It is my understanding that bitcoin was not designed to solve the wealth distribution problem. It is designed to take governments and banks out of the monetary system. So with bitcoin, you would still have a "rich and poor division", just no one can move your bitcoin except you.
(Providing you are the sole owner of your keys)
This division is worse with bitcoin then it is with other measures of wealth. A very small percentage of bitcoin users hold a large percentage of the total bitcoin in circulation. This makes the price very sensitive to sales by these large holders. Bitcoin is a currency, not a welfare system. It is also a free market, those who are wealthy (in fiat) are free to buy as many bitcoin as they wish. You cannot forbid anyone from buying bitcoin just because they are wealthy, nor should bitcoin be free to those who are poor. (You can donate to them if you want to) The fact that wealthy people own bitcoin is not the point. The point is that there are a few large holders of bitcoin who could potentially disrupt the BTC/USD (among others) market as they hold such a large percentage of bitcoin. |
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Laws are one thing, enforcing them is another.
Just like piracy laws, I bet 0.000001% of the people downloading illegal things actually get jailed or have to pay a very large sum.
Seems like the little guy should be ok. You just want to make sure you don't draw attention to yourself or be the one or two big players on anything questionably legal. For instance you think the government is going to go after someone for not reporting like 5 BTC of mined income? How would they even know you mined it? Generally speaking this is true, however it is very well possible that law enforcement would want to be aggressive with prosecuting a smaller user for a number of reasons. They could want to send a message to others that they want everyone to follow the law, they could be trying to bring unrelated charges against the person, but can't find enough evidence, so they bring these charges, or it could be any number of other reasons. |
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This is a big threat to the bitcoin economy as people will be afraid to deal in bitcoin with others as they are afraid they are going to be scammed.
I'll sell you insurance against getting scammed. I just need to see your private keys so that I can inspect how much entropy was used in their generation....   (for those who can't figure it out, this is not serious) I think this is a problem. Although you were not serious, many people could very well think that this would be a legit request of selling insurance. As a result they would likely get scammed. There are two risks here; 1 - people who will attempt to scam newer users out of their coins and 2 - the advanced nature of bitcoin and the lack of education available to new users to help then secure their coins. |
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-snip-
Edit: I think the important part is that realcoin has full backing, which national currencies usually do not have.
Huh? So you think realcoin is fine because it's backed up by something that is not? I don't understand the logic in what you said..... I don't think realcoin is ok, I do not think it will be relevant in two years. There were some arguments thown back and forth. Compared to a currency like Singapore dollar, that tries to follow a bunch of other currencies in a band, it seems that realcoin in fact can be pegged exactly to the dollar, since it is fully backed. You could also say it is a dollar extension, a warehouse receipt for a dollar stored. So I think it is possible that it can follew the dollar in value closely. It may work. There is a lot of benefit having dollar version of crypto coin. If they can convince merchant to accept it, and make it easy and secure for smart phone users to buy, the potential is higher than bitcoin as most bitcoin users are hoarding it hoping for higher price rather than using it. How would the network be secured? Would it be done by a central authority or would it somehow be decentralized? |
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I typed "I invented bitcoin" and it gave me this pub address: 1GodKLaaQrNuFpHhNsf3os8DpziDz1ukDx Is it a coincidence or am I GOD?  You do realize that you have essentially compromised your brain wallet to the point that any coins transferred to that address would be likely stolen? I don't think he's going to actually use it. And even if he didn't tell us in this thread, it would still have been a pretty poor brainwallet that would have been compromised sooner or later anyway. You are probably right about it probably being compromised regardless if he posted on the thread, however, by posting on this thread, he all but guaranteed that it would be compromised. What would be the point of generating a brainwallet like this if he had no intention of ever using it? Umm... I don't think he ever intended to use it. He was probably just mucking around and putting random words in the passphrase field at Brainwallet.org and seeing if anything funny comes up. Some people make very interesting uses of their free time. I never imagined people making a brain wallet without the intention of using it or attempting to use it. |
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In reference to the OP, I would not be entirely surprised if the OPs father worked for Chase, or another Bitcoin "hostile" bank as even banks that are not friendly to bitcoin have a legit need to understand bitcoin and the bitcoin economy.
Thank God there is one person on this forum with half a brain... I guess the rest of us don't have a brain, just because we didn't nod along with OP's storytelling. Right? I mean, it's plausible and everything, but there's really no reason for us to eat it up with a spoon. And there's plenty of bagholders around trying to do anything they can to pump the price.  If it is plausible and you have nothing to refute the statement then why would you call BS? There's a difference between being "plausible" and being "likely", and obviously that's further yet from being "true". And what I said was, "there's really no reason for us to eat it up with a spoon." I'm saying don't be gullible and keep an open mind. Many people would use unsubstantiated rumors to confirm their own biases. It happens every day. But the OP really does not have anything/much to gain by people believing him, and you have nothing to gain by proving/saying he is full of BS. Yes he does. Have you ever been on finance forums? People try to pump and dump all the time. Yes, people are desperate enough to baselessly try to pump the price, and some people are gullible enough to let it cloud their judgment. Also, read what I said again, because you didn't seem to comprehend. I'm not here to "gain" anything....  Do you think that the OP really would have any kind of impact on a crypto currency that has a $8 billion market cap by posting on these forums? |
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The need for people to have to store, hide, protect and backup their private Bitcoin addresses sucks imo. That's one of the weaknesses of Bitcoin.
