Spinning off this topic a little bit, I am willing to guess about 80% of people who work do not work 100% of the time....What else do you guys do at work that is probably frowned upon? I notice my manager looking at weather sites a lot....
It is not expected to be productive 100% of the time. If you were not allowed to take any breaks then you will be less productive throughout the day |
|
|
|
Definitely Bitcoin. The problem with gold is that it is manipulated and suppressed by the "powers that be". They have no such control over Bitcoin.
Who manipulates the price of gold? Wouldn't it take nothing more then money in order to control the price of any market. The larger the market the more money it would take to manipulate. |
|
|
|
as far as i know argentina has some sort of a dollar cult there. nobody wants peso but dollar is like forbidden fruit for average mortals. though dollar black market is thriving there. i believe that unlike in cyprus where those loosing most money being well informed investors driving the price up, in argentina situation might be different as btc is now having much larger market cap and amount of people getting into it will be limited to a small number of wealthy people who already hold dollar. if there to be foreign btc traders on the ground, would they buy pesos?
to me the situation looks like fed is desperate to have some usd demand not minding collapsing a country or two in the process.
their currency is very volatile and their citizens do not like to use it as they don't know how much their money will buy from day to day |
|
|
|
The profit of the exchanges is easily calculated by their daily volume, and as every exchange take only a little part of every trade as fee, you can deduct that from the whole volume. Regards ANXPROThat is the MINIMUM revenue (profit is revenue minus expenses, harder to guess). Bitcoin exchanges can profit in many other ways, that are illegal for stock exchanges. The Chinese exchanges have zero trading fees, but seem to be very profitable. This would be the higher end of the revenue potential for most exchanges. Most major exchanges do not charge fees above cost for "bank" related fees. What makes you say that chinese exchanges are profitable? Couldn't they simply be well funded? |
|
|
|
The inconvenience would only be something that would happen one time. If a customer were to use this merchant multiple times then they could receive this discount multiple times when dealing with the inconvenience only one time.
Exchanges do not generally charge that much in exchange fees. A $7 fee for a $360 purchase would be something that localbitcoins might charge, but you would not have to deal with the inconvenience. BTC-e for example only charges 0.2% trading fee for example.
But the customer still has to transfer all the dollars of the multiple purchases to the exchange (or BitPay, Coinbase, etc.) in order to buy the bitcoins. So the route dollars-->bitcoins-->merchandise cannot incur in less fees than dollars-->merchandise. Besides, the BTC price is still not rising, and may as well fall. At this time, buying bitcoin is not a sensible medium-term investment. That includes buying a bunch of bitcoin now in order to make multiple purchases over the next weeks or months. At this time, paying with bitcoin only makes sense if one already has bitcoins that were mined or bought for investment, and has decided to sell them. If the merchant actually accepts bitcoin, the route bitcoin-->merchandise would incur in less fees than bitcoin-->dollars-->merchandise. However, most bitcoin payment processors like Bitpay actually do the latter, so the dollar transmission fees must be paid by someone sometime. The customer could simply go through the KYC of getting verified for instant buys of BTC on coinbase (hassle but no money). The customer could then buy exact amount of BTC needed, send BTC to merchant (less the discount) receive the merchandise. The price of BTC may rise or fall as it is nothing more then speculation to say it will go in a specific direction over a certain time period. |
|
|
|
Casinos easily track their patrons and how much they are up/down
They do? And isn't there a hostload of illegal joints, bookies and dealers where there are no receipts and/or control? How about: I took all the money out in cash, because I'd rather gamble it away than let that bitch get it, then I went to Las Vegas, and I lost some 10K at Casino Royale (provable), then I went for a drink in a bar, where I met a gentleman who invited me to a private high stakes texas holdem party, and I got really drunk and lost the whole lot. How could it be proved that the cash still exists? Would the judge rule that the man has to pay half of what he had prior to the trip? What would the difference be in reality whether a business slowly drained money away or if you lost it all in a moment of foolishness? The end reality would be that it was all lost permanently. Perhaps the phrase 'I'd rather gamble it away than give it to the ex-wife' wouldn't go well with the court, but I can think of a number of other scenarios where a man could "reduce" his net worth without the money being lost forever. I would think such cases could be really hard to investigate. Don't you need very hard proof the money still exists? You can make up any story/scenario but in order for it to be accepted the Judge would need to accept it. A business slowly draining the money away is much more audit-able then one foolish mistake. It is also something that would be caused by a bad economy/market (something out of his control) as opposed to one foolish mistake is caused by poor judgment. Unless he had made one very good investment it is likely that he has a substantial amount of income that would generate and grow his wealth to get it to be where it was before it was "gambled away" so he could simply have more of his earning taken (or possibly garnished) if his assets were to "be lost in a bad bet" |
|
|
|
...
