Yep.  And that explains why volatility isn't completely acceptable - if you put a lot of money in something, you're going to have to sell it eventually, and the price might be down dramatically then even if you think it'll go up in the next 5 years.

Still, in my country the health services are in the public sector, and we have safety nets in some cases.  If you're wealthy though and you pay for things often it's always a huge problem.  People ignore that the end goal of this isn't money, it's enjoyment - you're not just saving until you're 100 years old and your back hurts too much to go paragliding.

I doubt it, in 2009 you couldn't even sell Bitcoin for any meaningful value (hence the story about the guy who bought a pizza with 10,000 Bitcoin), so the network was basically held up by people running mining software on their computer.

A significant amount of the revenue would have been saved then, and I'm sure that major miners like Jihan Wu are speculators as well - I doubt he dumps all his Bitcoin as soon as he gets it.

This chart is just revenues though, it's not an indicator or profit.  Electricity costs will take off a huge amount of the profit, as well as hardware buying and maintenance.

Coinbase has fees these days, I think even Xapo has started static fees on payments to external wallets.

Since the fees are set by the network not by your wallet, I would either stick with Blockchain or move offline.  Blockchain has had bugs and hacking problems in the past, Coinbase is in trouble with the IRS, Xapo's customer support doesn't respond to anyone - online wallet providers are never ideal. 

I would argue that Blockchain is the closest to a decent online wallet there is, but you still don't technically own the Bitcoin and these services are never completely reliable, so it doesn't matter what fees you have, either stay on Blockchain if you need convenience or move offline if you care about your security.

Isn't that just more of a reason that people don't want to spend Bitcoin?

When it's as deflationary as it is now, everyone just wants to hoard it and not spend it.  That basically just makes it a stable asset/investment and not a currency.

By the time that Bitcoin stabilises, it won't be used for spending either because the lowered block reward will result in transaction fees rising to cover mining costs.  I don't think people need to spend Bitcoin for coffee though - it was always going to be impractical.

I've put in 0.08 Bitcoin.

Transaction ID: 32cd007b5ff1692406d3063486e283225228f1a24b1bbca5fb37f2792896fb19

You're right, it's none really.

Sure, Japan sort of recognise its existence but that doesn't mean you can casually use it like you do fiat currency or that most stores accept it (which they don't).

But that's irrelevant, it's legal pretty much everywhere and is "accepted" in the sense that if people accept it, you can spend it.  Bitcoin will only grow from its user base, not from acceptance from governments.  Actually, I would argue that Bitcoin will never be fully accepted by governments because it's not closely monitored like digital fiat currency is.

I've never been scammed, just because I'm very wary with all transactions (although I appreciate that that isn't always enough).

It sounds weird, but while you're more likely to get scammed with Bitcoin, you're so much better off if you are that it doesn't matter.  With fiat, if you get scammed the chances are the scammer has your personal information, possibly even your credit card details, and who knows what they're going to do with that.  With Bitcoin, if you get scammed, it's just:  your money's gone.  That's a shame.  Time to make some more.

Solar power for mining isn't always a good idea, it can takes several years to ROI and even more if you live in an area with cheap power.  It's really expensive to install.

Still, OGNasty runs a solar power mining project called NastyMining, you can check it out on the thread.

It probably is easier to move your miners to Iceland.  That's not the sort of thing you're going to get much help doing though.

I guess they can't handle paying the higher fees on the network right now.

No online wallet provider should cover the fees for you, it's completely open to abuse and it's an oversimplification of the network.  At least now people will question what they actually do for you except make it look nice.

Maybe this'll convince some people to move their savings into a safer wallet.

They are legit but you shouldn't use them for the following reasons:

-Very easy for people to scam you, even if they have ID.  A huge amount of money lent is lost.

-Interest is 13% a year.  That sounds good at first but the loans are denominated in USD, and Bitcoin has grown by 50% in the past year so you'd be losing out dramatically.

Despite your claims that Satoshi practically expected Bitcoin to be a power vacuum and give way to altcoins, I think Satoshi actually aimed for Bitcoin to grow gradually and scale accordingly.

