I am not familiar with your country or its laws. So I don't have an opinion or insight why the family you mentioned lost everything.

I'm not familiar with the story, but if it's like others it was just a case of greed & stupidity. They gambled, and lost.

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Grant
Darwin NT

There was a sober and comprehensive assessment of the cryptocurrency phenomenon on BBC TV this week, under the 'Panorama' (investigative journalism) strand. They covered three separate issues:

* distributed transaction logging for sales and purchases
* the use of the coin itself as an investment medium, with the expectation of ever-increasing value
* the pumping of unverified coin systems at 'ICOs' aimed at naive investors

(1) requires a stable and accepted valuation
(2) is driven by greed and ignorance, and requires anything but stable values
(3) is driven by organised crime - the modern version of Bernie Madoff's tricks

I wonder what phase 4 will entail.

To me, Crypto currencies are like shares in a company.
Whatever people are prepared to pay for them is what they are worth. They have no intrinsic value. If people will pay huge sums of money for them, then that's what they are worth. If no one will pay anything for them, then they are worthless. The advantage of shares in a company is that they (usually) have some physical assets so you might get a few cents in the dollar if things collapse totally.

Crypto mining & trading is just a form of gambling IMHO. Never bet more than you can afford to lose.

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Grant
Darwin NT

To me, shares - like cryptocurrency - have become detached from their original purpose: which was to raise new capital - for plant, machinery, premises, raw materials - from investors. To me, the flow of capital from investors to (business) consumers is the purpose of a stock exchange, and the 'efficiency' of a stock exchange would the the proportion of turnover that ended up in the hands of entrepreneurs for productive development, rather than in the hands of other traders. I suspect the modern figure for efficiency would be vanishingly small.

On a related note, I was surprised recently to learn why the Industrial Revolution took hold so quickly in Great Britain. We abolished slavery: the slaves got nothing except their freedom, but the slave OWNERS (and there were a surprisingly large number of them) got compensated handsomely by the government for their financial loss. So there was a lot of loose money sloshing around, and a lot of it got invested in railways, factories, and the like (and some went into a 'stately home' building spree).

Well, that's one version of events, anyway.

Difference is Richard it was based on true cash value always will be a return Cash is Cash, Bitcoin is virtual you can't even hold a coin or note as it don't exist..

To me, shares - like cryptocurrency - have become detached from their original purpose

Very much so.
The share market was originally for the trading of shares & commodities. But now a huge portion of it's business is purely speculative- making money buy betting on which way the market/particular shares/ currencies will move in value.

Crypto currencies were meant to be like physical money- a method for exchange. But even more so than "real" currencies on the stock exchange, they are now nothing but speculation.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Difference is Richard it was based on true cash value always will be a return Cash is Cash, Bitcoin is virtual you can't even hold a coin or note as it don't exist..

Just like money in a Bank Account.

And paper money is actually a relatively recent invention.
Prior to that there were Bank Notes- a note from a bank stating how much coin or bullion they would give you upon presenting that note to them.


Actually there's a great old movie all about money, wealth and people's perceptions. "The Million Pound Note" with Gregory Peck.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Sorry for giving my + 2 bitcoins worth now valued at -3, will find a cave and hide for a while :P~

Heard of a QLD family who sold everything in August last year and put it on Bitcoin, now living in caravan (trailer)

Unfortunate that they didn't think to sell in mid to late Dec, they'd probably have a fairly nice house I would guess. But then again, the lesson I learned while I was doing the stock market thing at the end of the 90's was, in a crazy bull market, it isn't terribly hard to make paper profits, but then usually the greed kicks in too strongly, and well before the offsetting (rational) fear kicks in, you've often lost all those gains, and then some. Then the tendency is often to 'ride it out', and that can mean right to the bottom. Maybe it'll come back in X number of years, maybe not, but that experience has removed so many investors from the stock market. Same went for here, ppl saw 6-8 years ago it was below a buck, then in the low hundreds for quite a while, then the insane spikes over the last few years, and figured they didn't want to miss out on the action, which by definition they had. Sad, really,

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Crypto mining & trading is just a form of gambling IMHO. Never bet more than you can afford to lose.

Add most forms of investing to that. Anything is only worth whatever someone else is willing to pay you for it. That is what gives it a value.

And truer words have never been spoken.

+1

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Difference is Richard it was based on true cash value always will be a return Cash is Cash, Bitcoin is virtual you can't even hold a coin or note as it don't exist..

