Bitcoins?

Ever since we started doing business with Trinidad, we have had problems getting wire transfers from there. It seems that the banks there do not like to part with USD. Even though the TT government receives BILLIONS of USD for their oil and gas exports. It has taken as long as two weeks to get our payments. Right now we have an order for almost 50K, and our client is crying about this problem. In talking to a family member who is an IT security guy he suggested that we look into money transfer by bitcoin. This is woowoo stuff to me, but handling charges are minimal. Anybody here have knowledge about this? Run screaming away, or a valid alternative? Help from the hive, please.

(Note - I'm not a cryptocurrency expert, the advice is worth roughly what you pay for it).

As a payment/transfer system it should be fine as long as you've set things up in such a way that you can convert the money into fiat currency fairly quickly (ie, within days, not weeks). The main issue with Bitcoin is that it is very volatile, so the exchange rate to USD can change pretty quickly. As a result, if the buyer sends you $50k in Bitcoin, by the time the transaction is processed in the blockchain, in your wallet and you can take it to a Bitcoin exchange to turn into USD, you may have made a few hundred bucks, or you may have lost a grand. Yes, it's that volatile.

As an investment for anything but speculative purposes?

Nope, nope, nope.

Have them send the money to me, I promise to get it to you.

There is also the problem of occasional theft. The Mt. Gox case makes for interesting reading. I'm not much of a Luddite but bitcoin is an order of magnitude too shady for me.

There's actually some talk that Bitcoin is being used to smuggle money out of China.

As a currency it's highly volitile (despite the fact that it was created supposedly to avoid that) and you'll need to find a buyer to convert it to USD. I'm unsure how hard the latter of the two is.

I don't play with it because I'm too risk adverse. I believe both Overstock and Newegg accept it as currency although I'm unsure of how that's actually working out for them.

You have answered my question. Guess I will have to buy some patience pills. Thanks.

It can work but the extreme volatility of it is scary. Days is too long to hold onto Bitcoin for transaction purposes IMO, I'd recommend minutes or hours. Also the danger of making a typo is scary...there are no backsies or second chances.

Trinidad does still have foreign exchange problems (both in reserve levels and in the red tape of getting transactions done there), which is why they have a tight grip on those US dollars. They're a heavily oil-dependent economy and oil is dirt cheap right now.

Gameboy- Wires from Barbados arrive in hours.

And we've got our own problems...the economy here seems to be in an unrecoverable downward spiral that it entered almost a decade ago, foreign reserves are almost dangerously low.

Also our economy is almost as tourism-dependent as Trinidad's is oil-dependent, which is very bad news as "hipster appeal" has become a major factor in where tourists choose to go. Barbados is "mainstream" and "sold out" as a tourist destination, and it's always been expensive on top of that.

Back to bitcoin, I think at some point in the future (probably within the next 5 years) the price is going to crash as it runs into inescapable structural limitations to its growth and security, as well as privacy problems. At that point users will migrate to another cryptocurrency (I think I have a pretty good idea which one in particular) and those who don't get out early are going to end up taking a bath.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

Not to mention that governments are getting more and more interested in keeping an eye on bitcoin, like requiring exchanges to register here in the US and people who are not registered actually getting in trouble for selling Bitcoin to other people.

Suppose I want to buy some bitcoin. Is it possible through Vanguard?

I see something called Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. OTC: GBTC

GameboyRMH said:

Back to bitcoin, I think at some point in the future (probably within the next 5 years) the price is going to crash as it runs into inescapable structural limitations to its growth and security, as well as privacy problems. At that point users will migrate to another cryptocurrency (I think I have a pretty good idea which one in particular) and those who don't get out early are going to end up taking a bath.

Those limitations- the number of transactions it can do per day- have long ago been hit. Bitcoin will never be used for stocks.

I'm interested to know which coin you think is the "next" one; I would have said Etherium if they hadn't had to fork it over their security concerns a few months ago. Maybe Litecoin? I barely know anything about that one.

What about the mother berkin cash app? 

Hi cwh,

Beyond the volatility, I won’t have anything to do with Bitcoin as a matter of principle.

Many of the transactions are nefarious (drugs, weapons, terrorism, human trafficking) and I’m not going to help the bad guys by providing them with a sea of benign transactions to hide within.

Additionally, other than the blockchain technology aspect, crypto currency doesn’t add any value, it just creates a net zero game of winners and losers.

I’d far rather provide venture capital to a specific company or general industry I believe will provide excellent value over the long haul. That way, everyone wins…consumers get some combination of superior technology, higher quality, or lower prices and I, as the person that accepted risk and opportunity cost, on average, gets rewarded with stock appreciation and/or dividends.

I don’t day trade for the same reasons listed above but at least day traders can argue that they’re providing liquidity which allows money to flow from where it’s not productive to where it is productive.

Crypto currency “investors” can’t even make a claim to that…they’re the ultimate bottom feeders of just flat out trying to get rich at the equal and opposite loss of others.

I know you’re just trying to move money more quickly but, as a matter of principle, I invite you to draw a moral line and place all crypto currency on the other side of that line.

Cryptocurrency is sketchy. I wouldn't put any large sum of money into it unless I could afford to risk losing it entirely.

Also for a long time it was hard to get computer graphics cards at a decent price, because cryptocurrency "miners" as they call them were buying them all up to use them for crunching the data to earn more bitcoins or whatever. I hold some amount of resentment towards them just for that alone.

Some of you guys need to look at the dates of threads.  

This thread is like "Back to the Bitcoin Future".  You are currently having a three year old conversation.

I was feeling nostalgic.. and curious about BTC. 
 

Also just watched The Big Short and in light of recent Spring 2020 stock market performance despite all the agony in the real world... berkeley. 

In reply to RX Reven' :

Are you ok with using cash? I hear that is also used for nefarious transactions?  Using cash just gives cover to the bad guys. 

T.J. said:

In reply to RX Reven' :

Are you ok with using cash? I hear that is also used for nefarious transactions?  Using cash just gives cover to the bad guys. 

My understanding is that cash transactions exceeding $10,000 much be reported to the government.  But, beyond that technicality, cash is easy, crypto currency is hard...people generally don't make things unnecessarily hard for no reason.    

Buying Bitcoin is not an investment. It's speculation. It would also be a text-book case of when to use a trailing stop.  But whatever you do, don't put money into it you aren't willing to lose.