May be a silly question, but what is a "blockchain-based cryptobank"?
If you have full control over and responsibility for your money that's just crypto. If another entity holds your money it's a bank. Everything inbetween just seems like the worst of both worlds?
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is bitcoin address the same as Public key in my wallet's ?
thanks for any help i need it, i have tried to google this but did not understand this.
Not exactly. See this article on the Bitcoin Wiki, specifically the section titled "How to create Bitcoin Address." Bitcoin uses public-key cryptography. A private key is used to sign transactions, and the public key verifies that signatures are valid. For each "Bitcoin address" in your wallet, a public/private keypair is generated. Specifically, the address is a hash of the associated public key: [...] is bitcoin address the same as Public key in my wallet's ?
No, though many people confuse the two. A Bitcoin address is a base-58 encoding of a hash of a public key. [...] To expand on those two posts: Since your Bitcoin address is only an encoded hash of the public key, even your public key remains unknown until the first transaction from aforementioned address is made. Once you use a Bitcoin address to send coins, your public key gets published as well, which then allows nodes and miners to verify your outgoing transaction. Put differently: 1) Your Bitcoin address is necessary for you to receive transactions (well of course it is) 2) Your public key is necessary for other parties to verify your outgoing transactions 3) Your private key (which you should never give away) is necessary for you to send outgoing transactions
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Risk and reward.
Those who invest early, may have the largest profits but they also take the largest risks.
Those who invest late, don't have as large a gains potential, but also are looking at a much stabler Bitcoin. And they still can benefit from Bitcoin as a store of value. And once scaling has been solved, from Bitcoin's utility as means of international permissionless remittance.
Question being, how early or how late we are in the investment timeline right now. Maybe we're still in an early phase and Bitcoin is a much larger risk of an investment than the current bull market makes it seem to be. Maybe will stabilize somewhere between USD 10,000,- and USD 20,000,- and just become a boring stable store of value.
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[...]
2. Getting robbed at gunpoint.
[...]
Ironically one potential security measure against getting robbed at gunpoint would be storing your bitcoins in a bank safe. Robbers will have a hard time walking you in at gunpoint to access your safe deposit box. Same with possible backups -- although those probably shouldn't be in the same bank as your main wallet. [...]
These expensive hardware wallets rely on central servers anyway so lets not pretend that anything is perfect and do note that these days microsoft is running its own key-loggers and google + fakebook are recording what we say plus x-boxes are scanning anything on your LAN even when you think they are turned off.
Hardware wallets relying on central servers doesn't put your coins at risk though. Worst case an attacker could only deny an outgoing transaction or prevent an incoming transaction from showing up.
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If you use a dedicated smart phone (factory reset and everything) or a dedicated laptop / pc (fresh install, not used for anything else) you should be fairly safe, that's true. I'd still go for a hardware wallet however. They don't cost that much and keep your coins safe even if physically accessed. Disagree I don't think mobile wallets are that safe even if you take those precautions. The only wallets I feel safe with are hardware wallets or paper wallets because those are never online but rather offline completely.
To use bitcoin then an internet connection is a must, don't you know that basic? Bitcoin is a digital currency in the first place. You don't need your wallet to be online to store Bitcoins, only to sign transactions. Using hardware wallets or paper wallets enables you to store your Bitcoins without having the respective private keys exposed to the internet. In the end you still need internet connection to use your bitcoin. Yes, but the private keys that give you control over your coins are kept offline, which is one of the main aspects of wallet security ![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif) Using a dedicated smart phone / laptop / PC you decrease the chance of getting infected by malware, but since the same device that signs the transaction (ie. being online) also holds the private keys to your wallet, your coins are still exposed to the internet, albeit briefly. That's not the case with hardware wallets, which keep your private keys offline, all the time, even when sending a transaction. Read here, for example: https://doc.satoshilabs.com/trezor-faq/overview.html
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If you use a dedicated smart phone (factory reset and everything) or a dedicated laptop / pc (fresh install, not used for anything else) you should be fairly safe, that's true. I'd still go for a hardware wallet however. They don't cost that much and keep your coins safe even if physically accessed. Disagree I don't think mobile wallets are that safe even if you take those precautions. The only wallets I feel safe with are hardware wallets or paper wallets because those are never online but rather offline completely.
