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Master Jmd

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Master Jmd last won the day on January 18

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About Master Jmd

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    1613 - 1956 Farthings Master Jmd
  • Birthday 08/06/1990

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  1. Master Jmd

    Crypto

    Don't underestimate the younger generation's ability to buy things that don't exist: Counter-Strike skin sells for $400K, probably the most expensive gun in videogame history. Ever since its inception the main argument against Bitcoin is the whole "it's a bubble, it's going to burst", but so far this hasn't happened, yet rather amusingly price corrections act to bolster this belief that some people have. From an investment standpoint, Bitcoin's price history looks something like this: 2009-2011 Bitcoin goes from having no value at all to around the $1 mark by April 2011. News of it breaking the $1 barrier sends the price up to $15. The first "It's a bubble, it's going to burst" comments are heard. Price corrects itself down to $3.50, and the first "Haha, told you so!" comments are heard from the bubble commenters, despite the value now being 3.5x higher than it was before the price rise. 2012 Price slowly climbs from $4.70 in January to $13.45 in December. 2013 Price continues to climb to $120 until October when price shoots up to a high of $1,120. "It's a bubble, it's going to burst" comments become rampant. 2014 Price falls from all time high down to $500. Despite being 2-5x higher than it was before the price rise, "Haha, told you so!" is heard from the bubble commenters. 2015 Price stabilises between $300 and $600. 2016 Price steadily climbs from $300 at the beginning of the year to $900 at the end. 2017 Price continues to climb all the way to $13,380 by the end of the year. "It's a bubble, it's going to burst" comments have commonplace throughout the year. 2018 Price sharply corrects down to $10,000 before slowly falling down to $3,413 by the end of the year. Despite being 11x higher than it was before prices started climbing, "Haha, told you so!" is heard from the bubble commenters. 2019 Price bounces back and stabilises between $7,000 and $11,000. 2020 Price remains steady at around $9,000 until it begins to climb rapidly and ends the year at $28,993. "It's a bubble, it's going to burst" comments become rampant. 2021 Price continues to rise to an initial all time high of $58,783 in March, then $61,359 in October. The price here is fluctuating between $31,000 and $61,000, which percentage wise is no different from what happened in 2015, but with two extra zeroes at the end of the value. The bubble comments continue throughout this entire period. 2022 Price sharpy corrects down to $19,925 by June, then $16,528 in December. Despite being 2-3x higher than it was before the price rise started, "Haha, told you so!" is heard from the bubble commenters. 2023 Price bounces back a little to between $25,000 and $30,000 until the end of the year where it starts climbing up to $42,500. "It's a bubble, it's going to burst" comments start slowly appearing again. 2024 Price continues to sharply rise up to a new all time high of $73,000 in March. <- You are here. My historically-informed prediction is that Bitcoin will continue to climb for a few months before correcting itself down to around the $50,000 mark. The bubble commenters will be out again with their "Haha, told you so" comments despite this figure being more than double what it was before the price rises started in 2023, and the cycle will continue. Right now I think the only remorse felt in the Bitcoin community is from those who listened to others telling them not to put any money into it and those who sold several years ago for much lower prices than we see now. I was fortunate enough to get into Bitcoin back in 2013. I'm not someone who plays the market and tries to predict when I should buy or sell more, instead I've been steadily buying since I first learned about it and honestly have no regrets. I've used Bitcoin on and off to pay for various things, ranging from fast food to 5 figure trading card auctions. I've never regarded myself as an investor with Bitcoin, and don't think I'd be too bothered if the value did one day fall to zero - but I can't see that ever happening at this point. My only real regret with Bitcoin is listening to my parents advice in 2013 and placing half of the money I was going to put into Bitcoin into a company that specialised in fracking - and on that I'm down 98%. 🤦‍♂️
  2. Master Jmd

    Crypto

    The impact is noticeable, but it's not as bad as a lot of news outlets portrayed it when the story was going around a year or two ago. It's hard to find comparable recent figures - and it's harder still to find figures that relate specifically to Bitcoin and not cryptocurrency as a whole - but I believe as of the beginning of March Bitcoin is estimated to be using around 145 TWh per year equating to around 84 Mt CO2, which is around 0.25% of the world's yearly output. This includes both mining and transactions. In comparison, as of August 2023 gold uses 265 TWh per year (126 Mt CO2) and banking in general uses 263.72 TWh per year (though this figure is very hard to accurately calculate). Bitcoin does use power and is using increasingly more power as it scales up, but the challenges faced by Bitcoin are quite a bit different than those faced by gold - Bitcoin can be mostly powered using renewable energy sources. From what I can gather doing some quick Google searches, only around 15% of gold is mined using renewable energy, whilst the figure is above 50% for Bitcoin.
  3. Master Jmd

