Put differently, there's only 1 block roughly every 10 minutes world wide. You can't just mine for your own convenience. You can't just make transactions and "stick them in a block and mine it."

Your transaction has to be placed in one of these global blocks. And there's only one block every 10 minutes. And all the miners in the world are competing for it. And there's a lot of miners.

I think you are underestimating the amount of hardware, infrastructure and electricity you would require to attain enough hashrate to have even the slightest change of accelerating your own transactions within the next, say, 6 blocks. Or rather, the amount of profit such a mining operation would make all by itself.

Let's do the math.

If you can reasonably expect to mine every 6th block on average (ie. 1 block an hour) you are running an operation that mines 12.5 BTC in block rewards + fees per hour. At the current exchange rate of roughly USD 9,000,- that's USD 216,000,- a day, of which a significant amount will be spent on electricity. If that's your side business just to save on transaction fees, I don't even want to know what your main business would be.

It's uncanny. At least urban areas seem to be utterly overpriced all over the world, no matter where you look. Whenever I read about real estate in a country it's about how owning a flat has become unattainable to pretty much anyone other than the exceptionally wealthy or the people that already own a flat to begin with. That seems to be true for Northern America, most of Europe and at least India as far as Asia is concerned. Worst case, real estate is in a bubble. Even worse yet, it's not and this modern form of feudalism is our mode of life now.

As far as bonds are concerned -- I'm not sure how bonds can turn into a bubble to begin with. Junk bonds, maybe, but in general bonds are an incredibly boring investment, as they should be. Naturally their prices will fall once monetary policies around the world inevitably change, but I doubt that they are that much overbought to begin with. My hunch is that currently more money is waiting on the sidelines in the form of cash, rather than bonds.

As far as cryptos are concerned -- heck, who knows. Cryptocurrencies are leading the concept of bubbles ad absurdum, as market cycles move at a pace that traditionally took decades. Can one still talk about bubbles if losses can be recuperated within the duration of what usually amounts to a mid-term bond? Or maybe the bubble to end all bubbles is yet to come...

Actually yes!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-23/first-cryptocurrency-freight-deal-takes-russian-wheat-to-turkey

While more of an outlier, Bitcoin has been used to pay for 3,000 tonnes of wheat being shipped from Russia to Turkey earlier this year.

I get the volatility argument in general, but that example is pretty weird if not downright dumb.

When the value of a money decreases it means that its purchasing power decreases. This means that -- ignoring deprecation -- the value of a commodity stays the same, while the price -- as measured in the money in question -- increases. That's what happens during inflation. Not only that, it's pretty much the prototypical symptom of inflation.

To make this example more absurd real estate has served -- more or less effectively -- as a hedge against devaluating currencies for decades. Exactly because it doesn't lose its value as much as the money that was spent when purchasing it. Ignoring real estate bubbles, obviously.

If that really is this guy's line of thinking -- and if he's somewhat representative for his peers -- than no wonder that the traditional banking system is in the state it is.

Maybe I misunderstand what you are trying to do, but when the wallet that is holding the private keys and signing the transactions (via createrawtransaction and signrawtransaction) is also the one publishing the transaction on the network (via sendrawtransaction) you are not doing cold storage.

If the wallet that is holding the private keys is a different one from the wallet sending the transaction, it is technically impossible for sendmany to create a valid transaction, for lack of an available balance. If you are able to send a transaction using sendmany, your hot wallet is holding the keys to your supposed cold storage balances which is... not good.

As pointed out by the others, that's not something you can simply set up yourself. It's a service provided by some of the larger miners / mining pools -- to earn a bit on the side, I suppose. Even then it might still take a few blocks until your transaction gets included, since it all depends on when the mining pool providing said services is lucky enough to find the next block.



It depends, the free acceleration service of viabtc can come in handy at times and you don't leave much of a data foot print. It's hard to get queued up for one of the free spots sometimes, but when you get in it really helps to move things along.

Any paid accelerators I would indeed avoid though, especially since there appears to be a good amount of scams out there.

