Well, no doubt someone has gotten very rich already, and some others will get very rich. However, many others will be left holding the bag and lose their shirt. This whole crypto bubble is nothing more than a zero sum game of casino roulette. There is no new wealth being created. A lot of wealth has actually been destroyed (electricity consumption for mining). Someone is going to end up paying and will pay dearly. I know it won’t be me… 
What’s telling is the desire to convert to homes/cars. Most short term investments are risky.
Congrats to those who have already done it!!!
Gamblers that leave all their money on the table will lose it all. Smart bitcoin buyers have already sold out. Or at least are only playing with the house money now. Once you have pulled out your stake, gambling can be fun with no risk…
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Both, Bitcoin (Crypto) and Enron, are bad and they equally match each other. The only issue is that we all know Crypto is going to break one day where as we were not aware of Enron.
If someone (either you or me (even with 1 GBTC 70% = $1000 gain ) or someone else) makes money by this crypto-madness, it is well and good.
IMO, better be fearful on cryptos and come out safely whenever it is possible/profitable. Never regret later when it is going up further !
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Here is the question and well voted answer
Question: Do you think Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will be the next thing that changes society, such as the internet?
Answer: someone posted
I don’t think crypto is going to change society in any profound ways.
Let’s take a big step and look at the mile high view of what problem blockchains and crypto actually try to solve. The primary claim to fame of block chains is pretty much that they enable p2p untrusted transactions that are verified in a distributed public manner. If one were to attempt to differentiate them from existing currency transaction systems that would be their defining feature. Some also add more specific features like greater anonymity, but that’s not necessarily a feature of all cryptos.
The first question is whether or not these features actually add any real utility to most transactions. What kind of transactions actually benefit from this feature set? The answer is generally trade in illicit goods and services. Things where you don’t want a paper trail, don’t want to go through a bank and don’t necessarily trust the seller or buyer. There’s people who might value it for ideological reasons beyond that but from a purely pragmatic standpoint it’s pretty much just black market transactions. I think this is the first strike against cryptos from a regulatory standpoint. Major governments want to watch money flows for a variety of tax compliance and national security reasons. A tool specifically designed to circumvent that doesn’t stand much chance of legitimate acceptance because of it.
On the flipside there’s lots of problems with existing cryptocurrencies that either don’t have technical solutions or flat out aren’t technical problems to begin with:
Makes controlling monetary policy impossible. Again there’s going to be ideological arguments how this is the best feature of all but in practice if the world was running on Bitcoin in 2008 we likely would have ended up in another great depression.
Inefficiency. Transactions are expensive by design computationally and this ultimately translate into monetary costs. There’s some proposed solutions to these problems, but the most public one basically involves just taking transactions off the block chain and using it only to process dispute resolution.
No real leverage or credit mechanism beyond 1:1 lending. The world literally runs on credit these days and there’s really no mechanism to enable it in the crypto world. This is further complicated by the rapid price appreciation of most coins and the underlying volatility. Credit doesn’t work in a deflationary environment and while not all coins are deflationary by design some are and that pretty much precludes ever having a functional credit market.
Volatility. A real currency used for actual day to day transactions or even large credit backed purchases needs price stability and crypto doesn’t have that to any degree at all. You simply can’t plan medium or even short term business decisions regarding pricing around any major cryptocurrency currently and that literally precludes them from being used as an actual currency.
Deposit insurance, theft, fraud resolution and so forth. Basically all the services banks actually provide to customers, included lending and credit. Crypto is touted as being seperate from government oversight and banks, but both of these entities actually provide a number of very useful services. In practice there’s already entities moving into the crypto space that do these things anyways because they’re good features to have. Coinbase does some of these things for example. There’s solutions and insurance options to do these things, but it ultimately means you’re going to have banks anyways.
Overall there’s not many if any reasons for consumers or governments to support cryptocoin adoption imo. The whole thing is a solution in search of a problem that doesn’t exist for most people and even the areas where it could make a difference usually find it ineffectual because it’s an issue of power not of technology. Virtually every system that could improved by cryptocurrency could also be improved by a variety of other automation techniques too. You’ll see stuff about how cryptocurrency is going to revoluationize the bond market or something similar. That’s not because crypto solves some problem in the bond market that nothing else can, but because the bond market is just built on old tech in general and based on conducting transactions over the telephone. Even then most solutions are likely to be specialized private block chains run by institutional players where the actual costs of administrating such a network are minimized and there is method of insuring node uptime. There’s just not many reasons to use existing coins for much of anything even if block chain based solutions actually end up being superior solutions.
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All the above are good reasons to distrust crypto but fundamentally speaking, even if none of them are legit, it is still a major gamble to keep money in crypto at this point because valuation is purely driven by speculation and can’t last. People are buying into it only because they think prices are going to go up, not because they believe in the value that blockchain technology is going to bring to society.
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Then why is the price going up in the first place?
Wuqijun already said “People are buying into it only because they think prices are going to go up”.
This is speculative run, we do not know Mr.Market pulls down.
Normally, such will happen unexpected time when everyone is exuberant of CryptoCurrencies and everyone is fully involved their savings (with all credits full) !
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Also, it might not be necessary for everyone to participate on credit before a bubble would burst. Bitcoin already burst once back in 2014. There were insignificant number of participants back then. Also, most people didn’t buy into tech stocks when dot com busted in 2000. Most people didn’t put money into tulip bulbs back in the 17th century either.
