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SEC Warns 'Extreme Caution' Over Cryptocurrency Investments As Many People Take Out Mortgages To Buy Bitcoin (qz.com)
The head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission has warned bitcoin and other cryptocurrency investors to beware of scams and criminal activity in the sector. In the financial regulator's strongest statement yet, SEC chair Jay Clayton said: "If a promoter guarantees returns, if an opportunity sounds too good to be true, or if you are pressured to act quickly, please exercise extreme caution and be aware of the risk that your investment may be lost." The warning comes at a time when many people have begun to take out mortgages to buy bitcoin. From a report: Clayton's statement was also issued the same day the SEC took regulatory action to halt an initial coin offering (ICO). "Recognize that these markets span national borders and that significant trading may occur on systems and platforms outside the United States. Your invested funds may quickly travel overseas without your knowledge," he wrote, in a sentence that was in bold. Clayton's statement referenced some of the crucial debates that have swirled around the rise and regulation of crypto-assets like bitcoins. Are these currencies? Commodities? Or securities? The statement notes in a footnote that bitcoin in the US has been designated a commodity. But the broader answer seems to be that while it depends from case to case, initial coin offerings, at least, are more likely to be scrutinized and held to the same bar as securities offerings.
Now is when you cash out, if you were wondering...
Next month, "Help me, other tax payers who aren't idiots! My mortgage is now bigger than the market value of my house. Make a law that makes the bank put my mortgage back the way it was! It's not fair!"
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Stupidity is never a good investment.
They should have done that when it was at 11 bucks, not 11.000.
Its crazy that 40 bux worth of bitcoins at the start could be worth millions today and the facebook twins are billionaries off their 11 million dollars of btc they bought. Its driving up litecoin and ethereum due to the trading frenzy.
But the exchanges are raking in the transaction fees right now. Can't imagine how much they are earning per day now.
those of us that bought homes in 2008 will be more than happy to ...
(1) take a HELOC
(2) buy their homes at sheriff's auction when BTC crashes
(3) rent them back to them (or evict them and rent to hard-working immigrants)
(4) profit
Every future crisis is just a path to profit.
No, more like a giant poker game where a few people will win and a lot more will lose. Oh, and the game may or may not be fixed, but if it is, there's not a thing you can do about it.
Or more accurately, like the pyramid parties and pyramid letters that were so popular back in the early 1980s, where a bunch of people would pass money to the people at the top of the pyramid. You could make money at it, provided you brought in some greater fools to the next party to pass money to you.
Bitcoin is a zero-sum game. No one is walking away from the table with any money that didn't come from someone else's pocket. Or in some cases, from someone else's credit card, mortgage, retirement account, or college fund.
Isn't one of the key defining features of a bubble when a large number of relatively uniformed people decide to participate based on credit and margin? Tulips, the Great Crash, Great Recession, Internet Stocks, Great Recession...
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
No more need be said.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Mortgage guy here. While I'm sure SOME people have done this, there is absolutely no reliable tracking post-funding to see what people did with the equity in their homes. In our Loan Origination System, there is an option for "cash out debt consolidation" & "cash out home improvement" but no option for "cash out Bitcoin". I call BS
I wonder what the collateral damage is going to be when bitcoin bubble bursts.
My cynical bet is that it will be used as a pretext to start the next crypto war. You know, government backdoors, mandatory key escrows, and restrictions to what data at rest can be encrypted.
This is where contagions start. People taking loans out to level up with cryptocurrencies are just asking to get hosed when the price drops.
All it takes are a small amount of losses for the knock on effect to hit.
If you are mortgaging your house to buy Bitcoin, you're a fucking idiot. You deserve the very real chance of losing everything, but your family doesn't.
