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I previously bought $1000 of ETH and $2000 of LTC. The reason I paid in the form of a geometric series is that I was concerned my credit would not honor Electronic Funds Transfers from Coinbase. It declined several very small debit card charges because as I was told by their security "Coinbase has a high potential for fraud". I don't agree but that's what they said.

I'm not going to buy any more cryptocurrencies until I get my next paycheck, which will be towards the end of the month.

There are some who regard BitCoin's quickly-rising exchange rate to be an investment bubble, much as the dot-com boom was followed by the dot-com crash, as well as the real estate bubble that crashed in late 2007.

I agree for the short term but disagree for the long term.

That it is a bubble is evidenced by all the BitCoin Get Rich Quick advertisements that I see on Facebook. Doubtlessly they're appearing all over the Internet.

Most disturbing to me is an ad that describes BitCoin's rise as a "paradigm shift". If someone ever says the words "paradigm shift" to you, turn around and run as fast as you can. The dot-com boom was claimed to be the conceptually similar "new economy".

Cryptocurrencies sometimes crash when someone burglarizes an exchange by hacking its website. Just once so far - that we know of - the alleged burglary is an inside job. Mt Gox blamed its burglary on a flaw in the BitCoin BlockChain protocol. A forensic accounting investigation by the Japanese authorities led to the arrests of some of Mt Gox' top executives.

These crashes have all recovered quickly.

The current bubble is the result of naive investors buying lots of BitCoin. The most likely cause of a crash will be sales that are made by sophisticated investors and investment banks that want to realize their gains. There will come a point where even a small drop in price will lead the naive investors to sell as fast as they can so they can realize their gains before the crash.

Those same sales will be the cause of the crash as the naive investors panic.

When that happens I won't sell my BitCoins as I am confident the price will recover for the following reasons:

Each new BitCoin is minted by a cryptographic computational process denoted as "mining". The algorithm described by Satoshi Nakamoto's original paper placed as strict upper limit of 21,000,000 coins that can ever be mined. At present there are about 16,000,000.

The mining process gets more difficult with each new coin. The last coin is estimated to be minted a hundred years from now.

What to me is the best argument for BitCoin's long-term price is that increasing numbers of merchants are accepting it for payment. The first such merchant was a Papa John's that sold two pizzas in return for 10,000 BitCoins. Today there are 100,000 such merchants. BTC 10,000 could buy a vast number of pies.

Amazon doesn't accept BTC because it has its own payment system called Amazon Payments. But its competitor NewEgg has been accepting BTC for some time now.

There is a very simple way you can still buy pizza with BitCoins: purchase a Domino's eGift card at NewEgg then use that card to pay for your pizza delivery. I was doing just that with PayPal when I was working as a Mentor for CodeMentor.

Not long after that CodeMentor provided the option of paying Mentors with BTC. I haven't checked but I expect there are lots of other services that pay in BitCoin.

The IRS has ruled that cryptocurrencies are assets, just like stocks, bond and real property. One pays Capital Gains Tax on the profit one makes by selling one's crypto assets. Sales made from coins held less than two years are taxed as regular income. Assets held for two years or more are subject to the Long-Term Capital Gains Tax rate which for me is just 15%.

While I might buy and sell some of my cryptos I intend to hold most of them for two years. If indeed cryptos are in a bubble, the crash will have already occurred then recovered by then.

I might buy an Antminer S9 BitCoin mining rig but am having trouble making up my mind. My concern is that the fans might be too loud.

An argument for buying the S9 was made by a friend who pointed out that I could resell it. What's really ludicrous about his argument is that a new S9 costs ~$1500 for late January delivery whereas used ones are sold at Amazon for $3999 for immediate delivery.

If I did buy an S9 it would mint roughly one coin per year, as predicted by a BitCoin Mining Profit Calculator that I tried. My next paycheck will enable me to buy ~$12000 worth of cryptocurrencies. There is a strong argument for buying it but I remain uncertain.

I won't have to make my mind of for a while as Bitmain only accepts BitCoin Cash as payment. I don't have any BTC yet, but I do expect to buy some with my next check.