I'm not actually sure that will dampen volatility. It would remove selling pressure from the market since people would no longer need to convert BTC to fiat. But removing that liquidity from the market could actually make the market more volatile, since it will take less capital to push the price up.


I think you might be right. It boils down to Gresham's law. As long as bad money is still in circulation, people will have incentive to hoard BTC rather than spend it.

I'm not sure exactly what he's alleging here. But it's pretty well-known that YoBit engages in some unsavory practices. For example, they leave listed coins in maintenance for weeks or months at a time, making it impossible to withdraw funds. In many cases, it looks like they're probably staking customer coins on POS blockchains. Or maybe they're just insolvent.

I'd steer clear of them anyway, given the recent investigations by the Russian government and the arrest of the alleged founder.

I wouldn't either. In fact, I think Breadwallet and many other people are laying this on a bit thick.

The whole point of backward compatible updates is that they allow for a smooth transition at the cost of fast adoption. I'm slightly annoyed when I see people rushing others to adopt a voluntary upgrade. One of the reasons Segwit was acceptable to users like me is that it was a soft fork, where I could take my time to upgrade. I prefer other people to be the guinea pigs first.

The P2SH-wrapper was meant to be a transitional stage. I say, embrace the transition. 40% adoption -- without Blockchain.info and others -- is pretty damn good! No need to rush things. I use bech32 addresses for day-to-day transactions, but they're not where most of my funds are stored, and I don't care what other people do. I also agree with this:

The OP didn't really make that distinction from the start. Now that the issue is intrinsic value, I'd agree. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. Satoshi himself made that point in his early postings. What the market uses as money never boils down to its intrinsic value.

Whether it has value is another matter entirely. That determination is up to the market.

I'm not sure why Gyft and others shut down while Copay didn't. Maybe the difference was the fraud factor -- Gyft, eGifter and others allow payment by credit card, Paypal, etc.

I started using Copay for their Amazon gift card service whenever Gyft shut things down. The limit is $2000 per day now. I've used it 6-7 times -- it's instant and reliable. The only downsides are no Segwit addresses, and you need to pay the additional network fee that Bitpay charges (which you already had to do with Gyft). Also, these are only good in the US on Amazon.com.

I'm not sure about "better than ETF." Maybe so. But to me, they're both just paper contracts with different properties. They're both just IOUs from more reliable issuers than the earlier generation of exchanges.

Deliverable futures contracts affect real prices because they're an avenue for accumulating/selling real BTC. An ETF can also affect prices since issuing and redeeming bundles involves buying and selling on the spot market.

I guess it boils down to how accessible these instruments are and what the custodial security protocols are like. I'm guessing an ETF would be more accessible for average folks, people diversifying their retirement accounts an such. I have no idea about the security aspect.

Of course there's no guaranteed safe haven. That's why central banks hold various assets as hedges, and also why the rumor is about investing 1% of their reserves into BTC, nothing more.

I still haven't seen a reliable source for this, though. Just some articles about how the central bank wanted more information about BTC and some un-sourced rumors about these supposed plans. I'd take it with a grain of salt.

I think that's just the nature of opt-in upgrades. If it's not necessary, most people will take their sweet time -- it took me at least a couple months to start using Segwit myself after it was released. Nothing wrong with that.

If anything, it's a sign that people don't feel pressured by fees to get the modest fee reduction that Segwit provides. That might change the next time fees start ramping up like they did late last year.

It's interesting for a moment, until you realize that the entire debate hinges on the OP's rigid and arbitrary definitions of "value." He keeps changing the definition of "value" to fit his narrative, and his definitions are completely out of touch with society's. It's a futile exercise to argue against this kind of logic. He may not be intentionally trolling, but his approach is intellectually dishonest.

It seems like they only track Localbitcoins. Are there not any centralized exchanges, or other P2P exchanges in Argentina? I'd agree, volume looks too low to have an effect on the broader market.


Any source for these rumors about Argentina's central bank? I've seen this mentioned a few times, but never seen a source for it. Color me skeptical.

Someday, that fee might look more like $10, $100 or more.

It's the cheapest if you need Bitcoin's security. I think there are lots of cases where that's probably not necessary -- smaller/micro payments and such. Offchain mechanisms like Lightning are one option, sidechains are another. Altcoins are another. In fact, once inter-protocol compatibility is figured out, any altcoin that can communicate and interact with Bitcoin is effectively a sidechain. All these options involve security trade-offs: They don't have Bitcoin's security, but they can be much cheaper to use.