IF Bitcoin succeeds, a value of $100k-$500k is almost certain (As a floor. No one really has a clue what value a successful Bitcoin will plateau at over the long term.) -- Too many people and not enough supply for it to be otherwise. But Bitcoin is not yet a sure thing. Crypto in general may end up a failed experiment. Bitcoin specifically could implode, and be superceded by a different crypto. And even if it does succeed -- Bitcoin has had serious drops in the past -- seeing your investment drop to 25% of current value, and not recovering for 2 years is entirely possible.
If you've got some spare cash, and it won't cause irreparable harm if it disappears completely, sure, invest that if you think Bitcoin will succeed. But no more than that.
I wonder what the collateral damage is going to be when bitcoin bubble bursts.
Probably fairly insignificant. A few people will lose their ass because they have no concept of risk. Bitcoin isn't a big enough deal to impact the wider economy to any meaningful degree.
You don't actually make a profit until you sell the asset.... I suggest you do that NOW!
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Look at how much my House is worth! Everyone KNOWS that the old Economic principles don't apply anymore!
the facebook twins are bitcoin billionaires
You left out a word...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Though here in the USA, the socialist utopia pushers do try.
Folks don't seem to realize what the 2000 and 2009 crashes were about or what caused them.
Students of history are condemned to watch while the ignorant repeat it.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I am very uneasy. There seem to several bubbles going which in aggregate or perhaps 1 to 3 happening at the same time spells disaster:
1) Cryptocurrencies. Yes, plural.
2) AI
3) Financial markets
4) Housing
5) Student loans
5) Health care
6) Tech in general, a run up in price of things such as FB and Tesla.
7) Foreign and domestic real estate
And probably more I can't think of right now. A collapse in the NYSE exchange would have a large impact on the global economy but 2 or 3 smaller ones together might have a ripple effect causing a larger collapse. I think we live in fragile times. If you look at history there were bubbles about every 10 to 20 years after the lessons of the last collapse fades from memory. We're about due.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Personally, I believe it's catastrophically stupid to take a mortgage to buy bitcoin.
I rather suspect most of the people doing that couldn't even tell you, substantially, what bitcoin is.
It's a free society, they can do it if they want. What I really am not looking forward to is the inevitable crash/fraud/whatever, after which there will be a great hue and cry for government (ie with taxpayer money) remediation because these people were too stupid to understand the risks.
These people were the same ones flipping houses in 2007 because of the great income potential. And now we taxpayers have spent 10 years funding saving their stupid asses.
-Styopa
Absolutely this!! Even most bitcoin bulls say to only invest what you can afford to lose.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I was worried I'd have to go a whole day without seeing another fucking Bitcoin story...
Can you explain why you believe 100k-500k is "almost certain"? It is quite a wide range, and looks like arbitrary round numbers. Why not $1B?
You also call it an investment, I thought its value proposition was as a superior currency to fiat currency?
As soon as Wall Street gets involved, we are all screwed. We are there now. Here comes the next round of bailouts for moron managers that don't know what fiat currency is.
No, tell him to hang onto it, it's always fun to see the repo truck pick up a supercar!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
People taking out second mortgages to buy Bitcoin when it has peaked and a bubble is imminent? The time to buy was months ago if you had the money. Is this going to result in the next foreclosure crisis? That would be ironic. The root cause would be risky investments but of a different sort.
We'll make great pets
100k-500k is only a 5x scale. BTC has already shown it is more than capable of exhibiting far larger swings in short periods of time.
>Can you explain why you believe 100k-500k is "almost certain"?
Look at the overall message - you're responding to the post of a Bitcoin booster, which by definition means they're not particularly rational.
For one thing, they think Bitcoin's workable at all as a currency.
That's not how investment works.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Stole. You mean "legally bought at foreclosure auction?"
