A good introduction to the technical and conceptual foundations of what would later become Bitcoin:

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3136559

May be a bit much in the beginning but provides good context on where Bitcoin was coming from and what ideas ultimately led to its inception.

Alternatively, if you're on Windows or MacOS, you can download Node.js from here:

https://nodejs.org/en/download/

After which you can run the wallet from the commandline interface according to the instructions on the github page.

I love the idea. In my opinion other settings than fantasy would work better within this context (eg. sci-fi, cyberpunk, etc) but I guess that's mostly a question of personal taste. Still, that's quite an interesting and novel way to connect real world markets to a gameplay world. Especially given the drama crypto markets often entail. Balancing might be tricky though.



I think the variation in volatility may be part of the fun though. Some strategies may work better with more stable coins and reliable progression while other strategies may work better in chaotic high risk / reward scenarios. It boils down to the question how volatility is best incooperated into the gameplay.

At this scale of money laundering KYC doesn't achieve anything as the culprits are able to simply buy their way around it.

At its fundamental cryptocurrencies are free of KYC / AML while most banks had to implement such a procedure since more than a decade. Yet the brunt of money laundering still takes place using banks. Go figure. KYC / AML is only effective to catch small fish like common darknet merchants, not the real whales.



When banks are involved in money laundering schemes it's usually for customers, not themselves. Some people have a lot of money to move that comes from questionable sources, as such there's a demand for such services which some banks happily provide. As audaciousbeing pointed out it boils down to banks being in full control of the capital and its movement and money laundering being a lucrative business; mixed with limited legal consequences. Put together its too tempting a situation for some.

If you have a lot of small inputs, for example due to using faucets a lot, your transactions can get quite big (data-wise) and thus become rather expensive.

In general transaction fees should currently be a couple of cents. You can save on fees for future transactions by moving your coins to a SegWit address (either P2SH starting with "3" or Bech32 starting with "bc1").

The days were it made sense to send a single dollar on-chain are over, however. Currently Bitcoin is not quite feasible for micro-transactions but this might change if Lightning Network becomes more widespread.

Oh boy, this thread turned into a clusterfuck. artofwar, you ever got your payment processing logic up and running?



Of course non-mining nodes validate transactions and blocks before they relay them to their peers, everything else would be... not so smart.

Just check the code.

For example here:


Or here:


You don't need to be a developer to guess what those functions do.

The Coinbase bit was more of a joke so if that presumption made you laugh than I guess the joke worked... kinda?

Point being that while the transaction drop-off is unlikely to be a coincidence it is also close to impossible to tell who's play it was. Even less so if a mixer was involved.



I don't quite get what you are trying to say. Mining empty blocks (as was the case with Antpool, especially) increases the effectiveness of spam transactions so your hint of "empty blocks = less spam" makes absolutely no sense to me.



That's an oversimplification of the complexity of the issue and you should know better than that. But it's also pretty much off-topic and has been argued to death so I'll leave it at that.

frank1... gotta love the finger pointing that it was Core creating spam.

In all seriousness though, obviously we don't know who was responsible for creating the spam and probably never will. However Bitcoin Cash proponents being behind the transaction spam makes more sense to me due to (1) Core developers insisting on Bitcoin not running at capacity yet (which would have been the case, if not for the spam transactions) and (2) Bitcoin Unlimited / XT / ABC chanting the eternal song of "look at all these transactions, we need to move now and increase the block size" while flaming Core for "doing nothing" while "organic growth" is "overloading the network".

For all we do know though it might just have been Coinbase fucking up the network with their (back then) lack of transaction batching.

That being said I appreciate you posting your view on that matter.

It largely depends on where you are based. If you're in the US, for example, the steps described by ETFbitcoin could be translated into:

1. Buy Bitcoin (BTC) from Coinbase.com using your credit card.
2. Download Electrum from Electrum.org and set up a wallet according to Electrum's instructions -- withdraw the coins from Coinbase to your Electrum wallet.
3. Send the required BTC amount to the sellers Bitcoin address.

That's a very simplified verion of what you could do.


In reality you have a large selection of exchanges with varying trustworthiness, availability and ease of use:
https://bitcoin.org/en/exchanges

Depending on your location you may even have a Bitcoin ATM in your vincinity (although the rates are usually worse than what you get from an online exchange):
https://coinatmradar.com/

Be aware that when registering a new account with an exchange you'll likely have to get verified first (ie. provide them with personal data, verify your bank account, etc) which may take a few days.


You also have a vast selection of wallets for all sorts of devices:
https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet

Be aware that you should backup your wallet, do not share your wallet file or private keys with others (essentially anything that isn't a Bitcoin address) and note that if your device is hacked, money might be at risk (ie. if that's more than just a one-off transaction, consider looking into cold storage and / or hardware wallets).


