All Forum Posts by: Steve K.

It was always a speculative investment, investing on sentiment and a trend. Not once did I ever consider or view it as anything of any intrinsic or utilitarian value. Not once ever.

I was in crypto for years, flipping and trading. Again, gleefully out. And profitably too.

I consider myself rather informed on it. Nowhere near the 1% because honestly there all cult members high on hopeum and drunk on the kool-aid.

When I am paying for groceries and fuel with crypto, maybe. Until then, it's a shiny toy that's getting kinda old. No thanks.

The new shiny toy is ai.

Just bought my daughter-in-law a car strictly with bitcoin. This is with one of the most prestigious dealerships in Texas. And got her son a full sports outfit with crypto from a professional NBA franchise(same owners for the dealership & franchise).

People can disbelieve Bitcoin, etc., bottom line is emerging markets are usually correlated with higher population growth and desperate needs for infrastructure. With that comes a ray of hope for attaching to assets; bitcoin right now is the only tangible medium for that. Other forms of assets come with such steeper barrier entries coupled with devaluation of their current currency, it's very hard to resist this proof. Won't go deep and long in this, as I am not a fanatic but absolutely see the use case for it against currency. The US should view it as a threat to the dollar(and rightfully so), but to do that you need to get in front of it and not ban/eliminate it. It seems Trump's cabinet views it similarly in today's world.

apologies niece not daughter in law....getting old.

In just the last 5 days BTC has ranged in value from a high of $94,380.26 too a low of $81,157.32.

BTC is the very definition of volatile.

No business can humanly exist selling say a loaf of bread on Monday at one value, and come Friday when they go to reorder items to produce more bread, 10% of the sale $ they took in has evaporated into thin air.

And that's just in 5 days. Real moves.

The only reason 85% of people were on the BTC and crypto "train" was because it was going UP in value. Just like NFT's. Just like Tulips had long before.

Now it's rhetoric and assorted other hype to keep the hopeium alive. Because all who have leveraged into it know the fade is running out of runway.

As people get tired of it, don't see parabolic growth and profits, the shine is wearing off and people will sell and move on to what is current, shiny and with prospects of parabolic growth and profits ie ai.

As people sell BTC value goes down. Because it's value is based on NOTHING, literally. It's based on people holding and buying it.

So as it flatlines as it is, sentiment of it coming down grows as it is, selling takes hold and as it sells value drops reinforcing the downward movement and decisions to sell. And a downward spiral begins.

AMC & GME was little different. People chasing rainbows of massive profits. Than bag holders holding out on hopeium. But as time passes more and more wake up to the reality that the rainbows are long gone and 100% annual returns are fantasy but 50% losses are real.

It's the Gold Rush mentality. or better said, a Pump-n-dump. BTC and crypto is just one with some longer track to it than others given the criminal utility of it all. Great if your an international arms smuggler, not so great for a 50-something Jane/John Doe.

It was fun while it lasted, I'm over it now and onto playing ai. Selling Put's, taking leaps, selling calls, making $ 4-ways on market movements.

And continuing to do Real Estate, good-ole-reliable.

Why waste time on a literal gamble of BTC when it's at bizonkers high prices?

It's called buy low n sell high, not buy high and pray for inhuman additional astronomical highs.

Government promised...... Yeah well they been promising me peace on earth, clean water, clear skies, low tax's and all the other oh-so-good for long as I can remember.

Words hype and hopes.

I operate on facts, math and certainty.

That's very appropriate vol for BTC; VTI and QQQ were 3.5-4% negative in 5d and range quite strong too. Comparatively, that vol for BTC is quite normal. We've seen way bigger vol swings for BTC so not sure that's the point I'd make against it.

BTC vol will tighten once there's more adoption. That's proven given the fact we had significantly more drawdowns and significantly more often when less were invested. Just to give you a vol comparison in the last 10 years Nvidia has had 2 50% drawdowns. There's risk to everything. Given 10 years ago BTC was a fraction of what it's worth now percentage based draw downs are a bit misled given absolute value differential.

BTC adoption has gone institutional, prior it was emerging markets and little retail. It's hard to call it pump & dump now.

BTC's biggest argument is it's a threat to the USD, and a savior for emerging markets. For that reason, BTC will continue to yield up to the right but also correct more harshly than any other asset class. Like I said in a previous post, this correction and perhaps recession that will take place will be quite devastating for BTC, but long-term BTC holders or maximalists will yield the most advantageous.

