I guess there are a few distinctions, particularly when it comes to softforks.  With a "vote", participants are generally bound to honour the outcome, even though they might disagree with it.  Whereas the outcome of Taproot activation is effectively an ongoing 'opt-in'.  There is nothing that mandates its usage.  It's more analogous to an invitation to an event with no end date.  A "take it or leave it" kinda deal.

So we recently had a topic about requesting intervention to make avatar ads clickable and now people want intervention to make them optional.  Certainly a lot of interest in avatars lately.  I'm not a member of any other forums where the admins need to play "avatar police", so it all sounds a bit strange to me when people come up with these ideas here.  

What benefit would it bring to the forum?  If the answer is "None.  It would only benefit me" then it's probably safe to assume it's not going to be a priority for the staff here.

Fundamentally, nothing will change with Bitcoin itself.  The network will find another block in approximately 10 minutes.  Everything continues as it currently does.

It's the people who change.  They lose their minds a bit.  Plenty of hype and commotion.  An increase in the quantity of bold proclamations, wild guesswork and ludicrous theories.  Nothing we haven't seen before.

Mainstream news publications don't generally run headlines about what other publications are talking about.  It's almost as though these cryptomedia blogs don't want to achieve legitimacy and only see themselves as second-hand sources of information. 

Also, "media reports on fiat price of Bitcoin during bull run" is hardly a revelation.

As if there wasn't enough manipulation in trading already.  

In game theory, trading is widely considered to be a zero-sum game.  One person's loss is another's gain.  Attempting to copy the trading style of others just puts them in a position to exploit your (now entirely predictable) behaviour.

Don't engage this strategy obvious trap.  Either think for yourself or prepare to lose big time.

True, but then people also argue it's not 100% accurate to compare it to the M1 of national currencies either.  There isn't much we can compare it to, which is a shame when comparison is a useful method to help people understand scale.

I'm working under the impression they're treating it like any other software update.  Some will opt to do it sooner, some a bit later.  I don't get the sense there are any political motivations involved in the decision.  More a question of simply when it's convenient timing to upgrade.

I could be wrong, but I think it might just be a case of people expecting drama when there may not be any.

There is often a crucial distinction between "legality" and "morality".  Just because it's legal, doesn't mean we have to find it acceptable.

I'm still of the opinion that any custodial service dealing with IOUs and not operating full-reserve is effectively a scam.  Most people just don't realise it yet.  This applies to any exchanges or webwallets operating fractional reserve, not just PayPal.

It's a bit like 'Schrödinger's Cat'.  Until you open the box, you cannot tell whether the service has your BTC or if it's actually dead.

Should that not lead people to respect them more, though?

Ordinary people in authoritarian countries are taking a bigger risk than the majority of us to take part in this system, yet so many people living in relatively free nations give them nothing but shit for it because they don't like the leaders of that country.  I find it quite distasteful, personally.

Why don't you let them decide that for themselves?  Maybe some of them need it because they aren't on board with what their crazy totalitarian leaders are doing.  Maybe it's a statement of resistance on their part.  Or perhaps they have reasons that have nothing to do with your scorn of their government.

I'm guessing there are people in China who probably don't like your government either.  Try to keep things in perspective.  They're just people, like you.



Good thing it's not up to you, then, isn't it?  You're starting to sound pretty authoritarian yourself when you proclaim that miners from certain geographical regions aren't welcome. 

I've been looking into whether Paxos need to maintain full backing as part of their regulatory obligations.  I'm sad to report the impression I'm getting is that fractional reserve IS permitted.   

See the following link to read the capital requirements for all companies who have obtained a Bitlicense:
https://govt.westlaw.com/nycrr/Document/I85908c7a253711e598dbff5462aa3db3

It basically reads the "superintendent" (whoever that is) gets to decide what funds are "sufficient".  This does not instil confidence.

For anyone who doesn't quite understand why some of us see the potential for an actual scam, despite the fact that PayPal are a "respected and recognised company" or whatever, I'll see if I can make it clearer:


If we're talking about national currencies and custodians (i.e. banks), it's a widely accepted practice for such custodians to operate fractional reserve schemes.  Laws and/or regulations say it's fine for them to do that.  If we work on the assumption that it is highly unlikely all of their customers will attempt to withdraw their entire balance in cash at the same time, there is no issue.  

