I’m not a true believer in crypto, but I used to play around with it. I have received a 5-figure USD sum of bitcoin from the MtGox settlement, and I’m considering my options. It is a true windfall. It was worth maybe $100-200 when I used to play daytrader and shop silk road with it.
We are on track for early retirement as it is, but my “smart money” intuition says pay the long-term capital gains and invest in funds, how we do everything else. More money earlier is always good.
My gambler side says to withdraw some maybe, but split the rest into a half dozen likely candidates for someday real world crypto use which may take off. I don’t stay up to date on them anymore, so this would take some real research.
The weird Trumpy stuff going on with BTC makes me think it couldn’t hurt to hold through the election in case prepper types panic buy it lol.
My wife says it’s unexpected so just leave it as a high-risk part of our whole portfolio, but I worry she underestimates the risk and scamminess of it all.
Update: I sold the account down to 0.1 BTC today. I may sell more later on. Thanks everyone for your input.
Whenever I have got a big lump sum of money I get worried, I have put it into my savings account to not accidentaly spend the money untill I know it is mine, just incase it was given by mistake.
So let’s say that I had mined 12BTC right when bitcoin was started.
That would be worth 765702 Euros today…
I’d probably sell it off in peices, which would probably lower the value since I am flooding the market in a relatively short ammount of time.
Then I’d have to report my profits to the tax man, and since I didn’t buy the BTC I’d have to check with them how exactly to report it, if it is anything like stocks where you don’t know the purchase price, I’d have to pay 30% tax on 80% of the total ammount sold.
So for simplicity lets say that I managed to get 700 000 Euro for my 12BTC, I would need to pay tax on 560 000 Euro, meaning I would pay 168 000 Euro, giving me 532 000 Euro to play with.
Untill I got the all clear from the tax office, I would not touch the money.
I’d put 400 000 Euro into my retirenment right away, and use 80 000 Euro to try my luck at investing in lobg term funds.
I’d then have 56 000 Euro as fun money…
Most of it would just stay in my savings account, increasing my buffer, but I would spend part of it on a new camera and lenses, new monitors for my home computer and a new Ducky keyboard.
Nothing huge.