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Saw a good article on Quora:
Why didn’t Warren Buffett invest in any cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, etc.?
Interestingly, Warren Buffett was aware of Bitcoin and had a basic understanding of it earlier than 99% of the general public. In a March 2014 interview he gave on CNBC, he remarked:
“It’s a method of transmitting money. It’s a very effective way of transmitting money and you can do it anonymously and all that. A check is a way of transmitting money, too. Are checks worth a whole lot of money just because they can transmit money? Are money orders? You can transmit money by money orders. People do it. I hope bitcoin becomes a better way of doing it, but you can replicate it a bunch of different ways and it will be. The idea that it has some huge intrinsic value is just a joke in my view.”
At the time 1 BTC was trading at around $600. Today (12/15/2017) it is trading nearly 30x higher at $17,640. And I am pretty sure this has not changed his one iota.
In a recent discussion with MBA students in Omaha, here is what he had to say about Bitcoin:
Unsurprisingly, Buffett thinks coin offerings will end badly. “People get excited from big price movements, and Wall Street accommodates,” he said.
Bitcoin, the mother of all digital currencies, currently trades at around $5,700, with a market cap now surpassing $90 billion. Still, Buffett remains skeptical, saying: “You can’t value bitcoin because it’s not a value-producing asset.” He added that there’s no telling how far bitcoin’s price will go and described it as a “real bubble in that sort of thing.”
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Mr. Buffett views Bitcoin the same way he views gold — and he has never invested in it. This is what he had to say about gold in his 2011 Annual Letter:
The second major category of investments involves assets that will never produce anything, but that are purchased in the buyer’s hope that someone else – who also knows that the assets will be forever unproductive – will pay more for them in the future. Tulips, of all things, briefly became a favorite of such buyers in the 17th century.
This type of investment requires an expanding pool of buyers, who, in turn, are enticed because they believe the buying pool will expand still further. Owners are not inspired by what the asset itself can produce – it will remain lifeless forever – but rather by the belief that others will desire it even more avidly in the future.
The major asset in this category is gold, currently a huge favorite of investors who fear almost all other assets, especially paper money (of whose value, as noted, they are right to be fearful). Gold, however, has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative. True, gold has some industrial and decorative utility, but the demand for these purposes is both limited and incapable of soaking up new production. Meanwhile, if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end.
What motivates most gold purchasers is their belief that the ranks of the fearful will grow. During the past decade that belief has proved correct. Beyond that, the rising price has on its own generated additional buying enthusiasm, attracting purchasers who see the rise as validating an investment thesis.
As “bandwagon” investors join any party, they create their own truth – for a while. Over the past 15 years, both Internet stocks and houses have demonstrated the extraordinary excesses that can be created by combining an initially sensible thesis with well-publicized rising prices. In these bubbles, an army of originally skeptical investors succumbed to the “proof” delivered by the market, and the pool of buyers – for a time – expanded sufficiently to keep the bandwagon rolling. But bubbles blown large enough inevitably pop. And then the old proverb is confirmed once again: “What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.”
Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.
Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?
Beyond the staggering valuation given the existing stock of gold, current prices make today’s annual production of gold command about $160 billion. Buyers – whether jewelry and industrial users, frightened individuals, or speculators – must continually absorb this additional supply to merely maintain an equilibrium at present prices.
A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.
Admittedly, when people a century from now are fearful, it’s likely many will still rush to gold. I’m confident, however, that the $9.6 trillion current valuation of pile A will compound over the century at a rate far inferior to that achieved by pile B.
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Are we at the beginning or the end? 
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I never tried to copy Buffett nor his investment ideas. But his views on crypto and gold match my views exactly.
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Everybody must agree WB is thoughtful in his investments. He thinks about this sort of stuff every single day. So even if one doesn’t agree, and I bet most people here don’t, I think WB’s writing is very good food for thought.
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I guarantee my two friends “investing” in crypto have no clue what blockchain technology is.
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PENDING!!
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I guess the buyer still needs to buy tilte insurance, he must be paying without a mortgage since there’s no Bitcoin mortgage yet.
Question is how the escrow will handle the transfer the Bitcoin. Escrow companies don’t have the Bitcoin trust account yet.
When I plan to my old car, I can try to sell as Bitcoin only. But how do I verify that the Bitcoin I got is authentic? There’s a lot of insfrastructured needed.
I wonder how many sellers would like to be paid with bitcoin a year from now?
I do not know about future, but made a google search and got these references (read the body listing agent messages, seller is willing to accept bitcoins).
Unless crash comes, bitcoins will be accepted by many sellers.
Finally, they will lose the home as well as bitcoin values !
https://www.redfin.com/OR/Brookings/96598-Johns-Pl-97415/home/40364424
https://www.redfin.com/MA/Northbridge/0-Prospect-St-01588/home/103952093
https://www.redfin.com/FL/Miami-Beach/844-Jefferson-Ave-33139/unit-2/home/42796744
https://www.redfin.com/CA/Tiburon/747-Tiburon-Blvd-94920/home/1278802
https://www.redfin.com/NY/Unknown/160-20-79th-Ave-11366/home/20822449
https://www.redfin.com/FL/Sunny-Isles-Beach/17749-Collins-Ave-33160/unit-3001/home/101345438
I would suppose these sellers wanted to hold onto these bitcoins after the sale. Otherwise they would’ve asked for cash!!! Talk about flushing your home down the drain after bitcoin crashed… 
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