not...others, more rarely, cash in their windfall and leave happy realizing their good fortune relative to their skill level and knowing that they have no interest in truly becoming expert...others, more commonly, reveal themselves to be what they always were......congenital gamblers who were unknowingly on a roll but mistook it for expertise/insight they didn't actually have.

The truly skilled investor risk manages his positions and is unforgiving around managing the downside and cutting off the tails and most importantly only playing in games where he/she has an edge. If you've made three million in crypto and are still 100% in crypto despite all the evidence of counterparty risk, volatility, market structure problems, collapses, rug pulls, lack of disclosures, insider trading, acutal liquidity vs. perceived liquidity, market manipulation you've failed a very important test of risk management at the first inning. Perhaps you'll get away with but my bet is you won't.

Put more simply ZERO by way of three million awaits every man who stays at a poker table where they have no edge or in the casino where the croupier is pocketing his carry on each spin of the wheels.

Crypto most resembles a casino to me - so little economic value is being created in consumable goods and service that people are paying for (16yrs in now....not a single product or service I use or my company uses directly or tangentially is underpinned by blockchains or tokenomics).......the product being provided here is digital speculation pure and simple......for which various brokers/exchanges/token & white paper promoters will take first all the initial investment and then two or perhaps even 3% transaction fee on an on-going basis until all the money is gone....in zero sum games where no overriding economic value is being created....the only winner, over the long pull, is the croupier. This crypto three millionaire needs to realize that.
 
Having been in a somewhat similar situation to the guy mentioned here (but a much smaller amount of crypto) I fully understand why he doesn't want to sell it. I got into crypto purely out of curiosity when I first read about it and spent hundreds buying bitcoin at the time. Over the years I have cashed some amounts out for major life events (wedding, car, house deposit etc) but never for diversifying into other investments. I'm genuinely interested in the technology behind crypto and know next to nothing about conventional markets, it has been hugely successful for me over ~10 years, I'm my mind diversifying into something I know nothing about seems a much bigger risk than just holding the crypto (and earning 10% Apr on decentralised lending protocols). Everyone has their own story and any time someone asks me if they should invest in crypto my answer is always a hard no or nothing more than you don't care about losing.

For more background for a large time I definitely had more net worth in crypto but the scales are probably tipped the other way now with mortgage cleared and savings starting to build (from my day job).
 
Duke of Marmalade said:
City of Troy is even money for the 2000 Guineas in two weeks' time - I do fancy it and I'm thinking of investing 10% of my humble nest egg on it. Do people think that that would be "relatively harmless"?
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Your obviously not a racing expert City of Troy is odds on 4/6. If your offering evens you will be overrun with punters.
 
@lukas888 - you do understand that the odds of a horse can change, right? The Duke made his comment 10 days ago. I'd imagine the Duke understands the dynamics of betting better than most.
 
jasdpace@gmail. said:
@lukas888 - you do understand that the odds of a horse can change, right? The Duke made his comment 10 days ago. I'd imagine the Duke understands the dynamics of betting better than most.
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As a bookmaker in a former life i dont need you to educate me on betting odds. The odds on City Of Troy 10 days ago and in fact all winter
was 4/6 a long way from evens.Who knows what will happen on Saturday in Newmarket maybe end up evens or more likely his odds will shorten.
 
For someone sitting on seven figures in crypto right now:

BTC is deflationary and every four years the issuance is cut in half.
The most recent havening was in 2023, with issuance dropping from 6.5 BTC to 3.25 BTC every 10 minutes (roughly the time to mine one Bitcoin)
Looking at the past 10 years the annual cycle has been Three green (Up years) followed by one red (down year)

For the current 4 year cycle the "green" years are 2023, 2024, and projected 2025 to be green/up.

The key bull drivers for the next 12 months are:
> Blackrock EFT IBIT demand
> US pension fund allocation
> Reduction in block reward to 3.25BTC
> Increased regulatory certainty in the US
> Dropping in interest rates, increased central bank money printing / inflation / liquidity pump

So my advise would be hold for 12months and the start to gradually sell 50% (knowing that one third the profit will go to tax man)
Invest the profit 50:50 into a property and stock market global ETF.
With the other 50% hold through the next cycle with the long term outlook being ultra bullish.

PS: The current bull run 2024 has been driven by institutional buying via Blackrock (and other ETF providers). Retail has not showed up yet and wont until BTC breaks $100k.
 
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TheSkysTheLimit said:
PS: The current bull run 2024 has been driven by institutional buying via Blackrock (and other ETF providers). Retail has not showed up yet and wont until BTC breaks $100k.
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Maybe or maybe thats the official story out there.......cause maybe its the 'fake money' printer at the heart of crypto land called USDT - Tether.......which floods the system with imaginary dollars whenever the guys at Tether in the British Virgin Islands decide its time to move the BTC price up (or down) in conjunction with their broker/exchange partners like Bitfinex, Binance & general whales et al.

See below winding its way through the courts in the US - read the law suit which has been given the green light to proceed.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK In re Tether and Bitfinex Crypto Asset Litigation
https://storage.courtlistener.com/r...d.524076/gov.uscourts.nysd.524076.114.0_1.pdf

Keeping their identities secret, Defendants [Tether and Bitfinex] made massive, carefully timed purchases of crypto commodities to signal to the market that there was enormous demand and thus cause the price of those commodities to spike. Defendants used tethers, purportedly backed 1:1 with US dollars to engage in these transactions however what is alleged has far reaching consequences for underpinning of the crpyto market - that Tether has provided on many occasions USDT's into the crypto ecosystem that far exceeded the level of actual dollar reserves it held - in effect Tether, is as bad as central banks crypto purportedly hates....Tether has a money printer too....and has printed fake USDT dollars that don't exist to help create fake liquidity & spoof market participants.

