Right after I finished watching this video, I got an email from Coinbase saying they'd closed my account. Apparently, I'd violated their TOS by buying bitcoin on behalf of my friend in another country. (Ironically, underscoring the need for money-technology that doesn't require 3rd-party permission to transact!)
Enjoyed my lunch listening to an Andreas lecture on Bitcoin (and why it's much more political than most people realize). Five years later and this video is more relevant than ever to understand what's happening in the world and why inflation is increasing everywhere.
...but I had a feeling it would continue to rise in value and tried to predict, based on past data, when bitcoin might break $10,000 for the first time. I predicted April 2018, but it ended up happening even more quickly by November 28th, 2017!
Nothing makes me happier than seeing Western Union locations close. These places have really high fees and make it their business to prey on immigrants and the unbanked. I hope over time Bitcoin helps people everywhere safely store the fruits of their labor and allows them to send it over borders for much less money!
...tuned-in to watch the countdown to the Bitcoin halvening! (Every 210,000 blocks that are mined, the Bitcoin miner-reward is cut in half! On this historic day, the miner-reward per block was reduced from 25 to 12.5. Sometime during the summer of 2020, there will be the next halvening, and the miner-reward will drop from 12.5 to 6.25!)
...and then drew lines into the future trying to guess when the next big price spike would happen and how high the price would go. The price of Bitcoin in December 2015 was $325 and I based on my stupid photoshop comps I predicted that Bitcoin would hit $3,000 by Dec 25th, 2016.
I showed this to a few of my quant-programmer friends who shrugged and told me told me I probably had no idea what I was doing. Hahah.
Much to my own surprise, my prediction ended up being pretty close! The price didn't spike until June of 2017, so it took 18 months instead of 12, but the price did go up 8x to $2,800!
On Thursday, I decided to get my gamble on. After over two years of watching the price of Bitcoin, I had a hunch that it would continue to exhibit fractal growth-patterns (self-repeating at different scale).
Spent Friday using Photoshop to compare previous wave-events in the price of Bitcoin. All my obsessions with fractals finally had some "real-world value" when I decided to make some fractal predictions about the possible future-price of Bitcoin. Back on this particular day, May 8th 2015, Bitcoin was trading at $240 USD. (A little over two years later in August 2017, it's at $4000 USD - almost a 20x increase!)
...but the daily price-swings are NOT for the faint of heart. My advice: buy some and forget about it. In 10 years they'll either be worth zero (made illegal) or be worth LOTS more than you paid.
