I think you are under-estimating the capability of the people who will build or are building crypto based products. At the same time you are over estimating the importance of bankers or investment trusts. Bankers are a reality but value creation cannot come without crypto becoming something bigger than another wealth management tool. I also understand that this may seem as an overly optimistic view considering the range of scams and vaporware that has made the rounds in name of blockchain innovation. Yet, the bankers/ big money still wants its stake so it doesn't miss out when real value creation starts.

The new products don't necessarily have to emulate bitcoin or compete against it. In fact, Bitcoin was supposed to enable these innovations.(Till Ethereum became the next best option(. As far as developers are concerned (Both the sincere ones and the scam-artists), Ethereum has leveraged this better than bitcoin.


The oft-quoted comparison with Gold is apt but incomplete. Bitcoin is so much more than just a micro-payment system or a store of wealth. I agree that exchanges are basically Bitcoin banks. In fact, that is why exchanges are the ones which are fostering the most competition in cryptosphere. They are doing this by listing coins left, right and center. And allowing fiat on-boarding for more and more pairs. Banks ultimately need assets they can invest into. In the process, they foster innovation/ entrepreneurship. I'd mention again that my view may sound overly optimistic, but that is what the exchanges are doing.

Thanks for sharing this Jet. It gives me a chance to analyze and put my own views on this.

I am a HODLer by circumstance. There is no way for me to legally spend BTC around here. If i had, I'd probably be spending and selling stuff with it. I cannot be a trader as it seems to be mostly a game of networking and shilling in the crypto space. If you are at the right place at the right time (for the right announcements), you can make some money selling to others. As far as trading only BTC is concerned, it seems an uninteresting, technical exercise and I cannot, for the life of me, gather enough patience to watch all those wick/candle/trend videos.

So that leaves me to answer the question if I am a maximalist. I don't think so. I see more potential in bitcoin being the main currency for an alternate economy based on blockchain products. Open sourced information/ knowledge and products that have a market of their own. The hobbyists, small entrepreneurs and the good samaritans are the three main stakeholders in this ecosystem. The only problem is this sounds too anti-government and anti-tax for the comfort of masses as well as those hallowed institutional investors.

I totally agree with you on the best use i can put my little fractions of BTC into as of now.  A Lightning node and I am on it.

 

It is not the competing projects that can bring bitcoin down. The only ones who will bring it down are those who have the biggest stake in it. The Exchanges. Exchanges need fees to survive. Their fees depends on how many people get onboard the trading bandwagon at their respective sites.

These exchanges list all kind of alt-coins irrespective of merit, if any. The new money is coming in only for buying these newer projects. These are the people who simply have no interest in bitcoin's growth or survival. All they want is for the coin they invested in to reach enough value so that they can Fiat-out. Exchanges like Binance are working overtime on this.

Bitcoin will somehow survive in its own economy amongst the old timers and the trickle of new blood that feels good about its legacy. Yet, this could have been much more if the stakes on the altcoins were already not so high. The time is ripe for the worthy ones to grow separately.

For those of us who joined in the late 2017 feeding frenzy or during the heady days of BTC Gold/ LTC Silver and Buterin talking about the world-computer, The words of Coldplay ring true:

Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be this hard
Oh take me back to the start

How everyone wishes for the last line to be true..!

Well, Personally i still have faith in crypto as well as the prospects of blockchain based technologies. There is so much to do. It may not all be worth it but eh, not every sailor becomes a Columbus. For every Columbus, 1000 nameless die of Scurvy. So there are gonna be a lot of poor bastards and that is just life. How amazing.. Being a part of it..

Thanks for sharing this Komodor. Much appreciated. I have joined and looking forward to contributing towards the translation work. Looks like there is a lot to go around.

Bitcointalk Profile Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1107844
Current Amount of Posts (Including this one): 669
SegWit eligible BTC Address: 32B3XPrxaLxMSsBATTKvj7u9cgF1imctUU

I have been a bit offline lately but I'll be very interested to work with you. Please do take a look at my post history. Thanks..

Edit: Looks like all SM spots are full..

Edit 2: I don't like cannibalizing on Full Members but IF
1.) Full Members above me are rejected &
2.) You accept me..
Then I am willing to take the FM spot too. I basically want to associate with a good manager to get back in the forum game..

With the Government, you can never be sure if that terse "No, Sir" to the query at Sl no. 'd' means:
No, we do not collect the information related to cryptocurrency trading..
OR
No, Sir. We will not give you the details thereof..!!

Will wait to see how this turns out. Thanks.