Then castle doctrine applies :)
$100k-$500k is just a number pulled out of my ass, tbh. But I don't think it's unreasonable. If Bitcoin is a success, that means it is going to see widespread global use. Whether that is for online person-to-person payments, a value store for the rich, currency for the poor, all of that, or something else. But there will only ever be 21 million tokens to go around, and several million of those are already irretrievably lost. For billions of people. $100k is only another 10X away, and there is still at least that much more potential growth. Do I agree with McAfee that it will hit $1 million by 2020? No. But I'd bet real money that in 5 years, Bitcoin is worth well in excess of $100k, OR less than $1. Probably more, but less would not surprise me. I see virtually zero chance that it's between those two (arbitrary) values.
I have used Bitcoin as a currency -- I have exchanged it directly with others over the Internet, in exchange for hard (And legal!) goods. I expect to do so again in the future, either with Bitcoin, or whatever replaces it. But with the recent meteoric rise, and the developing issues with extremely high fees and slow transactions (which are problems already solved by other crypto currencies) I'm more about hanging on, and seeing where it goes.
And for the record, I didn't sell my house to buy in. But I wish I had done so a year ago. :) I'd be ok being a rich fucking idiot, and hindsight is easy.
First rule of responsible gambling: Don't gamble with more money than you can afford to lose. I guess nobody taught them that?
And make no mistake, it most certainly IS gambling at this point.
Check the context. " If Bitcoin succeeds "...
I think crypto currencies will succeed, TBH. I'm less sure about Bitcoin specifically, these days.
But I can't think of a single set of circumstances where Bitcoin hasn't failed, but isn't highly valuable. It might fail and become worthless, I'll grant that possibility. But if that is not the case, then the current value can only be a small fraction of the long term.
Using borrowed money makes it a risk-free bet since you don't really have to pay it back. Foreclosure and bankruptcy are normal and allow many millions to spend more than they earn
I suppose there is that bit of fun to look forward to.... That and being able to gloat over all the money they *used* to think they had...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
As an example, compare today's value with the first ever Bitcoin purchase, two pizzas for 10 000 Bitcoins.
The scale required to reach one million dollars per coin is a lot smaller than what has happened so far.
#DeleteFacebook
Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme: last man holding loses. Execept the last man is going to be like the last 60-70% of people holding after the top 5% dump there holdings.
>Check the context. " If Bitcoin succeeds "...
If I shit gold I'd be rich.
Though I am not on the cryptocurrency bandwagon, I am glad that it is a currency that no government would be willing to bail out in the invent it crashes. So that's good news for those taxpayers that constantly bailout companies' and governments' bad decisions. So please, by all means, underwrite your mortgage for Bitcoin, I need to buy the cheap real estate on fire sales. BTW, I won't be accepting Bitcoin as rent.
Although nobody is gonna be bailing out BitCoin, you don't seem to understand how the mortgage bailout happened.
The 2008 failure came from unsupported counter-party risk (incl obscure things like credit default swaps). That caused liquidity issues with Lehman brothers and AIG and other insurance companies. The problem wasn't with the mortgages, per-se, but with people betting on the mortgages (e.g., the people offering to insure them based on complicated financial arrangements that proved unsound). If people are taking out mortgages to buy bitcoin, they are taking on the risk, but if corporations do this, they generally hedge with insurance contracts and re-insurance (how else would you justify complicated financial arrangements).
The problem is that if enough cards fall down, the corporations need the payouts from the insurance contracts. If all hell breaks loose, the companies that underwrote the insurance contracts are not going to be liquid enough to pay those out. Also, even those that thought they have bought insurance for other things (e.g., not bitcoin, not sub-prime mortgages) realize that the insurance company they paid premiums to all those years will evaporate and not make good on their payouts in other areas. This is when the bail out pressure mounts. You don't bail out the mortgages, you bail out the companies that underwrote the insurance contracts (like the US bailed out AIG for $85B and loaned JP Morgan Chase $29B to buy out the insolvent Bear Stearns) and the companies that wrote the mortgages ($200B for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae). In comparison, only a measly $24B went for direct mortgage relief...
