All I been saying guy's, is I can get more from a tesco clubcard, than btc.. dont hate me for the truth.. bitcoin is a private club now, for those with, end of.

Who you calling a retard, bumfluffkins?

A private club going nowhere fast..

Bet on it?

Half the people you metion have probably dropped it in favour of real life..

people want btc, not particles..

21 million btc in total.. but there are  2.1 quadrillion discrete units of btc?

hahahaha...

they're that discreet, no-one can find any decent amount's.

All I'm saying is it's not worth getting involved in anymore.. long term users believe that the rarity of btc will make it go up in price, but this is only true if everyone has some.. most btc user's have all, or next to none.. and what they offer aint worth turning the computer on for.. unless of course, you already have enough money to get involved, win/lose some.. for new user's, it really is pointless.. I mean all we can really do with the plethora of btc sites is gamble really, no?

I thought years ago I'd be able to buy food with btc.. I'm still waiting on enough to buy my next 12"

It's not gonna happen any time soon is it?

Most btc services, are for geeks (no disrespect meant) and are not what the majority want, so why get involved, when it's cheaper to go to the funfair, and play the machines there..? Point being here, is you walk away with your winnings in your hand AT THE TIME YOU WON. Big cheesy grin.. ya dont get that often with bitcoin, that's for sure..

I'll prove a point with btc.. when btc goes up in value, do website's offer more? NO, they stay the same.. and when btc goes down in value, the offerings become less.. the problem being, when btc goes back up, the offering's dont, they stay the same, and when btc goes down again, so does the offerings, but when btc goes up again, does the offerings increase? No, again, they stay the same..

Three times btc increased in value, so folks SHOULD offer more, but they dont.

Three times btc went down and so did the offering's.. when btc went up, the offerings stayed even lower..

I'll not go into people's instant payment's being not so instant, by being sent to third party wallet's probably held by the same people.

I rest my case here.. speculate on what I wrote here..

Explain why (...) Bitcoin should not have been created as a spin-off of the fiat ledger.

On forkability in general, I see it as a great strength, not a weakness. It means that the economic majority is always in control even when major changes have to be made.

As a side note, I find it cumbersome during deeper analysis to think in terms of "Bitcoin." Rather, I think more fluidly in terms of the economic majority ledger (currently known as the Bitcoin ledger). Forking the protocol is largely powerless* to affect the economic majority ledger, because - by the same logic as in my previous two posts - the new protocol fork only retains control of the economic majority ledger to the extent that the protocol change is compelling to the economic majority.**

Since every differentiated protocol fork (here I mean altcoins) has so far created an entirely new ledger, of course they aren't very compelling to the economic majority, receiving at most tepid investment interest. A spin-off would be based on the economic majority ledger, so it would have a great advantage over an altledger/altcoin, though if it wasn't compelling it would just be sold off by bitcoin holders for more bitcoins.

If a substantially different protocol fork or spin-off is ever more compelling to the economic majority, and of course using the same ledger is the first requirement for that, it would be adopted. The economic majority retains their ledger with their wealth in all cases. Bitcoin-the-protocol may be no more, but the ledger stays so bitcoin holders have nothing to fear except a re-naming.

Suppose a substantial segment of the economic majority shows interest in some change you find repulsive. Likely many others will agree with you, so in some unlikely scenarios you will potentially have two ledgers form over time.** If this does occur, it's the most amazing form of democracy (not voice democracy, but exit democracy) because everyone can use the system they want without compromise. However, again, there is a strong tendency to simply converge on ideal money based on the wisdom of (investing) crowds.

For instance, if we suppose a substantial segment of the economic majority shows interest FedCoin, then the legal situation may make it likely that the two coexist, with Bitcoin either on the black market in that country or competing directly with FedCoin. In that case, again, exit-democracy prevails and the Feds have no more tools to corrupt cryptocurrency than they do now (see the arguments in my two previous posts).

Here's another important implication of thinking in terms of the economic majority ledger: Bitcoin issuance is not limited to 21 million coins because of the protocol, but because of the exit-democratic consensus of the economic majority. It is incorrect to say we have moved from an era of control by central bankers to an era of control by mathematics. We have moved to an era of control by the economic majority.

This is a great advance, but not because "no one" can change the protocol, but because no one can force any group of people to stop using it. To effectively change the coin limit, you have to either convince the economic majority to do so, which is a herculean task, or convince some subset of the economic majority - but then that doesn't affect the rest of the people. That means the coin limit could change (for example, in 50 years to deal with mining incentives), but not without a reason that is so incredibly compelling that it sways all or most of the economic majority - in which case the typical bitcoiner should probably not worry, despite how bad it sounds, because the economic majority has those same reservations to overcome. And also we know that the change wouldn't allow for any net-harmful degree of continuing inflation or other effects, because the economic majority would be behind it.

This is the kind of guarantee Bitcoin provides; it's essentially a decentralized governance where voice vs. exit is fully exercised at all times. What Bitcoin provides is not a guarantee by code or math, rather code and math are what enforce the "edicts" of this decentralized governance structure subject to the continual pressures of voice and exit backed by investment flows.

If, for example, the economic majority believes that increasing max_blocksize to 20MB or shorter block times or Turing completeness will make the protocol for updating the economic majority ledger more compelling, a fork incorporating these changes would thrive and beat out the Bitcoin Classic protocol.

So to me, all that's required for Bitcoin-the-ledger to survive in perpetuity and make every investor rich is for the protocol to be upgraded if and only if the economic majority deems it truly compelling, with all the prudence about viability that that entails. Forking makes that happen, giving that critical exit option to balance voice, which in Bitcoin is already vastly superior to government democracy voice since it's backed by actual money.