ShakyhandsBTCer
Not too hard to exchange your BTC for my cash... PM me if interested. NOT huge quantities. Not a cop nor a crook.
It's really hard for me to find BTC for cash, hardly anyone I know has any at all. And I want to be off the grid buying BTC.
I am not saying that I am having trouble laundering my BTC personally. My point was that for a money launder it is difficult to exchange BTC for fiat. NOT huge quantities. This is my point exactly as money launders usually need to move "large" amounts of money. |
|
|
|
Peter Todd has made an interesting statement in the comments of this coindesk's article. What Dark Wallet actually implements is to have two classes of users, those who need a transaction done immediately, and those who are mixing coins. The latter group simply copies the output amounts of the former group, providing a set of two outputs in every CoinJoin transaction whose ownership is unknown. SharedCoin does the same thing, but with blockchain.info acting as that coin mixing group. I may be wrong but it seems likely that bc.i uses a same pool of coins over and over for the sharedcoin txs. It's not impossible that, with some efforts, someone could identify which txos in the transaction graph are concerned (i.e. belong to bc.i), decreasing a bit more the level of privacy offered. To be effective and avoid this kind of privacy leak, coinjoin should use a large pool of mixing coins (the 2nd group of users in Peter's comment) and avoid reusing the same mixing coins over and over (with a frequency which allows to identify them). Btw, it's likely that decentralized solutions like darkwallet are the easiest way to achieve this goal if they have enough traction and can maintain a large mixing pool. The more times your output is the same address the easier it would become to trace your coins. |
|
|
|
It doesn't matter if the honest nodes don't want to accept anything from the attacker.
The attacker has enough hashrate to change the rules. How is the attacker (a miner and node(s)) going to force me to change the software (node) on my computer so he can modify the rules of the protocol? Easy, he can't. Seriously, either I didn't get what a 51% ownership of the network is, or you still don't understand the dangers of it.
Don't know which.
Maybe someone more knowledgeable on the subject can elaborate.......
