We're talking about two different things here. The BitGold airdrop is slated to happen in late October. That should be a non-event..... I'd be very surprised if that fork were offered on major Bitcoin exchanges. Maybe Poloniex, Bittrex, Cryptopia and other altcoin exchanges, though.

The Segwit2x fork is different, because it's backed by major services, exchanges and miners. I'm not sure what's going to happen. A split seems likely if the BTC1/NYA crowd moves forward with the fork, which would be bad for the price.

It's not ironic. They are an investment bank and broker, not a central bank. People often confuse the former with the latter. I'll bet Goldman Sachs was accumulating positions on NVDA for years while watching the cryptocurrency economy blossom. They're good at what they do -- investing and trading. And they're happy to take a fee for brokering crypto investments for clients. Central banks probably don't like the smell of all this, but that's a different matter entirely.

Because of a thing called "liquidity." No payment processor can guarantee liquidity for Amazon. So unless you are suggesting that Amazon is going to simply "hodl" the vast majority of BTC received, it's not realistic.


You don't know what "converting bitcoin to fiat" means? That equates to selling pressure by definition (i.e. downward pressure on the price).

I didn't forget that for every buy there is a sell. The point is that, all else equal, merchants accepting bitcoins for payment represents supply, not demand. If you want to have a discussion about why demand for bitcoins is too strong for that to matter because x/y/z, that's a different discussion.


We don't need merchants "accepting" bitcoin only to immediately dump it. What we need are users who use the currency, removed from fiat conversion. We need users who want to buy bitcoins for reasons other than to spend them at merchants who just want dollars.

I'm not saying that Bitcoin doesn't have use as a currency. I'm saying that merchant acceptance at this stage should not be a priority -- not when merchants aren't interested in holding BTC and actually participating in the economy.

Bitcoin = censorship-resistant, trustless money. And digital gold. Not just another payment rail for merchants to add alongside Visa and Mastercard.

You should be fine, then. As far as I know, Coinbase has no issues with adult entertainment. But it's generally good practice to move coins to your own wallet when spending from Coinbase, to avoid a provable connection between you and an illicit site (or a gambling site). I'd hate to get my Coinbase account closed over something like that.

But yeah, they aren't going to give your personal information to any merchant. The merchant can only see the coin source (Coinbase's hot wallet) and their node's IP address. Nothing about you.

Indeed, this is welcome news for those that were still concerned about rumors of a "mining ban" or block of the network by the Great Firewall. I wouldn't say they are "returning" per se; they never left. China is the major player in the manufacturing of ASIC miners and their pools control a majority of hash rate. The price action on their exchanges has also always moved Western markets.

I think this news hints at incoming regulating/licensure of Chinese exchanges, which is very good news for the market. I'm not surprised to see the price rallying today.

There is something else to consider here. Coinbase bends over backwards for regulators and law enforcement. They even do blockchain analysis on where you send your coins. People have had their accounts terminated for sending BTC from their Coinbase accounts to gambling sites. I don't even want to know what they do if you're sending BTC to a darknet market.

As far as what Coinbase shares with the site receiving the payment -- not much. They can see that the coins are coming from Coinbase and the IP address of the sender. Like I said, that would not be my first concern.

I'm honestly confused by people getting so excited about merchant acceptance. What is this, 2014? I don't think it's realistic for a company of Amazon's scale to accept Bitcoin at this point. And if they did, they would need to hedge most or all of the fiat value -- meaning the more that bitcoiners "support" Amazon by spending BTC there, the more immediate downward pressure there is on the price. Spending BTC in this context is equal to selling it.

If people really want the price to go up, they should preach hoarding, not spending.

It comes off like a Multi-Level Marketing scheme. So many scam accusations, and never any real responses. No attempt to save face by the developers. They just send out their army of low-level shills, who generally don't have a strong enough grasp of English to even address the accusations.

It's not faring well, either. It's only traded on that horrible exchange, Nova. It has very low volume and has plummeted in value. There is no economic activity on the network besides bounties/airdrop.

BTC China is doing the same -- they are already promoting their USD exchange. I'm not sure what kind of business it will attract, though. It seems like it's only getting harder to move USD to and from exchanges these days, too.


Well, I think we can assume that the Chinese exchange closures were already priced in. They were announced weeks ago, and the market dumped hard on the news already. More importantly, the market didn't dump hard on news of the Korean ICO ban or the rumors of a ban on cryptocurrency payments in Russia. That indeed suggests a bullish market.

The Bank of China appears to be doing the same thing. They have released a "Blockchain E-wallet" which is available on app stores, but of course, there is no support for real cryptocurrencies. The wallet can be linked to Bank of China debit cards.

