Avoid cryptocurrencies

[Pat Mustard]

I can see why people would trade on momentum, but to hold it?  I don't think anyone should hate their money that badly.

I gained a good portion of cryptocurrency from mining it, and I've basically held on to it ever since then and overall, it has performed way better than the stock market or anything else (owning gold, silver, etc.).

There are several different cryptocurrencies that I own, but I swapped some of the Bitcoin and Ethereum that I mined for them. I haven't sold any cryptocurrency for US dollars, and so far, I haven't purchased anything with it; I've been saving it to continue to take advantage of its continuing growth trend in the long run.

Cryptocurrency is also extremely volatile, but that has huge advantages for investors/traders if they know how to apply something to it referred to as "technical analysis."

The idea of cryptocurrencies is to have a medium of exchange with advantages over conventional money; for instance, the US dollar loses value to inflation; cryptocurrency has been doing the opposite in the long run. There are other advantages, such as being able to send and receive money over long distances quickly & inexpensively, and not having to deal with the same types of burdens as there are with gold, such as storing and transporting it.

The problem with cryptocurrencies is essentially that it's not practical or feasible for the average person because of its risks, complexities, and many other problems. Those issues have to be resolved in order for society to widely accept and adopt it as a medium of exchange.

Technical analysis is bullshit, it never worked for actual investments and it doesn't work for cryptocurrencies which have nothing behind them to analyse.

99.999999999999% of all crypto schemes are or were scams, and with the FTC's pre-christmas ruling to allow indirect trading of bitcoin in the US I fully expect that to be exposed as a scam too in the not too distant future.