    Crypto

    A shared European currency was first thought up in the 1920s and even after the Euro started being discussed across Europe in the late 1980s it didn't take off until the early 2000s. That's a currency with a lot of country governments leading the charge that still took decades to come to fruition. I think it's unfair to expect a worldwide digital currency that isn't politically lead - and is something governments have little to no control over - to be generally accepted as money 15 years after its inception. El Salvador became the first country to accept Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021 and I'm sure its only a matter of time before others follow suit, if not with Bitcoin but with some semblance of cryptocurrency. At the end of the day, through direct transactions and third party conversion there is very little I can't buy anywhere in the world in an instant with Bitcoin in 2024, and that makes it much more desirable to me than precious metals and time-gated shares, and makes it much more desirable as a foreign exchange tool than any country's siloed currency. I think Bitcoin's foundations are very strong and cryptocurrency in general will continue to grow in popularity throughout the century.
  4. Master Jmd

    Crypto

    I've been following and have owned Bitcoin since 2013 so I'm well aware of the fluctuations it has. The filling teeth argument seems an odd point to make given that gold wouldn't be the first choice (I believe porcelain would) - a much better use of gold is in electrical circuits, which as far as I'm aware is the only major practical application it has right now. Having followed Bitcoin for this long I'm well aware of the challenges it faces, however I've witnessed a lot of misinformation and a lot of misguided comments. A lot of those grannies you mention who don't trust Bitcoin are the same grannies who don't trust banks to hold their money in the first place. Grannies aren't paving the way for the future, and we've already seen a massive decline in cash usage (even before covid) since the turn of the millennium - it's only a matter of time in my opinion before the likes of foreign currency exchanges follow suit. I don't really see where your "the initial premise was wrong" comment comes from given that a lot of companies do accept it in exchange for goods, which is exactly what money is. Most major auction houses accept Bitcoin as a payment method, and in January I used proof of my Bitcoin balance to secure a new mortgage through Nationwide. I'm not going to try and convince anyone to buy Bitcoin as it's not my place to do so - I'm no financial advisor - but I do think Bitcoin has far-reaching future potential, and to be something most people in the developed world will have heard of is very impressive for something that didn't exist at the turn of the century. I don't think Bitcoin is going to go away any time soon.
  5. Master Jmd

    Crypto

    The basis for value of Bitcoin is for the most part simple supply and demand. Right now the price is up because a lot of people are trying to get in on the action both due to the recent introduction of SEC-regulated ETFs (which is a huge step forward) and the upcoming halving event which will decrease the rate at which new supply enters circulation. Ultimately there's little difference between owning Bitcoin in a cryptocurrency wallet and having money available on a bank card - in both cases your money is represented digitally until the point where you choose to spend or convert it to paper money, however the latter is owned by banks whilst the former is owned by you (if you have your own wallet, at least). A big thing holding Bitcoin back, and will hold Bitcoin back for the foreseeable future, is that governments cannot print their own as and when they see fit and for the most part have put up artificial barriers against its adoption (higher tax rates and in some cases state-funded smear campaigns). Right now we're 15 years in and Bitcoin is more popular than it ever has been, and that I think is something worth celebrating as a technological feat regardless of whether you believe in it as a currency or not.
  6. I managed to track one down for £23 on eBay in November after searching on and off for over a year. They do exist, but they're certainly not easy to come across (unless you're willing to pay £85 for the copy that's currently on eBay!). This is the post I made in the Wanted section referenced earlier in this thread: https://www.predecimal.com/forum/topic/14540-the-bronze-coinage-of-great-britain-2016/.
  7. Master Jmd

    St James Premier Auction Today

    There were some lovely coins in that block, but until I win the lottery I'm limiting myself to Wren farthings for the time being. 😅
  8. Master Jmd

    St James Premier Auction Today

    I had bid the coin up to £1,050 but watched in surprise as it climbed to almost double that. The 1954 proof seems to be the most common of the "VIP" proof wren farthings to have appeared in the past decade (I think 4 have passed through London Coins since 2015), and where I'd recently picked up 1949 and 1956 proofs each for under £1k I had gone into it with a fair level of confidence that I'd win. Will be interesting to see how the next example fares - though knowing my luck after all the activity for this date it will be the last one to surface for a couple of decades. 😅
  9. Master Jmd