Glad that you understand that it is hard to trust such a setup. I totally agree with your point about the hobby miner thing. It is a niche right now as it is not simple to realize profits too. (Most buying and selling is not p2p after RBI restrictions). Someone running a simple rig with 700W on wall will be paying almost ~INR 2000 for electricity. The problem is that the profits are too small to get a decent ROI.
I will be happy to discuss the details on any potential upside of using sourced GPUs/ Miners and helping you determine the profitability. Glad you opened up about the background. Are you still with cummins? We use engines sourced from cummins. I am not directly involved but I could verify this if i dug in.

I'll let you first check if its worth your time and effort to go through the notorious Indian customs. Good Luck. Keep us updated.

Umm..Isn't he like The Peter Todd ? I have read him being described as the Maximalist's maximalist..

And Thanks a lot for this Loyce. I saw a user who distrusted me and have sent them a PM to discuss it. Looks like the user didn't leave feedback and I would never have known otherwise without your handy tool. It makes me less intimidated about the Trust system and wiling to learn and apply it. You've lowered the entry barrier..Congrats!

You are right that the regulations are confusing and the general idea is that Bitcoin is seen as shady by the establishments as compared to US. Whether this "scared" the Indian miners away or not is a question i wish we could have answered from someone actually involved in this. I recall seeing youtube video of this guy running bitmain miners in Gujarat and other places. The videos are from 2016 or so.
Wonder what happened to those guys and how exactly they are sourcing the miners lately.

This paying for deployment thing is possible if you are in the same jurisdiction. Of course it is little other than a cloud-mining thing if it is overseas. Though i am sure if done on the forum through an established account, this could take some shape. If you are interested in seeing how the overall mining buying and deploying works for individuals then this is a great board.

Hey..In replies to you early in this thread, everybet had repeatedly mentioned a curacao license. He even asked you to let him know "what is the method to display that will satisfy you?". You didn't come up with a prompt response and this coupled with your trust ratings must have led most people to not take it seriously..(It did so to me)..I look forward to a thorough and clear discussion on the license issue, if and when the website is back up.

As of now, the website is not functioning. To be fair, they have actually sent mails to customers who got impacted. This did not get informed on the Sig campaign thread or even on this main announcement thread. All this while the website was down for almost 3 days. This was a big red flag as 3 days in crypto is like 3 months for a long con.
I posted regarding this on the signature page and now a clarification has been issued. I hope more direct customers can confirm here at the page that they indeed got the warning mail on January 9th. This increases the chances that the issue they are having was legit. They have also offered customers the option to withdraw whatever amounts they had deposited with them.

If more customers can independently confirm like dis93 above, then i guess it'll be reassuring for everyone. The jury should still be out on this one.

Looks like we are all in for a nasty surprise..

Yeah. Last i was on the forum on January 8th, things were going fine. There was a PM from everybet about promotional offer for new registrations. Sore throat took me down for 4 days and now it looks like the website isn't working due to an "expired SSL certificate".
As much as this sucks and rings the alarm bells, i still have a dying hope that it is just some Friday night hangover/ Friday weekend issue. Will that be a hope I am against hope hoppen?

EVERYBET...If you have a move then THIS is the time to make it!

Hi! The website doesn't seem to be working. It is legally an issue with the licensing authorities too to have a gambling site being non-responsive. Is everything alright or this is.....??!!

The website is showing an error. I have sent a PM to OP about it. The last post from him was over 8 days ago.

In their announcement thread, there was a fair bit of skepticism in the beginning. It was hard to take it seriously as game-protect themselves have a pretty bad trust history. There was Darkstar_ engaging in the discussion and everybet replying regarding the high margins on offer. The sensible replies from everybet make it seem like they are in this for real..

Now with the site being non-responsive, I'll wait for the reply to PM. Encourage you to send a PM and ask for clarification too. Post this, it'll be better to make your decision about removing/ keeping the signature. I am removing it for now..Can anybody else confirm if the website is showing an error for them too or this is just something with my Chrome/ Firefox?

At the peak I had ordered a motherboard and 2 RX580 from the Newegg website. The shipment went through smoothly with the duties paid but I think the price ended up almost the same as in online stores here. I could probably get you a comparison by digging up the invoice and checking current prices.
As far as interest in GPU mining is concerned, the market is still wide open but there hasn't been enough marketing or community building. Like i said, the older members either went underground or decided to run scams themselves. The indian community is also pretty engaged in the ICO markets and I can see some of the newer GPU algorithms picking up as more and more projects launch their mainnets.


I get it that people who would pay you to deploy are basically in this for the returns. My interest in getting hands on an ASIC are equally intellectual and hobby-based. I also like the idea of being able to support network decentralization. If there was a way to trade on here, I'd be interested in offers. Only thing is I haven't yet found examples of such trades running successfully in the Markets section here at BCT.