To use bitcoin then an internet connection is a must, don't you know that basic? Bitcoin is a digital currency in the first place. You don't need your wallet to be online to store Bitcoins, only to sign transactions. Using hardware wallets or paper wallets enables you to store your Bitcoins without having the respective private keys exposed to the internet.
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Yeah I was told from a friend to use Ubuntu 14 but if there's a more recommended one for mining I'd be open to suggestions.
I personally prefer Xubuntu (= Ubuntu + xfce) since xfce is the most light-weight desktop environment available for Ubuntu. For mining it shouldn't make a difference though. Just make sure to get the latest stable Ubuntu version with the latest GPU drivers. Especially drivers can make a huge difference in performance. You can always go for other Linux distros, but in my opinion Ubuntu is the easiest one to set up for a beginner and I'm not aware of any mining-specific distros.
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Thank you all for the tips! Certainly helpful- I’ll be doing more research and see what I’d like to invest in. What are ICO’s, might i ask?
ICOs are sort of like crowdfunding. Whereas you give a project a number of BTC/ETH, and in return they give you a certain amount of a token. ...whereas in most cases the tokens either act like shares in a company or as utility tokens that can be used to pay for services as provided by these projects once the software gets done. Problem being, that (1) in most cases, these ICOs explicitely deny any liability and shareholder rights and that (2) most of these startups are likely to either fail or vastly underdeliver. Think of it as investing in a company that does not yet exist, for rights you will not have on profits that likely will never materialize.
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I think you are missing the point.
Core Devs promised LN would fix the transactions & fee problems. LN hasn't failed, just because it hasn't been deployed yet. Well the transactions and fees issue have risen to the point that even die hard btc zealots are admitting btc is unusable at over $50 per fee. Agreed. Doesn't mean that it will stay that way though. Bitcoin Cash has seen a tremendous surge in support , because it works.
Don't like Bitcoin Cash , use litecoin instead, but either way they are affordable working crypto currencies and btc is not. Both of which will see an increase in fees once they run at capacity. How well they'll actually scale is something we'll only see once their blocks are full as well. It's easy to stay affordable when demand is little. The only vapor ware is LN , where is it, how long do you expect people to wait, when they need to conduct business or transfer funds. (Mailing a check is faster and cheaper than btc now, which should tell you btc is broken.) LN is already being tested on mainnet. It will take time, but progress is being made. And do the core devs up the blocksize to 2 mb, which is basically nothing extra, nope they say wait for LN, so the stupid keep waiting and the price per btc keeps dropping and other coins keep increasing marketshare.
Your btc is dying, either you move to Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin or you drop to nothing , as btc will not recover from lost marketshare this time like in the past , it competitors are too focused and keep their payment systems working and affordable. Increasing SegWit blocksize to 2mb would lead to an effective blocksize increase from 4mb to 8mb. A little more than "basically nothing extra". Let BTC drop and let other coins have an increased market share. Who cares about short-term price fluctuations, it's the big picture that counts. Your btc false religion is dying, accept it before it is too late.
╥Aztek
It's a free market of currencies, each with their own up and downsides. Religion has nothing to do with it. That being said, while I mostly agree with OP I don't see it quite as rosy. BTC is undeniably in a bad place right now and I fully understand everyone that is eying at the other alts at our disposal. And while decentralization is of utmost importance, it won't help if BTC gets crippled by its transaction fees. Nonetheless I'm fairly confident that the problems we are facing right now are merely bumps on the road. A simple block size would only fix transaction fees for a short time, which doesn't seem like a worth-while trade-off if BTC's long term independence is at stake.
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Hello all! I'm fairly new to the crypto game, after a few weeks of researching and learning the ins and outs (mostly, still a lot to learn!), I finally made the move to buy a small amount of BTC and LTC with Coinbase last night but definitely looking to expand on my knowledge a bit more. As of yet, I purchases a small about just to get familiar with trading and to understand which areas are worth investing.
One thing I am curious to hear is which areas are you investing in outside of the big hitters like BTC, LTC, and ETH?
So, with that being said, what are some tips you would give to someone who's new to the game? Interested to see what each other's opinion is and to have a good discussion!
1) Simply holding your coins of choice instead of trying to increase your holdings by daytrading will save you both money and time. 2) Be highly critical of alts, there's a lot of marketing fluff. Especially the minor ones are mostly a pure gamble. 3) Stay clear of ICOs, most are scams, those that are not are severely overvalued. 4) Do your own research and form your own opinions.
