The monthly merit supply has been posted just a few replies above:


I figure given the relative newness of the system there's still a lot of tweaking to be done. The amount of sMerits distributed amongst merit sources on one hand and the social etiquette on what to merit on the other (do we treat it as a like? or should it be reserved for more special situations?).

Right now it's too early to tell, but I guess a proper code of conduct will emerge over the course of the next few months. While imperfect I definitely see it as an improvement for filtering out which posts are worth reading and which ones can be skipped.

Some of the more trusted senior members act as merit sources, ie. they receive part of a monthly pot of sendable merits to distribute amongst posts they deem constructive. In other words, there's a steady inflow of new sendable merits coming in.

See here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2818350.0

So in your opinion, what are the use cases of a blockchain without a cryptocurrency incentivizing securing the network? Under these circumstances, what benefits does a blockchain provide as opposed to a more traditional database solution?

It seems like both developers and investors tend to forget that they are handling real, actual money. Would you leave a suitcase full of cash in the middle of the street? Would you give your credit card data to some random stranger on the internet? That's what basically happens in crypto all the time.



I absolutely agree with you. As much as I love that whole wild west, new frontier vibe that crypto is swinging, I so very much appreciate the formal approach that Bitcoin and some of the alts have taken.

To be fair, handling crypto is especially tricky. Holding what equates to actual cash on a computer system is unprecedented prior to cryptocurrencies. Even if you were handling payments there was usually some form of rollback available, should things go awry. Not so with crypto, yet it seems to be partially held to lower standards than finance which is insane.

Nonetheless we've come a long way since MtGox. It's almost as if the market has begun to realize that crypto is a billion dollar business now.



Hats off to you for critically evaluating technologies. I know this approach should be the standard, however it unfortunately isn't, which makes me all the more glad to hear that there are still organizations and companies out there that take a sane and prudent approach at blockchain techologies.



I don't think that European banks are much better in that regard.

Referring to "But who would bank with a company that was so careless with funds".... I honestly think that consumers are at least partially to blame on that matter. If people would avoid shoddy exchanges in the first place, a lot of these dramas could be avoided.

Yeah, a lot of the stuff that I've seen happening with the alts (eg. IOTA and its self rolled crypto or that whole Parity debacle... twice) and some of the hardforks (eg. B2X's insta-death and the BCH difficulty fluctuations) during the last year made me really appreciate the way Core handles things. Sure, progress may seem slow, but it's slow for a reason. Stuff's done when it's done. You can't just move fast and hardfork things. I mean you can, obviously, but its not necessarily a development and design philosophy that I personally could get behind.

Same with turing complete smart contracts. It just seems like such. A bad. Idea. Regardless of the underlying blockchain.

Maybe with some improved tooling, rigorous testing and a solid development approach this could work, alas who has time for that when there's a marketing campaign for your upcoming ICO to be run?

I love watching the altcoin and token space, but for every good idea there's a metric shitton of wtfs going on. And those whitepapers. So much fluff, oh so much fluff. Jesus.

Seeing how security and actual software engineering often comes as an afterthought, instead of serving as a fundamental requirement, it comes to very little surprise to be honest. I guess that's the downside of the comparably low entry level when it comes to developing crypto related software (as opposed to, say, traditional finance, military and aircraft applications).

Properly handling immutable, decentralized transactions is hard and mistakes are costly without recourse. Even moreso when it comes to smart contracts. It seems like a lot of companies and developers haven't yet fully fathomed the implications of what processing irreversible scripts and transactions really means.


I mean...


What the. Actual. Fuck. That would be bad enough in traditional finance or actually any online application that handles money. But in crypto such a bug becomes fatal.




