I’m not a true believer in crypto, but I used to play around with it. I have received a 5-figure USD sum of bitcoin from the MtGox settlement, and I’m considering my options. It is a true windfall. It was worth maybe $100-200 when I used to play daytrader and shop silk road with it.
We are on track for early retirement as it is, but my “smart money” intuition says pay the long-term capital gains and invest in funds, how we do everything else. More money earlier is always good.
My gambler side says to withdraw some maybe, but split the rest into a half dozen likely candidates for someday real world crypto use which may take off. I don’t stay up to date on them anymore, so this would take some real research.
The weird Trumpy stuff going on with BTC makes me think it couldn’t hurt to hold through the election in case prepper types panic buy it lol.
My wife says it’s unexpected so just leave it as a high-risk part of our whole portfolio, but I worry she underestimates the risk and scamminess of it all.
Update: I sold the account down to 0.1 BTC today. I may sell more later on. Thanks everyone for your input.
Take your free money and put into something with real, actual backing value. Ignore the gambler side - it’s just the devil on your shoulder. This is free money. Let it work for you over the next couple decades.
This seems to be the majority opinion. I’m thinking moving the majority to sound investments is my likely course. I do think keeping a little that wouldn’t sting badly to lose still scratches the itch without risking regret.
You got the money in the first place because you stood apart from the majority. Don’t assume they are better than you
I would not have kept it this long. I remember being mad it was gone when it hit $1000, because that seemed insane. It’s realistic to think I would have sold then.
something with real, actual backing value. Ignore the gambler side - it’s just the devil on your shoulder.
The stock market or real estate are yet another form of gambling and another face of the devil
In the short term, sure. In the long term the S&P 500 averages 8%/year for 100 years. I would argue that is a much, much smaller gamble.
Bitcoin were designed so that you own them. Trusting your money on for profit corporations isn’t going to pay off in the long term, i think you want to look a little further than your own wallet
I don’t understand your argument. Wall street was designed so that you and i could own actual shares in companies. Companies which produce goods and/or services. What is the backing value of bitcoin other than others possibly wanting bitcoin? What backs it other than demand?
I have owned crypto. I have made a lot of money off crypto. But to think it is safer than traditional investing i think is a bit naive. It’s, so far, a supposed solution looking for a problem.
I have owned crypto. I have made a lot of money off crypto.
Sounds like you never own many, someone else owned them for you. I encourage you to learn better how cryptocurrencies works
Sounds like you don’t have much left to say and can’t back up your point, so you get personal.
You still don’t have idea what i’m talking about because you still haven’t put 5 minutes to learn about cryptocurrencies.
https://archive.org/details/bitcoin-whitepaper
Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
Take your winnings and get the fuck out of crypto ASAP
Bitcoin shouldn’t be confused with the whole crypto fiasco
What are you talking about? Bitcoin started this, it’s was the first scam. It’s all bad.
Bitcoin is publicly and clearly documented. It has always been. It has never failed its goals. It has never been shady
I will never, never get tired of these CHUDdy types self-reporting every time.
“It has never been shady,” commenting on a post about one of the largest scams of all time lmfao
Oh yes, it’s just as good as money, it’s a real currency and totally not vapor as long as you act as your own bank and maintain ironclad digital and physical security, never slipping up a single time. Oh and your savings (because this is a currency) are completely uninsured. Totally reasonable asks to make of an average consumer.
Instead of writing shit you have no clue about spend 10 minutes of your life learning what cryptocurrencies are. MtGox scammed people and they were a bank.
Just spent 10 minutes researching MtGox, sounds like they were a pretty terrible bitcoin exchange and nowhere close to a bank.
You guys seem to forget that it had a very real purpose before… buying illegal shit on the internet. It didnt “start as a scam”.
You don’t seem to be well aware of the inner workings of the traditional banking system you claim to like so much. What you believe to be “real” money is a lot less real than you think
Real money is whatever the powers that be demand payment in.
No. You are confusing currency with money
Yeah but the value of my money doesn’t swing rapidly daily, and transactions process in seconds instead of minutes to hours. Oh and it’s actually accepted as a form of payment at most institutions.
Bitcoin, and all other cryptocurrencies, are securities at best and straight gambling at worst.
One in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Sell it. Invest that money in a less risky asset. You win no matter what that way.
I had to do a double take, I thought you said a 5 figure amount of BTC at first.
Cash it all out and shove it into a high yield savings account, or use it to increase contributions to your retirement accounts if you don’t have any immediate need.
Not financial advice, but what I’d do is just put it in a medium-high risk ETF. Something that should turn a decent gain in the long term but has some real underlying fundamentals unlike crypto.
This.
Something that pays dividends, and live off of that
I just sold all my Bitcoin like less than a month ago. (It took me a week for it to sync before I could actually sell it. It was a royal PITA. And people say this is the future of currency?)
