No.


Destroying Bitcoin is impossible -- both physically and figuratively.

People could stop using it, and the blockchain would grind to a halt if all miners shut down. But Bitcoin wouldn't be "destroyed." At any time, miners could just pick up where they left off and the blockchain would continue.


Governments can discourage people from using Bitcoin. That's all.

The cat is out of the bag. I think both private token sales and public ICOs will continue to proliferate. There are, of course, huge opportunities for VCs to push for private equity. No different than IPOs. So we'll continue to see two distinct classes of coin offerings -- 1) top tier private offerings for accredited investors and 2) public ICOs for everyone else.

We're seeing diminishing returns from the current wave of ICOs, and that's why a lot of people think they won't last. But the reality is this: even if ICOs were mostly cash grabs based on vaporware, they are a fundamentally groundbreaking fundraising mechanism. They remove major investment barriers for people across classes. Working class folks and people in developing countries have never had this sort of access to liquid investments. So they aren't going anywhere.

I think the first wave of ICOs were mostly comparable to altcoins in 2013 -- the Devcoins, the Chinacoins, the Feathercoins. The next wave of hype and investment will blow a lot of peoples' minds.

All we can do is speculate, but my thinking is that Friedman dissolved the relationship for the same reason that Tether can't move money. It's probably not that they're insolvent. Tether's banks probably don't even know what the money is for, and resuming withdrawals en masse probably means getting accounts seized by regulators -- like the CFTC, who sent subpoenas to Tether 2 months ago. If so, Friedman had no way to verify Tether's obligations and ability to repay outstanding USDT.


The feds take years to build cases sometimes. Consider BTC-e. They unsealed the indictment in July 2017, but filed it 6 months earlier. They were probably investigating for years before that.

I don't think LN will fundamentally change mining incentives. As you point out, there is the matter of opening, closing and funding channels. These require on-chain transactions. Even if a majority of network traffic goes to LN, a significant portion of network growth will still be on-chain.

For another thing, the security model of LN is different than Bitcoin. As I understand it, parties must be online and private keys are required to update settlement transactions. So your LN node is a essentially a "hot wallet" and shouldn't be used for value storage. I think most high-value transactions will probably remain on-chain. Also, the security of LN hash preimages is based on the idea that you can settle to the blockchain if your channel partner is dishonest. But if you can't get a settlement transaction confirmed on the blockchain before the timelock expires, you can't necessarily empty your channel before a thief can. In the context of high on-chain fees, that could prove significant.

So, even if we sidestep the matter of opening and closing channels, I think the differences in security model mean that LN payments are not interchangeable with BTC payments. There will always be a market for distributed and permanently stored payments/contracts/data on the blockchain.

No.


True, but given the developer excitement around LN and node adoption, I'm confident that a lot of Bitcoin network traffic will migrate there. It might take a while, but the incentives to adopt LN -- cheaper and more private transactions -- are huge.

In the meantime, I've been paying < 2 sat/byte, so micropayments work fine.

That's a pretty good list, with a couple exceptions.


What makes a hardware wallet more secure than an offline USB drive or PC? I think you'll be hard-pressed to find experts that agree with that. Encrypted offline wallet.dat files are about as secure as it gets. I've been using Bitcoin since 2013, but I don't plan on using hardware wallets for a couple more years until I feel they're more hardened.


Agreed there. Third party antivirus brings more bad than good. Defender (Security Essentials on older Windows OS) and basic avoidance of social engineering is usually good enough to avoid malware.

Just... no. Anyone who is thinking about building a Bitcoin mining farm: you should know that it takes immense capital, lots of man-hours in labor, and constant maintenance to run a mining farm. There is big speculative risk involved. And a few hours? Try a few years -- even if you invest heavily.


I think we're a bit further than that -- a recent survey revealed that 5% of Americans own BTC. But I agree. We're still very early. We're probably in the late 70s for microwave adoption or the early 90s for cell phone adoption:



Still lots of upside left.

Bitpay is definitely not known for good customer service these days. But I know Bitstamp gives the silent treatment like this when doing law enforcement checks on account holders and blocking funds. When that happens, the deposit is either credited a few weeks later (without much communication) or the account is terminated without explanation and presumably the money is refunded to the originating account/address.

Any chance you deposited funds of a questionable nature? It's probably just an error and incompetent customer service, but just throwing the idea out there given the silent treatment...

You should never trust exchanges, sure. Any one of them can go belly up. But using them for trading and cashing in/out of the ecosystem is necessary. We also depend on exchanges for price discovery. Using them is a matter of risk management: Deposit, trade, then withdraw coins. Don't use them for storing funds. And I only store USD (while waiting to buy) on licensed exchanges that offer FDIC insurance for lost funds, like GDAX.


Etherdelta is fine (assuming you use something like Metamask). Maybe it's not intuitive for novice traders, but I've never had any problems except thin order books.

That works, but I actually like that header. The watchlist is still useful, and the total time logged in and avatar -- why not?

I agree with the OP. "Show unread posts" is pretty useless now that the forum is so cluttered. "Show new replies" would be more useful if there was a time limit on threads it included. I haven't posted in the Wall Observer thread in 2-3 years, but it's still always at the top. Same with a few other megathreads.

