Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream • Hacker News Board

Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream

#231

Post by vertex-four » Sat, Aug 05, 2017, 5:05 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #230

vertex-four wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now we have large bitcoin exchanges which undergo regular, verifiable audits as a result.

Last week: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/btc-e-domain-seized-by-autho...

BTC-e has never been a reputable exchange. Nobody has recommended its use ever since there's been reasonable alternatives, such as Coinbase and Kraken.

Also, the fact that it was used for money laundering does not in any way show that the exchange system provided to customers was anything other than totally above-board. That the police are able to steal people's money when the issue at hand has nothing to do with those people's money is the problem here. HSBC isn't stealing its customers' money because it turned a blind eye to money laundering either.

Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream

#232

Post by davidgerard » Sun, Aug 06, 2017, 10:43 AM UTC

flashdance wrote: post #210

davidgerard wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What about the rest of the world? 6.6B humans? “Banking the unbanked” is much discussed in international development circles. Around 2013, Bitcoin advocates started claiming that Bitcoin could help with this problem. Unfortunately: * The actual problems that leave people unbanked are the bank being too far away, or bureaucratic barriers to setting up an account when you get there. * Unless they use an exchange (whi…

> Unless they use an exchange (which would functionally be a bank), they’d need an expensive computer and a reliable Internet connection to hold and update 120 gigabytes of blockchain. Some of your points are well thought out, but I couldn't leave this one alone. The vast majority of bitcoin users don't use a bitcoin exchange to store their coins. They also don't download the entire blockchain. SPV wallets exist (lik…

> The vast majority of bitcoin users don't use a bitcoin exchange to store their coins. They also don't download the entire blockchain.

I couldn't find numbers on this when I went looking, but that's a numerical claim. Do you have numbers on this?

Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream

#233

Post by Grangar » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 7:35 AM UTC

omarchowdhury wrote: post #107

honestlyreally wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone wants to take their $2000 out at once, can they? In most countries that's highly unlikely, so is it really $2000? Or something entirely different?

What happens to Bitcoin if everyone decides to cash in?

Price tanks. But your bitcoin remains.

Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream

#234

Post by codingmyway » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 12:08 PM UTC

otp124 wrote: post #171

codingmyway wrote: post #167

If nothing else, cryptocurrency might do one thing that is needed, if only roughly and imperfectly, and is to distribute wealth from the the old to the young. It's the one counterbalance to the debt based asset bubbles of the last 40 years that have transferred wealth to pensioners at the expense of the young

Care to explain? If anything, it's wealth transfer from the coin/token buyers to sellers.

Yes, it's from more technically savvy to less technical so to some degree from young to old. Not exactly of course but it's the one countervailing flow to the housing and other asset bubbles and debt transfer which have massively transferred wealth in the opposite direction.

Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream

#235

Post by themacguffinman » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 12:36 PM UTC

ty_a wrote: post #56

themacguffinman wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really "Linux on the desktop" as its advocates imagine it. For most ChromeOS users, the Linux-y parts like the shell and the GNU toolchain are largely restricted.

Not to be overly pedantic but the "shell" and "GNU toolchain" are literally not Linux.

You're right, and I didn't mean to imply those things comprise Linux. They are, however, what most people are talking about when they say they "use Linux". GNU + Linux comprise the "desktop Linux" platform.

Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream

#236

Post by themacguffinman » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 12:49 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #216

themacguffinman wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really "Linux on the desktop" as its advocates imagine it. For most ChromeOS users, the Linux-y parts like the shell and the GNU toolchain are largely restricted.

Well, were you expecting "Linux on the desktop" to be a giant terminal shell? Of course it was going to hide all the Linux-y stuff. That's what desktop UIs are for. Windows is "DOS on the desktop" and OS X is "BSD on the desktop".

I don't expect a giant terminal shell but I do expect the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and other open source parts of the Linux ecosystem such as systemd and X11/Wayland. The kernel itself isn't the only part of "desktop Linux" in the sense that many people refer to it in.

Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream

#237

Post by flashdance » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 3:44 PM UTC

davidgerard wrote: post #232

flashdance wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless they use an exchange (which would functionally be a bank), they’d need an expensive computer and a reliable Internet connection to hold and update 120 gigabytes of blockchain. Some of your points are well thought out, but I couldn't leave this one alone. The vast majority of bitcoin users don't use a bitcoin exchange to store their coins. They also don't download the entire blockchain. SPV wallets exist (lik…

> The vast majority of bitcoin users don't use a bitcoin exchange to store their coins. They also don't download the entire blockchain. I couldn't find numbers on this when I went looking, but that's a numerical claim. Do you have numbers on this?

Thanks for being curious. I scraped around to find some numbers to back up my wild claim--I think I did a fairly decent job of it. I do warn you--my numbers are pretty rough.

Blockchain.info claims to be the most popular web wallet with 10M users and users have control of their own keys without needing to run a node. Their android app has 1-5M downloads.

The Mycelium wallet for android has 100k-500k downloads.This is an SPV wallet like electrum, where users have control of their keys without needing to run a node.

Bitpay's wallet for android also has 100k-500k downloads, which is an SPV wallet.

The generic bitcoin wallet for android (also SPV) has 1-5M installs.

Multibit (also SPV) is the only desktop client that posts statistics but it claimed 1.5 million downloads in 2014. Now that multibit is discontinued (and bitcoin has gotten more popular since 2014) it's fairly safe to assume that electrum has numbers quite a bit higher than that. I suspect (although I can't prove) that electrum is more popular than all of the android wallets--It's even packaged in TAILS by default.

For comparison, the only popular wallet where users DON'T have control of their keys is the coinbase wallet with 9 million accounts. Other exchanges exist, and may have higher volume, but they don't market themselves as wallets to users.

There are less than 10,000 full nodes running at any given time--and a large amount of that is running 24/7. Its safe to say full-chainers are in the minority if you do some guesstimation.

I got most of these figures from the google play store.