Fortunately, BTC is probably too small to matter today. BTC market is only $276B total vs $10T for mortgage debt (~$5T pre-Year2000). Unfortunately, the Chicago Board has opened up BitCoin Futures to ratchet things up a level. With an established futures market, it will be possible to play BTC swings w/o being limited by actual BTC holdings. BTC holding insurance contracts can be written backed by BTC futures contracts and people can speculate on those as well. We'll see how big that futures and derivatives market gets relative to the underlying BTC (in some areas, you can see 10x the market in futures/derivatives over the underlying asset).
Things are a bunch more intertwined than anyone might imagine. Get your popcorn ready, the show is about to start....
Absolutely. I have a standing order to buy $50 of BTC each week, because it's fun. If it goes to $1 next week, I'll be slightly bummed but not hurt in the slightest (but I'd also be scooping them up in case their price ever recovers). I play with BTC exactly the same way I'd play with a weekend in Vegas or betting on sports with my friends: it's fun to participate in a wild ride, but only to the level where you're willing and able to lose everything and still be OK with it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Mean while at pizza hut dubai: "And here we have our pizza, topped with melted strands of 24K gold, notice the thinly sliced tourmaline mushrooms, carved sapphire green peppers, and sauce made from crushed rubies."
SEC Warns 'Extreme Caution' Over Cryptocurrency Investments As Many People Take Out Mortgages To Buy Bitcoin
The original source says "people" not "many people". That's also a quote without any proof.
People buy early and low, speculation drives demand high with no real assets backing up the worth save pure speculation. people early sell to people buying later. More people later than earlier. People at the upper end of the pyramid make crazy profits, people who buy are left holding the bag (the larger number of masses at the base supporting the profits of the top) when this balloon pops. once upon a time we had the gold standard.
When we didn't have enough gold to back it up, so...we abandoned it for speculative currency. The one definite thing about technology, is enables us to accelerate what we normally do, making the flaws in our systems more visible. Samuel Clemens write about the stock market in Huckleberry Finn, and Sir Conan Doyle mentioned it in his writings of Sherlock Holmes as well. neither gave a pretty picture. If they could only see this...
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
You missed the part where the corporations knew there was no chance the insurance could pay out, but only bought it so that they could legally not have to count the debt against their balance sheet. And the part where none of those criminals went to jail.
You missed the big one, Retail. Retail is predicted to be the cause of the next recession when all their loans start coming due in 2018. Read this article from Bloomberg "America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning"
https://www.bloomberg.com/grap...
As soon as trading in Bitcoin futures was announced, it legitimized in the eyes of speculators the whole idea of cryptocurrencies as an investment. This has taken place long before this whole class of commodity is even viable as a currency. Let the mining algorithms and forks proliferate for a few years until someone comes up with a version of the blockchain that supports a realistic number of transactions per second when used as money, and a money supply that can grow at a rate that makes it usable as money. Then and only then can cryptocurrency trade alongside such mighty currencies as the Mexican peso.
Futures markets exist so that merchants and fiduciaries can self-insure against the risks of holding or owing the commodity. Who is going to use Bitcoin futures as a hedge - North Korean ransomeware developers?
Same shit. Different unregulated speculation object.
In case you're wondering: NOW is the time to get out.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The cryptocurrency hysteria is starting to look more and more engineered based on the revelations of the Trump election: "They seem to be in the mood to do exactly the things we tell them are bad". Bitcoin is really being hyped in the news, negatively, ambivalently, and positively (less often).
Obviously the financial market is very bullish and this can't go on because the economy itself is not growing at anywhere near that pace. There's definitely a bubble being engineered especially in the stock market. And everyone knows interests rates are going to be jacked up severely in a few months and probably keep rising for the next year or so. So it seems like it's going to pop soon.
For mortgages the banks are not going to be generous with fixed rate options and variable rate options are proven to throw the average middle-classer for a loop. It seems like a trap.