You have it backwards. The ability to be the sole individual responsible for securing and spending my money is one of the greatest strengths of Bitcoin! No middlemen or authorities required. Yes, this is biggest strength of Bitcoin, but only for tech-savvy. I just hope in few years there will be very secure and cheap hardware wallet, so everyone can safely use Bitcoin even on compromised computer. I think this will be next Bitcoin milestone. This is correct. If you are not tech-savvy enough then you will not be able to secure your coins and would need some middle man to effectively for you |
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It is my understanding that bitcoin was not designed to solve the wealth distribution problem. It is designed to take governments and banks out of the monetary system. So with bitcoin, you would still have a "rich and poor division", just no one can move your bitcoin except you.
(Providing you are the sole owner of your keys)
This division is worse with bitcoin then it is with other measures of wealth. A very small percentage of bitcoin users hold a large percentage of the total bitcoin in circulation. This makes the price very sensitive to sales by these large holders. |
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I have never even heard of MXCnow outside of this specific thread.
It is an exchange written in native language. And they are not accepting new customer. You get interests on your deposits : "25% of all mcxNOW exchange fees go towards paying interest on deposits every 6 hours! " It seems very risky This alone would likely not be risky as it would just be a tactic of the exchange to try to get more people to have coins on and trade on their exchange. IMO it does set a bad precedent of encouraging people to keep funds at an exchange. It also makes them a target to attackers as they know that the exchange has an elevated level of coins under it's control. 0.48%/6h for Bitcoin means 2%/day or 77%/month You probably have near to 0.48% chance of losing all your BTC every 6hours  I don't think that exchanges make quite that much money off of trading fees as a percentage of total balances. They might make that much off of each trade, but their entire customer balance does not turn over that quickly. |
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Just hold, best thing you can do, if you sell and LTC price is going back up again you'll be very unhappy.
LTC is a solid coin, great dev behind it.
They may have good dvs behind LTC, but it still doesn't add any real features that bitcoin does not already provide to users and bitcoin is many times more secure then LTC is. The feature LTC offers is a secure blockchain. BTC got a secure blockchain and LTC will have a seperate secure blockchain when the hashrate have increased sufficient. That is were the the value in LTC is and why the value will increase long term. Features can be buildt on a secure blockchains, but are worthless on insecure coins (every other). If they both have a secure blockchain then why would you want to deal with the blockchain that is less secure (LTC)? Not only that but bitcoin is much more widely adopted and followed by the press, so any merchant that accept bitcoin would essentially get free advertising while a merchant that accept LTC would not. |
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Well other things may have been happening in crypto around that time to cause a price drop, but it could be down to manipulation.
I think that a lot of people have it in their minds that a piece of news should have a massive, positive impact on the price whereas actually it can see the coins overbought and then dumped.
Look at when Litecoin landed on Huobi, people were talking of a $50 Litecoin, it hit $22 then tanked hard - it was overbought and whales dumped their coins on all the people rushing to buy thinking that it was going to make them filthy rich.
But I believe ltc has been oversold, and it has already reached the low at ~0.01 btc last week. Yup, it's surprising how much Litecoin has dropped over the past few months. There was a time not that long ago where 0.035 BTC was the supported rate for 1 LTC. Then it dropped to around 0.025, and now it has nose-dived massively. It was believed that Litecoin would follow Bitcoin, both up and down, but that has definitely not been the case of late. Bitcoin has been very strong - a lot of funds have moved from classic coins like PPC, NMC, LTC to newer coins like DRK and beyond. Daytrading is very risky, mostly when buying into rising prices. There are very few uses for LTC other then speculation. If people have no way to use LTC then they have no reason to purchase LTC. This is true only to an extent. This was true for bitcoin as well, at some point. I'm not going to speculate on how much infrastructure development we'll see in LTC, but for merchants and payment processors that are entering the bitcoin realm, LTC becomes quite accessible with little additional development needed. When bitcoin did not have any/only a few merchants accepting it for payment, it was not competing with anyone. Today with LTC having no/very few merchants accepting it for payment, it needs to compete with bitcoin which has a stronger network and is not missing any features that LTC has. |
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Maybe a better way to get people to be comfortable would be to make wallet security education more of an important topic. Today people simply have to figure it out on their own, but some don't even bother like the person in the above thread. |
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This is an important step to take if you truly want to be paranoid about your wallet. This would only prevent an attack if an attacker was able to get control over the domain, but not the dev's private PGP key, and the public PGP key is found somewhere outside of the domain. If a user finds the dev's public PGP key on the same website/domain that they are downloading the file from then the attacker could simply change the PGP key listed and sign a message saying that their (malicious) download is the most up to date and correct one.
