Since 50K euros values more than 50K dollars, which is the maximum purchasable foreign currency in china for each individual every year, it has to go through bitcoin (which is legal)

All of the large chinese exchanges have different deposit channels, the only requirement is uploading your identification documents, and communicating with their customer service through QQ to get the deposit instructions. And since the exchange rate on chinese exchanges are normally a little bit lower than kraken and bitstamp, you could even make some money in the process

And, you better find a bitcoin accepting school

This has been debated for years. As I can see, typically those people in IT branch have little knowledge about how finance and value works, in fact it is totally another group of people like Mark Karpeles and speculators in China drove the bitcoin into current status

The value of bitcoin is decided on exchanges, has nothing to do with its technology, and on exchanges, it is supply and demand rules. A currency's value is based on trust, and trust takes TIME to build up, that's the reason bitcoin worth almost nothing in the first and second years. Any kind of major change in protocol will create confusion and reduce people's trust to this currency and hurt its reputation much quicker than QE did to FED

Once people realize that this is just another version of fiat money with a group of programmers instead of reserve bankers deciding the future of its user, they will trash it like a used game. Politics is the biggest threat for bitcoin, it should be totally forbidden. You never have politics with gold: No kind of Lobbying can change gold's extremely stable property. It is very difficult to move gold, but it holds its value for thousands of years regardless of transportation technology. Stability will build trust and value, without value, you can not build anything meaningful upon it

Similarly, stability will build value for bitcoin, and when it has larger and larger value, all the solutions will arise to enhance it. But currently, people are trying to create value through higher quality of services, this is a wrong mindset showing that they don't understand value. Maybe they have been working like slaves for the whole of their life and they always try to impress others to make money. Have you ever seen FED trying to impress its users with a higher transaction capacity to make the USD more valuable? No, they just print more of it and its value keeps rising. How did they do that? They are extremely cautious, they never make sudden moves, they don't fork USD

I think the more important is the production process in semi-conductor industry, it is going to be vast different in the coming years

KNC have claimed that they adopted 16nm Finfet 3d and achieved one magnitude of efficiency. So we can expect similar 3D process will all raise the efficiency dramatically in the coming years, but then it will be highly centralized in 1-2 semi-conductor factory 

Someone is shorting yuan like Soros did to HongKong dollar during 97, the pressure is so high that they must give up some ground. Usually the operation is not a single one, but a combination of different positions in stock index future and major stocks, maybe even commodities

Little bit off-topic here, but the greater fool theory applies to every type of fiat money, so it does not make any sense. There is no such thing called intrinsic value, all the value depends on humans demand, and the demand for money has become the major demand in today's financial market: People already have everything, they just want more money, because more money give them more safety and freedom

Following this thinking, XT coin will worth a little because there is no demand on market, and after the XT fork you will immediately have 10+ million coins on that chain, I don't think that Mike can build a whole ecosystem to withstand that large amount of sell pressure. And when price crashed to cents, the whole mining infrastructure will become a pile of paperweight, they would switch to core chain

Get some idea about Mike's points, however I disagree with this sentence

"But this isn’t how money works. Money is inherently a social tool and to use a currency is to accept its rules, even if you don’t like them. "

He maybe meant that "this is not how fiat money works". True, people have to become the slave of central banks because they don't have a choice, but that is forced upon them, not their free will to participate. Now people have the choice to use a currency of their own will and devoted much resources and effort into it, they definitely don't want it to become something they don't like

Because cryptocurrency is not forced upon its users, those who don't like the new fork will just leave it (dump their holdings and crash the price at mean time), that's the reason it is very important to reach a consensus at a most acceptable common ground, everyone should make some compromise

Uncertainty. The larger the change, the larger the uncertainty, and for financial system you want changes to be as small as possible to avoid uncertainty, uncertainty increase the chance of totally unpredicted disaster

Stay away from Warren Buffet 

A usual complain about bitcoin is that some payment processors like Visa/Mastercard/Paypal can do several thousand transactions per second while bitcoin can only do 5-7

That is because those payment processors' transactions are all done in their own server, similar to an exchange. I believe bitcoin exchanges can also do several thousand transactions per second, or even millions like Nasdaq, given the right hardware setup. In fact huge amount of transactions happens daily on bitcoin exchanges

But transaction on blockchain is totally a different thing, its a true monetary transaction between different entities. Since with bitcoin you are your own bank, all the transactions on blockchain is essentially a transaction between banks. And we all know that banks do settlements between each other only once a day, not including weekend and holiday. From this point of view, bitcoin's transaction speed is already magnitudes faster than the fastest international bank settlement network (Swift, SEPA, etc...) on earth, it can do settlements between any different banks in 10 minutes, 24/7

So there is no reason to blame the bitcoin's transaction speed, it is already the fastest financial settlement network in world

An old article about bank settlement and bitcoin here
http://gendal.me/2013/11/24/a-simple-explanation-of-how-money-moves-around-the-banking-system/

Some payment processors like Visa and Mastercard claim that they can do several thousand transactions per second, but that is because those transactions are all done in their own server, like in an exchange. I believe those bitcoin exchanges can also do several thousand transactions per second, or even millions like Nasdaq. In fact there are already large amount of transactions done in exchanges.

