Also the VAT number id on the page (DE528006423) is -- unsurprisingly -- invalid.

Feel free to check yourselves: http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/vieshome.do?locale=en


Also the house numbers on the Lindenstraße in Prenzlau are ordered -- Starting at no. 1 in the south, ending at no. 19 in the north. So no, there's definitely no Lindenstraße 495 in Prenzlau either.



lol

Yep. It's a scam.

Depends on your investment horizon.

If you're thinking short- to mid-term, you might have a problem. If you're thinking long-term or based your investments on the fundamental properties of Bitcoin rather than its price, this shouldn't concern you. Either way, buckle up.

We are undeniably in a bear market right now. The Death Cross confirming it would merely state the obvious.

Which is precisely why the usefullness of private, permissioned blockchains is questionable. In the end they lose all the worthwhile properties of a blockchain -- including, effectively, immutability -- leading the concept of blockchains ad absurdum.

The upcoming data directive of the EU is merely yet another reminder why it makes no sense to try cramming blockchains all over the place. The blockchain use cases that "got lost" due to the upcoming EU directive were likely never viable in the first place.



Would make for an interesting legal case though. Say you're a company that offers the service to store your personal data on a public, permissionless blockchain by offering a simplified user interface for the likes of OP_RETURN. Who has the legal responsibility over the data? The consumer that made use of the service or the service provider?



Exactly.

Storing personal data is not a prerequisite for smart contracts. The large majority of currently active smart contracts are working without the usage of personal data.

Land registries can decouple personal data from the property transactions to be stored on a blockchain.

Heck, even a digital identity can be established without storing personal data. Obviously not what IBM is striving for though.

Which companies in this space actually do store personal data on a blockchain? Transactional data is not affected by this directive, which is what blockchains usually consist of. Transactional data can usually be decoupled from personally identifiable data.

Besides, it seems to only affect private, permissioned blockchains, which to me still looks more like snakeoil rather than a viable use case.

It does affect the handling of KYC/AML though. ICOs operating in the EU will need to be able to comply with this directive.

Pretty close, but not quite.

Wealth is not created when the price of a security (stock, ICO token, whatever) increases. Wealth is created when these companies use the money provided to them by investors to create actual products, may they be physical or a service. Until that happens it's just debt that gets shifted between speculators.



Advancements in technology have been the new way of wealth creation since the industrial revolution.

Is it fair that the older generations are holding most of the real estate, forcing the younger generation into a modern form of serfdom?

Is it fair that wealth begets wealth and that income through labor is much more heavily taxed than capital income?

Is it fair that the younger generation has a much smaller chance of aggregating wealth due to the fact that income levels have not even remotely kept up with the purchasing power of fiat currencies over the last few decades?

People investing into new and unproven companies, industries and technologies take high risks. Naturally they expect high rewards. It not always pays off, but when it does, even those that failed to invest usually simply accept it. I've never heard anyone complain about how investing in Microsoft, Apple or Google in their early days was unfair. Something that has always been well in reach for older generations. And for the most part of modern history, investing in stocks was much more difficult for the layment than investing in crypto is today.



No one is forcing anyone to invest. Those that invested early, took the highest risk. Those that will use cryptocurrencies once adoption is high and risk is low (should that ever be the case), will profit from improved economic freedom caused by less friction in international remittance and trade.



If you find a viable ICO, sure, by all means, go for it. I'm sure as an economist you are well aware of the failure rate of startups and how to asses and mitigate these risks accordingly.



Do they? There's been a lot of talk about how cryptocurrencies could help economies in developing countries. Banking the unbanked is a prevalent topic. Supporting citizens of nations suffering from hyperinflation and questionable monetary policies is another.

Banks will do whatever profits them the most. If that means running an exchange and reaping trading fees, than that's it. Trying to destroy crypto is not as profitable as simple going with the flow.



Sorry to say, but that's already the case with any exchange following KYC/AML procedures. That's pretty much what this data is for. Unfortunately legit exchanges are pretty much forced to play ball and follow these orders, lest they get smitten by the powerful arm of the SEC.

PoS does not require a smart contract. There are a lot of cryptocurrencies out there that use PoS (or some alteration of it) instead of PoW.



