61–70 of 191 posts
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Can you provide reasons/evidence for why I should not trust Coinbase?
Not trusting is the default. It is up to Coinbase to prove that they can be trusted.
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Bitcoin was meant to be a trustless system. You are handing over your private keys to a third party, and hence all the direct control over your funds. How do you know they are solvent? How transparent are their security measures? There are many, many examples of this going horribly wrong with people who could supposedly be trusted by the community, and there are more popping up on a regular basis. You are asking the…
Ease of use. Exactly the same thing all the bitcoin fanatics are talking about improving. Exactly the reason Coinbase was created. I'm lazy.
> This will continue to be the case until the US government takes bitcoin for taxes. I like how this is only about the US and the world around doesn't exist.
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Bitcoin was meant to be a trustless system. You are handing over your private keys to a third party, and hence all the direct control over your funds. How do you know they are solvent? How transparent are their security measures? There are many, many examples of this going horribly wrong with people who could supposedly be trusted by the community, and there are more popping up on a regular basis. You are asking the…
Ease of use. Exactly the same thing all the bitcoin fanatics are talking about improving. Exactly the reason Coinbase was created. I'm lazy.
The problem with Bitcoin right now is that it isn't convenient, even if you use these third party services. It's not convenient having to trust the services to provide you with convenience because if they fail, you fail.
But, ultimately, if you don't mind losing your money, it doesn't matter whether you trust Coinbase.
> And even if bitcoin itself fails, I think the blockchain will be one of key technical innovations of this time period. A blockchain is only useful if it is heavily secured by hashing power. This is only the case if there is significant mining equipment devoted to validating blocks. That in turn only happens if there is a reward for validating a block. Long story short, it's currently very difficult to use a secure…
With merged-mining[1], any alt-coin can hijack Bitcoin's security via PoW without any additional mining, see, e.g., Namecoin (which is unfortunately defunct for unrelated reasons). [1] http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/273/how-does-merg...
> Anecdotally, I hear from merchants who start taking bitcoin that after an initial spike they see almost no volume. To me, this is one of the biggest problems with adoption--bitcoin doesn't offer much benefit to the typical consumer for mundane transactions. I'm about to buy a coffee machine on Overstock.com. There's no practical reason that bitcoins are better than what I'm going to do which is put it on my masterc…
Keeping your credit card number out of their database where it can't be hacked is a practical reason to use bitcoin. It reduces your risk of merchant's getting hacked, which happens all the time.
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For many of us, Bitcoin represents far more than an opportunity to gain or lose money. For us, the freedom from financial and fiscal paternalism is worth the risk.
How does Bitcoin provide you any "freedom from financial and fiscal paternalism"?
Whether you agree with those restrictions or not, Bitcoin does not have them.
In a moment of some depression, reflecting back on sinking so much money into Bitcoin at close to the peak of its price history, I made this: http://i.imgur.com/f3tIJwK.png It's important to understand that Bitcoin is dangerous to you, and you need to respect its danger if you decide to buy some. You need to be using a secure cold storage wallet. You need to not trust services like Coinbase to hold onto your coins fo…
Can you provide reasons/evidence for why I should not trust Coinbase?
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The only "outs" therefore are the greater fool theory ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory ) or a pyramid scheme structure. Or, perhaps all of this price-mongering is the wrong way to look at things. Consider this: BTC success should instead be measured in transactions / day . The only people who care about BTC per $$$ are speculators.
In order to facilitate transactions BTC has to have value greater than $0 You can't transfer value via Bitcoin if the value of a Bitcoin is zero.