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41  Economy / Speculation / Re: Will bitcoin "stabilize" at more, or less than the current price? on: February 02, 2015, 05:03:09 AM
There's really no reason for it to stabilise at this price or to be honest any other at the moment, since the majority of buys and sells are for speculative purposes and thus highly prone to snowballing, destabilising effects.
42  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Regret and depression on: January 29, 2015, 07:42:15 PM
Unless you bought in for cents it would have hardly been overnight anyway. Take a look at the chart, months and years of volatile uncertainty. You'd probably have sold early like lots of people.
43  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Bitcoin Demographic (Enthusiasts vs Fiat warriors) How to move forward? on: January 28, 2015, 10:20:26 PM
If you want bitcoin to stay in the hands of those who care about it, then probably the user number will never grow hugely beyond what we already have.

If you want people to 'see the light' and replace corrupt institutions, the bubbles are probably the most effective method to draw mass attention and convert new users. Some % of them will become hardcore supporters, but first you need something big to force them to seriously consider bitcoin. Yeah, it leverages greed but so what? Money doesn't work at all without a smidgen of greed.

Ask yourself why you want the userbase to grow anyway. I'm sure part of it is to do with your own personal desire to get rich  Tongue
44  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: What if? A government controlled digital currency on: January 28, 2015, 04:02:00 PM
It's totally possible. The question as you have pointed out is, what would be the purpose, and who would support such an idea? A big part of the advantage of crypto is that users can hold their own wallets and mimic online banking activity faster, cheaper and better. Presumably fed-coin would let you use your own wallet, so yes, banks would still be hurting just as much as in the case of worldwide bitcoin adoption.

Would people use it? I think yes, if it happened before people got used to using bitcoin or similar. The fed-coin could instantly capture a userbase of millions by swapping all dollars for fed-coins in one big publicity drive.

Will they actually do it? It seems to me the advantages for the powers-that-be are limited to killing bitcoin and its alts, with a side benefit of tracking currency, presumably with wallet software legally required to take personal information. Of course, this helps them to keep or increase their power, but my intuition is that this isn't yet a strong or obvious enough motivator for them to get organised and take such drastic action. It will take much more adoption of cryptocurrencies before they start to get worried enough to seriously consider it!

45  Other / Off-topic / Re: Age of bitcoin users. on: January 28, 2015, 03:40:57 PM
IIRC a few people have made surveys that indicated 30 is around the average age. So fairly young to be dabbling in financial 'products' but older compared to the typical demographic of popular sites/forums which tend to have a userbase focussed more in the teens to early 20s (i.e. before real life kicks in).
46  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Bill Gates: "Bitcoin Alone Won't Solve Global Payments Challenges" on: January 23, 2015, 01:33:58 PM
From the quote in the article, it seems his objections are relatively superficial i.e. volatility, irreversible transactions. The value will get more stable if the proportion of trade shifts more towards consumer use and less towards speculation, which is what will happen if we ever get out of this stage. Irreversibility is a bit of a stretch for consumers but it's more of a mindset thing: use escrow, and realise that just because you can't force a merchant to give up your funds doesn't mean you can't do it in a civilised manner.

Still, I see these objections raised all the time and even if they aren't showstoppers, I'll accept that having to think about these issues is a barrier to adoption  Tongue

Would have been more interested to hear some technical criticism about scalability. We're 'only' one order of magnitude from reaching the transaction rate limit now.
47  Other / Meta / Re: And we are Back!! on: January 23, 2015, 01:06:38 PM
Good, was starting to have separation anxiety...
48  Economy / Speculation / Re: OMG! Bitcoin price hits $199,470! on: January 17, 2015, 11:58:14 PM
49  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: CNN Money article, comments are hilarious on: January 15, 2015, 06:53:50 PM
Media can be truly loathesome and biased, but this article isn't too bad. There are so many negative quotes they could have chosen to highlight (Buffet et al) but instead they merely point out that the fundamental properties of bitcoin seem to matter far less to the valuation than speculative haze, add that those who bought in two years ago are still impressively in the green, and praise the transactional ease of use.

Edit: yeah, the comments, same old crap. Quite mild compared to the trolling around here of late  Grin
50  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Gavin Andresen on the front page of the FT on: January 15, 2015, 01:08:46 AM
No matter what you say to journos, you can't win because they will chop up and present your words however they wish. They are in the business of presenting interesting narratives to please readers, not sticking to impartial reporting. If Gavin had harped on about how people should invest, quite possibly they would (relatively subtly, given this is FT) spin him as a crazy shill and print a big fat price chart to prove it.
51  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: We are the fools, lunatics... on: December 24, 2014, 04:54:19 PM
In one of my experiences, a restaurant with an average transaction size of $80 catered a huge party around the holidays for which they charged $5,000. The processor thought it was too high compared to their average and froze the $5,000 in addition to all of their revenues going forward. They had to spend weeks trying to convince the processor that it was for a catering event. That meant humiliating themselves and getting their high paying customer involved in it. The customer had to submit affidavits to the business's card processor that confirmed they paid for a party and accepted the costs. Even then the processor didn't want to okay it. They told the business they wanted to cancel the charge altogether and the business was just going to have to deal with the customer paying them in cash. It was a nightmare.


