Have you done a lot of volume through Purse? I probably spend 5-figures a year on Amazon and I've always been tempted by those discounts on Purse, but the fraud risk concerns me. I remember seeing this story and after that I decided not to try it.

Regarding how big I thought Bitcoin could get, I began as a skeptic. I remember thinking things like "niche currency" and "internet novelty" back in 2014. At that time, "tulip mania" seemed like a plausible comparison. Not anymore, though. I'm definitely more of a believer now.

I think fiat will eventually be replaced by a return to a fixed exchange rate system with commodities like gold and silver. After enough time, I could maybe see bitcoins being used along gold and silver in the same manner too.

However, I don't believe Bitcoin will "replace fiat" and I don't think government-issued currencies are going away. I think Bitcoin is just gradually joining the ranks of commodities historically seen as "money" and I also think fiat money systems will eventually be replaced.

I really hope other countries don't take the route of Japan, who can only be described as over-regulating. Japan is using its licensing scheme to force exchanges to de-list any cryptocurrencies it deems to be a threat. Several exchanges have de-listed privacy coins as a result:


I'd much prefer to see a more hands-off approach to regulation.

That would be satisfying in some ways, but it's a slippery slope. Who is supposed to have authority over that handle? Who will Twitter/Jack give it to if they do take action? Bitcoin isn't a corporate brand, so it's not a trademark issue. What terms are being broken?

I think people should just get over it. Satoshi didn't care that bitcoin.com was already taken when he started the project. I feel the same way here.

 

I'm sure some Bitcoin Cash supporters sold their bitcoins, and some newbies were mistakenly diverted away from Bitcoin. However, I think there were also lots of Bitcoin supporters who sold their bcash for bitcoins. It's hard to know in concrete terms how much these things affected price.

Compared to the activation of Segwit, though -- which basically launched the vertical stage of the 2017 bubble -- the effect of the fork was probably negligible.

They are competing in the sense that both are -- or could be -- used as store-of-value assets that hedge against currency failure or devaluation, failure of banking systems like bail-ins, etc. In that sense, they each occupy a certain "market share" of the store-of-value space.

Bitcoin proponents often take the position that since it has some superior characteristics -- predictable scarcity, portability, the ability to be transferred over a communications channel -- it will eat into gold's market share.

Not anymore, but it's still available in the Bitpay wallet. No premium, of course. It seems insane to pay an 8% premium for the privilege -- Bitrefill is crazy with their premiums. It used to be that we'd get a discount through Gyft or eGifter for using Bitcoin.

It's way too early to expect that. The market is not very liquid and with Amazon's volume, they risk not being able to easily settle to fiat currency without losses. I don't think a company of Amazon's size can just set up a Bitpay account, nor would they want to. Then there's the scalability aspect to consider.

I could see it years down the road if/when the markets are more liquid and Lightning is more ubiquitous and easy-to-use. Until then, you can buy Amazon gift cards with bitcoins. I buy them through the Bitpay wallet myself.

I imagine we won't. That also sounds incredibly tacky.



Between these two Bitcoin charities, that's around 7,000 euros in donations, compared to the more than 1 billion euros donated by prominent philanthropists. It sounds like enough donations have already been received to cover the restoration entirely. I imagine the Church, given its global network, could probably have covered the costs itself anyway.

Seems like Changpeng Zhao didn't give much in spite of his billionaire status and all the publicity he generated around his charity.

John McAfee, credible?

Like the way he does paid promotional tweets to pump altcoins? Or maybe you're referring to his plan to eat his dick on live television? Or the way he was suspected of a gruesome murder a few years ago and was found civilly liable for the man's death?

Sounds like a really credible dude. It's too bad the Craig Wright debacle shows these sorts of lies can go a lot further than one might expect.

He didn't post his source for the data, but I'm assuming that number doesn't account for change outputs.

If I send a 2 BTC output to make a 0.05 BTC payment, it shows on-chain as a 2 BTC transaction but that's a drastic overestimation of the actual economic activity taking place. The Venmo numbers aren't inflated in this manner.

It's still really impressive, but I think this is important to point out.

The SEC chairman has said virtually all ICOs he has seen fall under existing securities laws. He also said that under existing law, securities transactions paid in cryptocurrency entail the same AML/KYC requirements as cash payments:


So, if an ICO is making its offering available to US residents, they are definitely regulated by the SEC and other US agencies. Even if they prohibit US residents, other countries (or blocs like the EU) have AML/KYC regulations too.

I think the "wild west" days where everyone thought no laws applied to cryptocurrency are pretty much over.

