He hates that he is irrelevant as far as bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are concerned. He doesn't understand the buzz and the hype behind it. I would love to actually have a valid argument other than the same old line about "It does not produce anything" argument.

It is getting stupid. I think some of these reporters probably raise the question just to instigate him to go into one of his raging fits and give away gems like "Rat Poison squared". LOL. The man is legendary and has built so much value over his life of investing.

How I wish he was more like the kind, understanding Gandalf the Grey rather than this nasty, bitter old man like Saruman the White!!!

I think it is only an ego thing with him. He is, after all, The Warren Buffett, legendary investor who has always told people to invest in businesses that they understand. Understand being the key word here.

Like the article mentioned, he missed Google and Amazon because he thought he did not understand them. Now he calls it a miracle but still doesn't have the humility to accept what it was. A mistake and mis-judgement on his part. This is the typical stubborn, orthodox behavior that these old men clutching to their own ideas almost always have.

I suppose it is too much for him to accept that after things like Google and Amazon, Bitcoin has also spawned which he most definitely, doesn't understand one bit. Imagine the surprise of someone who doesn't 'get' Google and Amazon, on being told that you can now own value without a bank based on mathematics and a huge network of computer nodes.

You don't understand Internet all so well, You don't get Google and Amazon, You have no willingness to go into the nitty-gritty of open source development, You are bloody 87 years old and these smiling chaps with their memes tell you about internet money, which by the way, you are told you have missed buying at 10, 100, 1000 USD all the way and it is at 10K now. What else can you do but shout at the non-understandable madness of it all every chance that you get??

That is all this is for Warren Buffett. A very personal sort of being proven wrong which he simply can't bear to accept. So he does all he can to disparage and trivialize it. But well, who cares!

When wars take place, you inevitably have civilians running to save their lives while having to leave behind their property and belongings. Even if they carry something, It is vulnerable to theft and loss. in such a scenario, people would be more than willing to keep some BTC as an asset that can be carried without much of a physical footprint and can be kept safe very easily.

Not that anybody should wish war or economic collapse but i think such a situation will inevitably prove the strength of peer-to-peer currency that needs no government or central bank to impart it value.

Such steps are pretty much welcome because categorizing bitcoin in terms of taxation gives legal identity to bitcoin as an instrument in the country's jurisdiction. This makes it easier for the fence-sitters to make their move. It can also attract some of the bigger investors who hitherto, would have been unwilling due to the uncertainty in terms of legal and tax implications.

Internet has been the great leveller for the world and a truly international community has developed on the web. With bitcoin becoming the borderless, internet money, this opens up opportunities for a lot of people in these countries which have till now, been pretty low on the international trade radar. It gives choice and power to the individual. One of the most exciting features of bitcoin.

There is nobody who understands bitcoin and wants it to be centralized. Who are these "numerous citizens" who want it to be centralized. A trusted third party is nowhere involved when you want to own bitcoin.
Your BTC is only yours for the safekeeping. Its value will not be judged or allotted by any third party. The only people who are okay with centralization are those who think that the transaction rate has to be increased at the cost of decentralization. That is why you have ideas of masternodes, PoS, Increased blocksize size etc. etc.

As a community we shouldn't be making the dentralization trade-off. It dilutes the idea completely for short term gains. The moment you create a central point, there is a possibility that it'll be co-opted someday or the other.

This was a pretty badly written article and I think it is just some story for Tangem, the company that is releasing the notes. It says the company is sharing it's code.

What special code do you need to generate a paper wallet?? Nothing which isn't already open source. It then goes on to explain that it is basically an NFC enables, USB shaped device. Just doesn't sound right.

The utility of such a "banknote" too is limited as one could as easily carry around a mobile for this. If the "banknote" wasn't fixed in denomination but allowed you to transfer funds securely from a cold wallet, that would be an idea to be excited about.

The frenzy for cryptocurrencies in South Korea was born out of two things:

1. A very tech-savvy and educated youth population
2. A desire to make it big in a country where even upper-middle classes are finding it hard to build enough assets and settle in life.

The young population saw crypto as a way out of the inevitable grind of having to compete with thousands of other over-qualified youth. They have also been the ones who lost the most when the prices tanked. They are hugely invested into cryptocurrencies, not for the technology but purely for the speculative gains. A lot of people that FOMOed at the top are going to be the ones who sell as soon as they break even.

