It is basically impossible to speculate in bitcoin and not be greedy and stupid. There is no underlying logic to result in any particular price or any way to use some sort of technical charting. My point about greed is important. The best way to get burned is to put money into an exchange like Mt Gox to have them hold your private keys. First, you will own nothing since there is no regulation like at a brokerage. Second, their centralized server is a central point of failure and attack. It *will* ultimately fail since protection it has to be public facing and protection is alway more difficult than attack.
The "proper" and very safe way to hold bitcoins is with your own private key, thus they can't be traded in and out of currency (speculation) but must be held or transacted on digital services. They can also be spent on physical products but that generally involves a physical product company using an exchange like Mt Gox which doesn't make sense. In that case (my case with 0.1% of my portfolio so far) it is simply digital gold in a mattress. Buy, hold, diversify and wait for the dollar to crumble.
All that said, the best way to exchange value in the information age is something like bitcoin. There is no doubt whatsoever that the distributed transaction chain has long lasting value contained within it. It was designed that way. If I had to speculate in something like value in a chain, I would pick some scrypt coins and diversify. The newest coins are 99% doomed since they have no new qualities making them any better than the old ones. But there will be new coins that will jump in value because they add new value. As an engineer I would like to create one of those. But for now I will learn about what new value can be added to a coin to make it appeal to a wide variety of people.
Excellent observations. Thank you.
I generally agree with your assessment with one caveat. I beleive the true value lies in the decentralized network not the “ currency “ per se. As the article stated “ the light bulb to the grid “.
After reading the White Paper I realized that this was a network. After watching with fascination over the years the adoptions of new technologies and doing a vast amount of reading on the subject, I determined that this was a killer app.
Every movement of Bitcoin from its inception to present day has been exponential and gaining speed. You can look at network hash rates, price, number of users, all of it. The other very important thing is that it is global, worldwide. I know, redundant but this can’t be overstated.
Mankind has never seen the adoption of a technology this rapid. I am grateful for this opportunity and the ability to see it coming. This is the natural evolution of the information age, THE NEXT BIG THING!