Yes, that'll certainly portray Bitcoin fans in a light that signifies they're ready to take world finance to the next level. Very impressive PR stuff from the little lad. He'll go a long way.

And why isn't it E sports?

Man, there's a blast from the past. As far as I know there's no formal market for them at all. I've seen a few people mentioning P2P but that was months ago.

This is the only place I can find anything and it's probably dead - https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/mt/markets/BTC

They really screwed the pooch on that one.

So what is the favoured sport of this thread? I assume by this point it's offshore power boat racing or polo.

At what point do you feel it's risen enough for you to start spending in a more wanton manner without being haunted by it? There'll come a price level where it all becomes somewhat academic, maybe it already is for certain people. It's free money now, it'll be even more free money in the future.

I spent a bit around the $1000 level. It would've been lovely to pay 6 times less for the same filth but I don't regret it as Bitcoin had been making me wait long enough so it was time for it to repay my patience.

That's a sign of having vast amounts of money to burn to push your pet down a few extra throats.

They've been laundering billions forever decades before BTC ever came along. They'll have the right people in their pocket. There's no reason for them to bother with BTC. It opens up new avenues for tracing, failure and seizure (not the BTC bit obviously).

They have enough money to buy anyone in the conventional system.

Unless I'm much mistaken it's started rolling - http://data.ledgerx.com

What's your forecast on its effects in the coming months? Lots of fun, another damp squib, absolute dystopia?

The Chinese 'ban' is priced in and discarded. The never ending Russian 'ban' hasn't even started yet, and Russia is nothing in crypto terms anyway. Other than that regulations on exchanges will get ever tighter in the non ban countries. This should be of no surprise to anyone.

And what gets lost between them?

If you read a translated book or subtitles you're not reading what the author wrote, it's the translator's effort. I know enough of a couple of languages to know that quite often what's being fed to you is radically different to the original work.

Similarly if you're some guy from Lesotho who only speaks your local dialect, how much of the world's knowledge is being denied to you by the lack of translation? What about your government as they're likely to be the one and only news source in that language? Surely objectivity and neutrality is almost non existent if someone's information sources are that limited. How much of his knowledge is being denied to anyone who doesn't speak what he does?

There must be mountains of information, art and learning that disappears between cultures because of this.

Is this an unpublicised cultural disaster or does the right info always find a way?

Certain miners and pool operators have an agenda they want to push. Spamming allow them to push it with an instant, very powerful and completely unavoidable effect for every single user. It's the biggest no brainer in crypto history as far as I'm concerned.

You do realise that the people who are in their 40s,50s and sometimes beyond are the ones who built everything that surrounds current tech from the ground up? Mobile phones are now over 30 years old. They weren't developed by goblins and leprechauns.

Someone who is now 50 would only have been in their mid/late twenties when the internet started to become a thing.

I'm firmly beyond 40. I have infected several people in their 60s and 70s with it and they all found it relatively straightforward to grasp the overall concept. They will also have experienced what it's like to live through an insanely inflationary phase along with banking disasters. Young first worlders will never have come across that so in certain ways they'll be less schooled in why it's important.

At this stage of the game I seriously doubt many young folks have enough free capital to be able to invest decent amounts. It's the oldies who have the cash.

The only Bitcoin fan I've met randomly in real life was far past 40 too.

May I ask why you're interested in doing it out of pure curiosity?

It seems like a potential universe of ball ache for not a great deal of gain. This forum is infested with slugs who'll go all out to rape each other and I assume escrows get regularly caught in the middle.

I'd say if you'd earned enough trust to be escrowing you could probably find a way to capitalise on it better with straightforward trading of some sort.

One way to learn how it's done would be to check the profiles of this forum's highest profile escrows and read all their posts. You'll be able to follow the arc of how they go to where they are. It might take bloody ages but it'll all be on the page to be picked up.

This guy has now possibly the worst trust rating on the forum, but he was very active trading and escrowing until it all went wrong -

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=358020

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=358020;sa=showPosts;start=11400

Me too. The regular proclamations on here from people that we're fully out of the early adopter phase are genuinely ridiculous. We may not have entered it all yet, but there's not exactly an adjudicator to tell us that anyway.

No. As far as I can tell they're still pure Beta. They love taking very dramatic positions. I'd prefer it if they concentrated on becoming non Beta.

I adblock everything to hell, but if I didn't I really wouldn't have a problem with this as long as it was implemented in a transparent manner.

Even better is if they split the proceeds at the end of the month with everyone who mined as I assume most people won't have a clue how to do it themselves. There's a universe of CPUs doing nothing. We may as well get some benefit.

I've seen a few people who've cashed out and coughed up say they priced everything they paid at 1c each for the sake of an easy life.

As long as you keep records of all your bank transfers and wallet movements it must be possible to build a precise picture of all your gains. Should the time ever come I don't think I'll bother with that as it'll be a pretty negligible difference in the tax paid with a whole lot of extra work on top.

At least you're not Ross Ulbricht.

Those fees are quite possible because you're at the mercy of the fees of the sender. The only thing you can do is choose the service with the lowest fees, and I haven't heard of any charging that much on a regular basis, but services are traditionally painfully slow in keeping up with the fee situation. I suppose it would be a full time job constantly adjusting them.

If you have control over your BTC and you're not in a hurry then very low fees are still possible if you have a wallet with fee control, however the days of paying nearly nothing for the next block are patchy at the moment and numbered for sure.

Assuming whatever's lurking in the alleyway is a blip then that's possible, but even then acting like tens of thousands are a right and an inevitability is enough to make real trading professionals wince.

Speculation is still the overwhelming driver of this, and speculator confidence is a nervous and vapourous thing.