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Oops.

"Recent and significant crypto hacks include the Bybit exchange hack on February 21, 2025, where nearly $1.5 billion worth of ether (ETH) was stolen, and a North Korean hack in March 2025 that stole $1.5 billion in cryptocurrency, making it the largest crypto hack on record according to the FBI.65

North Korean hackers have been increasingly active in the crypto space, stealing approximately $660.5 million across 20 incidents in 2023 and $1.34 billion across 47 incidents in 2024, marking a 102.88% rise in value stolen."

I was waiting for this type of response.

Show me you don't understand anything at all any more clear, Ken.

Bybit didn't hack "Ethereum". They hacked SAFE Wallet. Bybit was too cheap to purchase extra security (measures)--left UI systems as is & not enhanced. So again, it's user error and storage.

In laymen terms, this is like a scammer sending you a text to log in to confirm your AMEX details. You do, and they get access to steal funds. No other security measures. Did your USD get hacked? Or did AMEX get hacked? And are you the vulnerability or is USD?

Unfortunately, retorts like yours show that compete lack of knowledge & understanding.

This is what is coined "SPIN".

Look it's simple.

For long crypto sold itself as SAFE, secure, even claiming for many years to be SAFER than current in use systems.

Crypto even slogan'd on anonymity.

If you have $ at a bank, and bank calls saying "sorry half your moneys gone, it was stolen" do you care HOW the thieves stole it? Does it matter HOW it was done? No, what matters is you thought it was safe, it was stolen, so now your sense of safety and security is GONE.

How NOT safe is crypto? I can sum it up in 1 word: WILLOW....

Every masters degree/ Phd level data scientist and computer engineer I know has exited crypto since the confirmation with WILLOW. ALL OF THEM, 100%.

For those who don't know or understand, WILLOW is the breakthrough in computing that is taking ai effectively from the era of the horse & buggy straight to nuclear propulsion.

And that analogy is even far too weak a comparison. It's more like from caveman too spaceman. Yeah, it's THAT big a leap.

So take an ai capable of running every cryptographic permutation in existence, in an hour. It can solve mathematical problems that would take conventional super computers billions upon billions of years, and do it in seconds.

Effectively, there is no such thing as data security anymore. All codes, all that jazz, DONE. All it requires is one with hardware access and the desire to implement it for such.

In other words, N.Korea, Iran, RU, etc etc etc.....

You will see crypto heists parabolically increase THIS YEAR, head my words, this is inevitable.

1) Bybit hack had nothing to do with QC. 100% to do with security. There's no spin here, if you're saying I am spinning it in a different like point #2 then sure but I never did that. Nor did I ever subscribe to it.
2) Don't care what crypto "slogan'd" itself for. I just take it for what it is. Again, I don't parrot and form my own thesis. If someone thought they'd be anonymous, they needed to verify that then engage in illegal trades because someone told them it was anonymous. You'd trust your drug dealer to tell you how to operate? Give me a break.
3) Willow is google's QC chip. Go get long GOOGL or long quantum ETFs. It is not inversely related to BTC and Blockchain's health. FYI there's more of a threat to Willow than there is to Nvidia Blackwell on the horizon-- not advice just a note.

Willow is a weak, kind of amateur answer to why BTC will fail. As this has been a material sight on the horizon-- notice I said sight not obstacle--for some time as well as some other QCs. Willow is also nowhere near a threat to cryptography; Google will admit that.

Anyone at the institutional level has underwrote this risk and has not found it tangible. Anyone at the institutional level that's against BTC has bet on this and realized it's a quite a way from any recognition or realization. I don't know one that hasn't that we've conversed with, along with other Chinese chips like Zucho or distantly down Majorana among others.

For the people that actually are in the know with institutions that are heavily against BTC and heavily PRO the easiest way for me to summarize the threat of quantum computing is that it's way easier to develop resistant forks on the blockchain than to get QC scalable.

That's the general consensus among some of the real smart money pro & anti BTC. There's one reputationally aggressive fund, if not the most aggressive, that's tried to up the ante in QC to create this as they believe it's a threat to USD-- I know you don't-- that even admits it's a far larger reach than the solution for the blockchain fixing itself via latency, soft forks, etc.

You do realize if QC becomes scalable and defeats any fork attempt or latency attempt to a blockchain, then all digital security is at risk. A lazy answer for sure, but definitely a point to note. It means your communications, local bank, etc., all at risk.