When staking your coins in a PoS system, you also run at risk of minting orphaned blocks. Therefore adequate block intervals are still necessary. Also note block intervals is not at the heart of the scalability problem, but rather the rate of blockchain growth. This problem is not circumvented by smaller block intervals.



PoS has nothing to do with piracy or gambling.

Consensus algorithms always require some sort of scarce resource to make potential attacks as expensive as possible. This could be processing power (in the case of PoW), trust (in the case of banks), coins (in the case of PoS) or pretty much anything else.

In the case of PoS, various users in turn get to decide whether a transaction is valid or not. If they decide rightfully, they earn a reward. If they try to cheat the system, they lose their stake. In PoS you basically vouch with your capital (ie. your stake) that what you claim is correct. That's pretty much it, in a very oversimplified nutshell.

Why else would they track Bitcoin transactions?

Here's one of many articles regarding the Snowden leak and NSA's monitoring of Bitcoin users:
https://www.coindesk.com/nsa-reportedly-eyes-to-scrap-bitcoins-anonymity/

They are not the only ones analyzing money flows on the Bitcoin blockchain:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/irs-uses-chainalysis-to-track-down-bitcoin-tax-cheats

No one ever claimed that only Bitcoin is being monitored. Alts may very well be affected as well.



Any organization that has the resources at hand to monitor the bulk of global internet traffic wields a significant amount of power. There's no way to sugarcoat that.

The problem with such organizations is not the surveillance and manipulation of the individual -- it's the surveillance and manipulation of the masses. Hand this power to the wrong person and you hand them the control over a whole population past the point of no return.

Maybe we've been reading different headlines, but from what I recall the NSA is "merely" tracking Bitcoin transactions, possibly trying to de-anonymize users. Because of course they do, they're the NSA after all. Also they are unfortunately not the only entity to do so, but it was pretty much clear from the beginning that this would happen due to the transparency of Bitcoin's ledger.

Transaction times during December / January were slow due to Bitcoin's limited transaction capacity and the network being overburdened with unconfirmed transactions. Imagine a queue at a grocery store -- if there's just few people, you'll be able to check out faster. If there are many people in line, it will take longer.

However as mentioned by VitKoyn, queues are short right now, so transactions should be fast again.



Not really, no.

Oh there was much drama. Maybe you were lucky enough to have missed most of it, but the whole blocksize debate and the Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash rivalry dominated most of 2017.

Just a short recap:

1) r/btc vs r/bitcoin respectively big blockers vs small blockers

2) Bitcoin XT followed by Bitcoin Classic followed by Bitcoin Unlimited ultimately leading to Bitcoin ABC / Bitcoin Cash

3) Accusations against Jihan Wu of Bitmain to blockade SegWit due to alleged usage of covert ASIC boost in their miners

4) Bitcoin Cash deployment drama (shifting dates around, opt-in 2-way replay protection vs full 2-way replay protection, last minute protocol changes leaving wallet developers scrambling)

5) NYA drama that lead to SegWit2x drama (basically r/btc vs r/bitcoin on a corporate level)

6) SegWit2x not implementing 2-way replay protection, false flag nodes, B2X futures trading...

7) "SegWit transactions are not safe because they use anyone-can-spend transactions!!!111one"

8) Hashrate oscillations between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash due to Bitcoin Cash's EDA (emergency difficulty adjustment)

9) Alleged spam attacks against Bitcoin leading to increased transaction fees

10) "Lightning Network leads to banking hubs!!111one"

11) Coinbase stating that they won't support Bitcoin Cash and that customers wanting their hard fork coins should withdraw their coins in advance, followed by legal threats by customers that left their coins on Coinbase after all, followed by Coinbase allowing their customers to withdraw their Bitcoin Cash in January

12) Coinbase receiving flak for their delayed SegWit integration

13) I'm sure there was more but I just realized I should get outside more


Now you might say that this was all just stuff happening in the background and has nothing to do with the SegWit soft fork itself. But no! There was this whole UASF vs UAHF thing, Bitcoin Cash moving their hard fork date up as mentioned above, miner signalling being indecisive for most of 2017... it was quite an interesting year.

What they call a "waste of computing resources" is what makes blockchains secure in the first place. You want the data to be hard to compute, otherwise it would be easy to manipulate.

