Loading ...First…. I do NOT recommend bitcoin. When I did it my cost was under $10. Mt.Gox was the exchange then, and I did not trust them. But I sent funds to the exchange… I guess now it is coinbase. The exchange deposits BTC into your account. If you leave it there you are vulnerable… as was proven when Mt.Gox went closed. Anyway, I transferred my BTC into my home ‘wallet’ which was a bitcoin network node that had to be kept on line to keep synced with the network. Then I took my node/wallet offline. It was all on a thumb drive and I put it to sleep and stored the thumb drive. By keeping it offline, it gets out of sync with the verification network, and when you put it back online it can take a long, long, LONG time for the network to recalculate the chain of verifications on your BTC before they are ‘sync’ with the network and available for transactions or moves. Depending upon how long it was offline, it can take days or weeks before coming back into sync with the network. I do not know if more recent software wallets that store off line have solved this problem or not.
But definitely get your funds & BTC off the exchange as soon as you can. The exchange is the vulnerable spot and I haven’t seen one that wasn’t crooked yet. I got into and out of Mt.Gox before they went belly up.
I saw the inception of Bitcoin at the beginning and figured it would form some nice Elliot waves as it grew. I hung on until I saw a good 5-wave Elliot wave pattern and then I moved out of it in groups. In all, I made a 50-bagger on BTC. This was before the reporting requirements on IRS 1040 forms as you must now do. But I would never touch BTC again. Despite the hype, it is too vulnerable to scams and the exchanges all seem dishonest to some degree, and with reporting requirement the IRS wants to know if you got some… so they will come after you later. I don’t buy into the hype that it will be good for transactions in the future. If the network goes down, if you lose the grid, or power at your location, you will be helpless with an offline wallet and no way to transact. Again… I do NOT recommend Bitcoin. I could have been a multi millionaire if I had the gutz to hold on to what I had back then, but greed slaughters pigs, too. I’m happy with the 50 bags I pulled out of it at the start. Now I view it as toxic waste and won’t touch it.