Wow. That message reeks of scam. They are unable to send you your money and they want you to deposit bitcoins, and quickly?

I would convert the money they owe you and buy bitcoins and get out of there quickly if you can.

Well, if you consider a two month delay as "right before", I suppose the halving did occur "right before" the rise in February to $260.

Either way, the rise to $1100 didn't start until October, nearly a year later. The price was down or flat for the 6 months before that bubble started.

You might consider Nathaniel Poppers explanation that the presentations to Silicon Valley venture capitalists by Wences Cesares convinced a few to buy a bunch in February, triggering the bubble that popped in April.

Getting 1 bitcoin is only a little more difficult than getting $290. For some, that is difficult, and for others it is not.

A person in the U.S. with a minimum wage job earns enough to buy a bitcoin every week, though a person with a minimum wage job should probably be investing their money in skill development, rather than bitcoin.

It depends on where you are and who you serve.

To be legal in the U.S. or to serve U.S. customers, you must comply with U.S. federal regulations and typically the regulations of the states that you serve. You can read more about legal issues in the Legal forum: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=74.0

Think about it. Nobody is going to give everyone on the internet something worth £180 for free. If you want to obtain bitcoins, it will cost you something of value -- money, effort, or time.

The most efficient and effective way to obtain bitcoins is to do something productive and get paid for it. If you aren't paid directly in bitcoins, then buy them.

Faucets are a waste of time.

The wallet
When someone sends you bitcoins, then send to an address in your wallet. Only the wallet knows the private keys of the addresses it holds, so if you want to send those bitcoins, you must send from that wallet. Note that a wallet doesn't hold bitcoins, it controls bitcoins at the addresses it holds.

Moving a private key between wallets
It is possible to export a private key from one wallet (using dumpprivkey, in your case) and import it into another wallet, but there are very few times you would want to do that. Keep in mind that both wallets now manage the address associated with that private key now.

Moving bitcoins between wallets
It is not clear what you mean by "withdraw the funds", so some explanation might help. If you want to spend the bitcoins, then as stated above, you must send the bitcoins from the wallet that controls them. If you want to use a different wallet, such as an online wallet or wallet provider, then simply send the bitcoins from your bitcoin core wallet to an address in your new wallet or account first.

I feel it is not a good store of value because it has little to no utility, other than as a medium of exchange. Its value currently depends on the whims of the people that use it and could evaporate at any time. Anyway, "store of value" is not well-defined so I expect many different opinions.

The volatility makes it a poor unit of account.

The problem with wide ditribution is that you are giving it mostly to people that don't want it or that think it has no value.

Bitcoin is not a great store of value (5) and it's a terrible unit of account (2). I would give Bitcoin a score of 8.0. I expect it to improve in the future.

That is like asking if tides are good for the ocean.

A recession is not good or bad for an economy -- it is a natural part of an economy. A recession is a result of poor investment during a boom.

It does nothing for me. What it does for the U.S. government is it allows them to track every dollar.

In order to allow fractions of a dollar, you would need to track every penny. I don't know what kind of effort it would take to track 400,000,000,000,000 electronic pennies, but it probably wouldn't be easy or cheap.

I wouldn't be surprised if the number of bitcoins held by Coinbase, Circle, Xapo, and other wallet providers, as well as the exchanges, already exceeds the total number held by individuals.

A "supply shock" is a sudden shift in the supply curve. Technically, tere is a supply shock every ten minutes when 25 bitcoins are added to the money supply. You could also say there is a daily supply shock relating to the addition of 3600 BTC. It depends on the time scale.

The halving is not a supply shock. It is a reduction in the severity of the ongoing supply shocks.

I agree, but there is no way to measure that.

Furthermore, supply and demand are not numbers. They are curves. The price is at the intersection of the curves. The reduction of mined bitcoins will shift the supply curve, but without knowing what the curves look like, there is no way to determine what effect that shift will have.

There are different ways of estimating the effect of the change in supply.

If you assume that demand is constant over time (which is not realistic, of course), then a good estimate of the effect of inflation is simply to reduce the price by about the amount of the inflation. So, in this case at the time of the halving, the price would change from dropping by 8% per year to dropping by 4% per year.

Another way is to look at the change in volume over the entire exchange volume. This comparison itself overestimates the effect because people exchange bitcoins for other things of value, not just currency.

People are also treating the halving as a supply shock, when it isn't. While rate of increase in the money supply changes suddenly from 3600 BTC per day to 1800 BTC per day, the relative change in the money supply itself is quite small.

Because you wrote that the higher number of transactions would win. Anyway, if you assume that all the blocks are full then that criteria is not important.


Having two nodes would double my chances, and double my income. Also, the odds are not 1 in 2²⁵⁶-1 because you wrote that the lowest hash wins. If there are 3 miners, then 1 of the three always wins -- the odds are 1/3 (unless I have two nodes, in which case my odds are 2/3).

People bought bitcoins at $1000 each a while back -- how could they sell them for less? Yet, they do. People frequently lose money on investments, selling them for less than they cost.

A smart miner whose operating costs are greater than the value of the mined coins will simply stop mining so they don't have to sell at a loss.

If you go to http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/, you can see daily exchange volumes for most exchanges. The total today is about 100k BTC, but it doesn't include all exchanges.

People that store bitcoins at a bank or other third party don't have an address. They have an account.



Yes, FRB will cause severe downward pressure on the value of a bitcoin, countering its rise in value from mass adoption. This is why the value will never be millions of dollars, as some people fantasize.




Bank runs and default are the major flaws in FRB, but that doesn't mean that it won't be implemented. Banks will lessen the risk by pooling their deposits in order to insure each other.

When the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the U.S. was on the gold standard and dollars couldn't be created out of thin air. A Bitcoin Federal Reserve would be created to perform the same function as the original Fed, holding deposits to back up its member banks.



Banks will pay interest on deposits. Savers will decide that earning interest is worth the risk.

Here is the simplified explanation by example:

Person A deposits 1.000 BTC in bank A. Total bitcoins: 1.000
Bank A loans 0.900 BTC to person B who deposits it in bank B. Total bitcoins: 1.900 BTC
Bank B loans 0.810 BTC to person C who deposits it in bank C. Total bitcoins: 2.710 BTC
Bank C loans 0.729 BTC to person D who deposits it in bank D. Total bitcoins: 3.439 BTC
Bank D loans 0.656 BTC to person E who deposits it in bank E.  Total bitcoins: 4.095 BTC
...

Fractional reserve banking is likely to become a part of the bitcoin economy, but perhaps to a lesser degree than the dollar.