Not sure about that, it does seem like parts of Wall Street already have skin in the game. However institutional investors are still missing. I don't expect them to enter the market until the market cap and price stability has increased though. Once they're in we would have a pretty solid price base.



Fully agreed.



I don't see this happening anytime soon. Government currency collapse maybe, but I think an official switch to cryptos is rather unlikely. I could see unofficial use of cryptocurrencies by the general populace though, however not until transaction fees have been curbed by improved scalability.



Voting for Trump to fight the establishment is like buying into Ripple as a cryptocurrency. It may seem like a good idea to some, but is ultimately a misled approach at solving a misunderstood problem.

Personal convictions aside, I see very little anti authoritarian and decentralized thinking in the world. Otherwise people would actually move away from all the central authorities that dominate their lifes instead of complaining about politics by posting on Facebook from their iPhones that they paid for with their VISA when they bought it from Amazon. If anything the rise of nationalism has shown that the world has become more conservative and protectionist.

Interesting, glad to hear that.



I honestly don't know how to feel about that. Don't get me wrong, it's good to know that the hackers won't make much of a profit. Still I always get mixed feelings when coins / tokens are being marked and effectively pulled of the market, questioning the fungibility of the currency as such and how free a money it really is. Same holds true for Bitcoin and all other transparent blockchains of course.

Funny you should mention this, just the other day I've been thinking about how real estate is in need of disruption. I was not even thinking about a decentralized solution but rather how awesome it would be to have a public database that you could query according to your renting or investment needs.

Alas, not even such a database exists, not where I live anyway. And here seems to be the heart of the problem -- real estate is handled very differently from country to country, from city to city even. Real estate agencies offer very little public information of the assets they are trying to sell and from a business perspective probably rightfully so. It's a very opaque ecosystem were trust and personal interaction is still key, even as far as giving out information is concerned. Maybe in other places there's more transparency, but I'm sure most cities are in the hands of private real estate agencies that will try to protect their data as crypto enthusiasts protect their private keys.

That being said, I'd love to see such a platform. I'm just afraid it would be incredibly hard to free real estate of the firm grip of already established agencies while still adhering to local regulations. AirBnB has found its niche in that holiday rentals are more profitable and some regulatory loopholes can be taken advantage of, not sure if the same could be applied to everyday life real estate as well.

The theft is only larger than MtGox if you peg the price to 2013/14 Bitcoin valuations. The value of these coins has appreciated considerably since then. Remember that Bitcoins were stolen, not USD. If someone were to pull a heist like MtGox nowadays I think it would still have a noticable impact, although probably not as much as Gox back in the day, given the variety of exchanges available today.

What to do with the USDT problem? Sell them for BTC of course

In all seriousness though, if people were to move out of Tether completely and stopped using the corresponding trading pairs that would be more or less the end of it, no? The only thing you can do is educate and warn the trading community of the dangers of USDT. Everything else is moot, because what are going to do about it? Regulate it?



Interestingly enough the NEM price doesn't care about it either though. It really seems like traders have run out of fucks to give.

Not sure how onion routing comes into play in regards to smaller blocks, but the basic rationale for smaller blocks is the following:

1) Smaller blocks mean smaller blockchain means less bandwidth required to sync network state across nodes

2) Less bandwidth required means it's easier to run a full node

3) The more full nodes there are, the better the connectivity between nodes

4) The better the connectivity between nodes, the harder it becomes to isolate or block off parts of the network

5) The harder it is to isolate or block off parts of network, the smaller the risk of government forces intervening


The TOR network itself is rather slow and limited in terms of bandwidth. I guess the speaker was referring to it being easier to run a full Bitcoin node on TOR with smaller blocks, rather than with big ones.


In general onion routing refers to the practice of encrypting network traffic in a way that makes it impossible for a single node to derive origin or destination of a network request. I'm not aware of any hard limits in that regard, but I'm by far no TOR expert. Note that SegWit blocks can reach up to 4MB in practice, so it's probably more a question of "keeping the blocks as small as possible" rather than "keep the blocks at 1MB or less".

Bitcoin always was antifragile, otherwise it would have been long dead by now.

I think the lack of impact on BTC's price level goes to show that by now the exchange ecosystem has become fairly healthy. Keep in mind that MtGox was the largest exchange by far back in the day. It was Bitcoin's single point of failure and in hindsight pretty much amateur hour. Nowadays not only the quality and security of exchanges has vastly improved, but there's also a wide selection of exchanges available; so the shut down of a single exchange does not matter as much. The exchange market has become de-centralized, so to speak and Bitcoin is stronger because of it.