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Hi guys! I have to admit I am new at this but I have a ledger Nano S, and I have made a few transfers so far to another account of mine, but now I am running into a problem that seems quite odd. When I try to perform a new transfer of even as little as 0.0001 BTC (around 1.42 USD at the moment), it shows fees of 22.12 USD, and if I raise it to 0.001 (14.2 USD) the fees go up to 68.5 USD! https://image.ibb.co/cdDdS6/Capture.jpgWhat could the problem be caused by? Thank you for your help! Unless it is a really urgent I would recommend waiting for the mempool to clear up a bit before making a new transaction. The market is pretty volatile right now which seems to cause a lot of people to move their coins, which lead to more than 170k of unconfirmed transactions at the time of writing: https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactionsOnce the market cools down a bit and the amount of unconfirmed transaction reduces, fees should reach saner levels again. Which unfortunately won't make them cheap though. As mentioned by bitperson, the overall transaction fee is dependent on the transaction size in bytes, which means that the more inputs a transaction has, the higher the fee. So if Ledger needs to gather Satoshis from a lot of different addresses to achieve the amount you are trying to send, the transaction size and thus the fee will rise accordingly -- ie. in your case sending 0.001 BTC will require more input addresses than sending 0.0001 BTC.
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Do you guys billieve that bitcoin will become the only one currency that can use as a mode of payment in the whole world? How is this become posible in the future?
You mean Bitcoin -- or any other cryptocurrency for that matter -- replacing all the fiat currencies in the world? Not going to happen. At least not within our lifetimes. Currencies are much more than just a means of payment or value transactions. They are a reflection of the local economies and the sovereign states that issue them. Bitcoin may very well become a globally accepted means of payments like credit cards, existing side by side with fiat currencies, but I doubt that it'll displace fiat currencies any time soon. I honestly doubt that even the concept of one global currency, that is shared by all, is possible any time soon. There's too many cultural differences and too much conflict of interest to achieve something even close to a one world currency.
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Why would I want to keep BTC in my investment portfolio? That's most hyped and quite overvalued coin I'd say. There are other more technologically advanced coins. Is it because of "digital gold" and store of value properties?
Some alts follow different approaches or different use cases, neither which necessarily make them more technologically advanced. Most alts are nothing more than marketing talk Every alt has its downsides, no alt has solved the issue of decentralized scalability and no alt has the amount of development experience and community support behind it than BTC. The latter of which makes BTC most likely to survive during hard times.
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If someone asks me, what is the most confusing in this world. Of course, I will answer Human is the most confusing. Because They sacrificed their Health for money, then they sacrificed money for health. Humans are always busy thinking about the future, and forget to enjoy today.They think they will really live forever. Yet he will not live in the future, nor do they feel alive today.
Speak for yourself :p It's like bitcoin, we always predict the price in the future without thinking of its function today, that makes it more seen as investments than a cryptocurrency. In fact, we are not necessarily living to see the future. What do you think ?
What if Bitcoin's function today is the price of the future? Transacting value is just one use case, storing value another. There's nothing wrong with that. Anyone who is in to Bitcoin and talks about it with others who are not gets a rapid schooling in how mindless the average person is.
Bitcoin at $250 'Hey, buy some Bitcoin. It'll never be this cheap again.' 'Nah. Way too expensive. I'll wait.'
Bitcoin at $19,500 - 'Hey. I just bought some Bitcoin. When does it double for me?'
It's depressing but utterly dependable which is why we have whales who command everything. They know perfectly well how the average person behaves and preys on it. That lack of logic makes the bigger picture completely logical.
One person is totally unpredictable. 100,000 of them is not.
Very true. Watching cryptos over the years I've learned a lot about people. One of the biggest lessons being, that people overvalue assets that go up in price because they go up in price while undervaluing assets drop in price, merely because the price dropped. Which ironically leads to the exact opposite of "buy low, sell high". Which could be avoided if people were to invest based on the merits of cryptocurrencies and their own valuations instead of focusing on the price only. Alas, you don't only learn this about people, but also about yourself. You as a person are also prone to such irrationalities. The tricky part being not getting caught up in herd mentality and not losing sight of the big picture. Nonetheless I'd argue that this mindlessness of the masses is also a good thing for Bitcoin. It's how Bitcoin gets attention and as many people as possible get introduced to the concept of cryptocurrencies. It's only when people don't bother learning more about the basic concepts and only care about the price that things start getting problematic. However those people learn their lessons soon enough.
