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Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

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Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#231
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Bitcoin has by far the greatest amount of research and intellectual effort driving it, and it's far from a static protocol. It doesn't need to have gotten everything perfect, it needs to change just quickly (or slowly) enough to retain its core value proposition vs. other cryptocurrencies. Maybe it will get replaced, maybe not. But there's no question to me that Bitcoin is by far the most decentralized, most secure,…

> Ethereum offers a lot that Bitcoin does not Myth. There is not even a single thing you can do with ethereum that you cannot with bitcoin. OTOH, you can do money with bitcoin, but you can't do it on ethereum because neither is it a true blockchain nor is it immutable ledger or decentralised either.

https://oasisdex.com/ is a decentralized OTC exchange for Ethereum tokens that has been successfully running for a year on Ethereum(without getting hacked!) No fees for transactions other than gas costs.

I know you can do it on Bitcoin too, but has anyone done it? It took a team less than 2 months to build this OTC market on Ethereum.

Bitcoin can do one type of money with extremely rigid parameters that is volatile and not efficient for payment transfers. Ether is similar but at least has lower transaction costs, but Ethereum is well on it's way to host a hundred other types of money by the end of 2017.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#232

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What transaction fees you mean? I can transfer between wallets with no cost using BTC right?

They're "optional", but the miners can pick and chose which transactions they include in a block, and the larger the fee they get from the transaction, the more likely it is to make it into the block.

They are optional but it is no longer safe to send a transaction without fees as the code in Bitcoin that allowed for free transactions if they met certain rules has been removed.

You might get lucky but you can always resend with fees to push it through.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#233
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> useful property of PoW is that you can provide a proof that you destroyed physical resources Thought experiment: Say there's a PoW currency A, and PoS currency B. Alice mines A. Now Bob wants currency A, but he can't afford to mine currency A, because he needs special hardware. So Bob exchanges currency B for currency A with Alice. Alice now holds some currency B, and Bob is happy with A. Now the question is, would…

>Bob exchanges currency B for currency A with Alice. Alice now holds some currency B There is no reason for Alice to want B, a less secure money than A which they already hold. If Alice were perfect mathematician, this exchange would never occur.

I'm failing to see your point. I do not know why, nether don't care, why Alice wants to buy currency B. Maybe she just wanted to buy some coffee from Charlie, and she was comfortable that her transaction didn't burn thousands of dollars of electricity to verify it? Maybe it was early in the morning? Faster block times means she'll get her coffee sooner. If that was the reason, let's hope she was satisfied with her coffee. I also do not care why currency B got so popular, but I suspect it may have been because of the coffee ICO ;-)

Oh, and then there were cryptocurrencies C, D and F too, but that's a different thought experiment.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#234

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Ok, I see. Well, I agree with you there. But I have an other problem here : it's theft as well when people who keep buying and selling property keep profiting on people who actually keep companies running, who keep losing. Trump, Lepen, what is called populism (I hate that word) feed on that. People feel that what they produce is being stolen. I, for one, don't want to think that finance is a problem. I think it's go…

> it's theft as well when people who keep buying and selling property keep profiting on people who actually keep companies running, who keep losing. I still don't understand what your complaint actually is? How are people who buy and sell stock being unfair to those who work at the company? The company got it's fair deal when it IPO'd and sold shares in exchange for money to operate. That investors later trade that s…

Complaint is a strong word, I'm not an employee myself, I'm just trying to think about what is fair :)

> That investors later trade that stock back and forth between themselves doesn't affect the company who already got paid.

This is where we don't agree. I've seen plenty of times companies that made profit being moved to other countries where work is cheaper, or companies that were doing not so well asking salary cuts, then not giving salary back when things were doing better, and distributing bonus instead. Now that I'm in trading, I know why : this is a mean to produce "good news" and make stock rise. There is unfairness to employees, there, and people are getting more and more angry against finance because of that, this will end badly.

This is why I think allowing them to trade insider news - maybe with a moderate amount of money maximum - could defuse potential conflict. We could say to employees : "yes, stock value is a prime to us. But look, you can make good with it doing your own easy profits". It doesn't have to be about millions. Most employees would be very happy with an extra $500 here and there.