Not sure if a world wide ban of Bitcoin would be all that recoverable, but Bitcoin would definitely still find its niche. Nonetheless it's indeed nothing to worry about, as such a ban would require all nations of the world to work together. And when was the last time the governments of the world agreed on anything?

Yes. Opening and closing channels are both just on-chain Bitcoin transactions -- like sending coins, but with a different script obviously -- for which the regular transaction fees apply. Once a channel is open you only need to pay a negligible fee to each hop along the route of your payment.



Not sure about mainnet, but you can try the Eclair testnet android client or the HTLC.me testnet web client. Both are rather simplified in their functionality though, ie. HTLC.me hides opening / closing payment channels from the user and Eclair can only send, but not receive Lightning transactions. From what I've gathered so far you currently have to run a full node yourself to securely receive Lightning transactions.

I'm a freelancer that does his own bookkeeping so by now I've been navigating Austrian tax forms for quite a while. Luckily only a fraction of tax forms is relevant to me and I have a tax advisor to see me through.

An Australian living in Austria? Sounds like the beginning of a typo joke

About tax reporting: Unless you're lending out coins on the likes of Poloniex it's likely that only income tax will apply to you.

The end of the financial year is December 31st to January 1st. For handing in your income tax reports there are two deadlines:

1) 30th of April when filing old school paper forms

2) 30th of June when filing online via FinanzOnline

I'd definitely recommend going with option 2) as it's more convenient. However you'll have to register for FinanzOnline first which will require personal identification via mail (Ident.Brief).

Note that if you have a tax advisor they are usually able to push back that deadline for you.

For reference regarding tax report deadlines (German, sorry):
https://www.bmf.gv.at/steuern/selbststaendige-unternehmer/einkommensteuer/est-einkommensteuererklaerungspflicht.html#Erkl_rungsfrist

FinanzOnline:
https://finanzonline.bmf.gv.at/

France and Germany know better than to try banning cryptocurrencies. By now most governments are aware of the possible benefits of cryptocurrencies and will act with circumspection. Not sure what will change though, most exchanges that are connected to the European banking network operate pretty much by the book already. At least compared to what apparently went on with some of the Chinese and South Korean exchanges.

Regardless of what happens though, I doubt it will be of much use against scammers. Scammers will always find unwitting victims and not even the European Union can regulate bad decision making.



I guess exchanges, mostly. Maybe they want to start consolidating the legal frameworks for cryptocurrencies as well though, making it easier for businesses to internationally navigate the current hodge podge of crypto law and lack thereof.

Came for the profits, stayed for the technology. First I completely dismissed Bitcoin. Then its price increase made me re-evaluate my assumptions. And then I got utterly hooked on the technology and its ecosystem. Once I understood what Bitcoin was all about it was the first technology to excite me for years. So I got in. And now I'm here. Watching either one of mankind's greatest achievements or biggest flukes unfold.

I have to say though that the blockchain is one of the least interesting aspect of cryptocurrencies. Reaching decentralized consensus despite conflicting incentives is what makes it revolutionary. Stripping the consensus aspect apparently makes it easier to repackage and sell however, not sure if this way of thinking is going to lead anywhere useful though.

Honestly, at that point I'd just get myself a tax advisor. At best they help keeping the Finanzamt off your back, at worst they can tell you which forms to fill out.

As for your example:

The last step seems pretty straightforward -- OMG and LTC have been held for a year and are thus tax-free, buying and selling the ETH would likely be taxable since you didn't hold the ETH long enough, however since no profits have been made, there's no taxes to be paid (Note that additional income of I think less than EUR 600,- does not need to be taxed, so small Euro profits that could occur while moving OMG to ETH to EUR are likely negligible).

However I have absolutely no idea how your third step, converting OMG back to ETH for a profit would be taxed. I assume that this is a taxable event (ie. income tax would apply for your profits) however I have no idea how this profit would be calculated. I guess the EUR value of 30 OMG at the time you sell it minus the EUR value of 30 OMG at the time you buy it? Would be consistent with how mining is taxed, but seems kinda weird when applied to trading. Unfortunately the only examples I've come across so far only cover trading between fiat and crypto. I personally don't daytrade alts, so I have no experience in this regard.