Have you read the wiki which gives a very simple explanation of what an attacker with a lot of hash power can and can not do?Have you? Please stop arguing when you dont understand crap. Having a longest chain doesnt mean they can change the rules. The rules are set by nodes. In the event of 51%, there will be a folk of blockchains. The network can react by completely ignore blocks from the attacker (updating client required). This is a complete hard fork. Hence we only see this as disruptive attack. Its still a damage to bitcoin. Now, since GHash is a pool, the second they do this attack, its clients will move their hashrate else where and GHash will have nothing but shot themself in the foot. The practicality of this attack is close to nil. There is better way of hurting btc for far less the cost. CoiledCoin used merged mining similar to Namecoin. LukeJr was able to use Eligius' combined hashing power to execute a 51% attack against the new CoiledCoin blockchain. The Eligius-mined blocks contained no transactions, effectively slowing the function of the Coiledcoin network to a crawl. The same could be done with Bitcoin. I don't really think Ghash.IO has any intent to do anything but profit from being the largest pool any more than I thought Tycho intended to harm Bitcoin when Deepbit was the front runner. The possibility exists that a government or other entity that wants to harm Bitcoin does not need to invest a fortune in equipment to do damage. They can simply use your equipment to do it. PoW is a flaw that needs to be corrected before Bitcoin exits beta and becomes production software. Many would say Bitcoin is no longer in beta because the market cap says so. If that's true then this problem needs to be solved now before anyone loses any more money to this experiment. You're missing a key point is that Eligius Bitcoin miners dont mine or care for scamcoins about anything but profit hence Luke Ghash can effectively disrupt the network for a long time (he becomes a single largest miner in the Bitcoin that scamcoin's network). Another point is the remaining miners scamcoin's participants are not robust enough to effectively ignore Ghash.IO Eligius. Everyone is in it for pump and dump including many Bitcoiners ( get rich quick scheme) FIFY If ghash were to launch this kind of attack then the value of bitcoin would decrease, leading ghash miners to have an incentive to leave the pool making it difficult to sustain such an attack. |
|
|
|
I'm not sure if market cap is the only relevant factor for price stability. I think equally or even more important is the main use of bitcoin.
I'd argue that the more bitcoin is used for transactions the less volatile it will be. If bitcoin is primarily seen as a commodity it will have higher volatility than if it's primarily used as a transactional currency. With market capitalization in the trillions and primarily commodity properties it will have gold-like volatility which is still substantial but would not impede usability either.
This is 100% correct. It is not so much market cap that affects stability but total transaction volume, both measured by goods/services to bitcoin and by exchange volume. Once TX volume picks up (from TX of actual trades involving goods/services) then the price of bitcoin should stabilize. |
|
|
|
|
Have you tried this?
AFAIK this would not be something that any exchanges allow
|
|
|
|
I would love to be able to spend my bitcoins on facebook ads. Promotion is always needed for growth of my business.
The potential for bitcoin is not spending ad dollars in bitcoin to facebook but rather allowing users of facebook to give money to their friends (maybe for paying them back for dinner or a short term loan between friends) People can pay each other bitcoins without facebook. The benefits is ad money and allowing users to spend bitcoins in the facebook games. Facebook could provide a very convent way to do this. You may borrow .02 BTC from your friend for dinner but not see them again for several weeks. |
|
|
|
online currency bitcoin can basically be used for various transactions. For example, for legal transactions such as wordpress.com, Galatic virgin airways, republikhost.com, and various social donations like to wikileaks.
On the other hand, the digital currency can be used for the benefit of a greater portion of illegal internationally. Illegal acts that include money laundering, gambling, drugs, and even protitusi.
But it is possible if in the U.S. ensued with bitcoin money laundering. If there are politicians who commit this crime, the police will be very difficult to handle. Unless, if they cooperate with or exchanher bitcoin users who understand the concept of bitcoin
I don't think that it is nearly as easy for politicians in the US to hide money as you seem to think it is. Their finances are fairly public and moving large amounts in and out of bitcoin exchanges isn't going to help them evade the public eye as much you think. If you mean that they could take corruption payments directly in bitcoin, then yes, I see what you mean there. That does make it easier for them. But even so they still have to cash it out somehow, or buy things with the bitcoin. Or they could hold bitcoin if they felt that it was a sound investment. All and all, it's not much different than cash. A corrupt politician could accept a briefcase full of cash and have the same problems washing it as he would with washing the bitcoins he would receive instead. Also, using bitcoins requires a little bit of technical familiarity and a lot of the US politicians are well known for being technically inept. The biggest challenge of laundering money with bitcoin is moving it into and out of fiat. It is very easy to have bitcoin that you control not be associated with previous transactions but is much more difficult to exchange it for fiat without raising any kind of red flag |
|
|
|
|
This would be expected with moderate inflation levels
|
|
|
|
For long term, gold.
You can see and touch gold. And it can exists as a stand alone item without dependency on technology. It has proven itself to be money for longer than 1000 years.
