One tiny detail has slipped your mind. Bitcoin itself was much cheaper not so long ago. If we were still in the 2/300s the fee would be 10c or less. Miners are probably making broadly similar amounts of BTC per block in fees and they can't be expected to take fiat fluctuations into account.

There only need to be enough happy customers to drown out the ones who are potentially needlessly raped. And no service wants to be nasty, when money's involved they're so twitchy to please The Man they'll go insanely overboard with a breath of provocation.

And this scenario already partially exists in the form of Coinbase and we can see every day that people are getting nuked by them, often with no explanation. With an accessible blockchain at least Coinbase is purely optional. It wouldn't be if this stuff carries on.

The effort to keep Bitcoin decentralised and censorless in its current form will drive the majority of users straight to massively centralised services.

The thing that really intrigues me about WW3 is how long they could keep up total war. A supposed first world country like the UK has 138 top line fighters, and 81 fighter bombers.

I assume a minimum of 30%, but maybe over half, are being serviced or mothballed for parts. Throw in the expense of modern ammunition and a long weekend of action would exhaust the national economy.

If they decided to restock we'd have to call a hiatus on the war for 5-10 years to build more shit to throw away. Even if a modern economy could afford a world war against another, the equipment is so complex and expensive that they wouldn't have the infrastructure to keep it up for more than a few days. They're all geared up to gang up together and drop bombs on goat herders in sandals.

Back in the day you could cut up a few fences at the local park, melt them down and turn them into a bomber a few days later. That's impossible now.

That would be a quasi Paypal which I think is probably the direction it's going to go anyway. People will wake up one day and wonder what happened when their transaction is reversed and the underlying Bitcoin confiscated.

Yup. The mining situation is not fit for purpose IMO.

Private company exercises rights over other private company. It's all optional. Anyone treating Google like some type of public sector service is setting themselves up for a sad time.

If we're talking purely about Bitcoin's usage as an online currency, to buy anything credit cards most certainly are better. You get more protection, cashback in certain cases and it's cheaper. I don't give a shit about merchant fees, all prices reflect them so they don't cross my mind.

If you already have Bitcoin which has risen then it's cool to spend. It's free money. You can't buy it cold without paying a premium and/or waiting forever for your stool sample to be dipped into by whoever you're buying from. So it's a 1-10% premium and then the tx fee on top. Pointless.

Bitcoin is many things, a good currency it isn't. I wonder how long most merchant usage is going to last. It's great for them. It's not enticing at all for the customer.

It's going to be really intriguing to see who blinks first. I'd guess that many of the current users are using it as a curio and luxury rather than having any pressing need. If the price keeps on rising then I suppose enough people will swallow it for now but I wouldn't underestimate the willingness of people to walk away.

Anyone using it for commerce from either direction must be not too far off shopping elsewhere, or they'll all go off chain such as the merchants now only accepting sales from Coinbase wallets.

The only price that interests me any more is tenty trillion gazillion. Nothing else is going to cut it.

I think it may be too late now. Coinbase, Bitpay and a few others tried to introduce 'bits', 100 satsoshis, and that went nowhere.

If Satoshi hadn't been balls deep in computer science, he would've realised most humans don't want strings of zeroes before the numbers that count. He should've either started off with many more primary units or made the change when it was just starting to get somewhere.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/5vo2ov/daily_discussion_thursday_february_23_2017/de4ivk3/

This is a very interesting little thread. By the sounds of it the amount of action this application has produced is unprecedented. There've also been ETFs with similarly drawn out application periods that were withdrawn at the last minute. It's not in the bag yet.

Unless it's forever affordable it's not going to get very far. I do wish we'd managed to switch to mbtc or whatever a long time ago. For better or worse that's more important for getting people on board than some cool tech tweaks.

The 14th actually. That was quite some time ago. We'll know what was discussed soon enough. I assume dragging all those people in is a positive sign unless they personally wanted to slap each and every one of them for wasting their time.

Compared to 2013 we are now all fully grown men and women who consider it uncouth to discuss such things. The most interesting thing is that it didn't bubble through. It kind of ground through it. That's a powerful sign that the excitement has yet to really kick in.

It feels remarkably peaceful in comparison to me. It's been a slow burn this time around and there are many more battered bulls than last time. Perhaps it hasn't even begun to warm up. Passing the ATH in this manner is a lot more compelling in a way.

Hot damn. It certainly made us wait for that one. Good to see once more. Congrats to anyone who sat through the entire thing.

Millionaires didn't get to be millionaires by buying near all time highs. People seem to be expecting their wealthy overlords to enrich them by all piling in at once. They won't. That's why they're our overlords.

Why on Earth would any self respecting exchange permit a publicly traceable BFX coin to be sold? I think the hacker's wee plan might grind to a halt fairly rapidly.

Who knows what the odds are? The only people who know aren't going to let anything slip. Everyone else is in the dark.

There's a good chance there'll be a fall in case of a no, but at the same time there are ever swelling volumes in places where an ETF will be of absolutely no interest or use whatsoever.

Instead of forkageddon, why don't they just create an alt in a similar fashion to how Clams were created? Take a snapshot of every balance, make it redeemable with the private key, start the mining at the same moment. They're in full control from the off and free to do whatever they wish.

I suppose that's too straightforward though and doesn't allow for adolescent triumphalism.

I can't imagine any charting site would include OTC stuff. They'd be all over the place and I'm sure such sites don't necessarily want to publicise sales. That would go against everything OTC is about.

Itbit seems to make a big appearance every now and then and then disappear once more.