[Market capitalization, by itself, is NOT a measurement of the value of entity]

I have probably said this at least a hundred times and since these days people keep repeating bitcoin share of market cap I though to make this topic, finally!

Market capitalization (market cap) is the market value at a point in time of the shares outstanding of a publicly traded company, being equal to the share price at that point of time times the number of shares outstanding.
in cryptocurrency world the "shares" are the number of available coins". and to put simply market cap is calculated by a very simple multiplication of "available coins and price.

Market capitalization, by itself, is NOT a measurement of the value of entity

A company set up to run a business will usually have money (and perhaps other assets) put into it by the shareholders in return for an allotment of shares.
a cryptocurrency however can have as many "shares" or "number of available coins" as it wants. because to put simply, it is code and you can put any number you want as the block reward, the initial block reward, the premine, and a whole lot of other methods! and you don't have to worry about taxation and other legal matters than a company faces when they issue a share.

here is how Market capitalization is a bad factor of comparison. (to those who said bitcoin has X% of market cap now):
I can start a new coin today and set the maximum number of coins to a big number, premine the coin to hold a large portion of it myself, add some "interesting features", advertise the coin by spending some money and release it.
lets say I pump the coin to 50K satoshi (it is easily done every day in the altcoin market) in which case I only need about 32 billion coins available to surpass bitcoin's market cap.
now lets assume I have a lot of money and am a good and experienced pumper and can actually pump my coin up to 0.01BTC in which case I would only need 1.6 billion coins to surpass bitcoin's market cap. and so on.

now is my coin really worth more than bitcoin? (see the example in this comment)

it is worth adding that currently there are 2 coins with 180 and 100 billion "supply" with 2 digits satoshi price. and a total of 12 coins with above billion available supply prices ranging from a couple of satoshis to 21K satoshi and they get pumped so price can go much higher.


finally with altcoin supply two things happen:
1) these available coins are really available to everyone and if it is not well thought and is really big it will crash the price.
as an example I can name Dogecoin. in this case the massive sell pressure (big supply versus a small demand) will crash the price and will always keep it down.

2) these available coins aren't really available. here is where all the manipulations come in. methods like pre-mining the altcoin, things like ICO and so many other ways of taking control of the supply so that the real (available) supply is far less than lists such as https://coinmarketcap.com show.
as an example I can name ethereum with its (apparently) no max limit coin which currently has 90 million coins available. but is it all really available?

what do you think of Blackcoin and its current pump? is it another one of its 400%-500% rises or is it a small short term rise?
https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-BLK

Blackcoin has been one of those small coins that is always silently being pumped and its price being very cheap (5000 satoshi at the moment) makes the pump so much easier and also the profit so much bigger.
as you may know pumping a low price coin (specially when it doesn't have a lot of sell resistance) is so much easier than pumping a big coin with a high price.

for example going from 0.00005000BTC up to 0.00020000BTC which is a 300% rise is so easy.
but going from 0.05BTC to 0.2BTC which is the same 300% rise is never easy and it takes a lot of hype, lies and pumps and manipulations to get there.

looking at BLK charts I say we can see another one of these:
the previous pumps:



and the charts right now (the volume has already gone up 10x):

["why would I pay $0.9-$1 fee for using a new thing called bitcoin that I don't even understand instead of using my credit card for free that I have been using my whole life."]

after 3 years of introducing bitcoin to other people and getting at least 100 of them into bitcoin I have stopped.

because all these years I have never told anyone bitcoin is an investment, whenever there is talk of bitcoin I first say bitcoin is a currency and show them the benefits of it as a currency, being decentralized as the best thing and then the security and speed and finally the cheap fees and lots more.
then I introduce them to services they can use with bitcoin, and all the discounts they can get.

but honestly I can no longer give any answer to the question saying "why would I pay $0.9-$1 fee for using a new thing called bitcoin that I don't even understand instead of using my credit card for free that I have been using my whole life."

of course I can always start arguing about lots of other things and benefits and start talking about bitcoin being an investment but deep down I agree with them and also I hate telling new people "bitcoin is an investment and you are gonna make profit from price rise", that is just silly.

edit: to those who say credit cards do have fee: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1801459.msg17959102#msg17959102

Edit2: I closed this topic since it has turned into a non-constructive spam-fest of people repeating rather similar things and ignoring most of what I said. sorry everyone else.

