If Bitcoin is to be a reasonably fungible form of currency (i.e. its price in fiat is easily discoverable and it can be converted easily to and from fiat without much loss in fees or slippage), then making bitcoins and making fiat should take approximately the same amount of effort for a person possessing a given set of skills.

If you spend 30 hours a month posting for a signature campaign and make $100 worth of BTC ($3.33/hour), but can make the same amount in fiat working for just 2 hours setting up a SQL database for a website ($50/hour), then you'd be better off just doing SQL administration and buying BTC with your earnings. The point is that it is always better to find work that pays you the most for your skill whether in fiat or BTC. Focusing on tasks that pays directly in BTC is seldom worthwhile, except perhaps if you are offering illegal services and cannot accept traditional forms of payment.

Not saying that it won't go down to 900, but now we are back at 960 and the right-shoulder is starting to look awfully dislocated. I don't think it was even a clear head and shoulders to begin with.

Only if you want to take your profits in 2016 and pay taxes on those by April 15 2017.

I know this is bitcointalk.org but please try to note the difference.

Buffet:



Buffett:

Well the same could be argued about a parcel of land that your family has owned for generations. They might have bought it for $500 a hundred years ago but now it could be valued at $1 million. Zero investment has gone in and it has not grown in size. However, it does not make it a Ponzi.
 
Meanwhile the same acreage in some desolate par of the world is worth pretty much 0 and has not gone up in value at all.

Short term trading is literally a zero sum game. For every winner there is a loser. Oh, and trading is not investing.

QueryPerformanceCounter() in Windows just returns a high-resolution timestamp with microsecond precision.

Therefore nCounter is computed identically under Linux and Windows. Correction, it is not the same for Linux and Windows. The baseline is not the same (the zero value of the timestamps refers to different points in time). Therefore even though the computation is conceptually similar the seeds returned by Windows or Linux would be different for a given point in time. You need to figure out which OS Satoshi was using.

I am not sure which is worse:

1) people running their nodes on AWS (https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/), Azure (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/)
2) people running their nodes on Comcast, Optimum, FIOS

Both are geographically decentralized but under the centralized control of a few companies. Considering that each home internet connection in a particular region from a particular home ISP all connect to the internet backbone at the same choke point, there is probably no difference in decentralization between all FIOS home nodes in NYC vs. all AWS nodes in US East.

I tend to think that 2) would have more restrictive ToS than 1) as far as running servers is concerned.

It is fine to discuss rewarding nodes, but I doubt an agreeable solution can be found. PoS is definitely out of the question (I remember the OP suggesting that Bitcoin be converted to PoS a couple of years ago).

Here is one example. A lot of international interbank transfers occur on the SWIFT network. Banks need a BIC code to participate and connect to the network. It costs money for any bank to maintain a BIC, plus there is a per-message charge to send a transmission on the network. In this example a cross-border wire transfer requires an MT103 message: https://www2.swift.com/uhbonline/books/public/en_uk/al_2_1_autoc_inst_user_guide_20110520/b83.htm

The MT103 message is basically a formatted text file that is sent from the sending bank's computer to the recipient bank's computer. The cost for sending each MT103 is easily 100-1000x the cost of a typical Bitcoin transaction fee. The justification for such high fees is supposedly to guarantee message integrity and network security. Although SWIFT is backed by a consortium of banks, individual banks actually hate the monopoly that SWIFT currently has and would welcome an alternative option that they can use to send transaction messages amongst themselves (safely and securely) without paying SWIFT. This is why there is blockhain research happening on the sly.

This is just one example.

No, but I lost about 2 BTC from my localbitcoins wallet when I accidentally entered my password into a phishing site that went something like localbitcions.com. I just got a new phone and had 2FA turned off and was actually logging back in to turn it back on against the Google Authenticator on my new phone. My stupid new phone autocompleted the URL to the phishing site and almost instantly I lost the 2BTC that I had in the wallet because I was about to sell them.

You ought to know by now ... the price goes up (and down) in short spurts. Most of the big price movements happen in just a few days of the year. The rest of the time the price just drifts or goes up and down in a boring trading range.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583286.0

I don't think the 250 BTC belonging to the forum that was lost when paraipan passed away was ever added to this list.

I think I've asked this before. How do you port-forward port 8333 to your node on public WiFi. Almost all public WiFi give you a NATted private IP address and I doubt they open AND forward port 8333. Most likely you are not running a full node and you only have 8 outgoing connections and 0 incoming.

To answer the OP, I doubt mobile devices will every be the primary type of node that supports the network. Although it currently is possible to run a full node on a 4G mobile device, it is neither practical nor cost effective. Currently from a cost perspective it is bad enough to run a server-based full-node. Why would anyone run it on a mobile? In future if blockchain resource consumption does not increase as fast as technological improvements then maybe we will see more mobile full nodes. But then again, I'd expect there to be far more PC or server full nodes.

I miss those days. Around that period I helped my friend double about $2,000 through a short term investment in Bitcoin. I forgot the exact number of coins involved but it was somewhere between 250-300 coins bought and sold on Mt. Gox. Today instead of being happy that I helped her turn $2K to $4K, she keeps reminding me what a bad decision it was to sell too early for only a 100% profit.

To keep OT, I still have more that 1 bitcoin and have always had more that 1 bitcoin since 2010.

Do you see many institutional investors buying Bitcoins at this time? No? Well then on your chart we are before the Institutional Investor phase.

A payment chip in your right hand or forehead is not the mark of the Anti-Christ if the currency behind it is optional and not something that you are forced to use. Since when did any government or anybody tried to force you to use Bitcoin?

Haha! Thanks for resurrecting this thread and reminding me of how lucky I was back in 2012 when I avoided the Bitcoinica hack just by pure luck (I had withdrawn all my coins on a whim).  

I hope Zhoutong is doing well, zhoutonging all those he comes into contact with in life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdvTkddp1F0

Seriously speaking though, do you really think that it makes sense for every 7-cent transaction to be seen by everyone and propagated to every node in the world? When building a scalable system you don't just scale up in one direction - you also need to consider partitioning the data, and moving low-value transactions off chain makes perfect sense. When those 7-cent transactions add up to $7 or $70 then they can be consolidated and moved on-chain. The assumption here is that off-chain transaction costs are much cheaper (sub-cent)  and much quicker, though likely less secure.

I think your setup is pretty secure as far as protecting the privacy of your transactions from random blockchain analysis and network scanning.

I would start paying attention as to how you buy your bitcoins and how you spend them. Even if you use paxful or localbitcoins you could give your identity away depending on how the transaction was done. The seller may not know how you spend the coins, but they will know you as a buyer/user and may be able to associate your real name with the amount of coins you bought. Is that ok with you?

The same could be said about real estate. A certain sized house in a particular neighborhood may be going for $500K, but in reality only a small number of houses are on the market at any one time. There is no way everybody in the neighborhood can sell their houses for that price all at the same time.


As long as you have a fair amount of liquidity in the markets it could be argued that the price you get will be "fair market value". Today fair market value is approximately $790. Tomorrow it may be $1000 or $10. If you are getting approximately the same price as all the other guys who are buying or selling at the same time, then you are getting fair market value.