The message sent by making insider trading a crime could be heard that way : we're making money with your work that we don't really care about because we won't own stock from your company a year from now, we're deteriorating your work environment, and we'll punish you if you try to join the party.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's theft as well when people who keep buying and selling property keep profiting on people who actually keep companies running, who keep losing. I still don't understand what your complaint actually is? How are people who buy and sell stock being unfair to those who work at the company? The company got it's fair deal when it IPO'd and sold shares in exchange for money to operate. That investors later trade that s…

Complaint is a strong word, I'm not an employee myself, I'm just trying to think about what is fair :) > That investors later trade that stock back and forth between themselves doesn't affect the company who already got paid. This is where we don't agree. I've seen plenty of times companies that made profit being moved to other countries where work is cheaper, or companies that were doing not so well asking salary cu…

Here's an other idea : insider trading could be allowed only for buying on good news. That way, there won't be people owning stock losing big money without warning. Investors won't have a chance to buy stock, but this is a miss opportunity, not harm, and they'll have plenty other opportunities elsewhere, or they can even jump in during rise and still make profit, just smaller than usual. It could even be a good thing : I love to trade small amount during big unpredicted spikes, because their pullback is big as well for a few minutes, and I often make my day just on those (when there's no news and no TA reason, moves get crazy).

It would harm shorters, but since those ones are wishing harm to the company, it still seems fair.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#236

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> which benefits greatly from features provided by Segwit Which is only possible because of the features provided by SegWit.

Actually, that's not technically true. FWIU, Lighting could be run on both Bitcoin and Litecoin today, but issues with transaction malleability could cause it to be less than trustworthy, for some use cases. So, Segwit, which fixes transaction mailability by moving the header in the transaction to it's own section, enables a higher trust Lightning network to be deployed, on top of a more trustworthy blockchain.

Your understanding is correct AFAIK. However, the entire point of Bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies in general) is that it's a system that does not have to rely on trust. A "less than trustworthy" implementation is not a tenable implementation. In order for L2 solutions to be truly, universally usable we need a fix for transaction malleability.

Don't trust. Verify.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#237
post #150
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin has by far the greatest amount of research and intellectual effort driving it, and it's far from a static protocol. It doesn't need to have gotten everything perfect, it needs to change just quickly (or slowly) enough to retain its core value proposition vs. other cryptocurrencies. Maybe it will get replaced, maybe not. But there's no question to me that Bitcoin is by far the most decentralized, most secure,…

>But there's no question to me that Bitcoin is by far the most decentralized 3 people control 95% of all hashing power on the network! http://bytemaster.github.io/update/2015/09/29/Bitcoin-is-100...

That article (which, btw, you're not even reading correctly - go back and look at its numbers again) is way out of date. You can see the actual, current pool share statistics in many places online. The author makes a lot of baseless assumptions and glosses over a lot of details and then uses his ill-derived conclusion to peddle an unproven proof-of-stake system. It's sensationalist bullshit. It's fake news.

https://coin.dance/blocks/thisweek

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#238
post #219

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From Black's Law Dictionary: Ponzi Scheme: "...Money from the new investors is used directly to repay or pay interest to earlier investors" Bitcoin does not fit the definition of Ponzi scheme for numerous reasons: - There are no paid dividends to anyone - The purpose of using bitcoin isn’t to recruit new participants - There’s no centralized body that funnels money up to the top - Unlike Ponzi schemes, Bitcoin retain…

We're talking about litecoin, not bitcoin. The ponzi aspect of it is that it's inherently worthless and people who bought in early are paid off by money (or even bitcoin) coming from later suckers.

By your definition the entire stock market is a ponzi scheme because early investors are "paid off" when they sell their shares to later investors.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#239
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about litecoin, not bitcoin. The ponzi aspect of it is that it's inherently worthless and people who bought in early are paid off by money (or even bitcoin) coming from later suckers.

By your definition the entire stock market is a ponzi scheme because early investors are "paid off" when they sell their shares to later investors.

Most (all?) publicly traded companies produce something of value which is sold and translates to income and profits.

A better analogy would be buying gold which produces no dividends.

An even better analogy would be pyrite.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating analogy. Are you saying that the rise in Bitcoin's value recently is driven not by speculation so much as more people realizing Bitcoin's true value as an investible asset? And where are the yields coming from if not speculation ... ICOs?

But to actually answer your questions that are tailored to bitcoin, I would say bitcoins recent rise has nothing to do with that. Cryptocurrencies' rise is though.

Understood, thanks for your informative replies.
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