91–100 of 355 posts
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I dunno, are we happy with the status quo? Making money is nice, but I miss being able to use bitcoins to buy things.
I have a bitcoin debit card. It works just fine thanks. I can spend it anywhere that accepts a card.
What should we do about the destabilizing potential of Bitcoin?
There are two facts about Bitcoin worth worrying about:
1. There is no upper bound on the price
2. Everyone who thought the price won't continue to exponentially increase was wrong
Greed is a powerful motivator.
It's easy to smile at this[1] but it will only take a couple more 10x increases before people stop laughing.
What happens when governments start putting money into Bitcoin because they don't want their economy to be left out? It'll only make the price go up even further.
It might be a good idea to take a step back for a moment and stop thinking "Can I get rich?" and start thinking "Before this reaches a point where we should worry, what should we do?"
I'm aware that this has roughly a 0.1% chance of happening. But if you'll suspend your disbelief for a few minutes and accept "What if it might be true?" then you'll find it's an interesting question worth thinking about.
It's starting to feel like no one really has a plan for this contingency. It will be a relief if the price crashes back to $1k, but Bitcoin defies belief. How many of you have parents that are seriously talking about getting in? Everyone wants to become rich. And if that infectious mindset spreads to the whole population, we might get an uncontrolled upward spiral.
Is there a way to prevent that?
Now, to add to the discussion: Several people have voiced that there is no reason to worry, both because it's impossible for BTC to hit $1M/coin and because this is all conjecture. But there is every indication that the BTC craze could in fact spread to the entire world -- literally nobody will be able to escape thinking about it, because that is what the world values. This has low probability, but just like climate change, it's worth planning for it now rather than later. Can we please try to think of something? Look at this[2] and let that graph sink in.
Fiction is also worth taking seriously. Satellites were predicted by fiction long before they were deployed. Many of the most influential ideas start as works of art. The dystopian future as envisioned in [1] is a far cry from how things would turn out, but the underlying idea is that we will become subservient to a tiny few. It's only a matter of time before that money starts turning into real power.
So, if we could set aside our selfishness and try to snap out of the getting-rich craze, and ask "Can we possibly stop this?" it would probably be one of the most impactful ways you could spend a few minutes.
Making BTC illegal won't work. It'll just go to countries where it's not, and take the people with them.
I don't think it would be possible to sneak a backdoor into BTC. People would notice by now. And even if it works, they'd just fork and preserve the wealth.
Even if one were to theoretically become batshit insane and try to hunt down everyone who holds BTC, that won't work either, because it's easy to conceal. The price of mixing services will just rise to the point of taking transaction fees into account, and that's how much people will start to pay.
I can't think of anything else. Ideas?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_time...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7f3z8j/btc_price_a...
Most interesting thing I learned from this article: Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, "said he now holds more of his wealth in a Bitcoin competitor, Ether"
Brian Armstrong has quite the history of being on the wrong side of every argument to do with safe and scalable crypto implementation. He has been a champion of centralization and attacks on bitcoin governance. He was a vocal proponent of four out of the five failed fork attempts of bitcoin over the past couple of years. He, and coinbase investors, are very lucky they had people like Charlie Lee managing the technica…
(For those not aware, Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin that removes segwit, the initial groundwork for off-chain scaling solutions, and instead simply increased the blocksize; so far this has proven to greatly reduce network congestion.)
Maybe it was the right call for Coinbase to not support many of the forks, but they will be adding support for Bitcoin Cash in 2018 (at least withdrawals). So it’s inaccurate to characterize Brian Armstrong on the “losing” side of these debates.
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They use Plaid[1] to verify bank accounts using bank login credentials instead of micro deposits -- which reduces abandoned applications since you don't have to wait a couple days to complete verification. This is a very common thing for fintech companies to do. [1] https://plaid.com/
What the fuck ? There is no way, never, ever, that I would even consider doing that. How the hell is it a good idea for any company to try to convince people that it should be normal to share login credentials with a third party for any service, much less something as sensitive as one's bank account? That's just training people to get scammed.
Yes. All the work of "don't enter your bank password on any website that isn't your bank" went down the bloody trash once this awful workaround to the awfulness that is ACH happened. It's very sad.
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"As as safe as possible" - are you out of your mind?!
Going out on a limb but I think OP probably meant that: 1) They take account verification seriously and leverage best practices around 2-factor auth etc even going so far as suggesting you NOT use simplified solutions like authy. 2) Your "hot wallet" balance is insured from internal breach / external hacking / etc. Good to note it's not insured from somebody stealing your account credentials from you directly. 3) The…
So seriously they blocked my entirely legitimate account from buying and refused to provide any explanation or recourse.
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It's safe if you keep your money in coinbase.
Completely false. The number one rule of bitcoin is never store your bitcoin on an exchange. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 You wait and see what happens when coinbase has 500 billion or a trillion dollars worth of hard currency on their platform, and the us dollar is three years into its slide. The temptation to raid that will be far…
What I find most interesting about Coinbase is that they quote your selling exchange rate the moment you place a sell order. If I click "sell" right now, they lock in the $13,000 exchange rate or whatever it is. The amount that shows up in my bank days later is exactly what they quoted at the time I placed the sell order. When people start selling off, this policy is either going to drive them to bankruptcy or create…
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Well I meant "safe" in the way that a Normie would think is safe. IE, similar security guarantees that a bank would provide. Obviously, this makes no sense to a cryto enthusiast, because they care more about the stuff you talked about. But the "average" zero knowledge person who freaks out about how Bitcoin is "unsafe" is usually talking about private key theft, or getting scammed by someone. These "unsafe" things ar…
So not safe but just say it is.