What is encouraging is the positive stance the government seems to be taking. They realize that the youth are emotionally and financially invested in this and cannot be left to fend for themselves. Any positive sentiment from the South Korea will be the signal for leaving the blues behind. I would love to hear from some of the Koreans themselves, if any, here.

I guess SK has quiet a bit of language gap because they do almost everything in their own language. It would be great to figure out their sentiment at some Korean forum.

Well said. Though I don't know what you meant when you said

Bitmain is the major mining hardware manufacturing company at present and not a 'distributor'. Samsung and Intel have announced intentions to produce bitcoin miners and this is one of the most bullish news for bitcoin. If everyone can afford a mass produced miner, we'll have a decentralized, win-win situation for everybody. The centralization of mining hardware is a pretty major concern.

If you look at the novel things are happening in major cryptocurrencies, bitcoin is the only one with a viable plan and implemented idea. SegWit and LN are already working and lot of developers and sellers are on-board. Most other are just repeating the same lines of "cheap and fast" transactions with temporary measures that hurt decentralization. To any serious investor looking to invest in a world changing technology, it will be much easier to separate the marketing and hype from innovation and adoption. By serious investors, I don't mean those day traders at the banks but investors who look for real value and prospects.

An ASIC is, as the name suggests, first of all an Integrated Circuit. An IC. An umbrella term used to describe all kind of semiconductor hardware which basically consist of set of transistors etched on Silicon wafers.

Being Application specific means that it is optimally designed for a specific operation. A microprocessor is an Integrated Circuit too but one which has become the most popular avatar due to it's use in general computing. Microprocessors have an ALU to perform the basic logic and arithmetic functions. Apart from that there is the I/O, Registers, Cache, Control etc. The ALU is still where all the basic functioning takes place.

ASICs may have in-built microprocessors, memories and everything on board in a SoC configuration such that they are self-sufficent black boxes doing a specific job very optimally and in the fastest possible manner.

A Bitcoin ASIC miner has all the necessary interfaces for network and connecting with pools etc. I am sure there must be some blueprint or VHDL schematic available for it in the wider internet. A good search target for the evening then.

Here: https://thebitcoin.pub/t/build-your-own-asic-miner/14173

It seems hard to understand in our own fast-paced, constantly-pushed lives but it does looks like that poor people are much better at sharing and looking after each other than the rich folks. Though the author himself chooses to not fall for the romanticism of this notion when he says "the motivation is necessity, even desperation".

There is something inherently strange in believing that the only way to grow and survive is for the middle classes to become small engines driven by a passion to succeed and spend their lives serving corporate world. Though, this is also true that to enable major human accomplishments, you HAVE to push people somehow. Whether with the threat of a common enemy or with the notions of success. What challenges this desire for a slower, at ease world for me is the hard fact that most major innovations in 20th century happened when people were on their toes preparing for war. The kind of technological progress that the Cold War led to may never have been possible without the work forces of the two countries motivated by chauvinism. Sorry for the sidetrack.

In this particular case, yes people will find the way and will to survive in any condition but not before the worst has happened. Especially if a developed society has to face such a situation. Modern economy is a mess of it's own making but then this is hardly a good example to counter it.

There are a lot of ways to obtain myriad other cryptocurrencies. If you can do some dev work and teach yourself coding, there are bug bounties in various crypto projects. If you can be productive and meaningful at community building then there are opportunities in managing groups and bounties. The reward is proportional to the time/ effort you put in for the grunt work.

As far as bitcoin is considered, if you plan to stay for any meaningful time in crypto, at least half your effort and half your capital should go towards understanding and gathering bitcoin, the purest form of crypto known!! The other half is going to be a grunt job, with high risk of scammy results.

That would be a stupid decision to make. To earn enough money from bounty campaigns, people join hundreds of them and then make spam posts to fulfill the criteria. This leads to becoming a pretty low-ranking and low-respected member. The peanuts that it earns you are hardly enough to support a family.
Even if you do this full time, it is not worth the trickery and rule-breaking people resort to. In place of that, it is much better to spend some time initially in learning the ins and outs of bitcoin, the technology and the socio-economic background & implications. This way you can find the niche you are comfortable with.

If you live in a developed country then there is already an existing system of goods and services you can provide if you can manage your bitcoin transactions. There are examples of people selling honey eclairs for bitcoin and doing pretty good with it. Those kind of learning and ventures will go way farther in allowing one to support a family than mindlessly tapping away at bounties. Or a judicious mix of both without falling for the associated trickery of spamming the shit out of the forum..

