Cannae wait.

Almost all options in 2017 were goddamn terrible unless you got out in time. I would not call any of them great.

It'll be interesting to see what is latched on to if there's another mania phase. ICOs are thankfully dead with stake hammered up their sphincter just to be sure. It may even be Bitcoin itself but that's a crazy notion.

It's been 5.5 years for me and what a long and strange journey it's been.

 In that time I have regrown my virginity, become morbidly obese and started to go bald.

O how I miss that young tight-bunned idealist. My only comfort as the darkness closes in is to pass on my knowledge before I'm discovered dead in my assisted living apartment and they have to get one of them specialist toxic cleaning teams in because my corpse has melted into the floorboards.

The only card that appears to operate in Asia at present is uquid but maybe that's old info and you're likely to get walloped with FX charges as they're usually USD, GBP and EUR only.

And they won't accept Bangladeshis so keep that under your hat.

If you forget about crypto and just look for sepa and a card there must be plenty more options bit I've no idea what they'd be.

That's 10 a day. You can pull that off just fine while running a life elsewhere. Many will have long commutes, lunch hours, nothing to do in their conventional job, or be insomniacs. And it all depends on how interested you are. If you're forcing yourself to come up with that content you could waste hours staring at a blank screen. If you're fully engaged in a subject the responses will flow.



I do find this attitude weird and interesting. The inference from some posters is that it somehow smacks of low morals to be paying for your existence through here rather than screwing the tops on salt shakers in a factory somewhere. It sounds like a great idea to me if you can keep it working for you.

Same goes for the hours you keep. I usually go to bed between 4-6am and wake up 10-12 ish. If you mention to people that you're tired because you woke up at 9am they go fucking ballistic. When you wheel out your white board and point out in exceptionally large numbers that 6am to 9am is a scant 3 hours they still think you're a bone idle piece of shit even though they were in bed at 10 and woke up 8-9 hours later.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

I'm confident most people who piled in only had one thing on their mind and it was dollars, not decentralisation. Since the creators of almost all coins were only doing it for dollars too then there's a certain collective honesty there, albeit an unspoken one.

I can see no mention of the fact that many a coin cannot be deposited or withdrawn from exchanges where the price is radically different.

The 'best price' is usually fleeting in the extreme and if a price remains noticeably cheaper or more expensive than other markets for any length of time that doesn't mean it's a bargain or an opportunity, that means there's something wrong with that exchange.

No one leaves free money on the table. If arbitrage is possible the price difference is flattened near instantly.

The thing to me that emits most strongly from everything Satoshi got up to is self discipline. The time and thought to create it, boot strapping it from nothing, keeping it chugging and then vanishing at just the right moment. That's many years of intense and sustained effort.

I can't believe someone that on point would ever have revealed themselves to anyone else. He could get what he needed from others while staying completely anon. Even if it was a group there was still no need for any of them to know who each of the others were, let alone write a wee memoir a few years down the line.

Nothing and no one who's come along since has a whiff of that at all which is why I don't buy any of them. And as time passes the incentive to stay disappeared grows ever more powerful. It has not slacked off. It is white hot and getting hotter.

You go and do the after dinner speeches when no one give a shit any more, not when the whole world is ready to jump at you.

I thought it read like a tweenie's discarded slash fiction myself.

I wouldn't really call it hype as such. It's news that informs Bitcoin users that their utility just increased a little bit. Growing merchant adoption is a pretty rare thing these days. Compare it to 2014 where it seemed like your cat would be accepting it before the year was out.

My guess is that Mr. Mcafee's reveal hinted at this week will be Satoshi as himself and then he'll tell us that you're Satoshi too and then we'll feel all warm inside and that.

Why he would have a clue who he is is beyond me. By 2009 he was well into his jungle freak phase and before that it was yoga and microlights for many years. And if he did have the vaguest hint why did he not pile in in 2009/10/11/12/13 and more? By the time he arrived Satoshi was long gone and no one else has ever claimed to know. I can't see anyone cheerfully telling him over a line of drain cleaner a few years down the road.



I don't know or care what the endgame is but there's no evidence of this trust either.

Money aside, I think one of the biggest impacts will be property titles.

When you're a porky first worlder it's easy to forget that in many parts of the world there's no straightforward and incorruptible way of establishing ownership over anything. That traps people in poverty or leaves them vulnerable to the corrupt or dishonest with no hope of any comebacks. If something is anchored to BTC all of that goes away in a puff of immutability.

You can still be a bent prick, but your lies will instantly be proven to be lies without any possibility of doubt.

Anyone married to a price before it happens with no plan if it doesn't is a bit of a silly sausage in my book. Plan for eventualities by all means, but that eventuality not happening is an eventuality in itself.

Anyway I think we should get this year over and done with before declaring any price projection for the downward part of this cycle dead and gone.

Everyone knows that almost all regular established businesses who take BTC will only be using it as a payment rail for USD. You'd have to be very dim to think it was any other way. You can pay for their services with Bitcoin and that's the bit that interests people. The back end can whistle for it.

Huge or dead. There's nothing in the middle.

I'll be impressed if anything other than BTC is still alive. And BTC itself may bear little resemblance to its current form.

And I think 'blockchain' will be doing things we never expected it to and be nowhere near what people are touting it for now. It's still a solution looking for a problem in most cases and it's going to take some finding.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-18/bitcoin-going-mainstream-might-hinge-on-new-york-crypto-license

This article certainly points towards licensing being the prime hold up and after all this time it seems pretty weird that only now are they looking into finding alternatives.

If they're starting from scratch they could be looking at a long arse process.

I wonder what the average banlieue resident feels about it, let alone French countryside dweller who'd rather see the whole of Paris carpet bombed. At least it looks like it's posing money rather than government money that's going to pay for it.

If the British equivalent burnt down I wouldn't give the slightest shit and would not be impressed if tax money was poured into it while our grannies are on the streets sucking off truck drivers for food.

Give us names then.

Wagecan don't offer cards any more that I can find, though they may still service existing cards. They also cost about $200 to buy and took one week to load with funds. That's not my idea of a good time.

For a decent length of time Wavecrest cards served most of the world's population but I guess newcomers won't be familiar with them since they're dead and gone. There was Wagecan too who didn't seem to give a shit where you are, but they seem to have gone quiet.

Revolut have definitely done something because people keep mentioning them here no matter how many times they're told it's not very crypto ish at all. Ah well. If they wish to waste their time who am I to stop them?

If I were in a developing nation you can bet your bippy I'd be maximising the opportunities this forum made available to me. That's a superb demonstration of the power of this whole system in a nutshell. Some day if you added it all up it may have lifted a considerable number of people out of poverty and a dead end.

This place doesn't care if you're being hand relieved in Monte Carlo or living inside a putrid cow floating in the Ganges. The playing field is level and neutral and that's how more of the world should be.

If you were in any way financially precarious you'd have to be a mad person to depend on it as the means to stay alive. If you're already comfortable enough it's a fine way to spend a little time.