Folks involved with crypto......have literally zero idea how rigged the game is against them.....they find out occasionally when something blows up like FTX or Bitfinex.

The whataboutism argument says the stock market too is rigged.......sure bad things happen there too but at least there's a cop on the beat there......not so in crypto and the quantum of nefarious behaviour is what matters...its night and day.....in crypto over the long pull.....you dont stand a chance.......its an amazing way to get poor over time.
 
So the old chestnut that is Tether. I was first to complain about Tether on AAM so for once I'm not necessarily in disagreement with you. We can talk firstly about strokes pulled by Tether in the past. I've no doubt that they have, and in some cases to simply continue to exist they had no other choice. I'm not naive enough to believe that it would have stopped there, although the extent of what might have went down has as yet not been fully outed - so it remains a matter of speculation. Lets then look at Tether right now. It's very much a profitable business. They've been making bank. If there was a hole there, I suspect they would be more than capable of filling it (unless they've really messed up entirely).

You refer to the potential for market manipulation. I'm sure it was much easier to get away with that in the past - I'm not so sure that it's so easy right now or if it is, it's certainly getting harder by the day.

So, with all of that out of the way, what does it mean for Bitcoin if Tether was taken out of the game? Around about the time discussion of BTC started on here, I would have said that would have been a huge deal. Today, it would be a big deal - but I don't think it would "break" Bitcoin. You have to also acknowledge the progress that has been made in the marketplace where Bitcoin is concerned. Its network effect keeps on growing.

No "cop on the beat" as you put it is a failure of the old system. You're talking about the regulation of the centralized parts of this entire marketplace. They've been negligent. You half-heartedly pointed to manipulation and games in the conventional game but its not whataboutism to point that out...as otherwise, you wouldn't have acknowledged it.

So if we acknowledge some merit in what you've just brought up, it still doesn't mean that the main contention here is going to be realized i.e. that Bitcoin will fail. All the indicators are to the contrary. A couple of years ago, you pointed to "no more fools" and yet, Bitcoin found a new market. You said that we were in a high rates environment and the party was over. You said that the powers that be in the U.S. were going to crush Bitcoin. Gensler/Biden/Warren didn't win. The high rates environment hasn't destroyed Bitcoin either. Bitcoin finds itself close enough to its all time high - that it has achieved in that high rates environment - at $66,000 today.
 
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tecate said:
Lets then look at Tether right now. It's very much a profitable business.
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oh yeah..they're profitable?.....you've seen the audited accounts have you you? Have a copy of the audit report (not attestation) you can send me?

You are very trusting person @tecate .......bordering on naive.

In the big boy real world of finance & counterparty risk......attestations to audits...are what electric bikes are to Ferraris.

To help you understand the difference cause I'm not sure you do...............think about the mortgage process......AIB/BOI wants to see the last 6-12 months of statements from you, payslips, expenses...money going in and out of your financial accounts......AIB/BOI, in effect, are auditing your finances, source of deposit funds, monthly cash flows and activity......and doing so over TIME.

Tether with its attestation is going to AIB/BOI.....and say...hey listen....I wont be doing any of that audit, financial sharing stuff...no statements, no payslips, no looking back over time for me......what I'll do is let you look at my online headline bank balances only, on a date of my own choosing......lets call Dec 31st....and you can note down the balances you see then and there....but you cant click through to the underlying transactions that make up those balances, you can't see the flow of funds in the days/weeks/months prior or intra-day transfers......I'm not even going to let you see the balances that were on those same accounts on Dec 30th and you cant see the balance the day after either on Jan 1st....you've got one day, one moment in time, of my choosing, to look at the headline balances in those accounts.

Well AIB/BOI wouldn't entertain, for a second, such an attestation as basis to extend credit.....yet everyday the crypto faithful....becomes creditors to Tether on that very basis.....to the tune of $114bn.....and USDT effectively underpins EVERYTHING in the crypto system.....its the reserve currency in crypto land.....a foundational piece of the mechanics....a $114bn empire of sand.....built on a 10 page attestation documents....that your local credit union wouldn't accept to extend you a car loan.
 

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You could have saved yourself quite a lot of scribbling in that last post. The Tether attestation report vs. full audit saga has been discussed at length (as far back as 2021 - run a search), with the shortcomings recognized and acknowledged by all and sundry. It's not news. Whether Tether has issued unbacked USDT in the past or present we don't know with certainty yet, and if it has, to what extent? Whether it has mismanaged funds and gambled them away on risky investments, we don't know yet, and if it has, to what extent? We do know however that they're making bank on fees from USDT issuance and redemption. That is the component I was referring to, having already acknowledged the other two unknowns.

Anyway, your premise is that Tether will implode and this will have an impact on Bitcoin. What level of impact is it that you're suggesting such an event would have on Bitcoin?
 
Duke of Marmalade said:
Happy days
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Now this is bullish. The Duke is signaling a Bitcoin buying opportunity.

I know this won't be greeted with the same relish but the Nikkei just had its biggest plunge in history.

DazedInPontoon said:
Look at how efficient bitcoin is, it's taken Nvidia almost a month to lose the same percentage.
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There are no circuit breakers when it comes to Bitcoin price discovery unlike the conventional markets, the Nikkei being the latest example of that practice.
 
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