Does it really need to stop pricing itself in fiat? The current system is fine by me to be honest and I like the idea that I have a choice between fiat and Bitcoin. To all the people who are going for the "dream" of a world where there is only Bitcoin need to wake up. Bitcoin is only good when there is fiat and strict monetary regulations. Bitcoin is the cancer that every government and financial regulatory body has to live with. If I had my way, I would make more monetary regulations so that Bitcoin's use will be much more effective in circumventing laws. Do you know how hard it is to buy drugs online without Bitcoin?

Take of what I said as you will and see me as you will too. I do not care. It is your right and I do not judge all of you for it. The wrong thing to do is trying to discourage a person from expressing himself simply because he or she made a mistake. Get off your high horse as if you have not made a mistake yourself.

Yes Bitcoin is a giant bubble. Yes it does not have intrinsic value. But I sure can sell my Bitcoins at $750 per coin right now and that is all I care about.

The IRS has nothing on Bitcoin. But they are free to try to imprison all the Coinbase users or fine them if they were not paying taxes. Then what?

Back to bubbles. If you think it is a bubble now, you have not seen nothing yet.

Adoption of what? The mainstream? I would say that Bitcoin use is ok right now. It is funny listening to the thousands of people who are jaded because they expected Bitcoin to disrupt the banks and be in widespread use by now according to their estimations.

Bitcoin was not made for markets that are served by the banking industry. It will only be used widely in markets that are not served by the banks and markets that do not pay taxes.

Does the IRS snooping around Coinbase not bother you? I know they are there for only tax purposes but just to be safe, it would be advisable to stay away. What if the IRS finds something over there like some evidence of money laundering? That could be enough to lock down the site and have your Bitcoins trapped.

Stay away from virwox.com. That is not a good exchange for Bitcoin trading. Also stay away from Coinbase. The IRS are after them and they are demanding that they hand over the transaction records of all their customers. That is an invasion of privacy and if some users are caught evading taxes, they will be prosecuted. I believe Coinbase will also be prosecuted for being an enabler.

Bitstamp was hacked last year with $6m stolen from them. The same with Bitfinex, it was also hacked and some money was stolen. That leaves us with BTCe. The owners are anonymous but have been trustworthy so far.

I just read an article at coindesk.com entitled "What the IRS Summons Will Mean for Coinbase Users", located here.

It mentioned that (I will copy/paste below)

"The situation is reminiscent of the John Doe summons which the IRS issued in 2009 during the UBS Bank offshore banking scandal.

UBS had set up Swiss bank accounts to hide hundreds of millions of dollars belonging to US citizens. Swiss banking secrecy cracked, UBS sent a list of names to the IRS, and individuals were prosecuted.

UBS paid a fine of $780m and some Americans with UBS bank accounts paid fines in the millions and went to prison."

If the same were to happen to Coinbase then I would say they better close now or suffer the consequences if they continue on under the scrutiny of the IRS and risking the fact that Brain Armstrong and the rest could go to jail. So is this the beginning of Coinbase's demise or do they have a case to fight against the IRS?

What say me? I say they will be in for a challenge in taxing all Bitcoin users at Coinbase. That is just at Coinbase, so I cannot imagine just how insanely hard it will be to track the users of Bitcoin in all of the US. It will be a stupidly futile attempt to collect taxes from Bitcoiners. What they will end up doing is do what the US government does best, and that is fear mongering.

I would love to see them try taxing the Bitcoin dark market users. That is where the real money is.

As I mentioned before, please take what I say with a grain of salt. I will not refrain form "prophesying" because what you call "prophesying" is just speculation after all. This IS the speculation board of the whole forum, is it not? I am not afraid of losing face because I am not an expert and I have never claimed to be one. So take my "prophecies" as you will or just ignore them altogether. But that will not stop me from expressing myself.

Hence the use of the term patent trolling. I am not sure but I think that situation bolded in your post is what the term is referring to. If an entity is only applying for patents without the intention to build now or in the future, and that the real purpose of applying for a patent is for litigation and sometimes profit then we can assume that entity is a patent troll.

Some people may think that it does not limit innovation but it really does. We cannot have our inventors think twice about creating and releasing a design simply because they are afraid of violating patent laws.

 

Maybe it is me who misunderstood patent trolling. As I understand it, an entity applies for a patent but does not have the intention to build what he or she has patented. So when someone else accidentally "invents" the same idea the entity who applied for the patent first has the right to file an intellectual property related case against the person who has actually built the invention.

I am not sure if that is a case of patent trolling but I think that is what some of these companies are doing.

Good question OP! I would like to hear the answer straight from either a Core developer who worked extensively on Segwit or from a developer who is working on an LN implementation. This question was asked before but no one who really knows about the subject has come forward to answer. If someone has please post the link in this thread.

It would be stupid of him to come back and say that this is a bull trap. First of all he made a mistake, so anyone believing him now is as stupid as him or maybe they are trolling. Second, this is not a bull trap. A bull trap happens when a market is going down, not up.

A month or 2 ago I would have said yes. In fact I had buy orders placed at the mid $500's because I really thought that Bitcoin will stay below $600 until early next year. Answering your question now, I could only tell you to look at the price now and look how strong it is. Does that look like it will go back down to $500 to you?

I recently read this article on Coinbase. Coinbase Seeks Patent for Bitcoin Private Key Security System

It mentioned that there are Bitcoin companies like Blockstream, Digital Asset Holdings, and old companies such as AT&T and Nasdaq that are applying for patents relating to Bitcoin technology. I have also read that 21 Inc. have also applied for patents. Are we seeing the future of Bitcoin with a lot of patent trolls? Do they have the intention to make the products and tools out of those patents? It almost looks like they are limiting the developers' need to create.

OP, it is funny that you made this thread. I just had my longest wait for a confirmation just yesterday. I waited around 6 - 8 hours to get one small transaction to be confirmed. I checked the mempool and it had a really high no. of unconfirmed transactions. Should this be a cause for concern? I do not think this is normal anymore.

All who went short should be closing them now. It would be a mistake to continue to do so and keep on hoping that it will go the other way one day. Maybe it would, but by that time the price might already be too high and it was better to hold and go long in the first place.

There is one use case where a big time crime ring could make use of Bitcoins. What about kidnapping for ransom? It would be a lot easier for them to collect money if it was done thru Bitcoin. Let us all wait for the day that a Mexican cartel ransom demand is done in Bitcoin. Or do you see how the big time hit men in the movies only use their computers to send and receive funds? That could happen with the use of Bitcoins. It will be much easier for them and safer.

That is not the point. My point is there is an increase in some illegal avenues of Bitcoin's use case. Whether or not Bitcoin caused it or not is irrelevant in what I am trying to say. Like you said, it is a natural evolution in cyber crime. Well the use of Bitcoin is already part of that evolution and it will not stop there, it will grow over time and at some point it might be impossible to stop it. It will become a part of society's ills in their life with the internet.

I would say that is an excellent use case for Bitcoin if it becomes widespread and unstoppable.

Whatever they mean to do, it is not working. Right from the beginning the miners already know which "side" to support. To what reasons why they decided to pick a "side" is arguable. It may be politics, their earn or the safety and the well being of Bitcoin as a whole. So I do think in the end they will be supporting core all the way.