It would be interesting to hear from someone who was drawn in by Bitcoin.com and didn't realise what it was until they had parted with some money. I guess they'd be too embarrassed to admit it but I presume the main reason he puts so much money into it is for that to happen.

If both of the most prominent Bitcoin domains were owned by one conman phallus that would actually be a pretty neat demonstration of it being bigger than any single entity. The average shitcoin would go down in shrieking flames if that happened. Bitcoin would truck straight past it, though there would be noob casualties.

I guess the outcome will depend on which person is claiming to be Cobra that day. There seem to be several of them.

All pools are are administrators and distributors. Some may mine themselves. Others won't even have one laptop allocated to mining. And if a mining pool goes down or looks like it's trying to screw Bitcoin or the miners who are using it then it'll be abandoned en masse and be forgotten.

Miners are service providers to users. Pools are service providers to miners.

One of the few threads ever about it here - https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/8ecm6h/otc_what_are_your_experiences/  And not as informative as it could've been.

In an ideal world I'll never cash out, but I can't take sitting through another cycle without having enough pulled out to not have to pay close attention constantly so it's going to be done. It's too goddamn boring and I've served my time now. I will probably go with Kraken's OTC operation as I've never had any ball ache with their normal exchange operations.

My top tips -

Get yourself verified on the places you plan to use now while things are relatively dead still. The seizure in customer responsiveness if things heat up will be painful.

Set the price you're willing to sell at now and the proportion you're going to sell, and I'd never go let go of more than half, and stick to it no matter what the market is looking like. When the moment comes and you can't bring yourself to do it then you clearly did not set the right price. I would vastly prefer to get rid when things were quiet rather than fight my way on to some exchange or beg for the attention of an OTC trader who is swamped.

Or it could go the other way. In their attempts to 'control' Bitcoin, and I don't think they care enough but hey, the smoother the on and off ramps they enable are the more people cross over into crypto and don't come back.

If people earn in it and there are enough places to spend it returning to fiat becomes a bit pointless. If I had something for sale now I'd much rather take BTC for it. I'd happily spend that BTC elsewhere if I could.

Controlling banking now seems like an all powerful move. In retrospect it may look like a period where they helpfully provided a stepping stone to leap beyond them. Then it reverses and banking becomes something you occasionally need to dabble in for olde worlde transactions.

It's a cheap way of buying a little bit of immortality. Those coins will never move. That block will be venerated for as long as people remember BTC. In future no doubt we'll see more and more additions to it as more people cotton on.

Any high volume P2P participant would be very stupid not to be recording and reporting every trade they make, especially in the US. Even if you find a site that claims not to be monitoring you might be dealing with an individual who does.

I remember reading about him/her/it/they/mx a few months back. A truly nutty tale. It sounded like their life was 100% destroyed. I guess being a manic visionary eventually comes with a downswing too. An industrial strength one in their case.

It's toast. Telegram have announced that they have thrown in the towel - https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/12/telegram-abandons-its-ton-blockchain-platform/

It looks like they're pinning its demise entirely on the legal meddling they experienced from the US.

For an account with very, very few posts a weirdly high proportion of them mention Freewallet and how super cool it is. That's an odd look for anyone. No one has problems until they do and with a real wallet there are no problems to be had in the first place.

I think it started on Reddit actually.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/2lxkqk/daily_discussion_tuesday_november_11_2014/cm0085i/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2m1brp/this_is_gentlemen/

And no, nothing to do with me.

It's a factor but not the main driver in the most deranged places. Look at places like Vancouver. That's Chinese money that's been driving things. It's not tourism, it may be citizenship tourism.


Commercial stuff has been much more wobbly than residential in the UK for a long time. It's been closely following the decline of town centre shopping. They're very separate markets and no doubt it's going to be absolutely mangled by the lack of shopping, crippling of hospitality and increased home working.

In way it could be worse for economies than residential because the heavyweight investors go for that, or did in the past. In the UK local councils have been left so broke a lot have been buying up commercial property in a desperate search for returns. They ain't gonna get them and us lot will have to eat the pain.

You mean fund your Wirex account with your Paypal account?

It says here that you can link accounts - https://wirexapp.com/help/article/can-i-link-my-wirex-card-to-curve,-paypal,-or-revolut-0238

I'm not sure whether that means you can buy BTC with it but at the very least you should be able to withdraw from Wirex to Paypal as is possible with Coinbase and others. Going the other way is risky for them so Coinbase won't do it, not sure about Wirex.

Your dollars in Coinbase are insured. In theory the coins in there are insured too but only if they themselves are hacked, and only the hot wallet. By far the more likely scenario is that you're hacked in which case you're covered for nothing.

You also have the same issue of handing complete control of your coins to them.

Paper wallets are underrated as long as you're confident in using them. Hardware wallet seeds should always be fine. I do wonder whether the current hardware wallets themselves will slowly get picked apart by researchers until people give up on them.

I retained an old laptop and took out the wifi card for all my crypto related fiddling and that's the only thing I'd use for a paper wallet. I'd never use my regular computer to go offline, do my business, and then go back online as soon as the job was done. That has the possibility for pain.

As for redeeming a paper wallet I used Mycelium's cold storage spending functions which works very well. Do NOT use Mycelium on iOS though. That's been given up on. Not sure what the alternative is for Apple hardware.

I'd only do it for certifiably dead addresses, not that there's any way of telling apart from definite burner ones. And I'd hand them back to the original owners. And if they didn't venerate me to the heavens I'd empty their new address. And every other subsequent one.

Totally ridiculous property prices have become sacred to many people despite the fact that it damages society at every level. They'll do anything to keep it propped up so I would expect all types of weirdness to keep plates spinning.

Look what they've done in the UK with shared ownership, help to buy, first time buyer savings products etc. All they've done is made it harder for the people at the bottom while giving them the illusion that they're getting ahead. The people at the top are still golden. No way will they let that change without a fight.

Your choices are weird. Either empty the coin or insist on a value you won't get at present. And you won't get $5000 for it peeled either.

Future values are exactly that - values in the future.

You'll get more keeping it intact, selling now and not making the video but that's the one choice you appear to be refusing. You finish up with no coin, less money but a vid to show for it. Your choice of course but it's an odd one.

This is very true.

I think a vid showing how you do it in modern times could be useful. The first one I came across used Mt Gox to redeem it.

I'd get permission from someone who's already recorded it on video to update the redeeming part. We can already see the peeling part elsewhere.

Hey, it's Ebay. Anything is possible there. It's the place where dreams come true.

I'm pretty sure he'd get more here selling it intact, or a similar amount, I guess it's down to how badly he wants to make his vid.