171–180 of 220 posts
So what happens when the entire earth's energy production is required to produce the next bitcoin and there is therefore no further bitcoin mining?
Bitcoin is limited at 21 million coins. After that, no more btc, and people will trade in btc divisions such as satoshis. But there are hundrerds of bitcoin alternatives now, some very interesting.
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It's not very good as a medium of exchange due to the high transaction time and costs. There is a theory that a recent bump in Litecoin prices was due to traders wanting to move Bitcoin between exchanges and Bitcoin is too slow.
I myself use Litecoin when moving between exchanges but Bitcoin is in my opinion to other cryptos what USD is to stocks. You can compare AAPL and GOOG, but you usually compare AAPL USD and GOOG USD
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The bitcoin exchanges have plenty of liquidity, and executions happen in less than one second. The real risk for arbitrage is with the crypto exchange itself: these can go bust, or disappear overnight. You wanna keep $1M sitting on one of these exchanges?
Mmmh, why do you need your coins sitting on one exchange? Can't you just take them out once your transaction is done?
https://www.reddit.com/r/bitfinex/
Nothing but complaints about withdrawals. You can't even withdraw anything from bitfinex less than 250BTC.
Buy Ethereum
The Ethereum network is imploding under its own weight. Running an ethereum node has become quite expensive and requires very state of the art hardware just to keep up. There’s a reason bitcoin chose the constants it did.
Note that with the "fast" mode you still have all the blocks, and with that all the information needed to recreate the state at a certain block somewhere in the past. And you can still help the network by syncing those blocks to newly spawned archive or fast nodes. It's just that requesting the state (e.g. balance) at a certain block in the past takes some computational work. Most people are not interested in that however, which is why it's the default synchronization mode.
[0] https://etherscan.io/chart/chaindatasizefull vs https://etherscan.io/chart2/chaindatasizefast
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It's not very good as a medium of exchange due to the high transaction time and costs. There is a theory that a recent bump in Litecoin prices was due to traders wanting to move Bitcoin between exchanges and Bitcoin is too slow.
I hate to break it to you but none of the existing cryptocurrencies know how to scale transactions yet. There are, however, many proposed solutions. Bitcoin is aggressively pursuing those solutions. The worst proposal, increasing blocksize, is not currently being considered because of its impact on centralization.
Hard drive space is cheap! Increasing blocksize isn't going to cause centralization, it's the easiest and most effective way to scale for now.
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The bitcoin exchanges have plenty of liquidity, and executions happen in less than one second. The real risk for arbitrage is with the crypto exchange itself: these can go bust, or disappear overnight. You wanna keep $1M sitting on one of these exchanges?
Wrong kind of liquidity. Trading firms, hedge funds, etc. care care about liquidity of the "Can I convert this into the kind of money I use to pay taxes and employees and investors?" kind. BTC has basically zero of that, as evidenced for the fact that there isn't a deliverable version of this contract. I'm not sure a sensible institution would even consider BTC held at exchanges to be real BTC, just a kind of IOU. Th…
Nor should they. BTC held at an exchange is, by any sensible definition, an instantly redeemable promissory note denominated in bitcoins. Several exchanges have defaulted on these types of obligations.
Where is the link for the CBOE Bitcoin Futures index ?
(Where did Bloomberg get the index data from? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-10/bitcoin-f...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate to break it to you but none of the existing cryptocurrencies know how to scale transactions yet. There are, however, many proposed solutions. Bitcoin is aggressively pursuing those solutions. The worst proposal, increasing blocksize, is not currently being considered because of its impact on centralization.
>The worst proposal, increasing blocksize, is not currently being considered because of its impact on centralization. Hard drive space is cheap! Increasing blocksize isn't going to cause centralization, it's the easiest and most effective way to scale for now.
AFAIK, the CBOE Bitcoin Futures exchange uses a specifically-built index from Gemini exchange to track the BTC price. However, I cannot find a link. Where is the link for the CBOE Bitcoin Futures index ? (Where did Bloomberg get the index data from? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-10/bitcoin-f... )
> XBT futures are cash-settled contracts based on the Gemini's auction price for bitcoin, denominated in U.S. dollars.