Another thing is QC will penetrate re-used addresses-- meaning if you're doing isolated withdrawals or single address one's--way less at risk. But adoption/belief will mitigated if you see other compromises, for sure.

Another retribute against QC against blockchain is there's PQC(post quantum cryptography) & QSC(quantum-safe-cryptography) which is already advancing faster than QC and faster than your local massive banks at creating resistance to their own security. And what happens if more adoption appears at the BTC level? Then, you'll see increased efforts of penetrating it but also saving it.

Again-- IF, THEN.

You're missing the forest for the trees.

This is spinning out down a rabbit hole that all of about 7 people on BP will comprehend, lol.

Short version is; the vast majority of people have no comprehension of nor do they want to fully know or comprehend all of the details. They want there money to be safe, simple and easy.

They earn $___, it shows up in an account, they go buy ___, know the price, simple life.

When they hear of this hack, that heist, this exploit etc. it scares them plain n simple.

And crypto won't work if 90% of people fear the use of it.

BTC value is set by usership. Less users = less market value.

It's shine is already wearing off. Will diehards such as yourself keep in, sure, of course. But reality is at least 50% in BTC today are not the ilk of yourself. There novices at best, and most just blindly holding something because it's value held promise of making them $. Lot's of $.

Burst that perception bubble, and watch those masses of novice exit. As they are literally today. I in one of my BTC chat's just read countless persons say "WTF is all this $ going from people selling????".

Well, guess who IS green today? Remember what I wrote before? O, Realty Income Corp. They are UP today, as so much else is gushing red all over the market. F Ford was up now down 0.35% as COIN is down (OOF-DAH) 17%.......

I warned, I said you WILL see this happen and happen very soon. I didn't expect it the next day, lol, but I did call it. I even called where some of the $ would go, which is exactly what it's doing.

Maybe you missed it, but I put it in bold again.

"Another thing is QC will penetrate re-used addresses-- meaning if you're doing isolated withdrawals or single address one's--way less at risk. But adoption/belief will mitigated if you see other compromises, for sure."

It will scare some folks, but it's not the end of the journey for BTC. Just like SBF/FTX scared tons of folks, it still came back. FWIW, I got into BTC as an allocation after Mt Gox. That did not scare me, it's actually where I started to educate myself. And actually where some of the largest investors came in, too. Little history will show some of the largest institutional players(as individuals not on the behalf of institutions) jumped in also in mid 2014-early 2015.

There's no missing the forest for the trees here-- we believe the same outcome for most assets(in the short term). We'll continue to disagree on the (long term) outcome of Bitcoin and that's fine. We see it in a binary fold; you see the headwinds as the reason it goes to 0, I see the headwinds as opportunities to buy. Time will tell.

I also said I am not a diehard or maximalist, I just believe the mechanism has a lot of rumors and little facts circulating around it. Like anonymity, and other ********.

But to go back to the how & why part-- it's leverage. It's not people selling BTC to buy Ford or O.

The entire market has/had too much of expectations and engaged in too much leverage. @Chris Seveney and I have been saying this for along time and even joked about whose more cynical/pessimistic about it. In that other locked thread, @Henry Clark and I were saying there'll be a massive drawdown on equities.

They're not selling BTC to buy Ford, they're selling BTC because they are overleveraged & expectations are missing because everything is pricing for perfection.

And I mean everything is pricing for perfection;
Houses are priced to date the rate, marry the house like some folks spew. That changed the valuation and folks are compromised with their monthly payment. Some are underwater with even higher rates when agents told them to wait till 2025. Good luck. There's little liquidity here so it's usually the last fall.

Equities were priced for perfect earnings, any beat but not significantly higher is a net negative. We're seeing that reckoning begin now.

Crypto stormed 40-80% higher post trump presidency based off the premise of a pro-crypto president with little tangible strategy on how and what it'll be to get there. They bought the talk, not the walk. Unfortunately, they bought a giant share of that gain with leverage.

They're not selling BTC to buy Ford or O. Such a ridiculous take, they are selling BTC cause they are overleveraged. Just like they're selling mega cap and tech. Too much expectations and too much leverage.

And like I said before, go identify where the leverage is. The most right now is BTC, it does not mean it's dead when it gets pounded. It just means it'll get pounded.

"Any leverage in any market is going to radically flip on it's head. Identify where that is, and you found the opportunity.

In America, it's almost every market. So all NAV in every field will take a circumstantial hit."