You feel this way because you have spent too much time thinking about altcoins or tripling your money by trading. If you tried to go to the roots of why people need bitcoin then you would understand that the purpose is much more than making easy gains available to early adopters and scammers.

The basic purpose behind bitcoin is to provide humanity a way to shrug the control that financial institutions have over the working class. There is close relation between the central bankers ability to fund governments with debt and increased burden of inflation, taxation and public spending cuts resulting from economic crises. Bitcoin provides a solution by removing all of those third party intermediaries that tell you how much value your money/ property has.

If you feel "dangerous", then you are spending too much time thinking or speculating on bitcoin as an investment. Don't link your dreams and give up your job over it.
The best thing is to focus on the technology and talk about that rather than price. Have you heard about the elements project, Sidechains, MimbleWimble.

Did you know you can run your own LN node on a simple Raspberry Pi.. These are the kind of things that can keep your interest going even when you feel like you are in danger. If technology doesn't excite you, then there is a lot of socio-economic argument involved in bitcoin. Reading about this is a great starting point too.

Amazon Web Services was already being used to run Ethereum nodes. There is nothing new in this or a special sign to be bullish. Typical example of how misinformation is being spread these days. People buy into stuff because of reading news that is supposed to be positive sentiment without actually understanding what it means.

This is one of the biggest pitfalls for cryptos to be taken seriously. Too few people try to actually understand the substance behind the hype.

Why do you think Amazon Web Services should influence buying process in Amazon shopping?

Another major reason for the spike in transaction was aot of people trading on exchanges and buying up in ICOs. Most exchanges didn't have SegWit enabled or Transaction batching.
Now those features are being added to bigger exchanges gradually and this must have contributed in reducing the load on block space.

Bitcoin is the one tested on its full capacity and ready to face the next level of usage explosion with second layer solutions. As usual, the other coins are still going to keep calling themselves "cheap and fast" when blocks are going completely unoccupied. This can never be a long term solution.

LN is already on mainnet and is now hnder community testing and adoption. As always, bitcoin is the pioneer.

I'll do you one better. Your poor ass never had any bitcoin.

You are here to spread lies and try to confuse newbies into thinking abojt Ethereum and BCash.
Ethereum serves completely different use cases and it should never be a choice between BTC and ETH. You should own both depending on your interest while BTC is a must.

BCash on the other hand is just another alt-coin being propped on Roger Ver's sly marketing and media's ignorance. Only a fool would trade their BTC for Bcash at this point.

Being your own bank by keeping a significant investment as bitcoin, running a full node and using it for settlements and buying stuff isn't something that a lot of peopld would ever be willing / capable to do.

Most people would like to keep bitcoin as an appreciating asset. A few would like to use it for intenrational transactions like getting hardware from newegg or a steam subscription. People who accept it in their businezz are the ones with most stake and they would love to be their own bank.

Although the basic tenet behind bitcoin is trustlessness and decentralization, we will need to evolve certain trustworthy mechanisms that normal people can verify and rely on..Being your own bank is ones own choice, one that needs considerable expertise to be exercised. Humanity is as ready for it as it will ever be. People who need the bank safety net will be an important consumer group in itself. The bitcoin economy is forming it's own trends and patterns and we shouldn't necessarily be contrasting it against present consumer/ investment banking.

Banking originated in it's present form mostly in Europe. It is the hub of major banking powers of the world and they are the ones set to lose the most if cryptocurrency like bitcoin reaches mass adoption and popularity.
It is no surprise that they will counter it with every thing they have and at every excuse they get for an attack.

Although it is surprising that a country like Norway with it's cold Northern climate so suitable for mining would also be regressive toward crytpocurrencies. I am sure there are a lot of Norwegiians mining some bitcoins in that cold climate.

World economy as we know it today, has been enabled by international institutions like the IMF and treaty organizations like the WTO. So definitely, International relations has a huge role to play. This is why globalization is the buzzword that it has become.

It's due to relations that developing countries like India are able to obtain cutting edge foreign technology. International.companies see the potential for a huge market and are willing to market and manufacture their products here. Countires that are conmected are bohnd to gain much more than those that remain willingly isolated.

Ths exchange of ideas and ethics is enabled on a large scale due to trade and those in turn depend on relations. What is amazing aboht bitcoin that if the governements keep their nose out of it and take an unxerstanding approach, we can have this trade independent of relations between countries and let ir depend solelh om product, services and the consumers.