Keeping track of your trades is a good start however. Make sure you can also proof your transactions to the Finanzamt however that may be. I guess blockchain explorer links and trade history records as provided by the exchanges themselves should be sufficient, but I have yet to find out.

Maybe ask the guys from the German local boards. There are some Austrians over there as well and either way, Austrian tax law regarding cryptos is pretty close to Germany's.

Cash being an exception, payments usually run through central payment processors such as PayPal, VISA or your local bank.

This works fine, until it doesn't. PayPal is known for more or less randomly freezing merchant accounts, essentially locking them out of their money. Credit Card providers such as VISA have blocked payments in the past -- look up what happened to Wikileaks as an example. Local banks can go bust during bank runs and shut down accounts if they find your transaction suspicious -- whatever that may mean.

Nothing of the above apply to Bitcoin. Bitcoin takes the power and responsibility away from third parties and puts it back in the hand of the actual owner. Hence it being censorship resistance, an attribute that has been rather unusual for a currency -- until now.

I would say ease of use and stability mostly.

Ease of use because this whole concept of payment channels is still fairly new and developers need to find a proper way to package the details of opening / closing a channel into a practicable user experience.

Stability in that there's probably still a lot of edge cases out there that need some testing to be done, otherwise we'd have people lose their coins on a regular basis. Not irrecoverably lost, mind you, but likely in a way that would require a multitude of technical steps that you can't expect from the average user. Even without people losing coins there's still aspects such as routing and connectivity to which a lack of stability is detrimental.

"Never try to catch a falling knife."

Is an advice that I regularly ignore.

I've already been buying back some of the coins that I sold on the way up. Will be continue doing so if we drop further.

If Bitcoin drops further without any chance of recovery, I worst case cut myself short on some profits. If we recover at one point in time, I'll have gained some. I believe the latter is more likely to happen than the first. Might take 5 weeks, might take 5 years... doesn't matter to me, the fundamentals haven't changed, I'm in it for the long run and no one ever went broke making a profit

Intrinsic value is a difficult topic when it comes to currency. Arguably no modern form of money has intrinsic value. The intrinsic value of monies in the past was when people still used fungible commodities such as grains as currency.

If you really stretch the definition of what could be seen as inrinsic value, you could say:

Bitcoin's intrinsic value is that it enables global, permissionless, trustless, immutable and counterfeit-proof transactions in a way that is comparably cheap and fast.

Fiat's intrinsic value is in that it enables some of the above (unlike cryptocurrencies, trust is required and counterfeiting is a problem), but you have to choose between transactions being either permissionless (ie. cash) or cheap and fast (ie. bank transfers).

If the ability to enable trade is not to be seen as an intrinsic value, then both fiat and cryptocurrencies are worthless in this regard. Same goes for gold, in that matter, because...


...what's the intrinsic value of gold? The current gold valuations far outweigh its technical applications. If a system at its core relies on countries bailing out other countries that have gone bust you already got a ticking time bomb at hand.

That's what the margin calls are for. Margin calls are enforced by the trading engine automatically canceling any losing positions before the balance of the margin trader reaches below zero. Short of the trading engine failing due to a software bug your coins should be safe from the lending party defaulting on you. The systemic risk of the respective exchange getting hacked or... getting "hacked"... remains of course.

Loan demands are made by people trading on margin, ie. borrowing coins to either short them or to use them for leveraged trading.

Loan offers is people lending coins to margin traders as mentioned above, offering them for a certain duration (at least 2 days) for a predefined interest rate (defined per day).

If your interest rate is too high, no one will take a loan from you, as you will get undercut by other market participants. If your loan offer gets accepted, you will then get a daily yield based on your preset interest rate. Your coins will get returned to you either a) after the preset duration has passed, b) the margin trader closes their position or c) the margin trader gets hit by a margin call and has thus their position liquidated.

Regulation doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. I don't know about France, but Germany has done good work so far providing a legal framework for Bitcoin related businesses to operate in. If the result of such talks is a better, border-crossing legal framework for putting the Bitcoin economy on more solid legal footing, all the better.


However I'm pretty sure that any speculation is moot due to this:

If the utility of a token is merely to pay a dividend, then it's not a utility token. It's pretty much an unregulated security at that point. At least I wouldn't expect the SEC to classify such a token as a utility token but rather as a security.

...a ponzi scheme is neither ethical, nor a business. You can run it like a business, but that doesn't make it one.

Businesses do need ethics. If they have questionable ethics, they should at least run on solid principles.