Based on his forum posts from just before he left, he was annoyed at WikiLeaks for adding Bitcoin as payment as he didn't want to draw too much attention to Bitcoin since it still needs to mature and become better.

In fact, one of his last posts was:


Other members on the forum generally agreed with this sentiment.  Check the thread.

I don't think you understand just how many altcoins there are.  There are literally thousands of completely terrible altcoins being created all the time which are just rip offs of Bitcoin or rip offs of another specific alt.  All of them think they're better than they are, many of them die very quickly, many of them scam everyone and take the money, many of them get pumped and dumped before they die.  You'd be surprised how much money goes into those from naive investors thinking they'll get rich.  Poloniex only lists at least slightly legit coins, they don't list every little coin but still the majority of the coins on there get pumped and dumped a lot, and it's very hard for you to profit from those or predict when they're going to happen.

Coins like Ethereum and Monero are different because they have actual purposes - Ethereum is more of an investment system as I understand it (but I don't understand it very well and a lot of people just treat it as another cryptocurrency) while Monero has much stronger anonymity than Bitcoin and is used a lot of the dark web.  Some of these coins have started crashing already though - DASH was crap from the beginning, it was clearly a pump with the sudden rise to about $100 and it's already fell to about $60.  With this kind of coin that isn't very good but is marketed well enough to be popular, you just need to get in early and sell as soon as the price flattens out a bit.  With some coins, you'll have to sell while the price is going up, and ignore the potential that it'll go higher because it's just too risky.

Tips:

-You need to research the coin and how they distinguish themselves from other cryptocurrencies (and why that'll bring them more investors).  Don't take meaningless explanations claiming that it has instant, anonymous transactions, and don't take explanations if you don't fully understand them.  You should also ideally research the developers' history and anything you can find out about them so that you know it's not a scam (to be fair, not a lot of altcoins with any significant marketcap are scams which aren't obvious).

-You need to find the altcoin's subreddit.  Reddit is huge on altcoins and the altcoin should have a subreddit where they're likely to post information often.  You should also find the altcoin's ANN thread - all good altcoins have ANN threads on Bitcointalk, often before they're even released, so that should help you to get in early to a good coin, but don't jump on the first coin that appears.  Wait for peer review and feedback from other forum members (is it premined?  Is it a copy of another coin?) and you can use that information to help you make your own decisions later on.

-Don't hold all of your money in an exchange, keep some of it in an offline wallet called a software wallet (research that yourself), because Bitcoin related exchanges are pretty notorious after what happened with Mt. Gox.

-Don't jump on altcoins that are rising if you don't understand the graphs.  Trust me, you'll fail.  I've tried it.

-If you want simplicity, you don't have to trade your altcoin with Bitcoin.  You can trade it with USD Tether (USDT) which is a cryptocurrency permanently tied to the value of a US dollar.  This way, it'll be clearer how the altcoin charts are moving because it'll be against something more stable.

If you find a legitimate coin's ANN thread, it might be an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) which will let you put money into the coin and end up getting coins when the coin is created.  This is getting in really early, and if you find a good coin, it could be profitable.  Be aware of ICO scams, which happen regularly.


Sorry for the wall of text.

I wouldn't call a significant amount of people paid shills, discussion has descended into a state in which everyone calls everyone else a paid shill with no evidence and without actually thinking about it.

Jihan Wu is a complete ass though, and he's clearly blocking SegWit on Litecoin (Bitcoin too, since without him SegWit would be leading dramatically).

The price barely even got to $800, it really is surprising just how strong the floor is for Bitcoin even with all the huge altcoin pumps that were going on then.  The lesson is not to get caught up in things before you really understand the market and the economics of it.  People should be really conservative with putting their money in super risky things like altcoins even if they're not holding a lot (DASH?  Come on, people shouldn't have fell for that.  Price is down all the way to $61 now).

Most people won't choose either of those options.  There are many reputable exchanges (well, who knows, they could Gox everyone someday but as reputable as they could get) which would do the transfer and make it a lot easier.  You don't have to go through a long process with debit cards to withdraw Bitcoin into fiat.

