gistfile1.txt

[effortpost due to severe headache, you've been warned]

buying into bitcoins right now is a dumb investment, and it has always been a
dumb investment, because the market was and continues to be completely
unpredictable and entirely unregulated. there is absolutely no way to predict
anything about where the bitcoin->usd exchange rate is going to go, because
there is no connection between bitcoin and the real world at all and most of the
people involved are not rational actors by even the loosest definition from your
freshman economics textbook. the amazingly shitty state of tech "journalism"
doesn't help either (although there are surprising exceptions)

at this particular moment it appears to be possible to turn bitcoins into
something useful, as long as you're in a country or economic zone with a working
and reasonably trustworthy exchange, which includes the united states and
(apparently) the EU, but does not seem to include canada. the "you can't use
your bitcoins for anything" canard is not completely true anymore, it is only
annoying and not impossible to do so

but even the exchanges that some people have had positive experiences with are
not regulated in any way and are generally run by the same sort of internet
startup types who think mongodb is a good idea (and if you don't know what that
means, imagine a database architecture that trades data integrity for speed).
some of these exchanges also require you to buy bitcoins first before you can
sell them, and some of them require sharing a complete identify theft kit with
them before they'll give you any real money. they are risky to use, but that
risk may or may not be worth it for any particular person's situation. buying
amazon gift cards on gyft through bitpay appears to be the safest and most
reliable method so far, but this only works for americans and obviously has its
own limiations

anyway, if you mined a bunch of bitcoins back when they were possible to mine
with a cpu because you were curious, hey, you got lucky and now you can buy
yourself some new toys. if you bought some on a lark when they were a novelty
worth a quarter each, without any expectations of returns, and you just now
remembered you had them, then it's probably a good time to cash out, while the
bitcoin exchange rate is high and there are some exchanges and companies that
appear to be at least somewhat reliable

could bitcoin shoot up to $10,000 each by january 1st? who the fuck knows, we're
dealing with a virtual commodity favored by libertarians and anarchists here.
will coinbase and bitpay still be around at that point? nobody knows that
either, which is why you have to decide if you're willing to "let it ride" and
risk losing everything you already have on the chance you might make even more
off of the idiocy of ron paul fans

if you bought bitcoin at any previous point with the expectation that it was
going to rise in price, you're a lucky gambler and nothing else and you need to
figure out if you want to let it ride or not. if you buy bitcoins now, you're
also a gambler, and if you're okay with that, then go for it, but everybody with
any sense is going to think you're the same kind of idiot who risks their money
in vegas

this is all, of course, assuming that you don't have an ideological stake in
bitcoins and are just interested in them as a commodity to make money on. if you
actually think bitcoins are going to cause a revolution in money, you are an
order of magnitude bigger idiot that somebody who bought bitcoins in the hopes
of making a lot of real money off them. you are the kind of people that the
lucky gamblers won their money from

in short, bitcoins are still a stupid, unworkable idea, but like many stupid and
unworkable ideas on the internet, people are throwing money at it anyway. you
might be able to take advantage of that, and a lot of people already have,
mostly through the luck of being in the right place at the right time, not
through any sort of savvy investment strategy. every possible indicator said and
still says that bitcoin is a bad investment: mea culpa, caveat emptor