The problem is that the BTC economy is not self contained enough yet. Dollars are freely traded similar to bitcoins but for US citizens they are to some extent buffered from this because there is a strong circulation of currency that takes place without having to exchange. Same for £ etc. We don't have that yet.

You can't force people to stop using traditional exchanges. The model works and people will continue to buy and sell where they can get the best deal. The only thing that will cure this problem is more circulation of coins between people who never cash out - then the price will scale more smoothly with the number of users.

Just to clear this up, deflationary currency is worth more vs goods over time, that's the definition. 2014 has been an inflationary year for bitcoin. Increasing money supply does not in and of itself guarantee inflation, and neither does having a fixed supply guarantee deflation.

Spinning language technicalities the right way in order to serve your own self interest is a fine legal tradition and one that lawyers and governments are quite happy to take advantage of, honesty, common sense and the natural evolution of language be damned.
I say use this wording ambiguity to avoid disclosing your bitcoins as long as possible. The legal types can come up with a stricter definition of 'owning' bitcoins later on.

Luckily not really a thing to tip delivery guys in the UK (yeah yeah, some people do it but it's not mandatory).

Interesting point though, how're beggars and buskers going to get their tips in a bitcoin future?

I suppose a lot of people have been exposed to the word 'bitcoin' via news. But it takes repeated exposures to start regarding it as something that might be worth looking into.

I keep track of the fiat total I've invested directly on coins, always subtracting from that total when I sell coins, adding again when rebuying, and I think that's the number you're getting at but for the whole userbase, right?

It seems like an obvious thing to try. Let's see how Ecuador's thing pans out...

Circumventing parental control is precisely what makes it attractive to kids and teens IMO. With that said, fair point that it may not look good for the PR of our community to be seen actively promoting this.

Everyone who owns bitcoin is part of our bitcoin economy, which is what backs the value. So exactly the same as freely traded fiats. If markets want to crash a fiat currency, it can and does happen just like bitcoin.

Swap all the money in Scotland for bitcoins right now and you'd end up with early adopter geeks having more coins than the whole of Scotland. Which is ridiculous, so it will not happen.

As a teen I had an online savings account long before I had any cards for spending online. Using something like localbitcoins I could have bought BTC via transfer no problem or perhaps cash and there you go. I can say that bitcoin would have been very attractive to me at the time, for sure.

More or less this.

Always preferred Channel 4 news

That's retarded. Buying and holding would have the same effect on supply, only without the 'pissing money down the drain' effect for the buyers.

OK. On the subject of the sustainability of mining if there was no block reward, just transaction fees. Currently we have something like 10BTC/day in transaction fees, which is roughly 100k transaction/day if all the fees are just 0.0001 coins.

Visa apparently has 2k/second transactions, so say 5-10k across major card companies. If bitcoin were to have zero block reward, but capture that level of activity (let's assume current coin prices and transaction fees for simplicity) then we would have around 0.5-1.0 BTC per second released in transaction fees alone. I think it's pretty obvious without even doing the calculation that transaction fees in this scenario would be >>>>> block rewards. So it would seem to me that we could sustain a high level of mining activity on transaction fees alone, as long as we have high adoption.


I just saw SgtSpike's post which goes into the same thing with a lot of detail. What we don't know is how transaction fees will have to change with increased BTC adoption. Obviously they have to be decreased to smaller fractions of a coin to keep bitcoin cheaper to use than legacy payments.

You can't really persuade such people with online arguments, they are too unreceptive to new ideas.

Though that doesn't mean arguing is pointless; there is always a silent majority lurking and reading comments, and many among them are ready to hear both sides of the argument. I'm sure that's how a lot of us jumped off the fence and got into bitcoin.

As far as I recall that is an experimental quantum computer, and nothing to do with the star trek thing next to it. Might be wrong though, just vaguely remember it from some article.

Holding bitcoins gives one a means to store money digitally without recourse to the banking system.

Do you have a good solid reason why they should continue to exist? Do you think they'll perhaps adopt cryptocurrency innovations to stay ahead of the curve and survive ? Or do you reject the idea of bitcoin/alts overtaking fiat because it seems too radical.

The rising price of bitcoin is something satoshi very much intended to bootstrap this whole bitcoin thing as an economy in its own right. I can't think of another good way to get people to use a decentralised peer to peer currency, can you? Remember, 1:1 swapping of fiat for government-crypto would inevitably involve banks because people do not store their monetary assets as cash any more, thereby entirely missing the point of cutting out middle men. And so consumers wouldn't notice any difference. I'm afraid every important change involves suffering for some, even the internet and mobile phones  killed off some jobs at the same time as creating more and benefiting those who could adapt.