From a consumer perspective, these schemes are useless. The only reason for fiat-linked services to use the blockchain is to dissuade investors away from real decentralized cryptocurrencies in favor of legacy systems with blockchain gimmicks added.

For a desktop wallet, I definitely agree to recommend Electrum. It's recommended on Bitcoin.org, and it's fast, lightweight and safe.

However, I do not recommend the Jaxx wallet. It has very poor security for a desktop wallet; at most, it is secured by a 4-number pin -- easily crackable. Any desktop wallet should offer full private key encryption with a strong passphrase. This level of security is completely unacceptable to me. I've heard some scary warnings about the Exodus wallet, too, but I have not verified them.

The witness discount was only included as a compromise with those seeking larger block sizes, and it was a worthy compromise since Segwit is at worst UTXO-neutral, whereas standard transactions cause inevitable and perpetual UTXO bloat.

How are there "two economics rather than one?" The only change to incentives appears to be that there is greater incentive now to spend UTXOs rather than to create them. That seems bloody great to me.

Proof-of-work is only wasteful if the same security could be provided with less energy. Proof-of-stake sounds nice, but it hasn't been shown to be viable on paper, let alone in practice. Yes, there are POS blockchains, but they are very small and undoubtedly do not / will not face the same kinds of adversaries that Bitcoin does.

If proof-of-stake is shown to be viable in the long term (years) on Ethereum, then I'll start taking it seriously. But from where I stand, POW is the only thing we can truly rely on. The incentives work.

Literally two weeks after the Russian Finance Minister said there was "no point in prohibiting" cryptocurrencies, it seems that the Russian government has yet again reversed course.

The Deputy Finance Minister had this to say earlier in the week:


For him, there is no doubt that Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrency) payments will be banned. Read the article here.

Thoughts? Russia is probably the most infamous government for flip-flopping on Bitcoin regulation. This seems like more of the same. The market doesn't seem to be reacting to the news.

That doesn't account for all the factors underlying the cryptocurrency market, or possible market manipulation. For example, it's possible that the BTC price could have gone much higher than $5,000 if Bitcoin Cash weren't drawing investors away. They are holding #3 or #4 in total market cap; that takes a lot of investor inflow to maintain.

There is also the allegation that Bitmain is propping up the BCH price. Would they do the same for Segwit2x? It takes a lot of money to prop up a market if real buying demand for the fork doesn't exist. That depends on users and new investors.

I'm pretty sure that some governments realize the inevitable truth that they can't stop cryptocurrencies. The CFTC gave LedgerX the green light to offer BTC futures markets, for instance. Canada is set to have an ETF on its listed markets in the near future.

And major Japanese corporations seem comfortable enough with the government's legal stance to dive into the mining industry in competition with Bitmain.

I think he and other detractors may understand Bitcoin; the jury is out on that. But given the hype surrounding Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies these days, it's easier to get airtime taking the contrarian position.

This guy is trying to sell his speaking tour more than anything else, and there are mainstream investors among his base. He's just trying to be relevant and taking the conservative stance.

No, you are right. Time will only make it clearer. It's already obvious to people who have been around a while that this is a complete scam. It's easily one of the worst scams I've seen in the crypto space. I can't tell if Deep Onion's army of trolls is too stupid to realize that the devs control the vast majority of supply and are staking it, or if they are all just hacked accounts.

I was lurking in Meta, and it seems like a lot of recently hacked accounts are wearing the Deep Onion signature. Plus, that would explain why so many people are claiming that they aren't getting paid for wearing the signature. Non-insiders are just used for free advertising for as long as it lasts.

Of course they would say that. By all appearances, they are BTC-E, so naturally, their terms say "we aren't BTC-E." Do you really take them at their word?

Think about it: Who buys a "database of accounts and all associated obligations * 55-62% + tokens" and "did not receive funds" to cover those obligations? As if WEX is just some charity giving away free money?

If they were smart, not only was 100% of the fiat not frozen, but the admins pocketed a good amount for their troubles (and towards their retirement). And I think they are pretty smart.

What they are doing is totally reasonable. The exchanges were operating as shadow banks... the biggest ones (Huobi and Okcoin) supposedly invested ~ a billion CNY worth of customer deposits, probably in debt instruments to facilitate capital flight: https://twitter.com/tuurdemeester/status/900027535450353664

So, I suspect that this was a "two birds, one stone" move. They want to bring exchanges under tight regulation (or perhaps even see them administered by the state). The issue is indeed capital flight, but not for the reasons that most bitcoiners think.