An occupational hazard of our newfound interest in bitcoin is that I am asked weekly "Should I buy a bitcoin?" or "How should I buy a bitcoin?"
On the first question, I take no position - it is between you, your spouse, your accountant and your god.
On the latter question, I made a little infographic below.
Some side notes:
(1) Anyone who has the first clue about capital markets will read this chart and understand immediately why bitcoin is so volatile today. The whole process of buying and selling bitcoins today is absurd relative to the well-established, very liquid currency markets that bitcoin interacts with. That will change with time as this process becomes easier and more institutionally friendly.
(2) If someone with better graphic design skills wants to clean this up, I would be happy to send you the PPT. I will have someone make an embeddable version tomorrow in any case; In the meantime, I think the JPG is downloadable and you can click to enlarge.
Very Important Caveats: (1) We do not care if you buy bitcoins (2) We are not a broker-dealer, broker, financial advisor or licensed in any way to give you financial advice (3) This is most certainly not a recommendation to buy, sell, short, trade bitcoins, litecoins, bbqcoins or StalwartBucks – you could lose all your money in one of many ways including, but not limited to: your incompetence, poor security, poor backups, software bugs, counterparty risk, exchange rate risk, liquidity risk , regulatory risk, and more! You are 100% buying bitcoins at your own risk and on your own initiative. (4) Bitcoins are not anonymous and exchanges and online wallets even less so. If you are going to use bitcoins to try to cheat on your taxes / divorce settlement / child support, you are a moron. (5) These are not the only ways to buy bitcoins (just some of the more popular ones) nor are we endorsing these companies – any of them theoretically could be hacked, run away with your money or be shut down by regulators / coopted by the ‘system’. (4) Ledra Capital, our affiliates and our principals might hold any number of old-timey or digital currencies at any time long, short or falling out of our wallet all crumpled up after a long night of drinking. If we knew how they would trade against each other in the future, we would be having umbrella drinks on our private islands, not tweeting about bitcoin.
For the full bitcoin series: ledracapital.com/bitcoin
Twitter: @polemitis and @ledracapital
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