*So far around 90% powerless, considering the combined market cap of all the altledgers compared to the economic majority ledger (Bitcoin).

**Although some kind of 50/50 or 40/60 split could happen in theory, the incentives involved make it seem unlikely in practice - and even if it does happen (because both forks are highly compelling in their own right), the market can only support a few such splits because there are only so many protocol feature sets to compete on through differentiation.

So I can't see any move toward FEDCoin not helping Bitcoin, or at least advancing the cause of cryptoledgers.

cointerra's team was also supposed to be top notch...until it wasn't (operationally)

32,000$ by mid 2017 is my prediction.

I've seen utility and usability grow enormously the past year, and i hear of many cool projects in the works. Market has been and continues to totally ignore all this and has been only focused on finding a bottom, I believe we found that bottom and we're heading up now, when the ball really starts to roll, poeple will come back and take another look at bitcoin and find that it can be very useful to them. Bitcoin will begin to fulfil its promise of being better more useful and cheaper, the world will take notice, we'll see it being used as a parallel currency here and there, china will have no choice but to reviste its ban on bitcoin use in order to participate in the "digital economy",  and then...



ok, fuck it, setting new target: 320,000$ by 2020

 

the sentiment is extremely positive we may see a new ATH until some time in 2015 Then we can start to imagining $5k bitcoins next year.

@Kipsy89. I'd actually say WSJ has been on "our" side for more than a year (remember the Kashmir Hill pieces about "living on Bitcoin", from 2013?). Just thought the above is a nice illustration of it.

Digital Asset Holdings aims to be a venue for buyers and sellers of financial assets to meet and transact, switching currencies into bitcoin in order to cut the cost and time of settlement and make use of the decentralised “block chain” as a secure record of transactions.

Its most ardent devotees include libertarians and drug dealers, but financial services companies are interested in exploiting the underlying technology, which allows the ownership of a bitcoin to be transferred from one user to another.

Ms Masters said she had held discussions with the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and New York’s Department of Financial Services about the venture, though it would not need regulators’ blessing because it was not an exchange, a custodian or a money transmitter.

Instead, it will admit creditworthy members — such as big banks and asset managers — to trade between themselves using DAH’s technology.

The basic use case I imagine is the situation where two machines with two different owners are drawing from the same utility, say electric power, being offered by a third party. Suppose there isn't enough to power both of them. How are the machines to decide who gets priority in receiving the power?

Well, if the owner of Machine 1 has a high preference for the machine to run uninterrupted (say a server), even if it were to be expensive, he can pre-allocate some spending money to the machine, as an insurance policy in case of power shortages. Meanwhile, the owner of Machine 2, maybe a poorer person or maybe someone who cares less if their machine's operations were temporarily interrupted (say a clothes dryer), would not do this. In fact, they may even allow their machine to sell excess power if someone is paying enough for it.

Then the person who values the resource more can pay for it, enriching others who value the resource less.

This could be for electricity, for driverless cars negotiating right of way on the road for users of different income classes or different time preferences (rushing to the hospital vs. someone just going shopping), or for any other rivalrous good.

So it's basically a way to make machines more effective agents on the owners' behalf. Whereas before any situation that required a monetary transfer in order to effectuate a mutually beneficial deal would have required the owners to negotiate directly. If the matter is too trifling, it would just be annoying and a waste of time to negotiate. Instead, have your machines do it. They couldn't do this before, not just because they weren't interconnected, but also because they have no way of transferring value to each other.

Bitcoin enables this. And the scale can be extremely small, so that even the slightest possibility of mutually beneficial trade is capitalized on.

IoT by itself enables this to happen within one's own property, like the different appliances in your own house, because no other owners are involved so no money needs to change hands. The dishwasher doesn't mind taking a 5-minute break to give extra power to another appliance that needs it. It needs no monetary compensation, because the owner owns both appliances.

It's when this kind of exchange happens with someone else, especially a total stranger, that it becomes necessary for money to change hands.

Now some people imagine this as heaven for the rich, like if for example a rich driver could flip all the red lights green. How sucky would that be if you had to wait at extra-long reds? But no. You had already preset the amount you were willing to pay in bidding for the traffic light to change, and it was far less...but more importantly you get paid for your waiting time. If it's not worth your while to wait and get paid today, just set your asking price higher (a dial just for this purpose is on your dashboard). You only wait if the other driver is offering enough to make you interested in waiting.

This guarantees that everyone benefits from the deal. If the rich driver ultimately wins out and gets the light flipped, everyone else - by hypothesis - gets at least enough money to make it worth their while. Of course the more crowded the intersection the more the rich driver would have to pay, but some will. Everyone is better off, because goods (in this case road space and right of way) are allocated most efficiently by the price system.

Bit_Happy, I think your on to something.  This looks like a new phase. If I'm guessing their intent correctly, they are creating hardware for the coming bitcoin economy. That's a big investment and vote of confidence over just accepting them for payment. It's all happening so fast!

People compare Bitcoin to the Internet. Well, the Internet required an enormous hardware infrastructure buildout before its potential as a software platform could be realized. That's where we come in. We believe that Bitcoin isn't going to happen simply by dropping a line of Javascript into a webpage. Someone needs to build the full-stack infrastructure for Bitcoin, from silicon to software. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Peter Thiel, that someone is us.

21e6 are designing ASICs, so you'd expect them to get into mining supply and mining. But surely it makes sense for them to use some of that capital to directly buy BTC reserves.