Not true. There are physical coins such as Bitcoin and LiteCoin. They are actual coins made out of silver, gold or plated metal that contain the key of the transaction and thus their worth.
10-physical-bitcoins-good-bad-ugly

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

The advantage of shares in a company is that they (usually) have some physical assets so you might get a few cents in the dollar if things collapse totally.

Or the shares of a company deliver back to the share owner, money in the form of dividends that represent a portion of the profit the company makes each quarter. So they have intrinsic value as long as the shares are not worthless and the company stays in business.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

Here's what the bitcoiners have done to the GPU market...............
I bought my pair of 1080s on Amazon.
I paid $745.00 each for them back on October 6th. They are now going for $1,280.00 to $1,600.00 on Amazon, where I bought mine. The exact same card.

Die, bitcoin, die.

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"The secret o' life is enjoying the passage of time." 1977, James Taylor
"With cats." 2018, kittyman

Here's what the bitcoiners have done to the GPU market...............
I bought my pair of 1080s on Amazon.
I paid $745.00 each for them back on October 6th. They are now going for $1,280.00 to $1,600.00 on Amazon, where I bought mine. The exact same card.

Die, bitcoin, die.

Ha ha LOL. But it should be Die, Ethereum, die. Bitcoin is only mined on ASIC devices not gpus. Ethereum and a few other alt-coins are mined on gpus

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

Here's what the bitcoiners have done to the GPU market...............
I bought my pair of 1080s on Amazon.
I paid $745.00 each for them back on October 6th. They are now going for $1,280.00 to $1,600.00 on Amazon, where I bought mine. The exact same card.

Die, bitcoin, die.

Ha ha LOL. But it should be Die, Ethereum, die. Bitcoin is only mined on ASIC devices not gpus. Ethereum and a few other alt-coins are mined on gpus

Well, my terminology may have been slightly incorrect, but I will stand corrected.
I think most people toss bitcoin in with the rest of the whole 'imitation money' craze.

Die, artificially created money, die.

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"The secret o' life is enjoying the passage of time." 1977, James Taylor
"With cats." 2018, kittyman

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09s3wbt (UK geoblock)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_70HeYL2lIs

There was a sober and comprehensive assessment of the cryptocurrency phenomenon on BBC TV this week, under the 'Panorama' (investigative journalism) strand. They covered three separate issues:

* distributed transaction logging for sales and purchases
* the use of the coin itself as an investment medium, with the expectation of ever-increasing value
* the pumping of unverified coin systems at 'ICOs' aimed at naive investors

(1) requires a stable and accepted valuation
(2) is driven by greed and ignorance, and requires anything but stable values
(3) is driven by organised crime - the modern version of Bernie Madoff's tricks

I wonder what phase 4 will entail.

---

SEC halts trading of three companies promoting crypto sales

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday suspended trading for shares of three companies that promoted plans to sell their own cryptocurrency.

The SEC banned investors from trading shares of Cherubim Interests Inc., PDX Partners Inc., and Victura Construction Group Inc., until March 2 as it investigates the companies.

All three companies announced in January that they had acquired high-quality blockchain technology, the ledger system through which cryptocurrencies operate. The companies said they would also launch an “initial coin offering” (ICO), in which a corporation sells units of a proprietary cryptocurrency as it would sell shares on the stock market.

The SEC cited “questions regarding the nature of the companies’ business operations and the value of their assets,” as the reason for its action. It’s the latest measure taken by the agency against companies aiming to rake in cash off of cryptocurrency’s rise.

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I suspect that they will be watched very closely.

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"The secret o' life is enjoying the passage of time." 1977, James Taylor
"With cats." 2018, kittyman

I suspect that they will be watched very closely.

One recently was not watched so closely, which is probably why they pulled these three:

LoopX Startup Pulls ICO Exit Scam and Disappears with $4.5 Million

A cryptocurrency startup named LoopX has pulled an exit scam after collecting around $4.5 million from users during an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) held for the past weeks.

The LoopX team disappeared out of the blue at the start of the week when it took down its website and deleted its Facebook, Telegram, and YouTube channels without any explanation.

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“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”
--- Margaret Mead

And I suppose that bitcoins have no serial numbers to trace.................................

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"The secret o' life is enjoying the passage of time." 1977, James Taylor
"With cats." 2018, kittyman