201–210 of 260 posts
I slowly bought about 25 BTC since January. Honestly this is very exciting right now and I've basically been daytrading for the last few days. I'm no expert by any stretch of the imagination, but it's been enjoyable to set alerts for different price points then buy/sell as necessary. I like the liquidity and 0 government involvement/taxation - something I couldn't do with stock/options/CDs etc.
Where are you doing your trading?
There is a LOT of talk about "blockchain technology" going around these days. It seems like another "cloud", i.e. some vague concept that consultants can sell to CTOs who are afraid of appearing behind the technology curve. New clothes for the emperor. Since bitcoin is the reference implementation of "blockchain technology" obviously all this interest rubs off. And since bitcoin at this point is all promise without m…
It's the first distributed, decentralized ledger that successfully operates in the presence of malicious nodes. The white paper and reference implementation represent a fundamental breakthrough in computer science (a solution to the famous and previously unsolved Byzantine Generals problem).
Bitcoin is a big deal whether you want to realize it or not.
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What do you do when the money is gone? With other payment technology you can get court orders to freeze funds, or judgments against current holders. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is irrevocable and pseudo-anonymous. In July 2011 the owner of MyBitcoin.com web wallet allegedly walked away with 50,000 btc of customer funds. We know where those funds are. You can see them on any block explorer. But it is not possible to f…
>But it is not possible to freeze or confiscate those funds. That is just a limitation of the Bitcoin protocol. One could build a protocol where communities could agree to freeze (not accept) or greatly devalue those funds.
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Btc is as real a currency as it gets, I bought VPSs with it just like I have bought them by unsafer payment methods in the past (supplying credit card info). Although more common in the trading of digital commodities, you can buy physical goods such as clothes and pizza with it, depending where you live. It just doesn't enjoy widespread adoption outside the digital world yet.
> I bought VPSs with it Wow! A VPS! Something that 99% of the population has no use for. How about paying rent, medical bills, utilities, phone bill, groceries, tuition, gas, car payment, car insurance, car maintenance, tolls, daycare, taxes... you know, the kind of things that real people actually care about. > just like I have bought them by unsafer payment methods in the past Bitcoin is by far the most unsafe meth…
None of that shit helps me when I can't buy what I want because the merchant is in the U.S., my credit card is issued in Canada, and my shipping address is in Thailand.
I don't care about other people, I should be able to buy things online in 2015 and accept the risk of fraud my own damn self. And the merchant should (and wants to!) be capable of serving me.
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On top of that, remember that bitcoin has many prices, the most important ones being US dollar, Euro and Chinese Yuan. Right now bitcoin is around 500USD, but it's sitting on 450EUR. People buying in euros will be confident that the price will go up to 500EUR and they'll keep pushing up the price. Wich will push CNY price to 3450CNY, a very ugly price, so it will probably move to 3500CNY.
With all due respect, I don't think that's how markets work. I know that people tend to psychologically anchor to round figures, but I don't see this situation playing out as you've described.
We are not talking about a regular market.
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So what numbers do you have to pump it to until you get your money back?
This is a blaming statement. Trust comes in all shapes and sizes, and includes information from individuals who don't trust each other sharing what they know about a given object or system. Trusting someone else's information is done on an individual basis, unless there is a decent consensus mechanism in place (Rai Stones for example). If you don't trust what csomar is saying, then you should just say that instead of…
Bitcoin seems more like a speculative commodity than a currency. As long as Bitcoin is experiencing such instability, how can it be useful as a currency?
It's very easy to use as a currency since it's the only way you can send value instantly around the globe with almost no cost and without any regulatory issues.
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Bitcoin is in constant development, so it's a hard question to answer. If Bitcoin core development suddenly stopped right now it wouldn't be very future proof. Trading volumes are irrelevant from a scaling perspective, what matters is number of transactions per second (tps). Right now Bitcoin has a really low capacity, just 7tps, way below VISA for example. However, progress is underway on creating the Lightning Netw…
Lightning isn't going to happen any time soon. Bear in mind it's not even block chain based, nodes are stateful and control signing keys, and no existing software works with it. Lightning will require entirely new wallets to be created for it, and those wallets will be very complicated. It's a multi-year project at most. The reality is that Bitcoin will fall apart if too much load is placed on it, and it's getting cl…
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Miners could conspire to mostly freeze certain bitcoin. It wouldn't even have to be done in a way that was visible on the bitcoin network, they would just have to agree to not include transactions from whatever addresses. A strong majority could probably refuse to acknowledge blocks including the blocked addresses, which would be a real freeze (rather than the hassle freeze obtained by not including the address in bl…
You'd need >50% of the miners to do that. It is precisely what I mean by building a protocol. Of course, without strong consensus (and a real algorithm/protocol) such attempts will likely just result in fractured blockchains (basically the state at the moment, with many competing implementations of the same basic idea).
You'll need 100%, because if a single miner decided to include the transaction, then it is in!