And the crypto-hysteria is spreading: to Ethereum and Litecoin especially.
The very odd thing I can't figure out is that Litecoin is up 100% on the day but the only currency trading more Bitcoin than the dollar is Litecoin....seems like Litecoin shouldn't be able to sustain that price against the dollar for any amount of time....I have no idea what's going on with that.
My guess this is because of the rumblings of the Fed severely jacking up interest rates and everyone with a brain wants to get rich off the naive hype buyers before 2Q 2018.
After this bubble pops there is going to be huge sustained growth with altcoins as the market decides the roles of the various crytocurrency technologies in the decentralized banking economy that is coming in the next decade. Hopefully there are enough independent small businesses left (besides drug dealers) to spark this decentralized economy into a roaring flame that cleans up our society a bit.
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
Nope. By now, the whole thing has become a "real" investment item. And it IS the exactly same shit as in the 1920s, just WAY faster.
In the 1920s, you had a similar situation. An economy that was not worth investing in because there was simply not enough demand to warrant investing in "real" businesses. Any business was a risk, and ROI was mediocre. So investors were looking for something that would promise a better ROI. They found it in stock. Unregulated and a fairly reliable way to "park" your money. Stock was a pretty safe bet, too, it was an investment that simply couldn't go wrong. Sure, you could in theory lose it all, but compared with banks, it was actually more sensible to rely on large corporations than on your money being safe in banks.
What happens with stock if you pump more and more money into it? It rises. And soon the price of stocks had nothing to do anymore with the value of the underlying company. The stock price was supposedly representing a share of a company and representing that share of its value. That went out of the window in the middle of the 1920s. Stocks were bought and sold completely independent of the company that issued it. It was like back in the dot.com era. Just even more crazy.
What you dealt with were investors desperately looking for something to pump their investment money into. Resulting in a HUGE bubble.
Couple that with an interest rate that bordered on negative interest and you soon had "normal" people following suite. Average Joes that never touched stocks before in their life, ever, but hey, you just couldn't go wrong. You bought, and the price went up. So you bought more, using your stock as security for the loan you needed. And banks were more than happy to give you the money, one of the reasons interest rates were on the floor was that nobody wanted to take out loans for investment.
Soon the train of thought was "mortgage interest rates are WAY lower than what stock revenue gets me, I can easily cover the mortgage rates with the stock revenue".
That was September 1929.
The jig was up in October.
I think we're in for a very interesting year 2019.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Pick and choose where you buy rental property off of former Bitcoin squillionaires ... wisely.
And we lost the war over the word "hacker" a decade or more ago.
"Crypto Currency" or "Crypto" as a shorthand might not be the best label, but it's the one that has stuck. Get used to it, because all the whining and begging in the world isn't going to change it.
:fistbump:
If I shit gold I'd be rich.
If you crapped gold, your net worth would increase by around 35 grand each time you took a dump.
That's how logic works. You might also note I have not anywhere asserted that Bitcoin is a sure thing, now or in the past.
parent is a star wars spoiler please mark troll
There are 'billions of people' with $10K of bitcoin? Do tell!
While bitcoin may or may not see widespread global use, it certainly will not be the ONLY currency in widespread use, and that will greatly limit its value.
As long as there is a 'bitcoin market' that remains wildly speculative (which it MUST do to keep gaining value) bitcoin is utterly useless as currency.
And once the speculation ends, guess what happens to the value?
IF Bitcoin succeeds, a value of $100k-$500k is almost certain
LOL!
How can is "succeed"? All it does is move money from one person to another person. It doesn't create any value, it just redistributes money.
If one person makes a million dollars buy buying/selling Bitcoin then 1000 other people have to lose 1000 bucks each. That's the way it works.
Anybody saying "it's scarce!" doesn't understand scarcity. Scarce commodities are only worth something if you can use them to either a) Make clever things, or b) Show your status to other people.