I am sure you won't be getting the opinions of people who have actually been around for 10 years. The reason being, in their own words "I am pretty confident they are the new wealthy elite". (Sadly, the link to article quoted in that post no longer works).

What i can share is my own experience with getting to know bitcoin. Post 2010 and the internet boom, it wasn't new to keep hearing about exciting new technologies and softwares. Yet, all of it was pretty distant and kindda hard to approach. I too had fallen into the rut of the ordinary life. Getting to know about bitcoin around mid 2017 has been exciting from an intellectual stimulation and technological interest point of view. It is fun trying to get to the basics of the mathematics, cryptography and programming.

Along with it, some of the other ideas around blockchain and decentralization have been interesting too. Decentralized computing and Games trying to use blockchain are some of the other things I have found interesting.

On the forum, I was earlier excited abut the BTC earning opportunities but realized a few months back that I did not have enough meaningful shit to that'd fill almost 4-5 posts per day. The dilemma of taking part in a campaign and just reading was solved when the campaigns dried up. On some side exploration, I saw that the betting and gambling market is pretty big with bitcoin and found a Sig campaign for that. Apart from that, I have setup a small 4-GPU rig and am trying to divert enough funds to try BTC mining someday. It has been eye opening to see how difficult it is to get hands on hardware in my country while trying to avoid so many scammers who are out to fool people.

So yeah, It has been an interesting part of life as a hobby and intellectual stimulant..

The impact of his dedication towards making his vision into reality is multiplied by his foresight to remain anonymous. Usually when we do something, the motivation is success, fame or wealth. Even simply self realization. It is hard to fathom that one man could do all of this and then choose to pass into anonymity, far from all the adulation and material gains.

This is probably the reason that some people believe that Satoshi passed on with Hal. It was really insightful and motivating to read this post. I renew my commitment to continue learning and contribute to the cause of decentralization and freedom of ideas.


I feel it just puts across the point that the level of knowledge needed to implement bitcoin's code wasn't Einstein-level exclusive. It was the dedication over those years of coding which was extraordinary. That is indeed the point of this post. For decentralization and Bitcoin to survive, more and more of us need to overcome our fear of not having enough knowledge and work towards our own individual contributions; with steadfast dedication.

Of course you understand that the intention is not to belittle anything. Even then, if you feel this (as a programmer yourself probably), it'd be helpful if you give your own perspective on the difficulty level of the code. It'd be good knowledge for learners like myself.

I have read and talked about these topics for a pretty long time on the forum now. There are so many people who want to believe that something will replace Bitcoin because they want their "Thing" or their "Bag" to replace it.

The thing with Bitcoin is that there are enough geeks, crypto-enthusiasts, traders, political thinkers and plain normal people who are feverish about ensuring world-domination.

There are intelligent, competent and secretive people who enjoy this as a challenge to the powers that be. There is the underlying legend of the early harbingers like the mysterious Satoshi, The second-in-command Hal Finney who was on a quest to understand and contribute to bitcoin even when he was taking his last breaths paralyzed by a dreadful genetic disorder. (Some believe Mr. Finney was Satoshi himself)

The lore, The technical depth, the creativity and sheer mystery of bitcoin is so powerful that it can never be replaced by people like Roger Ver or Craig Wright who are in this clearly for self-aggrandization or purely profit. Only people who doubt this and want to believe the naysayers fall in two categories:

1. Newcomers who hate that they weren't here earlier and simply cannot digest that they couldn't have it.
2. Ego-maniacs who cannot accept that they can never do what Satoshi did or what the Core Devs do as a team.

As far as GPU mining is concerned, these are available at several online stores. The prices compared to US markets are pretty high. The premium was even higher during the GPU craze in Nov-Dec 17. A Sapphire Nitro RX580 cost as much as INR 32000 which was ~500USD for the exchange rate at that time.
Today you can get the same RX 580 at INR 22300 which is around USD 320 at today's rates. The prices have been such that there hasn't been any ROI for those that FOMO'ed into GPU mining. (Like me..at a very hobbyist level though).

As far as BTC mining ASICs are concerned, I'd very much like some of the older, non-scammy people in the Indian community to let us know about availability of hardware. Right now, almost all of them will be scammy kids who will run away with your money. Unfortunately, Most of these older Indian community members have themselves fallen into either disrepute or have run businesses to the ground. There isn't much to work with at present. The market is wide open for a trustworthy supplier/ marketer for mining hardware.

Why the interest though?