Glad I Haven’t Sold a Domain for Bitcoin

At the beginning of the year, I shared three reasons why I wouldn’t be inclined to sell a domain name for Bitcoin. At the time of the article, a single Bitcoin was worth about $590 at Coinbase. Today, the value of a Bitcoin is approximately $317 on Coinbase.

The title of an article on BloombergView.com last week, “2014’s Worst Currency Was…Bitcoin,” says enough about why it could have been bad to sell a domain name for Bitcoin in the last year: “The digital currency peaked at a value of $1,130 just over a year ago. Its plunge of more than 56 percent in 2014 makes it the world’s worst performing currency this year, according to Bloomberg, which tracks 175 foreign-exchange values,” wrote Mark Gilbert, author of Β the Bloomberg View article.

In my article about why I wouldn’t sell a domain for Bitcoin, I shared three reasons for my hesitation:

  • Large swings in valuation
  • Lack of Β a paper trail and trackability
  • I don’t understand it

If I had sold a domain name for Bitcoin back in February, the value of the sale would be far less today. For the ease of illustrating the plunge, had I sold a domain name for around $6,000 in February, that sale would be worth less than $3,500 today. Had I sold it when Bitcoin was worth over $1,000, that loss would be even greater today. Perhaps I would have cashed out the Bitcoin at the time of the sale, but had I felt strongly about the value of Bitcoin, I may not have exchanged it and would have a paper loss right now.

Hindsight is 20/20, so it’s easy for me to say this today. I am also sure there Β people who bought and sold domain names before the huge rise in valuation who made even more money as a result of selling a domain name for Bitcoin. Looking at it today after initially thinking about earlier this year, I have to say that I am glad I have not sold a domain name for Bitcoin. That’s not to say that things won’t change in the future though.

Have you sold a domain name for Bitcoin before? If you did, how did you make out with the transaction? Did you exchange the Bitcoin right away or did you hang on to them? As always, your thoughts are invited.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

12 COMMENTS

  1. I sold a Bitcoin domain last month for $xx,xxx. They paid me in bitcoins. Luckily, i cashed out my bitcoins to USD using coinbase…took only 3 days to get my USD.

    I still love bitcoins…the whole transaction was flawless and took less than 10 minutes with no fees. But i still had to pay 1% to coinbase for selling bitcoins into USD.

    If bitcoins price was stable, i would have kept bitcoins and would not have been charged any fees unlike escrow or wire transfer fees.

    Happy Bitcoin Customer!!!

  2. Accepting bitcoin isn’t a zero-sum game. As another commenter mentioned, there are options, in which you can instantly convert to USD if necessary.

    Choosing to hold bitcoin should be done with a level of financial-comfort that it can go to zero at any time. With that said, there are both tremendous opportunities and risks associated. Holding is not for everyone at this point in time.

    Whether or not it’s bitcoin, digital currencies are the next evolution of money. Some simply choose to familiarize themselves with it sooner rather than later.

  3. >>”Hindsight is 20/20, so it’s easy for me to say this today.”

    It sure is. One of the biggest regrets of my life is not having risked a modest sum in Bitcoin. I could very possibly be retired now if I had. At every stage, I was not willing to risk a penny, in part I guess because of knowing what it’s like to sit on paper losses in the stock market, like shares of Zynga, for instance. When Bitcoin was ~$20, I felt there’s no way I could do it anymore. When it was ~$40, same thing. When I was playing poker on Facebook with people around the world, I was advising people in the Greece region that they could park their money in Bitcoin due to the financial crisis they were experiencing, in the early days of Bitcoin, while I was still unwilling to risk a cent here in the US. I think it may have been trading for pennies then. I would guestimate that with 20/20 hindsight if I had only risked an amount I could even easily have afforded to lose I would have made from $5/10 million to $50/100 million in Bitcoin, no exaggeration.

    So you’re right, Elliot. πŸ˜‰

    • I think when I got wind of it and could have first jumped in it may have only cost around .05 to .10 or so. Risking even just $5K to $10K would put you in the $100,000,000 to $200 million range at it’s peak. Just read an article title “Man buys $27 of bitcoin, forgets about them, finds they’re now worth $886k.” I actually regret not risking just a modest amount in Bitcoin even more than I regret not getting in on domains in the early years. Both are two of my biggest regrets, though. I guess maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.

    • Article says he paid $26.60 in 2009 for 5,000 Bitcoins – that would’ve been over $5 million at its peak and would still be a lot now.

  4. P.P.S. I think you said you didn’t understand it before, too. If you or anyone else really wants to understand it, then there is a free video series put out by one of the best computer based training companies around. The series has been out for a while, but it can still get you grounded rock solid in understanding it. You’ll probably even feel like almost an expert after watching it. If I had come across something like that in the early days, I’m confident I would have taken the plunge in Bitcoin.

    This video series is priceless for anyone who wants to become grounded in Bitcoin basics. Here it is:

    http://bitcoin.cbtnuggets.com/

    I know you probably won’t thank or acknowledge me for this post, though, Elliot. πŸ˜‰ Then again, you might now that I said that. Everyone else you can thank me later.

    Interesting side story: anyone familiar with the news from a few years ago or so where the guy accidentally threw away $7million worth of Bitcoin? It was only stored on his hard drive, which wound up in a land fill. I really doubt it was found and recovered, too. One of the pitfalls that can happen, but you learn all about it in the video series. People must’ve lost a lot with Mt. Gox, too.

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