The Venezuelan government want to trade using a cryptocurrency. What doesn't change is that they ultimately need the world currency, USD. That is why the under hand dealings with the said Russian bank. This does look like a way to get USD because the rest of the sources are sanctioned. USD are important for all sort of things needed to run a government. I'd say the arms, ammunition and technological spares needed to maintain control on the people. All of it needs to be imported in these countries.
If the government really just cared about the people and this was a sincere way to boost confidence and kickstart economy, the move would work if they made Petro openly tradeable while using it for direct trading in Oil with countries that would be willing. This would give the people a source to exchange value rather than just relying on a black-market supply of USD. What they are doing instead is to amass USD for themselves.

Umm.. The US world view and affect hasn't really been as benevolent as you are stating. Most of the time external interference has only worsened the situations. The US interventions motivated by oil hegemony and market for arms sales have been the cause behind most major conflicts in the world.

They are supposedly providing discounts on purchase of crude oil if purchased using Petro. This story here says that they will offer 30% discount to India. Last update on this news also said that they wanted Petro to be traded on the Indian exchange Coinsecure which was started by the long time Indian Mod Benson and has recently suffered from a hack.

The model though could probably if petro becomes tradeable against bitcoin in countries like India which have yearly import bills of crude upwards of USD 50 Billion. The problem for a country under sanctions is that their currency is unusable. If Petro issued by the government becomes usable, they can kick-start the economy. Though it remains to be seen if the US would stay quiet at such a proposal. I am pretty sure it'll arm-twist countries like India out of any such deal.

The idea can definitely work but the corrupt regimes in these countries have a way of screwing up things, no matter how good the idea is.

I think most of the now respectable ideas were fist proposed here in the form of a whitepaper or a post from the original author. Just some 12-18 months back, the discussion would have been prolific. Now it is mostly about filling space.

If you consider your idea can be revolutionary, maybe you should just go ahead and create an ANN page for it like a lot of other people have been doing. You say the network is already up and running, so if you include more people through an ANN thread, it'd be possible to test the robustness and security with adoption. Chains are getting attacked all the time these days.

If you pay someone for finding a bug without a ANN first, what is the guarantee that your idea won't be replicated? Any links here would be great.

Alright. Lets consider them for a moment. I can't see them as being shares or as loyalty points either. The use case will be different for different companies using such private blockchains. In case of facebook what could they possibly do?
People generate content on Facebook. A lot of it. Facebook has recently received a lot of flak for letting user data be used for commercial purposes without user consent. If Facebook launches a blockchain based token, it may be a method for them to incentivize users for allowing their data to be shared.  Say you have a few privacy settings and you get points every week on your facebook activity. The more private you make your account, your stakes get lowered and vice versa. This'll give them a good excuse to keep using the data while the people get something out of it.

I don't think it'll be that great for bitcoin. You cannot expect a corporate like Facebook to care about decentralization or the economic paradigm shifting properties of Bitcoin. Mark Zuckerberg is a technologist himself but I guess, being a billionaire presiding over an empire does changes things. Those ideals get sidelined when you have are so well integrated with the system. Blockchain based products from such established corporations like Facebook or McDonald's may be a body blow to bitcoin. It is clear that the majority of users don't give a rat's ass about decentralization or any long term goals. All they care about is getting some dough.

You can expect the apathy to multiply manifold once such blockchains running on private servers gain acceptance. Most people will simply use them rather than try to explore the privacy and freedom related aspect of a truly trustless currency like bitcoin.

I think these "Alt-coins" and "fluff blockchain" technologies have screwed up the whole thing. By now, the debate around bitcoin should have matured towards following points:

• Why governments and banks are so uneasy about a decentralized currency?
• What is it that makes them think that people transacting without the overhead of having to go through banks is an issue?
• How can a decentralized, transparent allocation of public funds can reduce inequality and bring more people out of poverty.

Instead of these mature and hard questions, we have this drama created by egoistic, greedy f***s everywhere who think they could be the next Satoshi or those who simply want to confuse more and more new people with cutting-edge sounding names and part them with their money.