In that case I'd also recommend the following article for a bit of context on the challenges of distributed, trustless accounting and the problems that cryptocurrencies are trying to solve:

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

In my opinion it's very important to understand what cryptocurrencies are trying to achieve in the first place, before throwing yourself headfirst into the matter.


As far as your structure is concerned, some starting points to consider:

a) Current impact and future implications

b) Token economy and the rise of decentralized crowdfunding

c) Non-governmental currency issuance and the resulting free market of competing monies

d) Smart contracts and digital ownership

e) Viability of private blockchains

f) Current practical role of cryptocurrencies in international remittance

g) Immutability of financial transactions on public blockchains

h) Permissionless transactions as means to circumvent financial censorship

How familiar are you with blockchains and cryptocurrencies to begin with?

The structure of your dissertation will largely depend on your perspective on the matter (ie. technological, economical, sociological, etc.) so that's hard to tell without additional information.

Either way, if finance is involved the European Central Bank may have some papers that could be of interest for you:
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scplps/ecb.lwp16.en.pdf?344b9327fec917bd7a8fd70864a94f6e
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpops/ecbop172.en.pdf
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/ecb.stella_project_report_september_2017.pdf
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/intro/governance/shared/pdf/201709_dlt_impact_on_harmonisation_and_integration.pdf

I personally only read the third one, but the others may have some interesting insights as well.

Rightful owners? The guy earned his coins by selling private information on the black market. If you would want to return the coins to their "rightful owners" you'd have to refund the data peddlers. If anything they would have to compensate the victims of this guy's crimes, the ones that had their personal data compromised. Not sure if a couple of bucks per person would really make up for it though.



I think your mixing this up with the Silk Road coins that got auctioned by the Feds in 2014 - 2015. The MtGox coins supposedly got sold on various crypto exchanges by their bankruptcy trustee.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that there's no demand for alt coins. But there's definitely no demand for almost 99.9% of them -- literally.

In my opinion some of the alts would be able to stand on their own, but get swept away with the rest of the market whenever something bad -- or good -- happens. Alts with strong communities that may even include people that never touched BTC at all, beyond transferring between exchanges. They are the ones that sometimes manage to decouple from the rest of the market for longer durations than just the occasional pump and dump; If only for a limited time.

For the most part I agree with your statement though -- the vast majority of alts are purely utilized as means to increase Bitcoin holdings (or fiat, for that matter). Even the stronger alts are for a large part used for what amounts to leveraged Bitcoin trading, hence the strong correlation between Bitcoin and alt price movement.

If I'm not mistaken Monero did some upgrade hard forks in the past which didn't result in two competing, surviving blockchains. Ethereum enforces upgrade hard forks by means of a difficulty bomb.

In general I don't think one can guarantee that a hard fork doesn't result in two competing blockchains. Like you said -- all it takes is some miners staying on the legacy chain. If then some dev team decides to maintain the legacy BCH code and some crypto exchange decides to support both coins you have closed the circle and two competing BCH forks. And there's no one that could prevent such a thing. Whether someone would be willing to go through these motions is a different question of course.

As for your two premises -- I don't think centralized development (2) would prevent a hard fork from occuring, unless the community stands 100% behind the hard fork as well (ie. the disaster around the corner or utmost trust in the dev team). I can very well imagine small projects (1) being united enough to enable a hard fork without a chain split token.

I do think that the BCH community is large enough for dissident voices though, thus I'm not fully convinced that their guarantee of "no more chain split tokens" can be upheld. All it takes is a handful of people stepping out of line. And that's a good thing -- no matter whether we're talking about BCH or BTC.

Congratulations, you just discovered the law of supply and demand and market depth. As mentioned by others, this is true for pretty much any asset really. If there are more buyers than sellers, the price goes up. If there are more sellers than buyers, the price goes down.



Wash trading in itself does not move the price, it merely increases the observable trading volume which some market participants may interpret as buy signals.

The question you are now asking yourself is whether the demand is real and Bitcoin's current valuations are justified. And it's a good question to ask yourself. Nonetheless I'm afraid you'll have to come to your own conclusions and act accordingly. If you only invested in crypto because the price went up you might want to reconsider your decision making process.