Well, it seems that at some point you will need to trust someone or something. But to minimize the problem of replaced PGP keys, I would publish my public key in all my public profiles I have. I think a better way for most users would simply be to search the forums for reports of incorrect code being on a particular wallet. There will enviably be people that will check the PGP key and check the source code to make sure everything is "on the up and up" and if not will report it. This would be much simpler for the less technically inclined. |
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Leave BTC alone. It's already simple. .001BTC today is .629 dollars or 62.9 cents. A change in divisor is an endeavor to make it palatable to hoards who like and can deal in multiples and and shun percentages. But who would ever use BTC without finding out first what it's worth? The day BTC price becomes so stable that we don't need to think about that is a day I don't look forward to.  This is very well said. If you change the way that bitcoin is written then it will only confuse people that are just getting started in using bitcoin as they will have to figure out multiple ways of how much things cost. |
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You can join PD campaign in your current status (member status), you get 0.0004 per post for a maximum of 400 ones per month. They don't pay the highest but they are one of the most established campaigns.
actually they are, UpDown isn't paying I think.. After gone for a month, now they're closing their sig campaign. Payment is done for some members now so PrimeDice is the highest paying signature campaign? I think they and 777coin are the only remaining pay per post campaigns PD is not the highest paying campaign, they are actually one of the lower paying ones, but they are very reputable, which some people (myself included) would consider to be more valuable then a higher paying campaign. |
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I believe in Bitcoin but I wouldn't recommend taking out a loan for a mining rig rental. Unless you or your friend have done your due diligence and know how much risk you taking on before hand. Bitcoins difficulty is high and most likely won't be worth the time and effort if you don't know alot about what your getting into. Probably best to just buy and hold.
I think it would be more important to simply run the number to check if what you are doing makes sense financially assuming that no one you are dealing with turns out to be a scammer. |
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Craigslist really is a roll the dice, i've sold computers cars etc on there and you really have to be careful. I guess you have to be attuned to how the person is acting about the trade. I personally would never sell bitcoin on craigslist
I think selling bitcoin on craigslist would be a great way to get more people to use and adopt bitcoin. What I would be afraid of is selling large amounts (like thousands of dollars worth) as there would be a greater incentive for the buyer to try to rob me. |
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Why would we need Paypal to use Bitcoin as a funding instrument? Isn't one of the greatest things with Bitcoin that I can just send money to other wallets without having to go through an intermediary??
Yeah, but paypal is probably going to act like escrow and they also might have an api similar to bitpay. If paypal acts as an escrow service like they do now then it will probably be full of scammers the same way that paypal is full of scammers now What do you mean by "full of scammers"? If paypal is an escrow service, they will release the funds to whoever has more proof. But "more proof" simply means who ever is better at documenting the situation, not necessarily who is right. In general Paypal almost always sides with the buyer, this is why it is so dangerous to sell bitcoin with paypal. |
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Large investors already can invest in bitcoin via the second market bitcoin fund. I would argue that the main attraction for large investors is not having to manage a complex security setup to keep the bitcoin safe, but rather let the trust deal with that.
Is the Winklevii ETF open to investors who do not qualify for Second Market? Answered my own question, answer is yes Q: How can I buy shares of the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust?
A: Investors will be able to buy shares of the fund through their broker like any other stock or, mutual fund, or ETF.
This is (IMO) the most exciting part about COIN as it allows the average investor to be able to invest in bitcoin without having to go through all the hoops of buying via an exchange. |
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Why would this affect fungibility?
The OP is not talking about a central authority doing anything that would stop the Bitcoin economy from functioning as normal.
From what I am reading - he's just talking about a notification and monitoring system.
And you dont need blacklisted or marked coins to do it either. Just the blockchain.
The thief tries to cash out and the bank is notified that its stolen funds, simply by following the trail of public transactions on the blockchain.
Nothing more than passive monitoring and alerts.
The bank doesn't "freeze" the coins in some strange, abnormal way. They simply don't let the thief have them. The coins are still completely viable and would simply be held in an account and returned to the victim.
Im not seeing what is wrong with this idea, except for the risk of "mixers" and the like.
But a company providing this service will no doubt recover people's money quite often. There will be "smarter" thieves who can figure ways around it, but just like with everything else, a large portion of thefts are done by idiots.
The OP says that once the stolen coins are sent to a merchant/exchange they would be frozen. This would imply that this company would act as a central authority (or simply act as an authority) that would freeze "stolen" coins Obviously what I meant is that once is clear the victim is really the victim (if that makes any sense) the bitcoins would be returned to the victim. But even if the victim really had their coins stolen it would not necessarily mean that the person who sent the coins to the exchange is the thief |
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