I didn’t have anywhere near the amount you’re talking about, but like you I don’t believe there’s ultimatley any future in blockchain.
I agree with what others are saying here. Sell it. It could well go permanently to zero at any time. Trying to time the market is how you end up walking away with nothing. Put it in, if nothing else, a savings account.
I’d pull it all out and invest into ETFs or maybe some individual stocks or REITs with high dividends. Maybe AA+ and higher rated bonds, if there’s anything with a decent yield out there.
You’re on track for early retirement. You’re likely well-disciplined.
Take this windfall, or at least some part of it, for something to enjoy. A holiday, a reasonable new vehicle if you drive (I.e not a luxury car of course), or maybe home improvements. Hell, make it a classic car that appreciates in value and only drive it on the weekends in the summer.
You can’t take your money to the grave with you and none of us truly knows if we’ll even make it to retirement. It’s great that you’re disciplined financially, but you should also enjoy life while you’re still young.
OR throw it all into whatever you’re currently investing in, and retire a year or 2 earlier. Idk.
New motorcycle
I’d buy a cold storage wallet, and put it there. (Write the password down and keep it with the drive though!!!) Bitcoin is the least scammy of the cryptocurrencies, and it’s likely to keep going up for a while, since there’s a limited amount. OTOH, regulatory changes–since it’s so electricity intensive to mine–could means it gets banned in many places. Yes, it’s a high risk “investment” (I don’t think of cryptocurrency as an investment at all), but high risk can be part of an otherwise balanced portfolio. Since it was a windfall, you’re not really risking anything by keeping it as bitcoin.
If you don’t already have a financial advisor that has a fiduciary responsibility to you, you might want to consider getting one, and asking their advice.
I did already get burned by an exchange obviously, but I think I trust myself even less with cold storage lol.
Cold storage does neatly avoid the issue of getting burned by an exchange; your crypto is only stored locally with a cold storage wallet, so unless it’s plugged in to your computer and accessible to the internet, it can’t be hacked. OTOH, you can simply lose the drive (!), and forgetting your password means that the crypto is likely inaccessible forever (!!!).
I’ve misplaced things before, but I don’t usually throw shit out unintentionally. So I’ve still got my old Tails drive that has somewhere around .01BTC in a wallet on it. Now if only I remembered my password for the persistent partition.
That’s what I mean, that it’s more likely to get lost/stolen/destroyed in my hands, if I were to bet.
Whenever I have got a big lump sum of money I get worried, I have put it into my savings account to not accidentaly spend the money untill I know it is mine, just incase it was given by mistake.
So let’s say that I had mined 12BTC right when bitcoin was started.
That would be worth 765702 Euros today…
I’d probably sell it off in peices, which would probably lower the value since I am flooding the market in a relatively short ammount of time.
Then I’d have to report my profits to the tax man, and since I didn’t buy the BTC I’d have to check with them how exactly to report it, if it is anything like stocks where you don’t know the purchase price, I’d have to pay 30% tax on 80% of the total ammount sold.
So for simplicity lets say that I managed to get 700 000 Euro for my 12BTC, I would need to pay tax on 560 000 Euro, meaning I would pay 168 000 Euro, giving me 532 000 Euro to play with.
Untill I got the all clear from the tax office, I would not touch the money.
I’d put 400 000 Euro into my retirenment right away, and use 80 000 Euro to try my luck at investing in lobg term funds.
I’d then have 56 000 Euro as fun money…
Most of it would just stay in my savings account, increasing my buffer, but I would spend part of it on a new camera and lenses, new monitors for my home computer and a new Ducky keyboard.
Nothing huge.
If you have enough other investments to be comfortable, don’t especially want to change retirement timeline etc. and your wife is fine with it, I’d keep it as a potential hedge against a depression that crashes the value of index funds. I would not split it between whichever small crypto projects can sell you a convincing narrative that they have ‘moon potential’ when your financial circumstances mean you don’t really need that anyway and that is specifically what would open you up to the ‘scamminess’ of crypto.
I’m not sure how much the bitcoins compare to your overall wealth, but it’s generally ok to put 1-5% into high-risk ventures. Bitcoin is worth something at the moment, because people trust that it is worth something. It doesn’t matter that you can’t really use it for anything at the moment (i.e., it’s not more efficient for transactions, or moving money across borders, and you definitely can’t eat it, or make anything with it). Given that major institutions and retirement accounts (and even countries) are investing in bitcoin via ETFs or directly, you could say that there is a level of trust in bitcoin that it will maintain & increase in price.
Long story short, it’s ok to have a small portion of your overall portfolio in a high-risk/high-reward venture. So you may consider keeping some of it in bitcoin, and converting the rest into low-cost index funds.
I’d buy myself and my parents some Oculus headsets so we can hang out together in VR when I’m too far away for a visit.
Sell it and throw it into your normal stuff.