You see something similar when hashing user passwords for your database -- using "wasteful", ie. slow hashing algorithms is part of a proper security model, since you don't want an adversary to brute force through your user's passwords all that easily in case of a data breach.



This reads like they are trying to make a case for private key generation through third party agencies. While bad RNGs have proven problematic in the past, you have no guarantuee that a third party would fare any better.

If anything, leaving private key handling and signatures to "trusted institutions" has proven to be a systemic risk time and time again:

http://wiki.cacert.org/Risk/History



That one has nothing to do with blockchain security.



Both the privacy aspect and the security of smart contracts is cryptocurrency dependent and can't be generalized.

And which criminal smart contracts are facilitating murder, arson and terrorism? Has the IS been running an ICO that I missed?

This point also seems weirdly at odds with the prior statement. Either "it is hard to track user behaviours" or "the privacy protection measures [...] are not very robust". It can't be both.


Got a link to the paper? I assume there is more depth to their line of argument. Right now it seems rather shallow.

Whenever I feel like I'm too paranoid for this world, it turns out that I'm probably not paranoid enough. Whenever I feel like a luddite for keeping certain apps off my phone and avoiding cloud services, it turns out to be justified. I honestly doubt that the general populace will ever have privacy again. Especially from the viewpoint of a non-US citizen, the supranational role that the US tends to take is sometimes quite disturbing, to say the least.



Nah. Anybody worth their salt is not keeping private keys online.



Good advice, as this is easy to forget. Remember the good old 3-2-1 rule: At least 3 copies in total, of which at least 2 should be on different mediums onsite and at least 1 copy should be offsite.

It will only remain in the blockchain if you craft a special transaction as mentioned by mocacinno above.

While asymmetric encryption is sometimes used to ensure that only the receiver can decrypt the message, the use case you've been asking about is only about verifying the identity of the signer and the integrity of the message: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature

Note that sending bitcoins is technically not different from signing a message -- the message effectively being "Irukandji is sending X BTC to Y".

I don't think your prediction will hold true but I do like your line of thinking regarding long term perspective and buying opportunities. The crypto ecosystem may look different but the fundamentals haven't changed.

Since Bitcoin often came close to revisiting previous ATHs after the respective rallies came crashing down (eg. from USD 270,- down to USD 80,- and from USD 1,200,- down to USD 300,- -- forgive the rough numbers) your estimate of USD 2,000,- would fit to historical observations. Still I think that given the duration and resilience of the recent rally things may be different this time (as much as I hate uttering this phrase).

I think worst case we'll see a double bottom at around USD 6,000,- but I'm actually a bit hopeful that Bitcoin will be able to hold the USD 7,000,- to USD 8,000,- levels. Then again I might be a permabull.

BTC dominance is up again from 3x% just a couple months ago, so I doubt that alts are much of a factor.



The next halving is 2020. Unless you meant to say that the next rally will happen in 2021 after the halving in 2020, in which case I apologize for nitpicking.



Shhh, don't jinx it!

I feel you. But the last few months I actually started talking more about crypto again, at least with those that actually showed genuine interest beyond trying to get rich quick. Some people actually ask the right questions (ie. pretty much any question that isn't about the price) which is where I gladly help out. Some people are slightly misguided, but they'll learn. Some people simply don't have an opinion on crypto and that's ok as well.

But then there are the ones that simply can't be helped -- the unreflected ones, that either a) blindly throw their money into whatever venture promises the most profit or alternatively b) utterly dismiss cryptocurrencies out of hand, unable to see technological innovation when it sits right in front of them.

I feel bad for the first, to be honest, because they are the ones that will get hurt the most but ultimately rightfully so. In the end they might take their lesson though.

The latter will always bitch and moan regardless of whether crypto fails or succeeds, so don't waste your time on them.

When the mempool isn't clogged, Bitcoin is still faster than bank transfers. If the merchant of your choice accepts Bitcoin using the likes of BitPay, payments are handled just as fast as credit cards payments.

Sure, during 2017 there were times when Bitcoin was close to unusuable as a currency. But before that, and right now, transaction times were and are not an issue. Your mileage may vary, but given proper transaction fees, at least I personally never had any issues with transaction times outside of aforementioned timeframes. Long term I hope the likes of Lightning Network and SegWit will ensure that it stays that way.