If you're only doing this to transfer and then end up back in the coin you didn't want to pay the fees on you really need to do your sums and add up the cost for the complete process. If it's between exchanges trading fees and price differences can easily eat any saving in the cost of the fee and are likely to end up costing you more.

But we are seeing a different class of buyer and user rising - corporate and institutional types. They will care a great deal about the origins of what they'll buy as they'll be like frightened fawns entering a dark forest. There'll be enough people ready to take them under their wing. Whether a premium develops for that is the question.


If you purchase your way to the right stamp of approval it is. I'd like to know how they do figure out how certain gold is 'evil' considering it's an inert lump that's infinitely changeable.

I'd leave the elderly in blissful ignorance myself. If they started talking about putting their pension into it I'd start to get a bit antsy. Even if I managed to deliver a coherent explanation no way would I want them dealing with it. I've seen what they're like with TV remotes and that's painful enough.

Because it's so old you're going to need some old school help. You should close this thread and open a new one in the wallet software section which is here - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=37.0

There will be people there with experience of it along at some point.

The sole reason there hasn't been sustained high fees is because there hasn't been sustained high demand. We're getting spikes now and some day soon they may be there for weeks or months on end.

Segwit and batching certainly helps. It also certainly hasn't solved it. We may see fees even higher than last time.

There's still a hard upper limit of daily transactions and it's not all that many. The only way around it is to cough up more.

This is the most striking quote to me from there - 'Given the finite pool, such a material grab of bitcoin could only be accomplished by 978 companies before the supply technically “runs out”, though in practice a large chunk of extant supply is not even for sale.'

A company that hardly anyone has heard of has that much with what is effectively chump change in global terms. There's a whole lot of headroom to go, but that headroom is going to be met by an ever more dramatic squeeze in availability.

I hope people who own it right now manage to wrap their heads around the scale involved here. I see every day that they can't. If they don't recalibrate their perception someone will buy their BTC off them who does and benefit a whole lot more.

Not too sure myself.

There'll be a cascade of demand that keeps working its way downwards as top alts become 'too expensive' as well. They'll keep uncovering vaguely alive coins and pumping them too. Last time around even stuff that didn't technically exist or had functioning chains still pumped.

You'd expect the risible junk to die off but there may be enough fresh and desperate meat to keep even the most insulting and obscure ticking away in dark corners.

Segwit seems pretty healthy.

LNs are nowhere near smooth or developed or explained enough to tempt most existing Bitcoin users. All the talk of channels, watchtowers, routing. That's going to cause many an eye to glaze over.

I'll guess Bitcoin has three main reasons to move - to and from exchanges, buying the occasional thing, going to another wallet. Hardly any exchanges are offering it, there is a bit of LN merchant adoption but merchant adoption for Bitcoin in any form is not exactly booming, and your wallet is a final destination so lightning networking into it makes no sense as you'd still have another transaction to go.

So far I haven't seen anything that convinces me LNs will become the de facto second layer.

There are different types of Bitcoin adoption. Those bemoaning the dearth of merchant adoption should know how reluctant people who already hold it are to spend it. And then when you have a world which is largely ignorant about Bitcoin at all it's no surprise it's not exactly a booming area. It's possible it will remain a relative niche even if BTC becomes a fixture worldwide for other reasons like saving. Why would you want spend it if you have depreciating alternatives?

Bitcoin's core developers won't give a shit about this. They have more important things to ponder. Gmaxwell celebrated the moment fees approached the block reward briefly in 2017, more for the sign of future sustainability than rinsing faucet users I presume.

Nothing I've seen about LNs has indicated that it's anything other than an interesting experiment, but most of us are completely unused to watching open source development happening in real time. When we arrived at Bitcoin all the hard work had already been done. LNs may get there eventually.

I presume it would fall under the same remit as a cheque bouncing or cancelling the cheque before it clears. You're obtaining by deception and knowingly buying things with money you don't have. Conventional law isn't going to be very impressed with that. No matter what you're paying with you're exchanging value and intentionally withholding your value.

https://www.coindesk.com/bitmex-to-mandate-identity-verification-for-all-traders-amid-evolving-industry-regulations

Bitmex is bringing it in for everyone at the end of the month anyway so even if this hadn't popped up you would've been hit with it.

I don't know about Bitmex's feelings, but other exchanges have been rejecting coins mixed through Wasabi. Unlike other mixers they are completely identifiable as mixed. It won't necessarily be that you got 'hot' coins, it may well be that they know they're mixed and they want you to demonstrate they're not 'hot'. They have no way of knowing.

It already is a socialist country - for rich people and corporations. The savage capitalism is reserved for the little people.

They're not going to spread that socialism further down the food chain but let's see what happens in the aftermath of the virus. I can believe a lot of things that were previously unimaginable may become imaginable and it'll be done to preserve the hegemony of the rich.

That was my presumption, but that's the first time I've seen Bitstamp mentioned. Even then it might be straight from Bitstamp into a custody provider and that'll be that but that article also has talk of wallets and buying and selling.

We'll see soon enough. If it is a proper set up it'll be interesting to see how competent and rounded it is. And uptight of course.

That would be a more significant development than being just another place to buy and sell. Payment processing really hasn't moved very far and there are no recognisable names involved. It's doubtful whether it would encourage more actual usage at present but it does reduce a fair bit of friction for the future.

And, whisper it, it may take a fair bit of business off chain. Whether that's for the best is another matter.

A lot of the weirdest and most interesting stuff by far happens in the altcoin section. It's wading through the noise and hysteria that makes it an unbearable experience. That's one section that could really use a Reddit-style thread upvoting system to find the good content.

But if you're committed to ranking up your account you need to limit the energy you put into it. It's a shame there isn't more possibility of reward in there for the good posts.

The big one is whether you can deposit or withdraw the real deal. The more obvious route is for you to have an entry on their database called 'bitcoin' and not much more. That clears up a lot of head aches for them and maybe what most of their customers would actually prefer. Revolut do this and eToro started off doing it too.

Any service that people are already familiar with is going to bring in more people than a service they have to find and learn about. It would be a shame if they didn't offer a full choice of possibilities for users to grow with.

Of course. You've done it the long and hard way. Most others got a bit of a shortcut and gave each other a leg up too.

If I were intent on growing my merit score - and I'm not, the only meaningful figure to me was 1000 earned - there are places I wouldn't bother devoting my energy to like the altcoin sections. There are areas where it definitely flows more than others.

Am I right in saying Fiverr only accepted payment from buyers in Bitcoin but never paid out the workers with it? That's what I seem to remember and it struck me as a pretty stupid set up but I suppose it is more complication to pay out that accept.

They could've gotten a shit ton more people willing to debase themselves judging by the drudgery people are willing to put up with for a BTC payment.

This is definitely a factor for some accounts with vast amounts of merit. There are lots of subcultures on here and some of them are made up of nothing but accounts that were senior before the merit system arrived.

Many never step outside their groups so you have people who started off with large amounts of merits they were airdropped batting that merit back and forth between each other. A lot of the stuff they merit each other for is in jokes or one liners, or simply agreeing with the point of view that's fashionable among them, that would never be merited outside that club.