That's exactly the approach everyone should take. I always withdraw coins right after buying, and I only hold USD on exchanges for short periods. If I'm cashing out for a while, that money sits in my bank account.

As cryptocurrency gets bigger and bigger, the targets on the backs of exchanges grow. Just as exchanges aren't scaling their infrastructure to customer demand, they aren't devoting enough resources to security. The Coincheck hack this year really hammers that point home.


Technically, it reduces available supply because the stolen coins are difficult to sell on exchanges or spend through payment processors. That could actually drive the price up.

I'm not sure, but I think they might benefit overall liquidity and may even reduce volatility. If we compare USD stablecoins to USD exchange balances, I strongly suspect that the latter are much more likely to be withdrawn to a bank account. On top of that, stablecoins can inject liquidity into any market -- they're not relegated to any one exchange like a dollar balance at Coinbase.

When people talk about "money on the sidelines" that's exactly what USDT is. Assuming there's no funny business, an expanding Tether supply means increasing amounts of liquidity that aren't leaving the cryptocurrency ecosystem at all.

Not going to happen. KYC is completely out of the question -- you realize this is a message board, right? If it comes to that, signature campaigns should just be banned outright. I'd much prefer that.

What is with these people who are just dying to give away their personal identifying information and government ID? Do you enjoy having your identity stolen?

Also, there's nothing wrong with having more than one account. I love me a good gimmick account.

Indeed, and I don't see things fundamentally changing by February. I get the feeling they want to see the majority of trading volume on regulated exchanges, or perhaps regulated US exchanges.


The stock market and the bitcoin market are correlated over the long term. They've both been in raging bull markets since Bitcoin's inception. GDP as well. How is the regular economy deflating?

I don't think the SEC is necessarily against Bitcoin, either. It's not that black-and-white. I think they're much more worried about their own budget and mission than they are about promoting some government-wide conspiracy.

I'm glad someone reposted this... apparently it was published three weeks ago.

This is an interesting angle I hadn't considered. People have been speculating that Bitmain's recent lack of profitability and new product development (prior to the recently announced BM1391) were signs that the IPO was desperate move. Maybe that's not the case after all.

I'm not sure how it measures up to Bitfury's new miners, but the BM1391 sounds far superior to GMO's offerings if Jihan Wu's numbers are accurate.

I wouldn't take Unfriended as a realistic representation of the dark web. The consensus seems to be that it's a really crappy horror movie which is riddled with technical inaccuracies.

Yes, cryptocurrency can be used for dark web activity. It's much better than anything else so far because it's transferable and pseudonymous. But not all darknet activity is illegal, and the illegal activity is no different than what you see in traditional black markets that trade in fiat currencies.

If you want to break a chain of transactions (separate inputs from outputs), you can use VPN+TOR and a reputable mixer, or a non-KYC exchange. Personally, I'm looking forward to a Dandelion-capable wallet that obfuscates propagation. TOR browser is ideal where possible, as browsers leak lots of PII to third party services.

Coin selection is really important if you want to avoid being linked to previous transactions. I avoid letting wallets send by default, and instead select inputs based on their history and destination. When I need to consolidate inputs, I might break the chain of transactions to obfuscate the original source.

Another thing to keep in mind is how lightweight wallets work. Electrum is awesome for its usability and fast syncing, but if you connect to servers at random, the way it queries transactions can theoretically allow snooping third parties to link your wallet addresses together. Ideally, you'd run a Core node as an Electrum server, then connect to that.

Here's the original quote:

People should really go back and read his old posts here on the forum. They provide a lot of insight into why Bitcoin was designed like it was.

As it turned out, the block size limit Satoshi added is a very important mechanism for generating the fees required to compensate miners. Without some mechanism to disincentivize spam and drive fees up, we would have a tragedy of the commons situation, where everyone takes up block space without paying for it. That can't work where there is a limited supply of coins -- with each halving, miners get less and less subsidy. Eventually, they'll only get transaction fees. We need to incentivize miners to secure the network.

This happens each time Bitcoin has a bubble. The market has a correction and value drops a lot, all the hype disappears, and the average folks lose interest. Then people start saying "Bitcoin is dead." Some recommended reading.

A lot of people just buy in out of greed because the market is skyrocketing, not because they believe in the technology. That's just the nature of markets. Don't worry about it.


Honestly, I don't even worry about it anymore. Mass adoption seems more or less inevitable to me. I'm just enjoying the ride.