No:1 Final Fantasy Fan wrote:I want to invest in cryptocurrency litecoins. Anyone bought any? Bitcoins are too expensive but I wouldn't mind spending say £200 on LTC (litecoin) for fun and see what happens.
1) You don't need to buy the full bitcoin (btc), you can buy any amount of bitcoin you like, if you wanted to you could literally buy $0.01 worth of BTC, despite the name, it can be subdivided into 100 Million units
Grumpy David wrote:Bitcoins and similar don't have the stability that currency needs. The volatile nature of it creates the incentive to hoard it under the assumption of ever increasing value (due to the finite amount of Bitcoins that can ever be mined). It's similar to something like Gold but with wilder swings.
It's speculation to buy it, it could go unbelievably well like for people who bought it 5 years ago etc or it could be a disaster and you end up on some secret government watch list. It is heavily associated with buying illegal gooseberry fool and money laundering. I know Nationwide won't accept mortgage deposits that come from Bitcoins.
2) 5 Years ago? Try 3 months ago. BTW went from roughly $2000 per coin in August to over $5000 right now.
3) Know what else is heavily associated with buying illegal gooseberry fool? Real money! Oh gooseberry fool, hope you've never touched a penny or else the government will have you in their big database of potential criminals. How exactly would you even end up on a government list while using crypto currencies? The whole point is anonymity
Grumpy David wrote:If you want to invest and providing you have a sufficient timeline to wait out any volatile swings, I'd stick to global trackers like Vanguard Lifestrategy. Trust in a growing global population to buy more stuff.
4) If you were saying you want to invest all your money in crypto, then I would agree don't just jump in on it, but if you can risk the $200, and it's true there is some volatility to it but the trend so far has been constantly up there's no more risk than investing in traditional stocks.
5) Blockchains (what btc and other crypto currencies run on) is an amazing piece of technology. It's largest detractors (I don't mean Grumpy David, I mean large banks) try to make it look bad because they know if people switch they will be totally ruined. It's the same thing that happened with the internet and record companies. This is why people like Jamie Dimon try to say it's a scam, but then also have their banks buying up btc, or are trying to develop and copyright their own versions...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-1 ... oin-europehttp://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-1 ... -175-times6) If you don't want to invest in crypto currencies directly, there are now also ETF's and mutual funds that you can buy through traditional stock markets that invest in a variety of crypto currencies.