Warren Buffet's good decision making is based on buying undervalued stocks. Bitcoin itself is arguably an undervalued asset, which is why we see the appreciation that we do.

The problem with Bitcoin's decision making process is that there's no central leadership -- luckily. Thus you get a lot of conflicting interests that can stiffle progress in one way or another. I wouldn't want a Bitcoin with a central decision making authority however. There's too much power aggregated as is.




That post just made my day

Never heard of them, I'd stay clear if I were you. Also selling BTC to a PayPal buyer is the oldest trick in the book to get scammed. They can easily make a chargeback with no recourse for you.

I share your sentiment. It looks like BTC is stablizing at around USD 4100,- right now. Now if it were the beginning of the bull market I'd be positive that the rally continues. But the way it looks right now I'm afraid that most people will feel safer taking a profit, rather than trying to push for USD 4500,-.

There's Localbitcoins.com for face to face trading between individuals. If you're within the US I think Coinbase.com acts as a kind of OTC market, but I haven't used them myselfs so I'm not 100% sure. Apart from that you could do a search if there are any Bitcoin ATMs in your area. Depending on your location and legislature there may be other services that offer something that resembles an OTC market.

The most effective way to get Bitcoins however is via exchanges such as Kraken or Bitstamp.

In my opinion investing in crypto starts to make sense at USD 200 - 300,-. However you can get your feet wet with as little as USD 10,- so there's nothing wrong about starting small.

Watch out for withdrawal fees though. They differ from exchange to exchange and can take quite a bite off your investment if you invest only little and want to withdraw to a wallet of your own. I guess accounting for withdrawal fees the minimum viable investment amount would be at about USD 100,-

Depends. On one hand blockchain-based time tracking is immutable and smart contracts allow for more automation, both of which are nice. On the other hand there's a lot of tools out there that will be able to do time and process tracking a lot better due to being specialized products in that area. Nonetheless I can very well imagine there being a market for the former.



This will depend heavily on what kind of clients the market place attracts.

For clients that already have a software development workflow in place and are merely outsourcing modules it sounds viable enough; assuming they are able to define the user stories and success metrics themselves.

For clients that have nothing to do with software development it's going to be the freelancer that has to define the user stories and success metrics. Checking whether these are correctly defined can't be automated (lest you write tests for your tests and so on).

If the market place only serves the first type of client that's fine as well, but you'd leave a huge part of the market unserved. Thoughts?



Ah, I misunderstood you then. I thought arbitration would take place by default in case a scope contract is not fullfilled using the automated measures mentioned above. In that case I fully agree.

Yep, precisely. The fact that you can use cold storage with the ease of a hot wallet is liberating. Using an airgapped computer to sign transactions gets old real fast. However that's just my humble opinion. Everyone has their own use cases and security needs.

Apart from that, rest assured that even knowing the seed words won't help an attacker if your passphrase is long enough. You could basically create a paperwallet that can be used on a non-airgapped device via trezor without fearing to expose the private key.

Depending on the project type, I'm not sure whether smart contracts are really sufficient.

A time smart contract could easily be cheated on hours tracked, but then again that's a risk you have with traditional hourly pay as well.

A scope smart contract seems like a case of trying to solve a human problem with a technical solution. Performance, unit and integration testing are hardly sufficient metrics on whether a project has been successfully developed or not. Sure, it can work if both client and freelancer are already know each other pretty well and have a proper workflow worked out. It can also work for smaller projects ( < 5 working days). But for anything beyond that it's already difficult to properly define requirements in writing, let alone in quantifiable code.

At least from my experience getting the requirements right is often harder than writing the code itself. This means two things:

1) Think about how to allow for iteration loops, every step along the process, including the adjustment, redefinition and extension of requirements -- which will require both sides to come to an agreement.

2) You mentioned arbitration in your other post. Be prepared for lots of it. Depending on the kind of projects and people this market place attracts, you'll either have a huge quantity of minor disputes, or a handful of really complex cases. Probably a mix of both. And it's not even about people trying to scam each other. Everyday miscommunication is absolutely sufficient for that.



Not much to add here Looking forward to see what comes of it. I hope my input was of some use to you.

Well at least now part of their agenda behind the investbox has been revealed, although it's still a rather... weird?

My first assumption also was that the investbox is more of a marketing ploy than a scam attempt. The gambling requirement seems to confirm this suspicion, ie. the investbox is not only meant to attract noobs, but also to get them to play dice. It still seems hardly profitable from Yobit's view; then again I don't see anything about Yobit's dice game being provably fair, so maybe that's where the money comes in.

It will only be a matter of time until banks pass the negative interest rates on to their customers. I know a broker that already does this.