Burned by Crypto, Built by Real Estate: My Journey from Rock Bottom to 10+ Deals/Year

https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/55/topics/1234436-burne...

"Then the crypto crash hit, and we lost 90% of our funds."

You're just proving my point about buying what falls due to overlevegage.

Late 2022, I bought more. They sold and realized a large loss.

Identify the leverage, and buy the fall. You're just exposing folks who are **** at understanding it and one's who've made a career in it.

Go check where BTC traded late 2022 and it's current price. BTC, like other assets, need to be held for some term. Go check returns from late 2022 vs RE, not to say this will also be the trend but since you are asking for it. Take a look.

This is also my point James, yes folks like this guy panic sell and life is "ruined". You're not wrong about that, I just think the support bid & participants are not as weak as you suspect. 2022 was $12k expectations, $16k real, no institutions. Today I think it's high 30s with lots of institutions. No idea about nations.

Here's a trick question, Ken. Why did RE collapse in 08-09?

Is RE fraudulent or a scam?

VG Jason are you buying the dip today? TSLA also on sale, down 15%. Who wants to make a bet that Elon comes up with some new fake product to hype the stock price up again this week. I’ll bet extra that the new shiny object is AI-related.

1 Vote

Denver, Colorado

Megan's Law requires all states to have sex offender registries that are available to the public. Sex offenders are required to register their address on the public database when they move in to a new property. The presence of a sex offender nearby can have a negative effect on property value. The presence of several of them IN your property might lower it's value and make it hard or to sell if you ever need to. Appreciation is the number one profit driver in real estate and whatever extra money you can make by renting to sex offenders might be far less than what you may sacrifice in resale value. What percentage of potential applicants will be sex offenders compared to not sex offenders in that location? Is having your property listed as a place where sex offenders reside a value add? Just some food for thought.

5 Votes

Who buys a whole state though? Most people just buy individual properties.

I jest of course, but it's a silly thought to imagine states appreciating. If you want useful data in real estate you have to zoom in a lot more. It is also a silly (and divisive) exercise to imagine states appreciating differently than others based on their voting results, or even states being red or blue because no state votes 100% one way or the other obviously. Most states are solidly purple. It's necessary to reduce states to red or blue for the electoral college results, but that's about the extent of the usefulness of being so crude with the data.

Real estate data needs to be much more local than the state level to tell us anything useful, that goes without saying. For example most investors buy in cities, and just about every major city in the US is blue. So even if you're buying exclusively in "red states", you're probably still buying in a "blue city". A comparison of major red cities vs. major blue cities would basically be Oklahoma City and Fort Worth vs. every other city in the country, so how useful is that? If you really want to compare red and blue areas to see which appreciate better, you'd have to compare rural vs. urban areas because rural areas are mostly red and urban areas are mostly blue. Or you can compare the very most red or blue states to each other, like CA, VT, MA and DE vs. OK, WY, ID, and WV. It would still be pretty asinine though. Landlord/ tenant laws are also typically made on the municipal level more-so than the state level with some exceptions like the statewide rent control ban that we have in Colorado...

Sorry I just don't see how it can be useful to look at real estate from a state level and pretend that electoral college votes have much if anything to do with appreciation. There are so many other factors in play that are so much more important for appreciation than votes. Especially because the voting margins are actually super narrow in a lot of states, and really most are a shade of purple. 10 states swung from red to blue by less than ~5% of the votes in the past two elections, and a handful by less than 1%. If several thousand people had voted differently would those states appreciate any more or less?

I'll take the purplest state please.

1 Vote

Quote from @Matthew Becker:

We happned to have had a beer so I know what you have going on. You have cash flow rentals in an area that is doubled every 10 years for 50 years. You could go broke and loose everything you have worked so hard to get.

Are you crazy? But if you do sell maybe sell your potfolio to me. See you later this week for a beer?

Haha don't worry I am not selling anything. Just having some fun. Yeah man hit me up when you get to town. Looking forward to it!

0 Votes

Denver, Colorado

Quote from @Randy Dubiskas:

Remember the tulip bubble in 1634

I remember it like it was yesterday ;).

I wrote a paper on this for school once upon a time and an interesting detail about the "Tulip Bubble" is that the story as it is usually told today is actually mostly false. The story was extremely exaggerated by a Scottish journalist in 1841 who was ahead of his time in the "Fake News" sector, and the tulip "mania" actually didn't involve very many people and had very little economic impact:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...