Here's the next thing. Granted, if Solidity where more strict and rigorous its developer base would likely be much much smaller. Nonetheless I'd argue that such strictness would be required to allow somewhat reliable smart contracts. With Solidity it may not be a code issue, but it's definitely a design issue. I don't follow Ethereum all that much, so I might be missing parts of the big picture, but what I always ask myself is: If blockchain veterans such as the Ethereum development team is unable to design a sound smart contract platform, how can we expect blockchain rookies -- which is what most of us are, given how young crypto is -- to implement reliable smart contracts on that very same platform?

Sorry if this post comes off as ranty, I guess irresponsible code just kind of grinds my gears.

So much this. "How do you buy Bitcoin?" is my least favourite question to be asked. If people ask me about hardware wallets or mining or what the fuck this whole cryptocurrency thing is about I'll gladly help out. But if the first question is on how to buy Bitcoin, you first need to learn to ask the real questions, my friend. I might just be a dick tho.

It's so weird. People either dismiss cryptocurrencies from the get-go or immediately want to throw money at it, no questions asked.

Andreas Antonopoulos supposedly has some very educative YouTube videos and books. I personally never read or watched any of his material, but he's fairly well respected within the community.

However your highest priority in the beginning should be learning how to secure your coins using cold storage, paper wallets or a hardware wallet -- alongside with why it is important to have access to your private keys and to securely store them.

I'd also recommend trying to understand Bitcoin first before looking into alts, otherwise you might miss some of the context on what challenges those alts try to solve that Bitcoin is facing as well. Also try to understand the tradeoffs of each respective approach.

True. Well, not all new money is necessarily dumb money, but I'm sure there's a fair share of people that simply want to invest in cryptocurrencies because they have increased in value, not because of their technological, economical and social implications. In that regard I guess there's little lost if these newcomers stay out of the market. Quite the contrary, it's probably better for long term stability if the only people that are left putting money into cryptocurrencies are the ones that see the bigger picture and are actually interested in this new asset class by itself.

I think the lack of newcomers softened both the pump and the subsequent dumping of coins. Question is whether our new friends that will get their accounts activated over the course of the next few weeks are still interested in Bitcoin now that its bull run has seemingly ended.

Of course we might see a second wave of uptrend in which case FOMO is likely to hit the newcomers hard once the market gains steam again. Not sure how well this is going to end though. Maybe a new crypto winter would be a good thing after all. It tends to thin the herd of both shitcoins and get-rich-quick speculators, which in the long run would be a net positive for the crypto market's stability.



Kraken and Bitstamp seem to struggle with verifying new accounts though, both of which are very important for the European market.

Altcoins are alternative cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Litecoin. If you don't know yet what altcoins are, I'd suggest staying away from them until you have read up on the matter.

Given that 0.5 BTC is no chump change, I'd recommend getting yourself a hardware wallet such as the Ledger Nano S or a Trezor.

Buy one of these wallets directly from their stores, not from any third party resellers or eBay:
https://trezor.io/
https://www.ledgerwallet.com/

For all intents and purposes, both are effectively equaly secure. Ledger is slightly cheaper. Availability may vary.

Read up on how to use a hardware wallet. Keep your wallet seed back up secure and offline. Remember that every transaction you make is irreversible. Maybe play around with small transactions before moving everything onto your hardware wallet.

Keep your money off exchanges. Stay away from cloud mining. Stay away from ICOs and alts until you really know what you're doing. Daytrading is a great way to both make and lose money. Remember that trying to get rich quick is a great way to get poor quick. Not losing money on scams and pseudo-investment is half the battle.

Ripple and Ethereum being more stable than Bitcoin? Tell that the people that bought Ripple at USD 3.77,- or Ethereum at USD 1,377.72,-. Granted, Ethereum faired comparably well, but Ripple's value got pretty much eradicated when Coinbase dispelled rumours of offering XRP trading.

Of course either could manage to grow faster in fiat terms than BTC in 2018, but so could any of the other alts. "Deals with major financial institutions" mean little these days, pretty much all of the larger cryptocurrencies have some cooperate backing. At least regarding the respective protocols, not necessarily regarding the respective coins and tokens.