As for bitcoin, you can't touch and see bitcoin. It can not exists without the blockchain and internet. It hasn't proven itself to be money for more than 2-3 years.
Gold will likely have somewhat of a store of value over the long term. The issue with gold is that is it expensive to store and keep safe. The cost to store gold goes up as the amount of gold that you have goes up. With bitcoin the additional cost to store and keep safe one additional bitcoin is zero as you could simply transfer that one bitcoin to an address whose private key is safe. This is a very good point about costs of storage. It should be noted that gold is also much more difficult/expensive to move and as a result is not quite as fungible as gold stored in remote places would be worth less then gold stored near a financial center |
|
|
|
So while backing a currency with bitcoin (which is pointless in itself as you may as well just use bitcoin) might seem like a good idea it will never happen.
There would be plenty of reasons why a country would want to have it's currency backed by bitcoin 1 - Bitcoin is highly technical and a country's population may not understand how to properly keep their wallet safe. By having a currency that can be held people can understand how to protect it in the same way that they understand how to protect cash 2 - If a country does not have the infrastructure in place to support that level of connectedness to the internet. If a country used bitcoin as a currency then anyone wishing to spend their money must have access to the internet any where that a transaction is to take place. Even in modernized countries there are places without internet access that have transactions take place. 3 - Countries would need to rely on ISPs much too heavily for their economy. If access to the internet is disrupted then their country's economy would come to a standstill as no transactions could take place. 4 - Per capita income/assets may not be high enough for every citizen to be able to afford a smartphone that would be required to spend money with bitcoin. |
|
|
|
|
It would likely increase in price as it did when crypress had it's banking crisis last year.
A financial crisis by definition put the financial stability of banks into question. When banks ability to pay depositors is questioned then people will have an incentive to look elsewhere to hold their money. Bitcoin is a likely answer to this
|
|
|
|
Nothing drives the price up quite like demand of use. If some website, say Amazon, says they'll take a crypto. The price will rise. It's not because the coins are more rare, but because they are being accepted. Any of us can take our coins, sell at an exchange for fiat, move fiat to bank account, and then buy the item from Amazon - but it's a lot easier to just use the coin as intended.
This is correct but the question is how to get more people to use bitcoin. If more people use bitcoin then more merchants will want to accept bitcoin for payment. If more merchants accept bitcoin for payment (and potentially offer discounts based on it's lower cost) then more people will start to use bitcoin. This is a issue of what comes first, the chicken or the egg |
|
|
|
I was a software engineer at a company about 20 years ago that had a piece of code in the EPROM that would make a multi-million dollar industrial machine fail on a certain date. I often went out on field calls to simply update these EPROMs with a new "fail date". I wasn't allowed to tell the customer what I was really doing. Horrible boss too.
this is an example of the value of open source technology. I would think that this would violate the contract with the purchaser of the software/hardware |
|
|
|
A robot bartender will cost lot more than a human one. Makes no economic sense
It depends. Robots you pay for once. Humans you pay for continuously. Once you buy the robot then it doesn't get tired, it doesn't ask for a salary or sleep. If you use a robot for one year it will likely be more expensive then one years salary for a bartender. You will still need to pay for things like repairs and electricity for the robot. If you are paying the bartender only $2.13 per hour then these expenses would potentially exceed what you would pay the bartender. A robot will also not be able to effectively upsell and encourage additional sales the same ways that a human can. Have you ever seen a robot steal office supplies? Have you ever seen a robot take a smoke break without clocking out? Have you ever seen a robot watch youtube cat videos on the boss' dime. Man reigns supreme! Even with these inefficiencies the cost of tipped service labor is likely to be less then that of the electric and maintenance costs of a robot. Tipped labor has an incentive to attempt to sell the most product as their pay is linked directly to their sales as well as the level of service they provide. Tipped labor also has incentives not to be inefficient as in your examples as their level of service would decrease. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