I can wholeheartedly recommend Namecheap as well, however they don't have .om domains.

There appears to be only a handful of .om registrars, with Gandi.net being the only one that seems to accept Bitcoin:

I'm afraid at this point it's up to Wex.nz's support to help you, as they are only ones with control over the private keys of said address.

That is, assuming the coins haven't been confiscated by the feds, I didn't follow the aftermath of the btc-e crackdown all that closely.

Good luck!

No, cloud mining services are almost never worth it.

For the most part you will end up with a loss, having mined less coins than you initially invested. Those cloud mining users that claim fiat profits, usually would have made more profits by simply holding their coins instead of investing them into a cloud minig scheme.

Cloud mining is only profitable for the ones offering the service, not the ones investing in it. Basically it's a simple way for miners to make a safe profit off of "investors" while outsourcing the risk of difficulty adjustments and hashrate growth onto the unsuspecting hashrate buyer -- assuming the hashrate being sold actually exists to begin with.

Since Ethereum was initially crowdfunded and Ripple is centrally issued I could imagine the SEC having a weak case in favour of these coins being securities. If they deem these coins securities, it may affect Iota and other centrally issued / crowdfunded currencies as well. Ethereum Classic would be an interesting edge case, since they never received any form of crowdfunding despite being an Ethereum hard fork (well, technically it was Ethereum that forked, but that's a different matter). That being said, I personally doubt that Ethereum and Ripple satisfy the preconditions required for being classified as securities.

Either way I think Bitcoin will be largely unaffected. Should these kind of centrally issued / crowdfunded coins be classfied as securities we may see some capital flowing from alts towards Bitcoins though.

The traditional markets don't act much different though.

When a large economy such as the US or China fall into recession, other markets around the globe are affected as well. When a small economy falls into recession, their impact on the global players is usually negligible.

To make matter worse, while Bitcoin is already speculation, alts are for the most part speculation on top of speculation, making it hard for them to stand on their own. That is to say, the "peculiarities of the development" of individual alts are in most cases not relevant enough to cause any sustainable impact beyond the initial hype and trying to get rich quick. Put differently, most alts simply lack the trust, technical foundation and innovation for long term growth. While Bitcoin has gained a lot of trust during the years, many alts are still more of a gamble than anything else.

Btw, what do you mean by "pricing policy"?

No.

You didn't say "Let's keep Bitcoin simple" which is a fine argument with which I fully concur.

The statement I critized was "why do you need it when we already have ethereum?" which is a phrase that tries to shut down any meaningful discussion without bringing anything new to the table while also oversimplifying the matter.



Exactly.

And Bitcoin smart contracts could be very different things from Ethereum smart contracts. Or Neo smart contracts. Or Stellar smart contracts. Or Waves smart contracts. Or whatever other approach there is out there because apparently smart contract platforms are a dime a dozen these days. Which doesn't mean that alternative approaches aren't worth exploring. Which is the point I'm trying to make.



With wire transfers, credit cards, PayPal and whatever else people out there are using because they don't see the point in cryptocurrencies or find them impractical.



If people had stuck with this line of thinking they would have been happy with Bitcoin's scripting capabilities and not explored the likes of Ethereum in the first place.



I might have misunderstood your initial comment. What I'm trying to say is this: Don't write new technologies off just because its merit isn't visible at a first glance. Similarity does not imply sameness.

If Luno wallet stops the process before sending, then it never hits the Blockchain. Accordingly it doesn't show up on any block explorers (assuming that's how Luno does this, I've never heard of this wallet before).

Regardless of that, a con similar to the one you describe is possible, only it involves trying to send the transaction back to your own wallet after receiving the money. This is called a double-spend attack and one of the reasons why Bitcoin has been invented in the first place and why Bitcoin uses a blockchain. It's the reason why exchanges and merchants wait for multiple confirmations until they update your account balance. It's why face-to-face trades usually involve a cup of coffee and a nice chat until the first few confirmations have hit and cash is exchanged


Here's some further reading regarding confirmations and attack types:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Confirmation

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Irreversible_Transactions#Attack_vectors