If you need lots of order book liquidity, you need a centralized exchange. Bittrex and secondly Binance will give you the thickest order books. OKex is alright, but I'm weary of the Chinese exchanges after the recent government crackdowns. Sometimes I use EtherDelta when I only need to buy/sell small amounts up to ~1 ETH. I'm not familiar with AEX or Bit-Z, sorry.

The ideal is a decentralized exchange, where you don't need to entrust coins to a third party. But options are slim. EtherDelta is decentralized, but still uses centralized DNS -- if you use it, I recommend shielding your private keys with Metamask. Radar Relay is a better alternative, but it still hasn't built up much liquidity. So I still use exchanges like Bittrex, Binance and Cryptopia.

Supply and demand, which boils down to network usage. See Metcalfe's law:

When combined with Bitcoin's deflationary supply, the price should naturally be driven higher as demand to join the network increases. Though it's difficult to quantify, the exponential adoption of telephones and the internet are indicative of Metcalfe's law.

Who are the other 36% that are living under a rock? Maybe things are different in Germany.

Here in the US, mainstream media has been hyping Bitcoin (and other coins) for the better part of a year. Example: Ellen DeGeneres has one of the highest-rated daytime shows and she just did a segment on Bitcoin a few days ago.

No thanks. I'll probably leave the forum if demerits are introduced. Theymos can't keep piling centralized power on social authorities and expect it not to be abused. The Default Trust system seems plagued by subjectivity, petty infighting and financial conflicts of interest. Giving some members the power to demerit users they dislike or disagree with into lower ranks will expand that bullshit into new territory. Giving all members that power will turn the forum into a shittier functioning version of Reddit. Bad news either way.

If I thought merit was primarily concerned with post quality, I might have a different opinion. But I don't, and I haven't seen much evidence to the contrary.


You're basically describing Reddit. The "herd mentality" you speak of sounds like groupthink, which should be discouraged. One of the appeals of old school message boards like Bitcointalk is that they aren't dominated by social media groupthink bullshit.

Prior to the tax overhaul that was just passed, there was an open question about like-kind exchanges -- where you roll your investment into a similar investment without incurring a taxable event. The overhaul ruled out like-kind exchanges for cryptocurrencies (and most assets), so we're supposed to treat (2) as a taxable event.

The gains/losses are negligible in the example above, so it shouldn't really matter.

The point of like-kind exchanges is to avoid resetting the clock on reaching long-term capital gains. So in the above example, people use the lots bought in (1) to buy altcoins, but they keep using the original BTC buy date for determining long-term vs. short-term tax rates.

Private keys -- not bitcoins. Bitcoins you have on deposit are completely unaffected by the forks. And you don't control or "own" the exchange's private keys. I'd be curious to see your argument made in court, but it's definitely not a slam dunk in my eyes.


It's not cheap to mount a class action, and some of the exchanges are structured to make legal claims difficult. I think Bitstamp and Coinbase are good examples of how compliance-minded exchanges view things. If there is significant customer demand and market value (as was the case with Bitcoin Cash), they'll release the forked coins.

I keep most of my coins on encrypted wallet.dat, but it's not possible to do day-to-day spending this way. I just use them for coins I don't expect to move for months or years.


I wasn't aware that Armory had a GUI for offline signing. Any opinions here on Armory vs. Electrum? I use the latter, but I'd feel a lot more secure if I could do this with Core. Also, is it true that Electrum's seed might be easier to derive? What's the difference among the different HD wallets regarding seed security?

Fair enough -- don't expect the majority to agree. That's not how markets work. If Bitcoin reaches $100,000 and beyond, the majority will still be naysayers, so consider yourself lucky for having gotten involved. Most people will never buy Bitcoin until the speculative opportunities are already gone.


There's always going to be that element. I've felt the same sort of envy when I miss trading opportunities. There's a natural competitive psychological response where humans strive to be the alpha. Few people want to be left behind, so to speak.


Ideally, I'd like us all to escape that cubicle reality. If not, I'm happy to take early retirement.

Why is that? How is Europe different in this respect?

In reality, I think the problem was fairly limited. To begin with, cash advance limits are only a small fraction of overall credit limits. And exchange limits on credit cards are very low due to fraud risk, so I doubt credit cards purchases are a significant portion of global investment.

Having said that, a recent study showed that 22% of those buying with credit cards weren't immediately paying off their balances. Reckless people are reckless! But that doesn't mean that the middle class is swimming in debt from buying Bitcoin.


That's all irrelevant here. Credit card companies have been snooping on peoples' purchases and leveling adverse action on their accounts for "risky behavior" for decades. AMEX is infamous for this. They are private companies. This is their privilege.

Unless an exchange is defrauding banks by lying about what the charges are for, customers can’t avoid cash advance charges and interest. Any credit card purchase of BTC is definitely treated as a cash advance; I’m not aware of any exchange that processes the charges more favorably. That’s not to say that fraud can’t happen though. I remember back in 2010 or so when Pokerstars’ bank was processing poker deposits as purchases for golf balls, etc.

And if I could get cash back for BTC purchases, I definitely would. But no CC issuer pays out rewards for cash advances. Rather, they ream you on fees and interest. Last time I checked (last year), Bitstamp was charging 8% on top of spot prices when using credit card. Cash advance fees tack on another 3-5%. Who the hell is paying 10-15% above spot for the privilege of using credit cards? People charging back — that’s who. Not sure who is dumb enough to pay those prices otherwise.