And especially, heed LoyceV's warning -- there's a lot of scammers out there, so buyer beware! Bitcoin transactions are final and if you don't know who you're dealing with they might just make a run with your money.

Oh boi, so both the collateral are incredibly high and the interest rate is hilarously steep. Well, that's one way to manage your risk. I guess they also break your legs if you're late with your payments? :p

IIRC that drop in daily transactions around June was when the spam transactions subsided, presumably because the proponents of what is now Bitcoin Cash / Bitcoin ABC (FKA Bitcoin Unlimited FKA Bitcoin XT) gave up on trying to pressure Core into increasing the block size; finally deciding to simply fork off instead. On a closer look the initial release of Bitcoin XT in late 2015 also marks the beginning of the suspicious acceleration in transaction amount growth. Most likely a coincidence but still a kinda weird one at that, especially in retrospect.

I do assume you have a different take on it though?

Maybe I misread your post, but it seems like your talking about loans being made out in Bitcoin, rather than fiat

The company mentioned in OP gives loans out in fiat currency, while using Bitcoin as collateral. That's something vastly different.

Electrum's default gap limit is 20, I'm not sure what a sane maximum gap limit is though. If you can't see transactions until you've changed the gap limit to 200 you should review your application logic. While increasing the gap limit is a quick temporary fix there may be a deeper underlying issue with how your application works (eg. needless generation of new addresses that are then left empty).

Risk-management appears to be the biggest challenge here. Apart from hedging via shorts as mentioned by 1Referee, I assume that for the most part they'll either charge rather high interest rates as mentioned by clrpod (think subprime loans and junk bonds) or require a rather high amount of collateral as mentioned by davis196.

I think two aspects are quite interesting in this regard:

1) If, as a lender, you only work with crypto as collateral you're highly exposed. Banks can at least spread their risk by making use of a wide selection of asset classes with little market correlation and of varying volatility. Obviously didn't work out so well during the housing crisis but that was mostly due to banks being overexposed to a single asset class (ie. real estate). Would be interesting to know how Ledn plans to manage its exposure to crypto (if at all, maybe they are simply all-in).

2) Assuming that at one point using crypto as collateral becomes widespread, meaning not only Bitcoin but also alt coins, we're likely to see some sort of rating system for cryptos, similar to the credit ratings for businesses and governments. For better or worse.

So the fear is wealthy people relocating to tax havens? What else is new?

I doubt many Bitcoiners will fully relocate to save on taxes -- and even if, their economic impact will be infinitesimal compared to what wealth is already hidden off-shore both by private individuals and international cooperations. Not to finger-point, but rather to show that there's a deeper underlying problem that has nothing to do with crypto.



I doubt that "millions of citizens" in poorer countries will find wealth by speculating with cryptocurrencies. On the other hand if that wealth comes as a side-effect of increased economic output due to increased economic freedom than that wealth increase is merely a reflection of aforementioned output increase.

It's an interesting way to point out though that the current way of living in most developed nations seems to require some parts of the global population to live in poor conditions. It all boils down to winning the geolocal lottery. A kinda shitty system, is it not?

That's pretty neat. To me it still looks more like an outlier than the beginning of a trend, but if accepting Bitcoin as a collateral for loans becomes more widespread we're looking at a large step towards further legitimization.



If ever... what? Providing cryptocurrency as collateral is not the same as selling and is unlikely to be a taxable event. It's even mentioned in the article:

That's what happens when you rely on a private platform. Welcome to the world of walled gardens.

That being said, it does indeed rather seem like them trying to game the system and breaking Apple's ToS, rather than a direct attack on crypto. Not everything is an attack on our freedom, sometimes it's just people getting served for not playing by the rules.

Regardless of who's at fault, this wouldn't have happened if people (meaning both consumers and content producers) wouldn't put themselves into the hands of centralized services as much. It's the cost of convenience, I'm afraid.

I've heard about Wasabi mostly on Reddit, nice to finally see a thread about it on Bitcointalk. I was already wondering when you'd show up

I have yet to test-drive this wallet, but it's definitely good to see some innovation in the Bitcoin wallet space.

How so? UBI is usually conceptualized as additional income to what your employer already compensates you. It's about providing an income floor, not about regulating the amount that companies pay their employees.

CLAM was an airdrop for BTC, DOGE and LTC holders, so not really a Bitcoin hardfork. Additionaly CLAM uses different parameters from Bitcoin in terms of block interval and final supply (amongst other things), so it doesn't quite satisfy what OP was asking for.

Still a fun project though, always nice to see it mentioned.