Companies launching their own coins or similar paraphernalia to boost sales is nothing new. Things like points and coupons have existed for a long time. Alt-coins catering to a particular private organisation working on a private blockchain do not serve any purpose except being an easy, marketing gimmick.

The medium bitcoin has "Bitcoin: the network and the code" behind it. How do you replicate that level of network robustness and decentralization on some Alt-coin which comes up with novel Proofs-of-'whatever'? I think the alt-coins are bad for the ecosystem because they do not bring anything new to the table but instead, spread the focus of new users towards the race to finding the "next" bitcoin.

Without these gimmicks, people wouldn't be buying into all sort of crazy stuff hoping for it to grow because bitcoin has grown. Without them, the new wave of people too would have concentrated on the technology and tried to find ways for adoption through innovation. That kind of work has suffered when the majority of new people are interested in only investing, trading and flipping.

People who have invested significant amounts with the intention of winning that money back should probably follow this policy. To me personally, i prefer to hold whatever I have till i get a good technical grasp of this. If things work out the way they are meant to, we'd probably not have to worry about trading and stuff.

Another interesting way out is to use bitcoin to buy stuff. We need new stuff all the time. That money will be spent anyways. So instead of spending fiat directly on the good, I think spending it via bitcoin would be much better. I am still looking for ways to do this as the ecosystem isn't tuned to goods out here but rather to trading. I tried trading but realized i have not much love for it. All it gets you is money.

CNBC callling Roger Ver as Bitcoin Jesus and allowing him to shill BCash to millions of viewers is unethical on their part. They are actually confusing people into thinking that bitcoin is somehow not "The Bitcoin".  Falsehoods like "Their are many bitcoins" are being propagated. Thankfully, the community is vigilant of such attacks and mostly takes care of it. It's understandable, the love newbies have for these worthless coins. Something like XRP is especially dangerous. Its distribution is concentrated like anything and the marketers make it sound like XRP value will directly depend upon the banks using their platform.

In reality, banks have made it clear that they won't be using XRP for fiat conversion. That won't make sense too as you'd just be introducing another variable into international currency conversion.

The kind of fabrication in that article is unbelievable. Woz just said "Ethereum is a platform", the paid shill of a journalist adds "just like Apple's"

He says he is not using facebook anymore and the fucker makes the headline sound like he dumped facebook shares and bought ETH instead. How much more unethical and misguiding could these people be? On top of that, they have the name of Forbes while the small print says,
"Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.". Any newbie seeing this would simply FOMO into ETH and other such things thinking "Woah, Bitcoin is too expensive but ETH, yeah ETH I could buy. Maybe it'll go to 10K next". Similarly, there were a lot of people during the December run-up who said Ripple would hit 1K without even considering it's humongous supply.

Such deceit is going on everywhere. One more thing, all those twitter handles attaching "fam" like "vergefam", "tronfam" and with chicks putting up profile pics alongside, make me puke. The difference between the people who actually started this and the unethical, greedy idiots who are trying to mislead people now is mind-blowing. Hope more people can understand that this is more than just a get rich scheme. Ohh and your shares are always pretty interesting Hydrogen. Keep them coming..

LOL. Well written. The OP is our average Joe just like every newbie who tries to do his own research on bitcoin and crypto in general. New people should realize that media and a lot of internet publications out there have vested interests in promoting these so called alt-coins.

These platforms have failed to show any merit or deliver any product in all these years. The only thing they have been good at is making people part with their bitcoin. All while billionaires are doing their best to hoard it. Checkout this post shared by member Hydrogen

Media channels like eyeballs so they promote unethical people like Roger Ver as Bitcoin Jesus when the bitcoin community out there prefers to call him "Bitcoin Judas". They falsely maintain that the throughput and storage needed for 32 MB or unlimited blocks is not a hurdle for decentralization. They attack real innovation that has been happening on bitcoin by targeting the developers. All of this is being done to confuse the newcomers into spreading out their investments in all sort of worthless platforms when they should really be allotting what they can afford to bitcoin.