    It had to happen

    I can't speak for other cryptocurrencies or manufacturers, but I can say that for Casascius it's possible to verify the contents of the coin against a master list they have published at https://www.casascius.com/fulllist.txt cross-referenced with the Bitcoin blockchain. This is the information side of the first coin on the Heritage list you linked: In the middle it shows "137nAnw7", which uniquely prefixes a single address in the list linked above of "137nAnw7NpW8V4WagUMSmSWauk8b9Ejvay". We can then enter this address on a blockchain explorer where it'll show that the coin has a balance of exactly 1.00000000 Bitcoin which it was loaded with on 4th January 2013: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/137nAnw7NpW8V4WagUMSmSWauk8b9Ejvay. To my knowledge nobody is known to have ever spoofed or tampered with one of these coins, so there's quite high confidence that it will contain the indicated funds. That said, to your point about the grading company verifying the contents: there's no mention on the NGC label that this coin actually contains the 1 Bitcoin amount, they're only verifying that it's a Casascius 1 Bitcoin. I also don't think Heritage would be liable for anything either if the coin were to contain no Bitcoin, simply because at the time of auction it's possible to verify its contents. To your point about not being able to buy a loaf of bread with Bitcoin: you may be surprised to learn that Bitcoin debit cards have been around since 2015 and there are even Bitcoin credit cards now, too, which can be used just like normal cards and simply either send Bitcoin directly or convert the Bitcoin to the relevant currency during the transaction. If you trust the companies which offer these there's no reason you can't spend Bitcoin online or offline wherever you like. Whilst Heritage is only now offering auctions for these, Stack's Bowers have been running them since 2021 and I'm sure there are others as well: https://stacksbowers.com/cryptocurrency. 137nAnw7NpW8V4WagUMSmSWauk8b9Ejvay
  10. Master Jmd

    It had to happen

    These Casascius coins were a primitive type of hardware wallet that predate the likes of Trezor and Ledger that are now in common use. I'm not too sure what failed crypto currency system you're referring to here, but Bitcoin, now in its 14th year, is far from a failure in my opinion. The coins themselves contain access to a private wallet containing the amount of Bitcoin indicated. They have a built-in tamper-proofing mechanism to indicate whether the Bitcoin held on them has been redeemed or not. In this case, all 250 of these are unredeemed, meaning each coin contains its indicated value in Bitcoin, and I guess the grading company adds an extra layer of authenticity on top. Each of these are for either 1 Bitcoin or 0.5 Bitcoin, so it's expected that they'll sell around the Bitcoin rate (~£22,893 for 1 and ~£11,446 for 0.5). I imagine the majority of buyers will crack these out to redeem them. Whilst these are mostly now a novelty, they did once have a very practical purpose at a time when little regulation was in place to protect such assets - keeping your Bitcoin on these meant you had full control and weren't putting all your trust in an online wallet destined to fail.
  11. Master Jmd

    2009 Mule 10 Pence With Lion Reverse of 2007

    I can also highly recommend Wise. I've been using it for a couple of years now and it's saved me a small fortune in conversion fees. It effectively gives you a local bank account for whichever currency you're looking to spend. In your case rather than transferring USD from your US bank account to a UK bank (incurring a wire fee), you'd instead convert your USD to GBP, then send that GBP locally to the UK bank. Their conversion fees are also very competitive. Makes PayPal look like a bit of a joke. Right now if you were to convert $1k USD to GBP Wise would give you £800.38 whilst PayPal would only give you £769.15.
  12. Master Jmd

    The Bronze Coinage of Great Britain (2016)

    Apologies for the delay - did you have any luck finding this? There are a handful of catalogues uploaded in full on Archive.org. It's a long shot but I don't suppose you'd have any interest in uploading this there if it's now out of print? 😊
  13. Master Jmd

    Catalogue - Sanders Collection of Milled Coins

    It's such a beautiful coin. I don't know if I would have been able to win this one, but I'm gutted I missed out on the chance to participate by just 3 weeks. 😅 It's not too bad looking back on things which have sold 2 or 3 years ago that came and went before I rekindled my appreciation for coins, but this very much feels like one which has slipped through my fingers. Hopefully one day I'll get another chance!
  14. Master Jmd

    Catalogue - Sanders Collection of Milled Coins

    I'm sad that I missed this one. Not only does it look like it'd have been a fantastic auction to watch, I've dreamed of owning one of these 1601 patterns since first seeing them in The Alderly Collection which Colin Cooke sold back in 2006-7.
  15. After 8 months of waiting Waterstones have cancelled my order for the 2016 updated version of The Bronze Coinage of Great Britain (cc @Chris Perkins - not sure if you no longer supply these to Waterstones?) Multiple new copies of the 2006 hardcover version are up on Amazon for £25, but the 2016 version is nowhere to be found. I'd be happy to pay £30 for a new/close to new copy of the book if anyone here has a copy?
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