The thing that the fuckwitted autists who squeal about this never, ever, ever, ever seem to bother to mention is a small group of people known as...

wait for it....

users.

There are millions of them who wield staggering and overwhelming power. Miners can posture all they like. If they attempt to fuck the users then they triple entry buttfuck themselves with razorwire dildos.

Every single doomsday scenario has been played out ad nauseam. We've been told were going to be murdered by everything the tossers who FUD laid out in loving detail.

When it came to actual reality the risk of pissing off the users outweighed anything else and nothing happened.

No. Because if enough of them succeeded then the entire scene would become worthless. Bitcoin only has value because it has earned the trust of enough people. People aren't stupid enough to spread the value between countless forks because it would rapidly turn everything worthless.

The wrong and broke ones obviously, and perhaps there are a few out there who very sensibly won't admit to it.

Gold certainly has its place. It is strange how little impact it has on public consciousness in the West compared to places like India. I guess we're insulated from what gold represents to others.

There unquestionably is a finite limit on how long forks can produce a return. I don't think we're anywhere near tapping it yet. They tap into stupidity, short sightedness and greed. Crypto will never run short of any of those resources.

I see this thread is still bursting with misinformation, delusion and self righteousness. Remind me never to purchase legal 'advice' from anyone on this forum.

We'll probably start to hear about more than a few cases of crypto and divorce in the near future. If you're in the wrong country, ie America, UK and a few others, then your money, and crypto is part of that, being forcibly reallocated is a given. 

If someone does this they pretty much guarantee that the Bitcoin network will be forever worthless. No one's going to trust it again. No one's going to award it any value. The world will have to wait for a chain immune to this angle before people get interested again.

The only people who'd do this would be those who want to destroy it completely. At present Bitcoin's enemies with anything approaching this capability are people who want to control and co opt it, not kill it.

Shit article with moronic assumptions.

As with all of these things they assume miners are one mass who have nefarious plans. In reality they all have a mountain of bills to pay and zero interest in rocking the boat apart from a few maniacs who'll be drowned out anyway.

They can flirt and play with BCH safe in the knowledge they have BTC to run back to. That's not the case if they start fucking with the daddy chain.

I have never met one single person in my whole entire life who owns gold as a form of investment. Not one. Ergo this is not surprising to me.

The time to get a real boner is when the same searches are coming out of the White House.

Which sites? The article doesn't name any. They could be total obscurities for all we know, and knowing how clueless the Russians have been so far they probably are.

What's the score with VPNs in Russia? Are they going for a Chinese style wipe out of all of them? Russia is a strange place indeed.

All markets have leaders and when it comes to USD that's been Bitfinex for a long, long time. It doesn't matter if all of the rest of the market is real dollars and BFX is fake, the market will follow BFX for whatever reason and those fake dollars will drag the real ones along with them regardless of the proportion that BFX constitutes.

That means it does matter.

I've no idea what the score is with Tether, but to regard it as irrelevant is not the sensible thing to do.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/07/four-reasons-maybe-just-maybe-isnt-bitcoin-bubble/

Paywalled so here's the text.

OK, we can all see it: bitcoin looks a lot like a bubble. It stinks of irrational exuberance: it is incredibly volatile, and not only does its price continue to increase, but it is doing so at ever accelerating rates.

It took 1,789 days for bitcoin to go from $0 to $1,000, 1,271 days for $1,000 to $2,000, and just 13 days between $6,000 and $7,000, its latest milestone.

Individuals are selling their houses and giving up their life savings to put everything into bitcoin, seemingly more out of speculation that its price will continue to rise rather than because of any serious belief in its intrinsic value.

Many of the characteristics of a classic bubble - the fact that everybody is talking about it, extreme predictions about its future price, and the parabolic price curve - appear to apply to bitcoin.

For the record, I have no idea where bitcoin’s price is going to go, and in no way do I endorse it. It is very possible -likely, even - to believe this craze won't last. But is the only way down? There are reasons to think not.


Everybody thinks it’s a bubble

When a lot of bubbles pop - the real estate crash of 2007, or the dotcom crisis of 2000 - the aftermath is often characterised by complaints that nobody saw it coming. But there is a cacophony of senior figures in the finance industry - Jamie Dimon, Tidjane Thiam, Warren Buffett - warning that bitcoin is a “fraud”, “the very definition of a bubble” and “doesn’t make sense”.

This isn’t a situation where there are no safety warnings - almost everybody who people would usually listen to on this stuff say bitcoin’s out of control. And yet, people are willing to ignore them. If nothing else, it suggests that the market is not easily spooked.