A wallet with minimal funds to meet your daily requirement and operated by, say, a 4-digit PIN to sign transactions will be as safe as any of the banking apps we already carry with us. I don't think we should be too alarmist about "How" secure these day-to-day wallets need to be.

Being your own bank means you need to take care of the security too. Cold wallets for your savings will definitely work like they always have. Those who are afraid of keeping things safe themselves, I am sure there are plenty of ways of making a device that would record/ playback 24 words when you unlock them with a face scan and password.
Will that make people more vulnerable to extortion or theft? Not anymore than now i think. Even if you keep your money in a bank, an extortionist will find a way for you to part with it. In case of theft, well, according to the libertarian ethos, you guard your own.

For a LN implementation, surely companies like coinbase can be one of the well connected hubs. But they do not control your keys and have no control over the funds so I think we can live with them being a service provider. The important thing is that when transactions of public money like taxes, budgetary outlays etc make the inevitable switch to bitcoin, this will do wonders for transparency and accountability of taxpayers' money.

Transferring payment methods to any form like NFC, Touch payment etc is not the issue. It can take any form you can think of. Though, for all payments to pass onto a crypto, the first major hurdle would be confirmation time. This sets a bound on how fast the transaction can be.

This is taken care of by the Lightning Network because you don't need confirmations with it to be sure of the transaction. This is one of the reasons that bitcoin with a big enough Lightning Network implemented will be much better for micropayments than any of the other solutions.

What a load of nonsense. You couldn't be any more wrong. People had been trying to figure out a trustless, decentralized electronic payment method for a long time. None of them could solve the double spend issue without using a centralized ledger. Bitcoin elegantly solved it.

I assume you are a newbie who has just recently been awestruck by the promises of ICO vaporware and the "amazing" things that people will do on this "decentralized global computer" called Ethereum. It is hard not to get bedazzled by all the marketing. You need to study bitcoin a lot more to understand it's technical as well as socio-economic aspects that excited the first people Satoshi contacted. For example, Here is one of the greats, Hal Finney speaking about it in his own words.

Also, Please stop shilling Ethereum like it is some kind of promising long term investment. It has proved none of it's proposed usages. It has only contributed to the ICO craze and even there it has competition in the form of competing chains like EOS, Lisk, QTUM etc. For anybody is looking for a long-term investment, bitcoin with its proven network, robustness, utility and community should take be the biggest part of your investment.

This is a good point. As to who is doing the research? Who has the right incentive to ensure that mining becomes more energy efficient. Due to ASIC miners, the efficiency has increased manifolds compared to CPUs and GPUs but then you have more and more miners coming up.

Seems like the only upper limit to energy consumption is based on the amount of miners that the major mining hardware companies like bitmain, Cannan etc. can manufacture. Bitmain is the biggest player and we have seen announcements from the likes of Samsung and Intel to go into bitcoin mining. Due to the realtive monopoly here, Bitmain doesn't really need to become more efficient. If someone like Samsung suddenly came up with a more efficient miner, we may have some competition to make them more efficient as it directly affects the cost of mining and ROI.

Competition in manufacture of mining ASICs is one hope towards better miners. The other is when governments decide to do some positive regulation and stop giving away old coal-fired plants or cheap hydroelectric energy for mining. If "mining farms" are discouraged by policy measures, manufacturers will need to come up with efficient hardware to remain within policy guidelines.

What you mean is that for the economy to keep running, you need people to keep spending on something. Those who invested in bitcoin initially are now millionaires and thus have wealth created out of "thin air" because the price has been artificially pumped by goxdollars and tether.

Your first assumption is that most of the price rise is due to the Tethers being printed by bitfinex without there really being any USD behind it.
Second assumption is that all of the millionaires/ bitcoin holders are actually spending their money by converting it into Fiat and thus helping keep the economy running.
The first assumption is hard to verify or reject. The second one means that people are getting actual Fiat from someone else in exchange of the BTC. But then that takes out an equal amount of Fiat away from another person. The total in circulation remains the same because people who are buying/ selling at the exchanges are doing it with their own money. This is the benefit of bitcoin being a peer-to-peer, decentralized system.

