**A little Saturday read inspired by your post... I will merit you, but I just dumped all my merit on Hal Finney.  You can't be mad about that right?***

This is a very hard thing for the old school bitcoiner to accept.  And some will reject it outright. In fact that is why Roger Ver went the way he did.  I think CSW is an actual pathological conman, but I think Ver fell in love with a version of Bitcoin that he began to see as doomed, ironically as it began to become successful. But I want to put forth a couple reasons I think what you said above is important and inevitable.  

1.  The banking infrastructure  and concept is STILL useful.
2.  We actually NEED it.

The first bitcoin transaction I did in 2011 was to a poker site (bitco.in, as Seals with Clubs did not even exist yet!)  The whole reason I went to the trouble to get my hands on some bitcoin was to play online poker with it.  But like so many of us, along this path I suddenly saw what being able to transact value without a middleman FELT LIKE.  The lightbulb turned on... one pill will make you smaller, etc.  And it stuck.  My poor wife.  She has had to listen to a decade of it.

For some reason it is not as hard for me to accept as it seems to be VER.  It is inevitable.  Bitcoin, if it does indeed begin to serve the world as even a semi-niche store of value will grow to magnitudes of it's current resource usage.  And I am not going to crank the blocksize debate up again, but to put it simply we can either keep bitcoin validation decentralized and thereby enforce the consensus, or we can let it be taken over by a small minority, and end up with a digital panopticon that would make most fundamentalist evangelical's vision of the "mark of the beast" look like Monopoly.  The fight is over which resource use grows... and the market has, in some way against all odds, chosen correctly: Fees.

I agree with the market here and I realize the future is not what, even Satoshi, seemed to have seen.  Although Hal got it.  And WAAAAAY back then too...


2010, y'all!

And we are watching this unfold right under our noses.  But most people don't really see it yet.  There are a lot of contenders, and people tend to look at the exchanges and talk about them being the bitcoin banks... and behold JUST THIS WEEK the news hit that Kraken was granted the whatever-it-is regulatory powers to become a BANK.  But even more than that, I think the underestimated and EXTREMELY Savvy @jack is already a little ahead of them in some ways with Square/Cash App. Not only is it one of the best places to buy bitcoin, but he is laying the groundwork for all commerce to be done using his application.  They just introduced some sort of payroll feature.  This makes Wells Fargo look like a fucking brontosaurus looking at the curious bright streak coming through the sky called Cash App. "Oooh pretty!"

And then we have Jack Mallers, the grandson of one of the founding fathers of the Chicago Board Options Exchange who is doing one of the most interesting projects laying down a REAL, WORKING payment layer for Bitcoin using the lightning network.  This ultra laid back hoodie wearing millennial (Gen Z-er?) stands to create an even bigger legacy than either of his ancestors.  He is quietly laying the groundwork for a bulletproof bitcoin payment network, that SETTLES on the main chain.

Boom.

Credit card terminals are not going away.  Banks are not going away. Loans and mortgages and myriad other financial instruments are not going away.  The vision of each bitcoiner living in a citadel guarding his 8 of 15 multisig seed word stashes served by his farm of nodes all running mixing protocols and so on is a "Mountain Man Fantasy".  And some of those mountain men will doubtless exist.  But in reality the VAST majority of humans could never handle that amount of responsibility.  They want to pay someone else to guard their value for them.  Someone who is an expert in the kind of security needed to safeguard value, and now with the added wrinkles and challenges presented by cryptography.  Perhaps someone who offers insurance against a failure or theft. Someone who does all the dirtywork behind the scenes so you can buy your iconic cup of coffee without having to remember a 19 character password.  

Those someones are called "banks".  Or, at least that's what they used to be called.  This level of disruption is big enough that they COULD end up with a different name.


That was a very wise man seeing the rise of Cash App, Strike, and Kraken back when everyone else was just wanting to figure out how to get around all the regulations that made it hard to play online poker.  Insert Ver's scrunched up face here as he foams at the mouth taking about PEER TO PEER CASH!!! AND I AM SORRY I JUST GET SO EMOTIONAL!

No one can stop you from using the chain.  Ever.  That is CERTAINLY one of the things that makes bitcoin a "zero to one" invention.  But if you really want to compete for the kind of VALUE that Bitcoin will command and REQUIRE for on chain transactions??? ...better get that business plan ready.  And there are some fairly smart folks out there with a good head start on you already.  Bitcoin is not replacing credit cards... Bitcoin is replacing FedWire.

If we want Bitcoin to be successful then this is where we are going.  And we should really be glad.  It might not look like what we all thought it would 10 years ago (or 7 or 3 or last week), and part of the reason for that is our vision is limited.  We get hung up, like Ver, on shiny things that look more important than they are.

That feeling you got when you did your first few Bitcoin transactions?  It's not going away.  It's just changing form.  And you are one of the lucky ones that got to experience that first.  Most people will have the much more ho-hum feeling of just watching the mover and shakers roll out the new world for them...

-Greg Maxwell around the BTC all time high Dec 2017. https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-December/015455.html

Happy Saturday!

Well i sort of see this as how you look at it.

Sure "bad actors" will take positions as well... after all Bitcoin is for all people.  Even people that hate it?  As it is said "Bitcoin is for enemies".

But I do NOT think MicroStrategy's position building had no effect on coins.  It might have had less than it would at market. But what it did was pull liquid coins away from people selling them.  There are 3X,XXX less of those now.

How could this be bad?

- Well selling pressure from miners could rise a little now assuming other whales are not in the background buying up OTC.

But that's just it.  If this keeps happening then market prices will suddenly start to lok good even WITH slippage, and you know what happens then.