It's all a matter of timing

Bitcoin has been called a bubble for most of its lifetime. In 2011, when it dropped from a measly $33 to $2.51, The Economist noted that “the currency’s rise was the result of a speculative bubble”. The arguments advanced against it were eerily similar to those now. The same happened in 2013, when it peaked at slightly over $1,000 - a seventh of where it is today.


Bitcoin has crashed before - in 2011 and 2013 - but on both occasions, its price rapidly rose again. Looking back, you can hardly say now that it was a case of the bubble bursting. One can argue it’s only a matter of time, but on a long enough timescale, so is everything. Kodak had a long and illustrious run before it went bust in 2012, was it in a century-long camera bubble?

The total value of bitcoin - around $100bn - is tiny compared to other assets, so it might run for some time yet. Indeed, the floodgates are only just opening to institutional cash.

There is some - some - value to it

Critics of bitcoin say that apart from wild price swings and speculation, there’s nothing to it: it’s not a great way to pay for things, for example. But it isn’t exactly useless. The blockchain technology that underpins it is (at least in theory) useful for all kinds of things. Its decentralised nature makes the currency itself nearly unhackable.

And “initial coin offerings”, a way for companies to raise funds using cryptocurrencies, do have some benefits (albeit a series of scams, hacks and raised eyebrows have not enhanced their reputations).


Admittedly these are uses for blockchain and cryptocurrency in general - not bitcoin - but as the best known and original implementation of the tech, it has the position of being a barometer for the rest of the industry.

Believe it or not, it is more stable than other assets

Bitcoin might look like nonsense compared to the (relative) stability of the dollar or the pound. But this isn’t the case everywhere. Google suggests the most countries with some of the most interest in bitcoin are Bolivia, Columbia, Nigeria, Slovenia and South Africa, countries that have been hit by inflation, falling currency values or expensive money transfer services.

For many people in these countries, bitcoin may represent a safer, more stable and more convenient store of value than local currencies.

There's more to it than that but I can't figure out what it is. I've read in multiple places elsewhere that futures markets are what will enable ETFs, but I don't know what it is about them that magically assuages the SEC's doubts and magically magnifies abilities they're unable to execute currently. No one could give me a convincing answer.

I'm not massively up on this.

What is it about functioning futures markets that makes an ETF that much more likely? Because the normal markets are just as muddy and impossible to police as when the SEC disposed of the idea last time.

Even if they really, really wanted to approve an ETF there was simply no way they could do the job they're appointed to do.

What a crock of runny shit. My last one with multiple inputs was still less than a dollar though I certainly was in no hurry. The highest I've ever paid was $20 and that had tens of inputs. Take your alt shilling out to pasture, ta.

Are there any B2X supporters anywhere? I've hardly come across a single one out in the wild.

The value is established every single time it's bought or sold. But overall he's right. It's not a currency and it's very unlikely to ever be used as one. People simply do not want to spend it if they have another form of money to hand. There always will be spending as currency of course, but I doubt it'll ever make up more than a small amount of throughput.

Blindly holding Bitcoin and a couple of other things certainly isn't for everyone but it has served me extremely well so far.

The thing that separates this from almost every other 'investment' is the absolute unknowability of its eventual fate. The people who end up penniless and insane via crypto are the ones who spout the most confident predictions and opinions which almost always are total clueless shit.

I was already diversified before I got in and there's certainly not been any worthwhile profit elsewhere that I've missed. That's partially down to markets but also my own indifference to investigating other things.

Not surprising in the slightest. We're too far gone to know how it's perceived in the rest of the world. There was a similar thing done with a gold coin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgUxF7gvYeE

Snickers or 1/10th of an ounce of gold.

Most people never encounter gold in a monetary sense in their whole lives. Same goes for BTC. Most people never, ever question what money is. My attitude leans towards - fuck 'em.

It's a great read, but I struggle to have any sympathy for someone who made such a moronic set of errors and was only saved by the most extreme alignment of stars.

That pin number for starters is ludicrous and custom designed to scramble anyone's brain. Let's face it, most people don't have what it takes to be their own bank and never will.

https://medium.com/@jimmysong/segwit2x-game-theory-scenarios-part-1-7f863904a72

This is a useful write up too. I don't really get why we haven't had clear statements of intention from all the relevant parties regarding this. I'm not talking exchanges who won't care, I'm talking the miners.

They're not helping themselves or anyone else other than whales.