That might work fine for cryptocurrencies and tokens, but what about fiat? Fiat exchanges are the most bogged down by concerns about AML/KYC, licensing and regulations. We can tokenize fiat to work with a DEX, but how do we get that fiat money into people's bank accounts?

The elephant in the room is whether they can maintain their current KYC process. They seem to be trying to do so by ramping up their blockchain analysis and selective KYC. I'm curious to see how much more common account freezes and forced KYC become for unverified users.


I have a feeling he's right.

These are not influential congressmen. I wouldn't get your hopes up.


You'd think so, but bipartisan bills get shot down all the time. My read of the bill is that it's too taxpayer-friendly and investor-friendly. I think it'll be fought hard on the issues of consumer protection and tax issues like the like-kind exchange provision and the $600 exemption on exchanges for goods and services.


It's not that absurd. In the US, the laws affecting cryptocurrency are pretty lax. As for security tokens, it's not clear to me why they should be exempt from securities laws if other securities aren't.

I'll laugh pretty hard if all the Bakkt hype leads to nothing. Didn't they raise like $200M in seed investment just a couple months ago? That's a lot of money to see evaporate into thin air.

So, what's the holdup? LedgerX got CFTC approval for custody and physically settled derivatives almost two years ago.

China is home to the largest mining gear manufacturers, mining pools and purportedly hash rate. Adverse actions from the Chinese government could have significant and sudden effects on the mining sector, which could cause panic in the market. I don't think this would be the end of the world, but I think it would shake up the market quite a bit.

In some cases, users obviously are paying higher than me when they'd rather wait longer.

The Copay wallet (and Bitcoin.com's which is based on it) is very problematic because it's a sleek wallet with easy UI for beginners -- lots of newbies use it. Users have no manual control over fees. If they choose to the lowest fee option -- which means they specifically don't need next-block confirmation and are willing to wait several hours -- they are paying up to 5x-15x what it actually costs to get in the next block. A couple examples:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7ngbng/how_to_avoid_fee_sending_btc_from_copay_wallet/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/89xx9d/copay_is_the_most_broken_bitcoin_wallet_137/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6fyxs9/copay_super_economy_confirmed_in_11_minutes_are/

Coming from Bitpay/Bitcoin.com, it feels like a continuing political attack. I think they've been deliberately charging users absurdly high fees, which has had an unfortunate spillover effect on the fee market. This is what newbies see when they choose the lowest fee option (4 hour estimated confirmation time) and are still being overcharged for next block confirmation:



I'm sure there are many users who are happy to pay more than they need to. But I can't imagine all users looking at earn.com's estimator and sending 160 satoshis/byte for the "fastest and cheapest transaction" when there's 1,400 transactions in my mempool down to 100 satoshis/byte want to overpay. They just don't know any better, and unfortunately the Copay wallet and earn.com have been highly recommended for years on social media and this forum.

I agree there's no real way to fix this and the OP's idea won't really work. But I'm willing to acknowledge that it's a shitty problem for the network in spite of my appreciation for the design of the fee market. Users will keep overpaying because of shite fee estimation and ignorance and now that fees are strongly trending up again, they'll start blaming the protocol and complaining more loudly about it like in 2016 and 2017. I sort of wonder if we're gearing up for another political attack.

Indeed. I've always hoped these wallets would lose users due to higher-than-normal fees -- Copay is one example, and they don't even offer Segwit to boot. But the reality is that they drastically inflate the entire fee market so everybody is forced to similarly overpay to get any reasonable guarantee of confirmation.

I do seriously resent these assholes who immediately jump up 10-20 satoshis/byte just because there's 2,000 transactions in their mempool. This type of deliberate overpayment really screws us all over and it's really rampant. It snowballs when there is any spike in demand for block space. People are cramming $100 bills into a coin slot. It's just a tough philosophical problem because people should be able to compete in the fee market. It just sucks that the tendency of many wallets -- and people who are manually setting fees and rounding up to the nearest 10 sat/byte -- is to drastically overpay to maximize chances of getting in the next block. When everyone is overpaying so much, we all have no choice but to do the same.

You bring up an interesting point, that's for sure. These users are hurting my interests, driving up my costs, and relaying their transactions only reinforces their bad behavior. Miners have financial incentive to reinforce this bad behavior, but what's my incentive as a user and node operator?

That post is really unclear and vague. The "end of 2008 / early 2009" bit looks like a coincidence. I'm guessing the reason the author made that speculation is because it was October 2008. He sounds like a crackpot who's just saying, "Something is about to happen!" Go pull up the guy's posts from 2006 and 2007. You'll probably find other similar conspiracy theories and baseless predictions.

Edit -- I guess it's a fake, anyway.