My interest in listening to his opinion on Bitcoin's fundamental matters hovers somewhere around the big, fat, oozing Zero mark. He should be learning his iron buns off to brush up on the real workings and then maybe his contributions will be valid.

That's an extremely optimistic prediction for scaling timing. I don't think a great deal will happen for a lengthy time yet, if ever.

What does the number of coins have to do with anything?

Why? To obtain them you need Bitcoin, so you're effectively spending Bitcoin by proxy. They're also in pump/dump territory so you'd be pissing away vast amounts of value or making so much that you wouldn't want to spend them.

I heard on the radio today that Donald didn't really know anything about North Korea until the Chinese president filled him in a little.

What he probably still hasn't realised, as it's early days, is that the DPRK seems to regard war with the US as their divine destiny. It may be wee and underfed but it's also filled with fanatical psychos.

And anyone who sold it to you on that basis needs slapping upside the head. It might be conceivable with huge advances but it certainly won't happen as is. And there already is a wonderful payment system that can do this. It's called Visa.

So much hashrate controlled by one little fella and a poll on a site controlled by one of his special friends. Sounds objective.

And I'm with the spam theory. To go from very little to creaking backlog in no time at all when there's absolutely no reason points to the simplest explanation.

Openbazaar is one of those ideas that's going to float around until someone knocks it out of the park with the right approach and ideas. It could be years but the potential is waiting to be unlocked somehow.

In the meantime there's no way I'm bothering again. I couldn't figure it out or find a bleedin' thing.

On checking up you appear to have nailed it. I guess I have a file in the Kremlin now. Coolio.

I get the feeling there are more bots than humans in Russia these days. Or maybe there aren't any humans at all.

That's the sort of figure I was expecting. I would definitely make use of it if they had a viable European branch but shipping and tax from the US is bonkers.

Widespread use as a currency would be one of the last things to fall into place, if it ever did happen. Before that we need get through speculation into store of value. If that ever settles down then the currency aspect kicks in. However by then the deflation would start to be felt and even fewer people would want to part with it.

Retail is a huge boon for people who already have BTC but it's not much more than a sideshow right now.

I'd be very intrigued to see what the effect would be.

One thing I do wonder about though is whether his sheer impulsiveness will gradually blunt the effect of his pronouncements. It's one thing to tweet in capital letters about something he saw on the news a few minutes ago. It takes rather more effort to get it enacted.

Easily forked and non immutable takes away the entire point of crypto. You may as well stick to your credit card. Far more stable, far more acceptance and zero possibility of the entire thing disappearing in a puff of failed forkage. There is no potential upside.

There's definitely something to be said for systems that are more nimble than BTC. If they completely abandon the core principles, and many already have, they're useless.
 

Your reading needs brushing up. Mining continues until 2140. The machines that mine Bitcoin are solely able to mine that one algorithm. Not a single one of the big alts can be mined with them.

I think the people espousing monster fees are already stuck in the mind set that Bitcoin has already triumphed. Maybe in one's own echo chamber, but out in the big bad world that certainly isn't the case.

The longer it survives and the more expensive it becomes to use produces two things - ever increasing knowledge to come up with something better and the incentive to create it.

Even when Bitcoin fees were palatable for everyday transactions, hardly anyone was doing them.

Bitpay themselves say that more and more transactions are B2B. I don't think that's mainly down to the fees squeezing out the little guy. It's overall a better fit for that purpose. In that scenario a $1 fee for something that's done and dusted within an hour is still a vast improvement over conventional banking.

If you've got a debit card then there's no point in paying in BTC unless you have a huge gain you want to splurge or you're simply doing it to support the concept.

It won't be business or merchant usage that causes Bitcoin to be eclipsed, if it ever is, it'll be the speculation that's been driving this thing since the early days.

And in the case of big business using alts, most of the time it'll be like ETH. If you look a little closer these alliances are lifting the code and making private versions. A nice endorsement but not much more.

Neither of them work as exchanges at present. Ergo there's no point in getting one's knickers in a twist about the prices they're signalling.

Indeed. When a spread of this scale opens up it's a clear indication of a problem that isn't being solved. If it was simple arbitrage then it would be gone in a few hours as thousands exploited it.

I'm not really inclined to believe a word that comes out of his tweets going by his track record. The longer it drags on the more locked in some type of user inspired fork becomes.

By the sounds of it they don't know if and when you'll be able to withdraw USD. You can withdraw Swiss Francs and HKD and they're bringing other pairs in the coming weeks.

I wonder whether the volume will make a straight switch over or whether people will shop elsewhere.

Golly, you're hard to please. Let's send the two of them a selection of Sudoku and get an independent adjudicator to time them.