Excellent post. Anyone who has had to deal with money men (particularly anyone who runs their own business) will have similar experiences to the above at some point. It seems to me that much of the consumer-side 'innovation' in traditional payment and banking systems involves disguising the enormous gorilla we all have on our backs from supporting this vast, inefficient and clumsy system. The benefits of Bitcoin are really very compelling if you ignore the meagre perks banks give us (and the BTC volatility..)
52  Economy / Economics / Re: Speculation will kill Bitcoin. Distribution of ownership will save us all. on: December 24, 2014, 12:11:08 AM
This is a tired topic.

If you distributed the 21 million bitcoins equally to every person on the planet, each person would get about 0.003 BTC (about $1) and it would have no detectable effect on the distribution of wealth in the world.



Indeed. And then, if those free coins started circulating and gaining value as the popularity of the network increased, you'd find that by the time the coins were worth something, the poor would already have spent their initial share buying stuff from the rich, who would have ended up with lots. Therefore wealth would probably be distributed roughly the same as before (but now further away from the banking industry, naturally).
53  Economy / Speculation / Re: It only costs 100$ in electricity to mine a bitcoin??? on: December 23, 2014, 06:46:16 PM
I do enjoy the effort put into creative writing by the anti bulltard cohort here, it's all rather droll.
54  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Sometimes I question my libertarian beliefs on: December 21, 2014, 06:38:37 PM
People make mistakes due their enviornment and genetics (capaticity to learn and whatnot). Libertarianism is absurd when there isn't even freedom as we know it.

Everything is absurd if you think of it that way. It is perhaps a valid logical point, but it is not constructive. So what do you suggest, delegation of all (illusory) freedoms to other, bigger and stronger organisations because freedom is an illusion anyway, so better to just get rid of it altogether?

Oppressive systems can still cause suffering whether or not people have true 'free will', and even a deterministic mind can define it's own mistakes, and learning from those mistakes is still possible.
55  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: A nice peice by CNBC on: December 21, 2014, 03:04:33 AM
Nice article and good to see, but I wish people wouldn't use wording like this: "a truly trustworthy form of money, one whose value was constrained not by the laws and weaknesses of man, but by the universal laws of mathematics"

I'd rather see a word like 'integrity' used. To non bitcoiner readers, 'value' is going to imply something to do with exchange value or purchase power, and as bitcoin is famously very, very volatile and apparently not 'backed' by anything, the first thing they will do is disagree. This undermines the rest of the article. To be fair he does go on to expand on what he really meant, but it still gives doubters a little something to laugh at.

Also, this is a guest article by a guy involved in BTC, not some regular journo (who make their money being a reactionary and ignorant bunch, more often than not) - we're not quite that far along yet  Tongue
56  Economy / Speculation / Re: Bitcoin Price Bull Market Has Begun! on: December 20, 2014, 04:41:44 AM
His EW labels are completely meaningless without any kind of broader context. Also I guess he was sleeping during the run-up to 450-475, plenty of 5-ups there...
57  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: What would people think if I created a Bitcoin jobs board of my own? on: December 18, 2014, 12:30:40 PM
Instant transmission of pay to freelancers all over the world is a very good use of bitcoin. I freelance, and I've often been frustrated by the impossibility of working across borders and getting paid the full amount.
58  Economy / Speculation / Re: Do you see what I see? on: December 17, 2014, 10:40:40 PM
now full leverage long at 316, we can't believe it hit our target so fast!


Holy crap! Fewcoins is going long?!  Inconceivable!

IIRC he/she/it has been long previously. Possibly only to add credibility to the persona, but tbh they weren't bad calls.
59  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: bitcoin mentioned in Horrible Bosses 2 movie on: December 15, 2014, 04:13:48 AM

For people interested in other instances, there was a whole episode or two with bitcoin as the main theme in the 'good wife' tv show. What was interesting was that it was done in 2009, very pre cool of them.

http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2148561/?ref_=m_ttep_ep_ep13

Just to clear this up, this ep is from 2012, 2009 is just when the show started  Tongue
60  Economy / Speculation / Re: What if Bitcoin just levels off? on: December 11, 2014, 05:41:40 AM
I wouldn't rule out bouncing around in a range.. That range would probably be measured in the hundreds of dollars wide, though.
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