[21 million]

being one in a million is one of those interesting topics in bitcoin if you ask me. we all know that there will only be 21 million maximum bitcoins available (ignoring the number of coins lost).

so if you have 21 bitcoins you can be one in a million.

now we all know there are 7.5 billion people in the whole world and there is a very limited supply of bitcoin available.

The following is the cost of being 1 in a million throughout the past years.
* bubbles are ignored and price is average

Year	|	21BTC cost
2008-2010	|	Practically free!
2010	|	$3.7
2011	|	$84
2012	|	$188
2013	|	$2,200
2014	|	$9,030
2015	|	$5,670
2016	|	$12,117
2017	|	$21,210 Today's price (2017-2)

when you look at things like that, they seem pretty ridiculous that once you could be 1 in a million with only 3 bucks but today you have to pay 21 grand to be 1 in a million

The 6 months updates:

Date	|	21BTC cost
2017-6	|	$50,400
2018-1	|	$294,000
2018-6	|	$157,500
2019-1	|	$???

Each time there is a FUD around here and generally whenever it is time for dips it is the best opportunity that anyone can hope for.
you are either a long term hodler who can buy in these dips and enjoy the continuous upward movement (the green arrow) or you can be a short term trader who sells on top and buys back in the dips with even more money at hand having accumulated more bitcoin in the end.



have been doing this since early 2015

Electrum just made its first SegWit transaction (P2PKH nested in P2SH) (Link)

https://testnet.smartbit.com.au/tx/c21d7b8ae6078a269b1d0a6f203f74e129a65e0109544e0820ef1b7f4a42a976

p.s. if you were curious, this is TestNet not the main bitcoin network.

I just got a stupid email for a phishing attempt and thought I should share it here and warn!

it was claiming to be from paypal and said $50 was sent from my account and I should click on the link provided to confirm a charge back.

the stupid parts are these:
- it contained a shortened URL, with t.co !
- the email address was not even similar to paypal.com it was something like information.somthing.com!!
- the shortened URL lead to paypal[dot]com[dot]customer-summary-limited[dot]com/signin/ as you can see the domain name is customer-summary-limited[dot]com and it has a sub with paypal in it trying to fool others!

p.s. you can always open short URLs with an online tool, just google open short URL (I used http://checkshorturl.com/)
p.p.s. my antivirus warned me that this URL is phishing I love Eset
p.p.p.s. I reported that email to yahoo as phishing, and you should always do this too, it helps with the filtering of these type of Emails.

Google trends for the past year: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%2012-m&q=Bitcoin
and past 3 months: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=Bitcoin
both show a big rise in interest in bitcoin and surprisingly the top leading regions are from Africa (Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa)

With IRS coming down on Coinbase and asking them for their customers history, and now Circle changing their service and (apparently) no longer offering any buy or sell services for bitcoin, and also all other restrictions that US has and will keep on implementing on anything money related; don't you think it is time to see a new service based on another country?

maybe a Coinbase like service located in Switzerland would be nice in my opinion.

I am looking for any altcoin(s) that is on the verge of growing (getting pumped) so that I can invest the profit of previous weeks in it.
and please add your reason too.

I am looking for a coin
1. with potential of profit
2. with large enough volume
3. which is not currently at the top of a price peek.

thanks in advance 

I see that there is  lot of changes in the altcoin exchanger called bittrex they have changed the design, charts ,...

but what had me concerned is that they have added trading against fiat (btc-usd) and also I saw a section in the settings tab where it asks for more personal information like ID and ... the question mark on top on the said page leads to nowhere either.

I can't find anything in their news or any other links about these changes or even an announcement. so anybody has any information of their change? an announcement thread here might work too.

hello my fellow bitcoin gamblers! 
I want to do some gambling with my bitcoins and I am looking for some place to do this, so I wanted to know what is everyone's favorite gambling place where they go to have some fun gambling?

hello, i am new to this and want to choose a wallet, what do you suggest?