I'm pretty naive on the subject of Bitcoin so I might be missing something here, but can someone explain to me how it's used right now? Aside from treating BTC like a stock that is. The value of it fluctuates so much that actually buying/accepting it seems incredibly risky. The price can go down just as fast as it goes up. As a someone looking make purchases with BTC; if the value of a BTC is going up, why would I us…
>As someone looking to accept BTC for purchases, how do I do so with confidence that when I accepted $3400 today that by the time I cash out it's not worth $2700?
You can accept BTC and convert it to cash instantly upon acceptance if you want.
I'm pretty naive on the subject of Bitcoin so I might be missing something here, but can someone explain to me how it's used right now? Aside from treating BTC like a stock that is. The value of it fluctuates so much that actually buying/accepting it seems incredibly risky. The price can go down just as fast as it goes up. As a someone looking make purchases with BTC; if the value of a BTC is going up, why would I us…
Bitcoin purists will say that, eventually, there is no "cash out" phase. 1 BTC = 1 BTC and who cares about what the dollar equivalent happens to be. Once everything is in BTC you will never exchange it for dollars. Do you spend dollars today wondering if tomorrow the Euro will be worth more or less? No, so why would you care what the dollar equivalent to a BTC is when everything you buy is priced in BTC? This is long…
> Do you spend dollars today wondering if tomorrow the Euro will be worth more or less? No
Actually, yes; there's plenty of countries where they use the USD or Euro instead of their local currency because the local currency suffers from high inflation or instability. There's other countries where the currency is tightly linked to the dollar. Both because the dollar is a stable currency, one that isn't influenced by supply / demand like BTC is - BTC is a finite resource, dollars are theoretically infinite.
>I don't understand why it means that Bitcoin is insecure for people to be able to mine in their gpu. What do you mean? People can mine with a gpu, but they won't make much because of the many miners using much faster ASICs. If you think Bitcoin should have been made so that ASICs weren't possible: a number of altcoins agree with that idea, but there's an argument to be made that optimized hardware is always possible…
Yes, but this way you're trading an elite made of hardware specialists and people that can afford to hire hardware specialists, with an elite made of people that can afford to fill datacenters with the most specialized hardware. Mining quickly becomes a game of "who can throw the most money into the problem" and ends up skewing the pool significantly because you are rewarded with money for winning the game, which mea…
Sort of. There is a potential that if you take over the network that it all becomes worth nothing because users understand the trust problem and cash out in the lead up. Or the users elect to not use your currency, it could still hold value, as the blockchain until that point is valid, but it remains paused until the 51% is resolved. This encourages you to work covertly to organize the 51% stake and you have to hold it in secret or all your coin/power may become worthless. It's essentially the cold war and in the same way, it's in everyone's best interest to avoid destroying the value of the coin by being selfish in an attempt for differential advantage.
I'm pretty naive on the subject of Bitcoin so I might be missing something here, but can someone explain to me how it's used right now? Aside from treating BTC like a stock that is. The value of it fluctuates so much that actually buying/accepting it seems incredibly risky. The price can go down just as fast as it goes up. As a someone looking make purchases with BTC; if the value of a BTC is going up, why would I us…
Don't get hung up the price fluctuations if all you want to do is use it for transacting. You will only be exposed to BTC price fluctuations for a few seconds or minutes. There's a bilateral parasitic relationship between those who want to use it for transactions and those who want to speculate on its value.
Are you saying that the investors would get a better return on their investment if they had instead simply purchased bitcoins? That claim seems to require the ability to know the future. Bitcoin may eventually be superseded by a superior alt coin, and disappear into history.
Explain "superseded" to me. In the world of crypto there is no such thing.
Can anyone recommend a decent exchange that supports deposits and withdrawals from a UK GBP bank account without needing to do a SEPA or SWIFT transfer? Neither Kraken nor Bitstamp do :(
I can't find one either. I've decided the best option is depositing/withdrawing using localbitcoins.com, then transferring in/out of there to your preferred platforms.
I'm pretty naive on the subject of Bitcoin so I might be missing something here, but can someone explain to me how it's used right now? Aside from treating BTC like a stock that is. The value of it fluctuates so much that actually buying/accepting it seems incredibly risky. The price can go down just as fast as it goes up. As a someone looking make purchases with BTC; if the value of a BTC is going up, why would I us…
I'm pretty naive on the subject of Bitcoin so I might be missing something here, but can someone explain to me how it's used right now? Aside from treating BTC like a stock that is. The value of it fluctuates so much that actually buying/accepting it seems incredibly risky. The price can go down just as fast as it goes up. As a someone looking make purchases with BTC; if the value of a BTC is going up, why would I us…
1) you don't really know that its value will go up, the past doesn't guarantee the future
2) money itself is useless, people like spending it
3) why would you buy computer/phone today if you can buy it next year for half the price?
Coinbase makes a killing with their fees. The spread between the buy and sell prices on coinbase are 1-1.2%. On top, their bank transfer charges are proportional to amount transferred instead of standard flat fee. I wonder why they need another $100M ! For people who want to buy, I would recommend Kraken - they have much higher volume and sane pricing. There are others too like Bitfinex, Poloneix, etc.
> their bank transfer charges are proportional to amount transferred instead of standard flat fee. I don't think that is true. From everything I've seen they only charge a nominal fee of 15 cents to do an ACH transfer.
There is a $0.15 minimum in the US, but they will take the max of that or 1.49% (to a bank account) [1]. Different countries and output methods vary, but most are proportional to the amount transferred.
Coinbase makes a killing with their fees. The spread between the buy and sell prices on coinbase are 1-1.2%. On top, their bank transfer charges are proportional to amount transferred instead of standard flat fee. I wonder why they need another $100M ! For people who want to buy, I would recommend Kraken - they have much higher volume and sane pricing. There are others too like Bitfinex, Poloneix, etc.
I was wondering the same thing. At the volume GDAX is processing ($100M/day [0]) they should be making $100M in gross profit every year [1]. [0] https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/#gdax [1] $100M * 0.0025 = $250K /day, or almost $91M per year.
There is currently a 0% fee for "market making," or when you do a limit buy/sell. The 0.3% fee only applies when you make a market transaction (instantly filled) [0].