...
Then they fight you
...
?

Several years ago, I spent one full Bitcoin to buy an assorted handful of Zimbabwean bank notes. Notional value negligible. Lulz value in excess of the twenny bux or so that BTC was worth at the time.

True story.

Do I regret it? Hellz naaaw. Makes for instructive contrast.

The stuff of nightmares.

OTOH, may lead to the return of nibbling upon loved one's fingers.

Well, it's a centralized blockchain. Which suffers the counterparty risk of a centralized database, but has some of the positive aspects -- such as universal auditability -- of a blockchain.


SWIFT is slow, cumbersome, rent-seeking, not universally-auditable, and carries the counterparty risk of its centralization. Reimplementing SWIFT with XRP at its core would eliminate or vastly reduce several of these issues. So yes, you are missing something. The perspective of those entities for which SWIFT provides value - namely, financial institutions.


Sure, we do. But financial institutions? Not so much. So SWIFT isn't for you. Why would you expect it to cater to your desires, when it was built for large financial entities?


It is. See above.


Until Bitcoin grows by a couple orders of magnitude, it is not a solution for the entities that actually use SWIFT.


Not wrong exactly. Just looking at the issue from an irrelevant viewpoint.

I mean, I have no need for an airlock. But to claim that 'we've already solved this problem - it's a hinged entry door' does little to solve the astronauts' problem of retaining breathable air within a spacefaring vessel.

I have a Shift card. It's not a credit card though - it's a Visa-branded debit card. I don't really use it though. Here in USA, we need to track all use of crypto to buy things as a taxable capital gains event. Which makes using the card a headache.

Hmm... just pulled the Shift card out of the desk drawer. Looks like I don't have a Shift account any longer. Expired 1/19. They didn't contact me to re-up. Maybe because my relative non-use is nothing but a headache for them?

Might be difficult with tiny blocks. You may need a more capacious chain.

Well, I'd been buying all the way down from $20K. I was surprised to really cogitate upon how much had merely accumulated on exchange due to this activity. I've since put some back in order to re-establish my sell ladder, but not nearly so much as I drew down EOY.

Tru dat. But the imprimatur of Deloitte gives the pinstriped bandits 'career cover' in any recommendation of Gemini, and therefore Bitcoin at Gemini, and therefore -- to some extent -- Bitcoin.

Well, yeah. We didn't perfectly time the exit*. I continue to maintain that the tops and the bottoms are largely uncallable. Which is why we hodl.


^^^ This is the critical bit. Having been trough several blow-off tops, each subsequent one an order of magnitude greater than the last. Which -- again -- is why we continue to hodl.

pit pat piffy wing wong wang.

You're welcome, xhomerx10. Trace Mayer probably deserves a nod, as I think the entire idea of commemorating the anniversary with this communal Proof Of Keys event was his. I merely reminded the WO community. Of course, fundamentally, the real lesson here is 'Not your keys - Not your Bitcoin'.

Well, several of us have been here before. Several times. We know how this story ends. Or rather, continues. A bit of pain -- unpredictable in extent and duration -- followed by greater glory. Much greater glory.

Yes. Due to things such as Obama's Operation Chokepoint (the principles of which I am fairly sure have continued into the current administration), there are zero banks that will deal with marijuana retailers.

At that store maybe. Some Colorado shops have been accepting Bitcoin since years. Or so I am told.

If you think the IRS does not know about your tax liability -- or perhaps more properly will never know about your tax liability -- regardless of whether or not you've been 1099'd, you may be deluding yourself.

And again, the 1099-Ks that Coinbase sends are not an indication of any tax liability. In the USA, tax is owed on profit, not flow.

Yeah. It's almost is if they might benefit from a Bitcoin that has tx capacity well above demand for such, with the resultant inconsequential tx fees, enabling them to transact directly on chain. I wonder if such a Bitcoin exists...

Well, other than the fact that that is not true, I don't understand the relevance. Your tax liability is your tax liability. The issuance of a 1099 does nothing to alter this fact.

Cruddy article provides no link to source. Seems merely Dash hopium shill injection.

I understand the points you are making, I just find them underwhelming. I do not disagree with your immediately preceding statement. However _I_ care about what was in the original white paper.

Can you describe to me why is it that you believe the cruft that the current Core handlers have added is objectively better than the original protocol that they cast overboard?


No, it is far more than a talking point. It is a concrete technical difference between BTC and BSV. BTC has abandoned the original design, well before it revealed any flaws (i.e., none known to this day).


Sez you. I might throw your comment back at your camp.


The average world citizen should not need to care about the white paper. Just as they don't care about the technical details of how the credit card systems work. But such systems need be technically sound.

I agree that they just want a product that works and is usable.

And when the next step function wave of adoption occurs, BTC will once again experience an interminable backlog of tx volume, with soaring tx fees. At which point it will 'work' only in the vaguest sense, and will be all-but-unusable. At which point, the wisdom of having stayed with the original protocol design will be revealed.

tru dat

1099-K is not a form that most individuals have ever seen. It is for reporting non-cash money flows - typically used to track credit card receipts for retailers and such. Why Coinbase thinks this is an appropriate filing for individuals is a mystery.

I've not yet looked at mine this year. Last year's was yuuuge. But it did not tabulate any sort of profit, but rather sheer volume of transactions. I filed based on my own tabulation of capital gains, which was a scant fraction of the flows shown on the 1099-K. I have not (as of yet, anyway) been audited for 2017.

So the figures you are seeing on your 1099-K are likely not absurd. Probably correct, just irrelevant.