Not a humongous amount, but it would be a nice indicator of institutional demand which would give a wee fillip. It is a strange little financial instrument though.




It's already open. The holdup seems to be down to issuing the shares to their clients, that's if they want to sell at all.



There we go.

I can't foresee much on the horizon in the immediate future. GBTC trades above market would be significant but bureaucracy seems to be delaying that for a while yet.

Is there going to be a way to submit questions as well?

Some of them, such the worst investment of 2014 one, aren't relevant to someone who's just looking to have their curiosity sated.

And maybe there should be some sort of pinned summary of what Bitcoin is as the top or a link to one. The site addresses misconceptions but doesn't offer some more positive answers about how the reader can benefit from it.

And sadly they will never be far away. If you'd asked a scumbag ten years ago what the perfect vehicle for enriching themselves would be, something like Bitcoin would've popped out of their slobbering mouths.

It'll take a much brighter public, or plenty of bulletproof middle men for it to become a trusted option.

In the UK tuition fees for college and university are a very recent development. When I was a nipper university was free and they gave you free money to live on.

Our education loans aren't provided by conventional banking channels. They're backed by the government who probably fully expect a large proportion to never get paid back.

As for the OP's dilemma, it's going to be a toughie to slip into crypto without leaving a paper trail somewhere. Cash into ATMs would work. Lamassu ATMs come with ID verification disabled. I think it would depend on what state you're in.

Why not start off on a more organic basis? Tell r/bitcoin what you're up to. Put up some special offers on here. Dig out some knife fan forums and get posting.

He's stuck in the stone age UK. I'm not so sure circle can be used here any more. You buy from it for a little while when it launched but I think they closed that loophole. I might be wrong though. It would be wonderful if it did work outside the US.

No. And never, ever sell bitcoins for Paypal to anyone else either. They can do a chargeback.

If you're in the UK there aren't very many selling options. You can sell direct via localbitcoins, but again there's some scam risks. You could also look into bittylicious.com which links you to other buyers.

The most painless way would be via an exchange. There are a couple of UK exchanges but you'd be better off going with a European one like Bitstamp or Kraken as they have the volume and they're pretty slick.

Stick your coins on there, sell them and then get them to do a bank transfer back to you.

Quoting from the coindesk article

"In September 2013, approximately one CNY trade was carried out per three USD trades. At the moment, the situation is quite different, as CNY accounts for more than two thirds of all deals and on most days it outpaces the dollar by a ratio of at least 1:3."

Every single USD trade, apart from the occasional special offer, is subject to a fee. It's inevitable that there'll be less of them because it costs to buy and sell.

If it doesn't cost you a bean to switch between BTC and CNY then you'll be trading like a mad person.

That's trade volume, not coin ownership. It could be one coin being batted around thousand of times a second.

What's the basis for that figure? The really large amounts in individual hands will have been mined long before China ever knew about Bitcoin.

If you're basing it off exchange volume, we all know how skewed they are in China because of zero fees and probable outright lies. There's probably no shortage of foreigners using them too.

I'm sure a big proportion of coins are in Chinese hands, but the reality is probably more modest than many think.

Human nature innit. The herd panics and squeals while the lone wolf stocks up. Then the herd wails and panics upwards when everything is looking rosy again. Or the lone wolf fucks up too and is wiped out alongside everyone else.

As we've seen over and over again in recent years, it's savers who are punished and the debtors are pandered to. That seems to be an attitude that's hard wired into most governments. That might take paradigm shifts or generations to change.

That's the key bit. In an ideal world this present community will become a complete and utter irrelevance as Bitcoin spreads. No VC is investing to make it easier for us lot to use. It's for everyone else out there.

It's just like anywhere else in Western Europe these days. Actually I was rather annoyed by that. It wasn't foreign enough for my liking.

Considering the combo of blockchain analysis and the necessity to cash it out via exchanges, I'm pretty surprised there aren't more thieves who've been nailed to the wall. No doubt it'll become harder in the years to come to get away with it.

There are lessons to be learnt as it's happening now, but you're right. Apart from a few noble people trying to develop closed loops and private individuals trading with each other, it's not really an economy at all at present. It's still a system for transmitting dollars.

Regardless of what happen to Bitcoin, it'll be something that's still talked about and analysed for a long, long time to come.

That would set them up for accusations of trying to draw people into a totally rigged market. It is already, but at least we can't name those who are to blame at the moment.

The best thing they can do is build the tools to make Bitcoin an essential part of many, many more lives.

Organic and necessary buying power is what would eventually command the market. If that doesn't arrive then it's better to leave it to the hoarders and bots to die.

I've never dipped into the trust system and well and truly can't figure out how it's supposed to work. It all counts for nothing anyway as soon as someone has a funny turn or cashes in the long game they've been playing.

I'd just use the most established escrows and go on how the person who I'm thinking of trusting has acted in the past.

Swap it for M Pesa? There's already a parallel economy operating with that. BTC would run alongside it. There could be a huge volume of bitcoin exchange and cashing in and out without any of it ever touching a bank.

The question is whether it would be relevant to the average M Pesa user. Probably not that much in country, but there would be international applications.

Chinese miners? They make up a big proportion of the coins mined and they're in a country where BTC is essentially useless for anything other than selling or market playing.

The Chinese government should've done the world a favour and truly shut down any possible market avenue available to them. They're not exactly doing anything to contribute to the ecosystem and that's what Bitcoin needs.

There'll be some nostalgic computer scientist who mines the final dust from the original blockchain on their toilet or fingernail computer.

Once enough money is poured in, 'good enough' is a powerful incentive to keep things as they are. It's not a myspace/facebook where you can skip to the new technology with a couple of clicks and lose nothing.

Perhaps bitcoin will slowly morph as the years go by with the original token on the chain being fully transferable to a fresher incarnation.