What are you going to do if the price crashes? Go out wearing your bitcoin wallet on a T-shirt so girls can see how "wealthy" you once were?
No sig today...
I remember silver in the '70s. It was the hottest thing. Price was going up and up. Even batteries went up about 10x. People were mortgaging their homes to buy more and more silver. It crashed from nearly $50 to $5. Imagine mortgaging your $90k house and ending up with $9k of silver.
How can it "succeed"? All it does is move money from one person to another person. It doesn't create any value, it just redistributes money.
Don't tell Visa, Mastercard, PayPal or Western Union. They seem to think that transferring value from one person to another can be quite profitable. Don't burst their bubble.
There are 'billions of people' with $10K of bitcoin? Do tell!
There are thousands of people with $10K of bitcoin, and billions with none. Many may eventually be quite happy with $5 or $10 in current value.
And once the speculation ends, guess what happens to the value?
At some point, what people are willing to pay for Bitcoin will equal what others are willing to sell it for, and the price will plateau, much as the price of gold has plateaued.
And if Bitcoin does die, I've had a hell of a time. I'm always fascinated at the number of people who are absolutely, 100% sure that Bitcoin won't work. I've watched them come and go for nearly 10 years. Bitcoin is still here. I'm not 100% sure it will succeed, but it's taken everything thrown at it so far.
and I am becoming a bitcoin pauper.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Tulips are perishable and must be repurchased, over and over, to maintain a presence. Obviously, inflated prices cannot be sustained. Bitcoin is not perishable, and needs to purchased only once. There can be no comparison.
In other words, if only the tulips were made of plastic, this never would have happened.
He also has negative things to say about gold:
Gold is laughable compared to cryptocurrencies. How do you rationalize gold? How do you ship it? It's physical so how do you safely store it. It was good for people 3,000 years ago. Today it is inherently worthless. Soon it will drop in value as crypto currencies climb.
"Gold? Bah, I have something more valuable, bwahaha!" I have to wonder at this point whether he's managed to talk his wife into a stainless steel wedding ring. He's talking about the relative price of gold vs. Bitcoin as if the gold is going to be responsible for the fluctuation, and not the Bitcoin with its crazy, unstable valuation relative to the rest of the economy. But of course it can't be a bubble:
Bitcoin now at $16,600.00. Those of you in the old school who believe this is a bubble simply have not understood the new mathematics of the Blockchain, or you did not cared enough to try. Bubbles are mathematically impossible in this new paradigm.
Keep in mind, he is sitting on a lot of them:
I like stuff. Most of the stuff I REALLY like I can only buy with Bitcoins. I prefer stuff over money. I can't eat, smoke, wear or fuck a Bitcoin. I got 'em, but I spend 'em.
I don't blame him. If I had his Bitcoin portfolio I'd be filling my cart at overstock.com right now and tweeting crap like this.
There are a number of indications that Bitcoin has organically evolved into a Ponzi scheme, even if it wasn't engineered to be one.
The first page of Google search results strongly disagrees with you.
Cryptography is shorthand for cryptography, crypto is shorthand for any long arse word people can't be bothered to type and that starts with crypto.
Indeed. Even funnier when they find out that while stocks may crash down to pennies, Bitcoin can crash down to absolutely nothing.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
As Bitcoin is basically hot air, there is not floor or ceiling value that has any meaning or distinction. It will not get up to anywhere near your predictions though, the supply of fools with money to spend is too small.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You can light a straw-fire once. You cannot do it again with the same straw.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Unless it is done mass-scale and the economy crashes. Sure, you will not be the only one suffering, but a) you will be at the very bottom and b) you will have contributed to that crash. Nice lifetime-achievement.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The amount of mining required by Bitcoin is flexible, and at some point it will have grown to the point where it is no longer makes financial sense to increase it, and it will plateau.
IRS will have a field day when you cash out Bitcoin
Casteism