Transaction on blockchain is totally a different thing, its like transaction between different banks. And we all know that banks do settlements between each other only once a day, and not during weekend and holiday. From this point of view, bitcoin's transaction speed is already the fastest on earth, it can do settlements between any different institutions in 10 minutes, 24/7. This kind of efficiency has never happened in banking history

The most important thing is: Bitcoin is first a monetary system, then a payment network. For a monetary system, the most important thing is stability. Have you ever seen FED change the version of USD every few years? When FED issue USD in QE3, they issue 85 billion per month, and they might do a couple of transactions per month, that's all. Their tps is close to 0

Decentralized does not necessary mean distributed, a fully distributed network will have exponentially increased resource consumption following user base expansion. Raise the block size means going towards a distributed model, which will increase the resource consumption by magnitudes, this need to be very careful planned

This is almost suicide

Suppose that 75% of hashing power has switched to XT, and rest 25% stays at core. Is it possible that now XT becomes the main bitcoin chain and everyone moved to that chain following the fork? Far from it

Bitcoin is a whole global financial system, it is not only the blockchain, but everything that builds upon it. There are many exchanges and payment processors, merchants, security service provider and investment funds etc... and you must persuade all these participants to accept the new chain. And I guess many of them are experienced financers which always take conservative approach when it comes to change

Because pre-fork coins can be spent on both chains, if some of them (especially those with large amount of bitcoin holdings, and typically the core supporter of bitcoin) do not like the idea of XT chain, they will dump their coins on the XT exchange, so that any exchanges trades the XT coin will have a near-zero exchange rate when they are facing millions of coins dumped after the fork. And when XT coin worth nothing on exchanges, the whole hash power on XT chain would be a 100% loss, those hash power will switch to core chain, thus core chain regain the hash power and become the longest. In one word, if there is a conflict of interest, it is who have the most bitcoin decide where bitcoin is going, not who have the most hash power

Of course the XT fans can also dump their coins on the core chain, then value on core chain will also be heavily cut, but I guess the core chain would still have less sell pressure due to XT fans have less coins. Anyway this kind of mutual destruction will hurt the ecosystem significantly while achieving nothing

There is always unknown risk on XT coin: Core coin has hold its value very well for several years, but no one knows if XT coin would achieve the same thing, it is not time-tested. So XT coin faces a dilemma: without being time-tested in real economy, it can't gain value and go mainstream, but if it does not go mainstream, it will not get any test... This dilemma will make the fork of bitcoin extremely unlikely. Only a small change, with over 95% consensus throughout the industry would work

I think today's computer can handle 50GB data at acceptable speed, anything beyond that becomes too slow due to bandwidth and hard disk speed limit (for traditional hard disks).

An encouraging new development is 4KTV. A 4K bluray disk is about to reach 100GB, and by the time bitcoin blockchain reached 100GB, mainstream computers should all be able to handle that amount of data without difficulty. And something like 3d xpoint might vastly change the computer devices to magnitudes higher speed and capacity. But until that happens, I sit tight

http://seekingalpha.com/article/3369235-intel-and-3d-xpoint-processors

also

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/micron-intel-3d-xpoint-memory,29690.html

I just turned off my core node yesterday and hooked in a 3TB disk and turned it back on Should be enough for another couple of years

And I did not touch the software (still at 0.10.0). Even banks only upgrade their core software every 5 years, a global financial system like bitcoin should upgrade only every 10 years

Stability is all it counts in finance. Don't fix it if it ain't broken, and even when a fix is needed, should be as small as possible to not disturb the whole financial system

Bankers from different countries have different political view and priorities. Banks operating at multiple countries might be more interested in using bitcoin instead of stopping it

What if something better than Monero pops up? Should people constantly change to a new currency because of new feature and introduce more inflation every a few years?

The biggest advantage for bitcoin over fiat currency is its inflation resistance, and that's the fundamental support for its value. The consensus among cryptocurrency users is: Select one currency with limited supply and keep building its infrastructure and user base, you will get many anti-inflation benefits in the long run. However, if every a few years we introduce a new currency with new features and start to rebuild the infrastructure and rebuild the value and community from ground up, you can guess who will be participating this kind of cycle

Finance is about long term perspective, that's the reason bitcoin worth almost nothing in the first 2 years, you need time to prove a concept's value. If Monero can reach bitcoin's status after another 5 years, maybe people will start to take it seriously

The exciting thing with bitcoin is that no one knows what is going to happen, because all the traditional financial and economy models do not apply to some currency with limited supply and instant international reach, which has never happened in human history

After many miners discover that, they will just leave antpool

That's swedish kronor, so 100K USD 

You never hold something that has a long term depreciating future as a store of value (like fiat money). If it is always appreciating long term wise, then you can buy it any time and be assured your savings are safe in future