Will the price of bitcoin keep going up ?

[aFireInside]

I can't figure out if i should put some money into bit coin. 

 

Im new to it but i think if its a good idea i should do it before it become more popular and the price goes up . 

 

 

How do you change bit coin into fiat ? and fiat into bit coin . 

 

what is the official software or website buy bit coins? 

 

 

 

Sorry i haven't had time to look through all the tutorials .

 

I prefer mac 

[Bulbasaur]

Hi Ivan,

 

I just posted on another forum in response to almost the same question, so I'll just plagiarize myself:

 

I recently used Coinbase to get started. After looking into various options, I concluded that Coinbase was the simplest and easiest option. You can link your bank account the same way you can with PayPal, and then buy BTC without having to deal with international wire transfers or sending documents to confirm your identity. I didn't want to wait two days for the slower account verification method, and I believed them to be fairly reputable, so I trusted them briefly with my online banking login. The bank account was confirmed immediately, at which point I changed my online banking password. You'll have to decide your own level of trust and how much of a hurry you're in to buy. 

Once the account is verified, it's simple to buy and sell BTC. However, they have a daily trading limit which means that in times of high volume, you may not be able to trade immediately. In this situation, they offer to schedule the trade for a later date (in my case it was something like 2-3 days later) at whatever the market rate will be at the time the trade is processed. This is important to understand when placing a trade like this; when I tried to buy, BTC was in the 500s, but by the time the delayed trade was processed, it was in the 700s. With the extreme volatility of BTC prices, you have to be careful. The advantage of such an option is that you can save your place in line. You can cancel at any time up to the point that the trade processes, so if you do a delayed trade like this you should watch the price up until the date that the trade is scheduled for and decide whether or not you want to go through with it.

Coinbase is not an exchange. What it does is give you a relatively easy way to get USD from a normal bank account into the BTC system. So if you do want to participate in trading at an exchange, it's much easier to buy BTC through Coinbase and send BTC to the exchange rather than trying to get USD into the exchange. Likewise, if you want to 'cash out', it should be much easier to send BTC from the exchange back to Coinbase rather than trying to get USD out of the exchange. 
 

Quote

1. Is it too late to buy bitcoin
2. Is it worth even buying 0.5 bitcoin

I don't think anyone can really answer these questions for you, because no one can know for sure what will happen in the future. I would recommend that you think about your goals, do some research, and make a plan. The question you should think about is, do you want to be a trader or an investor? An investor would buy BTC and hold them, because they believe their future value will be higher than their current price. Investors are making an 'educated gamble' based on any number of reasons they find compelling, for example the design of the algorithm, the runaway inflation of the modern fiat economy, the acceptance of BTC by Chinese retailer Baidu, the implicit consent of the US Senate based on the Nov 18th hearing, advice they read on the internet... 

If you want to buy BTC as an investor, it is sort of implicit that you expect the price to rise in the long-term. However, your questions suggest that you don't have this expectation. In that case, I can't recommend investing in BTC until you've done more reading and research and developed a strong opinion one way or the other. There's no shortage of opinions on either side, and many are very uninformed or enveloped in conflicts of interest. In order to spot hit pieces and pundits that have only a specious understanding of the subject, educate yourself on the technical structure of Bitcoin. I would highly recommend this interview as one of the best resources I've found on the subject: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP9-lAYngi4

Another option is to be a trader. A trader doesn't attempt to predict the future price, but develops, tests and adheres to a trading strategy in order to profit from market moves. Trading requires more work, more research, more involvement in the market, and may ultimately be less profitable than 'buy-and-hold'. However, traders can react to crashes and walk away with a nice profit if the market collapses, whereas an investor would be wiped out. For more on trading, see Goomboo's thread: 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60501.0

Whatever you plan to do, educate yourself first and don't risk any more money than you know you can afford.

 

 

I would also add that if you decide to buy some, do some research on options for storing them securely. You can do paper wallets, online storage (trusting a third party), hardware storage with clients like Electrum or Armory... There are many options with different risks and levels of convenience.

[ribuck]

Bitcoin is not a get-rich-quick scheme. No-one knows where the price will eventually settle.

 

One course of action is to put 3% of your savings into Bitcoin, then go and do other stuff. Check the price again in a year or so to see whether you've lost your investment or whether it has done well for you. I think it was Max Keiser who first suggested 3% as an amount small enough that you can afford to risk losing it, but big enough that you will benefit significantly from any gain. It's not worth investing so much that you get sick with worry watching every twitch in the exchange rate.

 

Meanwhile, in the years ahead, the really big money will be made by entrepreneurs who build businesses around Bitcoin. That's going to be the gold rush of the next three years. Bitcoin is now where the internet was in 1994.

[Naer]

check out primecoin, it's superior to bitcoin in that it uses the cunningham proof of work system to find prime numbers to determine hashes in the blockchain. And even peercoin which uses proof of stake

[Wesley]

Altcoins like litecoin, peercoin and many others are a great option to get in early on the bitcoin arena. The bet would be that they gain in popularity as bitcoin does, and then eventually some bitcoin users may be looking for good alternatives and switch over.

 

It is higher risk as it may not gain any popularity and people will just forget about it. Or the differentiating features are integrated into bitcoin rendering the altcoin obsolete. However, relative to bitcoin you can make a decent risk investment in a couple altcoins.

 

Back to the OP I will second what others have said that you can never know. However, I think that in the long run bitcoin will go up and that is why I have bitcoin. In the short run it could literally do anything, but I am an investor and not a trader so I do not care what it does in the short run.

 

Also, in your YouTube videos or under them or something you could add an address for tips/donations. You might gets some bitcoin that way, probably not worth a ton right now but could be a way to get in and bitcoin will gain in value for the future.

[FreedomPhilosophy]

Bitcoin is volatile making any entry into the market high risk, long term prospects are good IMO because this is still an emerging technology that is undervalued.

 

Only risk what you can afford to lose.

[ReptilianBrain]

Obviously, Bitcoin has lost a lot of value since this thread was started. Looking at a chart of Bitcoin prices, I am predicting it will continue to fall and then settle in the $200-300 range. <- just my prediction. 

[Wesley]

Obviously, Bitcoin has lost a lot of value since this thread was started. Looking at a chart of Bitcoin prices, I am predicting it will continue to fall and then settle in the $200-300 range. <- just my prediction. 

Long term it is worth many multiples what it is now. It could do anything in the short run (literally, anything) but if it drops to 200, I will be very excited to make a few more purchases with my Coinbase account at that time.

[Jer]

Will the value of the dollar continue to fall? Signs point to yes... 

 

But obviously BTC is high risk like others mentioned