Manipulating the money supply to influence the economy is what central banks do. Whether they do it well is a different question. Luckily we all know a hedge against monetary policies gone awry.



Well in that case I guess the former will prevent the latter from happening

Apart from that there's still stocks and simply buying stuff, which is probably what central banks want to achieve with negative interest rates.

All of this has happened before, and it will happen again. Will there be a 10k Bitcoin? Probably. Will it reach 10k before a major correction? Probably not.

Bitcoin is more stable than it has ever been, yet to believe that Bitcoin will just continue to grow indefinitely at its current rate is rather naive. Once the upward momentum is lost profits will be taken, even if only to buy back in at a later date.



Bitcoin has grown up for sure. It will still take a while until people fully trust crypto-currencies however. For most it's still a highly speculative asset.

Seems unlikely. Most early Bitcoiners seem to have a cypherpunk / open source / liberal background, with a lot of focus on cryptography / code and with comparably little focus on finance / economy. If bankers were involved from the very beginning we'd have a very different rhetoric and very different people. Also they wouldn't be struggling to shoehorn blockchains into their existing systems as they do now.

I'm not saying that there are no bankers amongst the early adopters. I'm sure there's a couple of bankers and people from the financial industry that saw Bitcoin's potential early on. But I doubt that they were there from the beginning. That was mostly a very special breed of nerds <3



Wealth disparity is expected as only very few people entered Bitcoin early. Even today I guess more than 95% of people on earth don't own a single Satoshi. Probably never will. However I assume that for most people that got wealthy due to Bitcoin it was a once in a lifetime opportunity and not yet another investment by someone who already was rich in the first place.

Apart from that, most wealth that got accumulated by Bitcoiners is still nothing compared to actually rich people. Bitcoins complete market cap has not even reached Warren Buffett's estimated net worth yet.

It's a silly comparison, but if Bitcoin is the .com of TLDs than that's fine with me. The TLD of Google, Apple, Amazon... you know, companies that actually make money, rule the tech world and don't just spout random vaporware every way they go.

But you kids have fun. I see you don't remember all the other novelty TLDs that came and went during the last few years. Well... come to think of it, maybe the .io / .me comparison is pretty fitting after all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's good to see SatoshiLabs taking the necessary steps as swift as they did.

Apart from that, as long as physical access to the Trezor is necessary to hack it, I'm not really worried. XKCD's infamous $5 wrench attack would worry me more in this case.



Did you write your seed words by hand or did you use a printer? Because some printers store printed pages in an internal data storage. Just a heads up for when you throw out your old printer.

Yep... the alt coin and ICO token market was definitely bubbly, although it seems to have calmed down a bit. To me it actually looks like most alt coins are in the early blow off phase of the current cycle, with a couple of coins and tokens lagging behind. Of course it might just be an alt coin bear trap, but I think that alts already have grown way beyond what is healthy and will largely depend on Bitcoin's next movements.

Exactly. Good ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the execution that makes all the difference.

Also whatever your idea is, you're most likely not the first one to have said idea. Even Bitcoin was not a wholly new idea when it got started, but it was the first time someone managed to execute the idea so well that it actually took off.

So don't be discouraged by someone else working on the same idea as you. It will happen pretty much all the time. Look at how they did it, and see if there's some lesson that you can take away from it. Look at their project as a prototype of your own idea and try to improve on it.

And especially, don't give up just because someone else did it before you. If it were for that we wouldn't have the cornucopia of alt coins we have today, because hey, cryptocurrencies are already invented, case closed. So go for it. If you'd give up everytime you see someone else doing something similar you'll never get a project out.

I think most Bitcoiners that took a closer look into the matter are aware that fully replacing fiat with cryptocurrency is not all that viable (in its current form). Nonetheless one can still dream that one day Bitcoin will be as ubiquitous as the Dollar or the Euro. That's all there is to it. English didn't replace local languages, yet it is understood pretty much everywhere. Bitcoin could play a similar role for currencies.

Monetary policies can fail or be tainted by conflicts of interests. Decentralized protocols are predictable and uncorruptable.

Apart from that, no worries. Bitcoin will never replace fiat money and doesn't need to. Some form of inflationary fiat will always be required to enable economic growth.

Look at Bitcoin as a store of value and as a hedge against failing monetary policies that just so happens to be usable as a currency as well.

Come to Germany or Austria, we pay an awful lot of taxes but not for Bitcoin holdings that have been kept for longer than a year

Bad news is you'd have to relocate and obtain citizenship.

The good news is the beer is good.

Yes. Did you have a Windows backup on schedule? Otherwise here's a list of file recovery software:

https://www.lifewire.com/free-data-recovery-software-tools-2622893

If I remember correctly Recuva was quite OK, but it's been a while since the last time that I had to recover files.