Actually for small trades which I do now my preferred way of doing it is not to withdraw for fiat at all, but to put it into USD Tether on Poloniex and withdraw that to a Tether wallet, so that I have a fairly stable currency without having to go through the complicated process of switching between Bitcoin and fiat.  You also don't have to confirm your ID this way.

You can also exchange P2P instead of using an exchanging service - through LocalBitcoins is a great way, especially if you need to stay anonymous and you want to properly take your money out of Bitcoin instead of just doing a short-term trade.

My theory is that Bitcoin's user base will not grow significantly, but its price will rise because of the amount of money that each new investor puts into it.

Bitcoin will be much more of a stable asset.  A fee market is required in order to preserve at least some level of decentralisation in mining, and that'll result in people flocking to several different altcoins which are more scalable.  However, everyone that wants their money to be more secure will hold a significant amount in Bitcoin and use it for large transactions as well as HODLing, which people are starting to do already.  The fees will only grow due to halvings and that'll increase Bitcoin's use as a stable asset as people buy into cryptocurrencies which are better for everyday transactions.

If Bitcoin were to become used like gold (which is very likely, especially considering that gold is quite hard for an average person to hold on their own), its price could come close to 500,000 just from that.  Gold's marketcap is about 7 trillion, and dividing that by a 21 million total supply will get you 333,333.  Market cap is very misleading though because much less than that would actually be in circulation, so in reality the price would be much closer to 500,000.  It's possible, but it'll take time.

Jihan's motives for blocking Litecoin SegWit are extremely strong.  If Litecoin's SegWit went through, all of his power would start crumbling in front of his eyes from the amount of miners that actually support SegWit - clearly a huge amount of BU's hashrate on Bitcoin is just Jihan Wu. So what's to stop him manipulating Litecoin, with a much lower total hashrate, so that it doesn't put pressure on him to give up with BU on Bitcoin?  Why wouldn't he do that?

All Jihan needs to do is control just enough mining power to stop Litecoin from going over the 75% threshold, and he can make a tidy profit in the process.  Why do you think Litecoin's SegWit has been hovering around 70% for ages?

Bitcoin Wiki claims that "If you mow your neighbour's lawn, it doesn't matter if he pays you $20 in cash or $20 in Bitcoin".

However, I don't think the government is likely to care.  Thousands of people exchange Bitcoin for goods or services - I've paid Steam before with Bitcoin - doesn't mean that the government actually cares or needs you to declare it in tax.  That kind of everyday tax I probably wouldn't even declare in fiat, let alone Bitcoin which governments barely regulate.

I would also say that since Bitcoin is usually regarded as an asset/investment by most governments rather than a currency, you shouldn't really need to tax it.  That's not to guarantee that it's 100% legal, but I don't think it's going to matter at any point.

If you want to minimise your taxes legally, I would definitely declare the transaction if it was a significant amount of Bitcoin.  I wouldn't bother if it was, for example, depositing a little bit of Bitcoin to buy Skyrim, though.

This forum is trusted because it was founded by Satoshi, the creator of Bitcoin, and he posted here regularly for over a year.  This is where the Bitcoin community formed, basically.  All other forums can offer is a nicer design.

There isn't any censorship here, the mods are extremely lenient and you can even start self-moderated topics which you manage yourself.  You can't have a completely open forum, but all discussion is free, it's just doing extremely malicious or stupid things which aren't allowed.

The Antminer does take up a lot of electricity, but compared to the amount of revenue it creates the electricity usage is very low.  GPU miners will be worthless at best and lose money at worst because their hashrate and their efficiency is so much lower than the Antminer that there's no point having them.

You should take this to the altcoin mining section.  Maybe they can help you, since there are a lot of altcoins which you can mine profitably with GPUs (some very profitably).

From HODLers and general users, the HF wouldn't be that high consensus.  Miners supporting it doesn't necessarily represent Bitcoin in general, and you'd end up with a continued debate about scaling and potentially a lot of Core supporters holding on to BTC and selling the BTU.  Unless I'm understanding the fork wrong, everyone would have an equal number of BTC and BTU which could be sold/bought at will, right?

Uncertainty like that is never good for a market.