one more reason to hate that company. very tech-friendly 

Santa Claus might be more appropriate.

Man, what a culmination to this thread.

We're all on parity watch.

Ironic we might hit on Thanksgiving?

Yes, you are correct.

I was commenting on Bitcoin as a currency being special for them, not specifically about Bitcoin bought from BTCChina
They can transfer money on their own, at home, without middle man and black market exchange rates

im not so sure about that, the ltc dev team is aware of the mistakes that btc made and is trying to fix them before we run into that problem.

but anyway its what people use first they sort of stick with, and for millions of chinese it seems to be ltc


im not a btc hater at all but i saw the advantages and ltc very early and well this is no shock at all to me.



and for the people who are expecting a dump, well it might correct down some but its not like us long time ltc holders are going to do anything.

What good is the gold in Ft. Knox? I mean, if there is some there.

Extra credit:  have the offline computer encrypted using a USB key, instead of a password.   Your wallet on the computer is already protected with a password, and using the same password for the disk encryption is mostly redundant (though it's better than nothing).    I know it's possible to /dev/random data on a USB key, and have the bootloader use that as the FS encryption key.  But it's been a long time since I've done that, so I don't remember how.

It will improve the "hardness" of the system if it is stolen, as long as you don't keep the USB key with the laptop.  If they don't have the USB key, there's basically no way to even brute force the FS encryption.  If the thief gets both the key and the system, well there's still the wallet password that has to be found (unless you wrote the unencrypted key data to disk;  which should not happen with standard Armory operations, but it's nice to have the extra layer of protection).

If anyone has more details about doing this, I'd love to be reminded.  I've been meaning to upgrade one of my offline systems to that method, but been too busy to go figure it out again.

I agree that with the proper precautions (waiting a few seconds to see if there are double spend attempts, ensuring the transaction has a sufficient tx fee) 0-confs is enough for a point of sale transaction.

For online services however, there are two reasons why a faster block time would be an advantage: first, if the service offers withdrawals of bitcoin deposited, then they need to wait for at least one confirmation to ensure you're not withdrawing bitcoins that you double spent. Second, some services want to ship immediately upon the order being placed. Having to wait for a 10 minute confirmation versus a 1 minute confirmation before shipping makes a difference here.

It's also not convenient for a service to have to keep track of which completed purchases are still at 0-confirmations and wait until they have at least 1 before shipping. The merchant could more practically wait for 1 confirmation before confirming the purchase is complete with a 1 minute rather than 10 minute block interval target and avoid the need to wait for a separate 'shipping confirmation' after they've already confirmed the purchase with the customer.


True, however we can look at the real Bitcoin economy to see that not every service will allow 0-conf transactions.

It's tempting to make a connection between bitcoin boom and metal bust, but the market sizes are too different. The $ flowing into XBT is negligible compared to the $ exiting the metals, right? I think it's plain old "manipulation" of gold & silver?

This is already how the chargeback system works.  When the buyer initiates a chargeback, the credit card company asks the merchant to produce a "proof of delivery" signature.  If the buyer signed for the product then the merchant doesn't have to eat the loss.  If the buyer did not sign for it, then the merchant does.  That's the idea, anyway.

Of course most products purchased online are delivered without requiring a signature and I don't see this changing, bitcoin or not.  Smaller ticket items are generally considered not wiorth the hassle. 

Also, however, customers can seek a chargeback for other reasons, such as the product not being as described, or being damaged. 

Not all countries use the same wealth tax structure. The Dutch law requires you to report all your assets on January 1st of each year and pay 1.2% (30% tax on a 4% hypothetical yield) on it. If you own a house this is excluded (for fucked up unfair reasons). You are allowed to subtract foreign paid other forms of wealth tax (such as foreign dividend-tax).

So exchanging Bitcoins for fiat or not is a non-issue. If my wealth goes up sufficiently and the Dutch system becomes too much of a hassle, Germany is close by (I dislike the language though)

im not a tax lawyer either. However (in the UK) if i haven't "cashed out" BTC then there is no capital gain to be taxed. Unless I am hugely mistaken!

Wasn't the same argument made when litecoin came out.  I don't think anyone is going to launch an exact copy.

  All will or currently have variations on the bitcoin idea.  And we haven't even had a single major corp or government try to do a coin of their own.  What happens if Google or Facebook does a coin.  They've experimented with their own sort of money before but it didn't take off possibly because people inherently saw it as easily manipulated but under a guise of a crypto how fast do you think googlecoin would spread?

That's one of those issues bitcoin will have to deal with if it is to truly succeed.  It's a fact that it's easily duplicated and therefore isn't as scarce as some proponents like to prophesize.  How the market handles that will determine the future of cryptos in general.  Just like gold cryptos are an outlet for the current developed world government malaise called modern finance.  That may last a long while or it may come to a spectacular end much faster.  If governments are forced by circumstances and citizens to get their act together the need for bitcoin or other cryptos may not be as great as it is now.

I'm not planning to cash out all (I have to report market value).

Reporting less than I have would be tax evasion. Don't you think that's something I'll come to regret?

Are you bloody kidding me? Ugh. Be careful what you wish for, people.

More than one very successful (from a market-cap perspective) crypto will ultimately devalue them all, if there are no material technical distinctions.

I get in twitter fights with gold-bugs and their ilk all the time, and the best leg they have to stand on (and my only lingering long-term hesitation about bitcoin, for that matter) is the alt-coin argument. I have to lean on "network effects" and "first-mover advantage" arguments to defend bitcoin's market-cap and longevity in this light, and strong non-distinct alts will break that argument.

That said, bitcoin has risen almost 10x recently, and litecoin is catching up to keep its old multiple (~1/40), so that's fine, but much more, and we start to have empirical issues that invalidate important theory.