The theory that bitcoin is enabling circulation of new fiat is pretty baseless.

For this to become a big enough issue, you'd need crypto adoption to a level where enough people will actually begin to worry about the electricity usagee. Right now, except those trying to peddle their DPoS or PoS systems, nobody is worried about how much electricity the basic security feature of bitcoin uses.

The market is mostly concerned about the next levels of adoption. None of the so called alternatives have been tested or attacked enough to merit the kind of investments that have gone into bitcoin. The big investors and regulators know this. If these alt-coins gain enough adoption and value, they will be attacked and the truth will be out in the open.

If the energy consumption becomes a major issue, the miner community will definitely find a way to address it rather than letting bitcoin lose value. The chances of another currency becoming strong enough AND important enough before bitcoin can adapt are terribly low.

It isn't really much of a prediction but a straightforward inference from the decrease in the price of crypto. GPU mineable coins like ETH, Siacoin, Decred have all seen large drops in price. The buzz from new people who were willing to join simply isn't there. The inflated prices of GPU's and decreasing ROI must have made the new people lose interest pretty fast.

You can expect to see the prediction for a 2 times increase in GPU sales with the next bull run in crypto, if and when it comes.

Good that you asked yourself that question. You will realize that it is because you need consolation that bitcoin will work and won't disappoint you like silver did.
Don't you worry. Bitcoin's story is not the same. It is not really anti-government. It is more like an antidote to all that ails the government. You have nothing to worry if you are invested in bitcoin.

All government backed currencies derive their legitimacy from the government and give power and control back to the governments in return. The system works well if you assume all actors are honest and have the general population's best interests in mind.

History has shown that is hardly the case. More often than not banks, governments and businesses collude to create conditions where inequities keep increasing and those at the bottom continue to serve those at the top. This is enabled by an unlimited currency supply which only gets inflated and the burden is passed on to the common people.

Bitcoin has the power to change this equation with it's property of being a decentralized currency that does not need a trusted party like the government to give it legitimacy. It is power to the people as people choose to believe in verifiability and robustness of the underlying code and network rather than the central bank's word. So yes, As far as the long term effect is concerned, it is definitely a threat to established currencies.

I see where you are coming from. When entering into this space, it's hard not to be bedazzled by all the promises of new technology. You too probably watched too many videos and invested too much on the basis of shit those people say. If you have  "invested" mostly in bitcoin then like gentelemand said, just sit tight.

Sadly, for those who "invested" in ICOs believing the fake hype and vaporware promises will have to rely on their judgments or their luck. Those who did the research should just be part of whatever that ecosystem is. Those who simply bought Tron , well, get the hell out when you can.

The real fight is not with the manipulation that the big traders are doing. It is about the future of cryptocurrencies and how governments will try to regulate. Whether the regulation will be for safeguarding smaller investors or for controlling crytpo remains to be seen.

That is what backups should be for. If you intend to provide things like wallet recovery, then it is the same as using wire transfers with banks.

What kind of human intervention do you envision. A smart contract implemented on a supposedly decentralized global computer removes the use of third parties for this task. If you have an option for human intervention, then how is it different that just contracting things out to a law firm.
What is the value proposition for any such solution that wants to take decentralization away and introduce third parties to provide the traditional recovery services and human intervention??

Past results are no guarantee for future performance. So saying that because they have increased in the last 10 years and so will continue to increase is naive at best.

The value increase has to come from adoption, usage and acceptance. That is the only way this has ever grown or will grow. The governments are still not done trying to somehow either control or destroy it. That is the reason we hear government created FUD all the time. The market falls but then recovers. As this resilience gets proven again and again, you can be sure that more serious players will continue entering.

The development of Lightning network's capacity will also be a big boon as it will allow more and more people to opt for BTC for micropayments. Solving micropayments and making their usage feasible as the currency of internet is in my opinion, the most needed and most bullish use case.