471–480 of 490 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Digital gold is the kill app. That is enough to justify its market cap. For example, Chinese can use bit coin to exchange large amount of funds to other currency, although this can only be done in private because the official ban.
You cannot. There is no exchange from CNY to Bitcoin.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alright, then maybe in a hundred years your gold comparison will be meaningful, but not today.
Disruptive technology is disruptive. Tell someone from the past to imagine having godlike computing power in your pocket, and they'd say "why would anyone want that?"
Computers that are decades old, which were "disruptive technology" at the time, are scrapped today - for their gold.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>Bitcoin's narrative has had to morph from "digital currency" to "digital gold" I wholeheartedly agree with this. Let's look at some Reddit /r/bitcoin posts in January 2014: https://redditsearch.io/?term=&dataviz=false&aggs=false&subr... People were discussing bitcoin being used as a digital currency. There was talk of bitcoin being accepted on Overstock.com, TigerDirect, and using bitcoin apps on phones as a digita…
People were overly enthusiastic about it intially, but soon realized almost no one wants to use a slower, riskier, and now more expensive payment option. Bitcoin is good for merchants but terrible for buyers. Bitcoin lightning could change this, instant transactions with almost no fees, but it's still in early days.
Reading about the Lightning Network gives me a headache in general, but Phoenix manages to hide all the tech stuff. I think my old parents would be able to use it.
And it solves one LN problem of having to have bitcoin for opening a payment channel, you can simply install the wallet and start receiving bitcoin.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can start by asking people to take bitcoin for various transactions. For example, my friends and I all use it settle debts between each other.
The barriers to entry, usage, and understanding are just too high for average Joe. That and how the value of their money fluctuates compared to fiat makes it more difficult to use as a daily currency. Also, when things go wrong there's nobody to turn to in most cases.
Mentioned in another thread[0], the Phoenix wallet more or less solves this on the Lightning Network.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which they cannot do because 1) they don't have any banking and 2) they cannot allow redemptions which would risk a run on their reserves (to the degree those exist at all).
Except they do allow redemptions: https://app.tether.to/app/signup
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Bitcoin's narrative has had to morph from "digital currency" to "digital gold" The narrative around bitcoin has always been "It is digital currency. It works like gold". Hence the notion of "mining" . EDIT: downvote me if you want but you are flat wrong Section 6 in the bitcoin whitepaper explicitly likens bitcoin to gold [0] > The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expe…
The whitepaper only likens Bitcoin to gold in regards to the emission rate, not to it's supposed usage as "digital gold". In fact the whitepaper even opens with describing Bitcoin's usage for commerce. The very first paragraph in the introduction! The narrative has indeed changed to "digital gold" after it's made abundantly clear that Bitcoin is no longer suitable for commerce.
The emission of new bit coins following the "mining" of new blocks is like the minting of new gold coins following the mining of raw gold.
Because bitcoins are like gold coins.
I agree that neither gold nor bitcoin are suitable for commerce. But the narrative around and apparent intent behind bitcoin from in the beginning was "It is digital currency. It works like gold".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the limitations have been researched extensively outside of the echo chamber of bitcoin development. It is possible to scale a utxo system like bitcoins to hundreds of millions of txs per day. Xthinner[1] can compress blocksizes by 99%, but bitcoin devs have ignored this with handywavy arguments. [1] https://github.com/jtoomim/xthinner-spec
>but bitcoin devs have ignored this with handywavy arguments. Can you provide links to these discussions? I searched around on google and all the results are relating to bitcoin cash. I also searched the usual places that bitcoin (non cash) people congregate and turned up nothing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it illegal to transfer value from person A to person B without the middleman?
In many cases, yes. It's not the "middleman" that is required, but reporting the transaction to the government is.
A parent gives his child 5 USD to buy some sweets in the local shop.
A couple gives another couple 150 USD as a wedding gift.
A painter gets 200 USD for painting a house.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You cannot. There is no exchange from CNY to Bitcoin.
Come on, it was banned, but there is plenty of underground channel... Why is that even needed to be mentioned... Maybe I should be more clear in the OP.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This does nothing to explain the purpose of Tether. If Exchange A has no "traditional banking ties" but is where I want to trade so I need to buy crypto through Exchange B first in order to trade that crypto on Exchange A why would I buy Tether instead of BTC through Exchange B?
Maybe you do buy BTC on Exchange B. Then you transfer to Exchange A and sell, and what do you get when you sell? Tether. The point of Tether initially is regulatory arbitrage for Tether based exchanges. It gives them a fiat substitute without having regulatory baggage that trading in actual money would require. Tether then turned into a lifeline for a Bitfinex bailout and now acts as a (almost assuredly illicit) liqu…