Ripple has far less markets and trading pairs than Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and even Dogecoin though.

No, I actually mean any sector that is related to information technologies, computer hardware and finance. Maybe take a look at startups in those sectors as well, although I'm not sure how much of this information is public.

As far as I know none of the American companies in this space are publicly traded yet. (Ignoring companies that simply put "Blockchain" in their name such as the Long Blockchain Corp FKA Long Island Iced Tea Corp and companies that so far only dabbled with permissioned blockchains such as JP Morgan. Come to think of it, maybe it does make sense to look at companies that only dabbled with blockchains after all.)

Other metrics that just came to my head:

1) Wallet downloads
2) Amount of visitors to Bitcoin related websites and exchanges (eg. using Alexa ranking)
3) Subscriptions to cryptocurrency related subreddits

Just throwing some ideas out there, not sure how much sense it will make for your work in practice.

If I remember correctly Coinbase has been the only major exchange that didn't batch transactions for a long time. I think they fixed it by now, but I'm not sure.

Be sure to share your thesis once you've got your master's degree

A few thoughts:

1) Take a close look at timeframes when it comes to behavioural related indicators. It has been brought up before that an increase in google searches leads to a price increase, however it is just as likely that the cause and effect are the other way round -- ie. the price drives the increase in google searches. It would be interesting to see whether either causality can be debunked or confirmed when looking at the concrete time frames more closely.

2) The following economical variables may also be interesting to look at:
 a) Gold
 b) Closely related industry sectors, eg. NASDAQ, finance
 c) alt coins (trading volume, popularity, the rate at which new coins and tokens emerge)

You will need to rank up first before being able to post pictures on Bitcointalk. Posting pictures is disabled for new accounts to alleviate spam.

Read this:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1689727.0


Edit: Fixed link as pointed out by Potato Chips, thanks for the heads up.

Luckily clean energy based on renewable resources is on the rise, so with a little luck we won't need to think about this issue in 10 - 20 years.

Apart from that: One factor where Bitcoin is helping alleviate its own energy usage is the regular halving. Given a constant Bitcoin price, each halving makes mining Bitcoin less profitable, resulting in less money and thus in less energy being spent on mining.

Of course as we all know the Bitcoin price is far from constant, but assuming that Bitcoin survives the coming years and does not utterly devaluate, it is fairly safe to assume that Bitcoin price will plateau at one point. It's hard to say where this hypothetical sweet spot will lie, but at that point the energy spent on mining will likely reach a plateau as well, with hashrate only growing due to increased hardware efficiency rather than due to more money being spent on electricity.

I guess most exchanges use some sort of hierarchical deterministic wallet as defined by BIP0032:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki

Hard to say though whether they use their own homebrewn implementation or base it on one of the existing implementations. Both approaches have their up and downsides, so this will likely differ from exchange to exchange and their respective tech stack.

Assuming the bottom is indeed already in -- which I'm hopeful of, but not quite certain yet -- FOMO mode is likely just around the corner.

Assuming that the likes of Bitstamp and Kraken still need a couple of weeks to clear their backlog of fresh account verification, we'll likely have some new market participants soon enough that are just waiting for a good entry point. If Bitcoin continues its downward trend, these newcomers will likely try to time Bitcoin bottoming out. If we break upwards, however, buyers might once again get ahead of themselves but hopefully not too heavily.

Boy I sure hope we'll reach a new ATH this year, similar to 2013.

I'm cautiously optimistic right now too, seeing how USD 8,000,- is holding up fairly well with USD 6,000,- looking like a double bottom. I guess February is going to be critical. If we break below USD 8,000,- again, I doubt that USD 6,000,- will hold and the downtrend might continue. If we manage to break above USD 10,000,- however, or at least stay above USD 8,000,- until the end of the month, I think that we might actually look at an uptrend again.