I suppose we can still draw lessons from a story that is mostly fiction, but more accurate comparisons would probably be the South Sea Bubble in 1700s England, the 19th century railway bubble, or the dot.com bubble.

0 Votes

Denver, Colorado

Quote from @James Hamling:

Quote from @Steve K.:

Update: After signing an executive order to start a Strategic Crypto Reserve, the "Crypto President" held a "Crypto Summit" at the white house today with all of the "Crypto Bro's" in attendance (including his own crypto company, World Liberty Financial). He seems all in on crypto. Although he did flip/flop on having XRP, Solana and ADA (or any altcoins) in the strategic reserve... and it was announced that it would consist only of bitcoin seized by the US government. So a lot of crypto bros are actually upset with the way things went, despite Trump claiming to have ended the US Government's "War on Crypto".

It's crazy how not long ago he was crying about how crypto was a scam and calling Elon Musk a "bullsh*t artist", now he's got his own meme coin and platform for selling crypto, and Elon Musk paid for his election campaign with crypto.

Even though XRP is down on today's news, I'm going to buy some more anyway. $TRUMP (the meme coin) was down today also, but Trump and his company that started it have already made $350M on it, so I doubt he cares, even though most people who invested in it lost money. I am never buying that. Crazy world we are living in!

I think it could easily be a better year for crypto than real estate! But like everything else with this president, the jury is still out...

If stock market goes down another 5%, I assure with certainty it's going to be bad times for crypto.

The best hopes for crypto is the stock market rallies here n now, launching to all time highs and holding.

Because with those like NVDA touching 100 per share, or really just pick your favorite company doing great, and be offered an entry at 50% - 75% discount of it's expected fair market value in 9-18 months..... Well that's a whole lot of incentive to cash-out of BTC and into NVDA.

There is good and really good "deals" starting to price into the stock market right now. Add another 5% decline and were getting into very good - great territory. Go 10% added decline and it's "Holly-smokes I can't believe these discounts".

Nvidia, Coca Cola, Ford, Realty Income Corp and on and on, these are names we know with absolute certainty will be around and performing for decades and generations to come, 0-doubt what so ever.

The OPPORTUNITY COST to hold crypto vs snag a great position on a rock-solid "sure thing".....

People say if they could go back to 2009/2010 they'd buy all the real estate they could get there hands on, right. Well, that's what's kind of starting to come into play with stocks now. No brainer buy opportunities.

Head my words, if the stock market continues to go down crypto will also. Not because the market is pulling it down, but because smart $ is liquidating crypto to acquire the stock deals.

Yeah it’s funny how crypto was initially touted as a hedge for the stock market but now they move together, we’ve got mutual funds including crypto in their portfolio and crypto ETF’s… strange times!

1 Vote

Denver, Colorado

Quote from @Nicholas L.:

@Steve K.

can we all agree to meet back here in 2030, 2035 and 2040 to see if anyone's predictions came true?

i'll say this. i'm bullish on real estate.

@James Hamling

agree with your take although I confess that I do hold some IBIT just in case Bitcoin goes to $1M.

If we're going to bequeath this thread to posterity, I will need to clarify my position. The comment above will provide some insight into my true feelings along with the admittance that I have been doing some devil's advocating in this thread (or "trolling" in the parlance of our times).

I probably will continue investing in crypto extremely cautiously with a tiny percentage of my overall investment capital, just for fun and because it interests me basically. Perhaps I'll make a little money but am prepared to lose every penny. I'm definitely not selling any real estate or investing anything close to $1M in crypto.

Crypto could actually go mainstream during this presidency, in which case I'll be glad to have invested somewhat early. Or alternatively, Trump's grifting tendencies could actually ruin it for everyone if he get's greedy with it and pushes the level of rampant corruption that we're currently witnessing to its breaking point. TBD!

1 Vote

Denver, Colorado

All Forum Posts by: Steve K.

Steve K. has started 29 posts and replied 2734 times.

Post: Out of State investing does not work. With very few exceptions.

Post: Out of State investing does not work. With very few exceptions.

Post: Out of State investing does not work. With very few exceptions.

Post: Putting $1M into Crypto

Post: Room rental to Sex offenders.

Post: Do blue states appreciate more than red states?

Post: Putting $1M into Crypto

Post: Putting $1M into Crypto

Post: Putting $1M into Crypto

Post: Putting $1M into Crypto