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If you use one of the Ubuntu variants you should be fine even with limited college experience, assuming you got a basic handle on the linux shell -- or at least know how to google it. Using Xubuntu I once had to go through the extra steps of compiling one of the drivers, however that was for the Wifi adapter, the GPU drivers were mostly fine. Depending on the alts you are trying to mine you might have to compile some of the mining software from source though. If you're not comfortable with having to compile from source, Windows might be the better choice. It still doesn't hurt to give Linux a try though ![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
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You can not do anything about it, it was your fault for only putting your money in that shitty exchange. We all know that using your own wallet for storing your coins is a MUST. Your coins are lost now.
It sucks that happened to you. Take it as a valuable lesson. Store your coins off exchanges. That way if they are lost you only have yourself to blame. Good luck in the future.
That's the thing though, EtherDelta is a decentralized exchange that leaves users in full control over their own private keys, so OP didn't even store his tokens on an exchange. What happened, however, is that EtherDelta's DNS got hacked, giving attackers the opportunity to deploy a phishing site: https://themerkle.com/etherdeltas-dns-hacked-website-replaced-with-hackers-duplicate-to-steal-funds/It goes to show that security and decentralization is only as strong as its weakest link, in this case the web interface of the decentralized exchange smart contract ![Lips sealed](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/lipsrsealed.gif) Sorry for your loss OP, I'm afraid those tokens are gone.
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My wallet actually offered to pay for the confirmation of the transaction of $ 75! And this price is for low speed confirm. I doubt that with the price of bitcoin will retain its popularity. I very much hope that in 2018 the problem of scalable transaction is resolved. Otherwise, the user can actually switch to using the bch.
some users are actually switching on to bch because they see that bch dont have any known issues like scalability and high transaction fees. this is also the reason on why bitcoin has decreased and bch is now starting to increase and pump. however bch is not the only alternative coin that can be used when sending or transafering money because some coins like doge , litecoin, dashcoin can also offers those features. All of these alts, including BCH, will see the same issues once their adoption increases though. The only reason why most alts still have lower transaction fees is because barely anyone is using them. Should they ever run at capacity they'll face the same scalability issues that BTC has. But who knows, maybe the future of crypto-scalability simply lies in spreading your transactions across a multitude of blockchains instead of using just one. The only alts that currently may have a handle on scalability are centralized (eg. XRP et al) which is more or less beside the point of cryptocurrencies however.
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I don't trade much except on larger moves, so I wouldn't even think about moving crypto to fiat over the holidays. I'm fairly comfortable with holding crypto, otherwise I wouldn't have bought into it. When I shift my position from crypto to fiat (or the other way round) I do this due to market events, not because of the calendar. Crypto never sleeps and I'm not going to change my position in fear of short term market movements. Especially not in fear of short term market movements. Never lose sight of the big picture ![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
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Well, their reply is true enough, but it seems like your problem goes beyond the issue of an unconfirmed transaction. Problem being, that at least one of the transactions that funded your transaction dropped off the mempool -- ie. timed out and got cancelled by the bitcoin network. So your withdrawal transaction will fail and drop off the mempool as well, meaning the funds remain in btcmarket's control.
Maybe you should point out to them that your withdrawal transaction is not only unconfirmed, but has already expired and doesn't show up on block explorers such as blockchain.info any more.
I have no experience with either btcmarket or their customer support though. From the looks of it they've got quite a mess at their hands, so you are likely not the only one and they are probably swamped with support requests right now. Maybe you have more success reaching them in 1-2 weeks. Maybe you need to reach out to them publicly, on Twitter or something. Good luck either way, I hope you'll get your coins back soon.
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It seems like btcmarket fucked it up on their side. Looking at the input addresses used there are unconfirmed transactions all over the place, some of which apparently already have dropped off the mempool (eg. 1GMvRMi3PsvTU97kBGP6CM4PWFM88o8kt). The transaction fee they paid for your withdrawal seems to be fine, their internal processing however apparently paid too low a fee to get confirmed in the first place.
The good news is, there's no such thing as perpetually locked BTC due to an expired transaction.
The bad news is, at this point you'll have to rely on btcmarkets customer support. Have you already tried contacting them about the issue?
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