But when it comes to cryptographic currencies and custodians, fractional reserve suddenly becomes a very perilous gamble.  If the company in question are not capable of signing a transaction for every BTC they claim to own, they are technically insolvent.  Bitcoin doesn't do debt.  It's not a thing in our ecosystem.  A valid transaction must take place on the blockchain in order for a customer to withdraw funds from that custodian to their own wallet.  There is no way to fake it.  Meaning that if PayPal do eventually decide to offer BTC withdrawals, they better make damn sure they have sufficient funds in place, or they're going to have some very upset users, making some very legitimate allegations of scamming.

And until/unless they offer BTC withdrawals, we can't know for sure if they're solvent or not.  Paxos, the actual custodian, do have a NY "Bitlicense", but in terms of capital requirements, that merely means:


Or, in plain English, some random dickhead with a fancy job title gets to decide how much BTC they need to keep in reserve.  And that person probably doesn't understand the risks of not being fully backed either.  Hence my cynicism.

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TL;DR - Don't operate fractional reserve with Bitcoin.  It will fuck both you and your customers.

Contrary to popular belief, numbers can lie if you're clever about it.  How else do you explain companies cooking the books on their accounting or the popular expression "lies, damn lies and statistics".

The question always becomes "what numbers did they deliberately leave out"?

I'm sure a fraud like Faketoshi would insist that his numbers add up too, but we know better.    

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//EDIT:  Apologies LoyceV.  I need to stop using my phone when replying to multi-quote posts, heh.  Too easy to select the wrong text on touchscreen devices.

Yeah, I noticed that too.  I'm sure it was up earlier today, so maybe it's just a temporary outage and will come back later.  


//EDIT:  Definitely a temporary blip.  It's back up again now.

They'll simply buy smaller quantities.  At some point, people will start moving the decimal place and thinking in terms of fractions of a bitcoin.  People generally (unless they're rich) won't even think about buying whole bitcoins anymore.  It'll be unattainable for the average person.  Such is the nature of scarcity.



I've heard this argument before.  The counterargument given was that early adopters were taking a bigger gamble on an (at the time) highly obscure and nascent technology.  As such, they deserve to be rewarded for their foresight.  They invested time and/or money on something that might have gone nowhere.  In fact, due to the importance of network effects, if the early adopters hadn't done what they did, you might not even be here to nitpick now.



Assuming you use Bitcoin the way it was intended to be used, everyone does gain the same benefits.  The benefits are autonomy over your own wealth without having to rely on third parties.  No one who can block or restrict your transactions.  Noble as it might sound, I don't think equal distribution of wealth was on satoshi's todo list.

And even if it wasn't, illiquidity still wouldn't be a "barrier to entry" unless you had plans for using some high-frequency-trading algorithm.  The rate at which Grayscale are hoovering up BTC is evidence enough that there's sufficient liquidity and that the appetite is definitely there for institutional investors.

It's as though the author of the article is slowly realising that all their assumptions were wrong and then decides it would be a good idea to write as if everyone had made the same wrong assumptions.   

Isn't that just a lengthy way of saying he likes it because it's volatile? 

I don't think "Hedge fund manager likes volatile assets" sounds all that newsworthy, really. 

I agree to a point, but there is a limit.  If it transpires PayPal are operating fractional reserve, then I'd be inclined to call it a scam.  They'd be selling something that doesn't necessarily exist.  Those who understand how fiat works begrudgingly accept the premise that fiat works that way.  But it's wholly incorrect to accept the practice of Bitcoin IOUs which literally cannot be spent on the blockchain.  That would be a step too far and is 100% a scam.  Best we reserve judgement until their third party custodian, Paxos, provide evidence of full reserve.



But perhaps we should await some proof before we grab the pitchforks?  I'm suspicious too, but facts are better to act upon.

I'm more of a cynic and would assume the inverse.  They're probably just using Bitcoin's brand recognition to sell clothing.  

It doesn't even have the word "Bitcoin" in it, so I don't know how it's supposed to spread awareness.  If people don't already know what bitcoin, or "BTC" is, they would probably only see what they perceive to be a random string of characters.  The only way anyone unfamiliar with the concept is going to understand what "B T C M V M N T" means is if the person wearing it stops to explain it to them.

Either through ideology, greed, or a healthy mix of the two, I honestly don't see a whole bunch of pools going along with this.  It's not a pool's long term interests to undermine one of Bitcoin's fundamental tenets and it's not in their short term interests to give up the transactions fees they could be collecting.