I do not see how we can play "there goes the neighborhood" when bad guys start buying... That's what this was designed for. 

On track...  This weekend I think:

This is another one of those news items that kind of just drifts by us as the world drastically changes.

I think soon we leave the gradually part of gradually, then suddenly.

By the way... this drop is OK...  We will make the right shoulder, then break upwards.

I am sorry to be such a miserable pleb.  But I really need that to happen.  My job is killing me today.  It is sucking the soul out of me through my ass and grinding it into a fine pulp.  And I have never been a trader, and am probably almost as good at the titanium plates exercise as Bob, and have lived through all the booms and busts, and have very rarely complained.

But I might not be able to make it to the moon.  I can't take much more than this.  I think I am going to either go insane and end up on the news, and in jail or dead, or just in the water under some tall bridge.

I know money does not buy happiness.  In fact it sort of seems like it might challenge it, lol.  But it *DOES* allow one to stop being a slave making someone else money.

Wow... The price seems to have held up really well over 11k even through some pretty heavy selling over the previous hour.  The buyers are definitely there at 11.  Interesting.

I doubt Bob appreciates you posting a picture of him doing his metal plates ritual for all to see...

I am afraid there are not nearly enough people here realizing the magnitude of this current round of Proudhon posting.  I mean... if you just look at his history of calling tops and bottoms... it's pretty much confirmed.  By science. And all of the sources.  And you all think I am joking.  But I am actually dead serious.  Confirmed.

You guys do know what this means is about to happen, right?

He is going to be the poster boy for the:

"Bitcoin is garbage and the tulips are going to pop in 3... 2... 1..." to
"Wait a minute...  who controls this?  Who issues it? Wait... Umm" to
"I'm All In."

...Transition.  Seriously he will be interviewed sometime in the next few years to tell the story of how his mind changed as he has become one of the new elite investment luminaries.  Way more people are going to know his name in 5 years than do today.

Oh I am very bad at that sort of thing, but I will give a probable range for fun.

I would say Santa will likely bring us something between .009 and .013.

This is my conservative estimate, and I sort of hope it's right because:

If we are back down near -008 we are rangebound and if we are over .015 we are possibly going parabolic, and early IMHO.

That said, I base this off the idea that XMR is a proven old school alt that is therefor less likely to have a massive move up, but I also could see XMR decoupling from the momentum BTC has by either:

- being part of a quality alt "altseason"
- being recognized specifically as the state of the art privacy coin (finally)

In those cases we could see BTC prices that try to revisit the .03x mark.  But I see this as a remote chance by the end of the year.

Presented with no comment:

It's still kind of subtle, but the price action on gently rising volume is encouraging me.  And I do feel like XMR is looking a little more healthy than all of the yoyo shitcoins.

He was WAAAAAY clearer on his basic positions that Satoshi seemed to be, and he also saw more deeply into the future I think.  He saw the whole decentralized censorship resistant quality to be important enough that I believe it was CLEAR that he would have been a small block supporter (I think that argument is harder to make for Satoshi, but it is trivially easy for HF, posts here reflect it) and I think if you read his posts to this forum you will see him making small block arguments.

On thing I am interested in that he foresaw that is STILL ahead of the curve as far as the community goes is the need for banks.  He saw (before anyone and even before most of us now) that existing banks, bitcoin banks, and existing payment rails would continue to be in use as this tech evolved.  He saw that bitcoin was a settlement layer before that was a thing for the rest of us.

Man, I REALLY wish he was still here.  He would be such a clear voice of reason, I believe.

I have VERY few of these... but this one is DEFINITELY worth it.  He makes gemblitz look like a savant.

Yeah.  I liked it too and did it.



Using those stamps is pretty hard work on little washers.  I also bought cheap ($10) engraver off ebay that is much easier to use, though not quite as "official" looking.

This is THE killer app and few really understand the depth of game-chageyness in my opinion.

I don't know how long this will take to really emerge.  But in my opinion this will allow Monero to be Bitcoin's "privacy layer".

Eventually we will see some fairly staunch maximalists starting to wake up to the advantages of letting Monero do this work for Bitcoin thereby allowing Bitcoin to retain it's pristine auditability properties.  Keep an eye on Matt O'Dell.  He is staunchly anti-shitcoin, but he is also bending over backwards to push BTC privacy.  He may be rational enough to realize in the end that Monero really is an exception to the Maximialist's rule.  

Monero is poising itself PERFECTLY for this reality.  The tail emission, and the king of CPU mining.  This means Monero is more secure than the average shitcoin.

I was among the folks who was disappointed that we chose to add the tail emission.  In fact I was FIRMLY against it.  And still recognize it came at a cost.  The biggest of which was the change to the social contract, and putting Monero among the cryptocurrencies that have shown that unlike Bitcoin, the more centralized leadership can change the financial contract thereby putting a dent in the store of value property of Monero.

That said, not only will the tail emission do what it is good for, keeping the mining of Monero rolling, but in the same way that Monero can do privacy on behalf of Bitcoin, Bitcoin can do SOV for Monero.  This will leave monero to concentrate on it's killer app feature.  Allowing seamless flow between these two currencies will be pretty magical.  You can sacrifice auditability and SOV stuff for privacy and then come back as you please.

I have always seen a symbiotic future for these two projects, and am very pleased with the way this is coming together.  

Monero is so far ahead of anything else in the privacy game... it will remain useful and valuable for quite a while.

When these realities start to become more obvious to the masses we will start to see fairly significant price moves, IMHO.

Since we are entering the "Epoch of Unscience" I can confirm that this analysis of Analysis is moot.

I dunno...   it certainly could be.  Or it could be like the last time we flirted with 1k.