There's no value in knowing the identity of Satoshi. Only bad things can come of it -- pressure from governments, threats on his life, etc. Bitcoin is much better off without some figurehead like Ethereum has with Vitalik Buterin. Having no founder/leader removes one possible attack vector.

I'm also an advocate for privacy. He/they should just be left alone.

I'm not sure Bitcoin was ever intended to compete with Visa. It wasn't just designed as a payment system, but rather money, which is a far more impressive feat. I think this post by Satoshi really gets to the heart of his vision.

Also, in theory, Bitcoin could compete with Visa. Lightning or some other off-chain mechanism that allows for exponential scale will be required, though. I recall reading that Satoshi actually included payment channels in the original Bitcoin client, but they were removed because they were insecure.


It's scarcity of the currency supply (the 21 million coin limit) that does that, not scarcity of transaction volume.

The New York Attorney General recently reported that self-trading by Coinbase comprised around 20% of total volume. For Bitflyer, it was 10%. That's pretty drastic if true and would indicate that it's not just a problem for Chinese exchanges.

As a matter of fact, OKEx operates from Hong Kong and doesn't service CNY, so there may not be much the Chinese government can do.

They're physically backed by bitcoins. Bitcoin is held by a custodian, and then receipts are issued by Citigroup against the BTC held in custody. The receipts are then sold to investors. In a lot of ways, these receipts are similar to physically backed ETF shares.


They can't go around existing regulatory concerns. These receipts are negotiable securities. This scheme requires a rubber stamp from the SEC just like an ETF does.

Not me. I'm an anarchist in the historical sense, so I'm an anti-capitalist. I'm influenced most by market anarchists like Benjamin Tucker. Unfortunately, this usually means I disagree with everyone in the room, since most people see things as a spectrum of Capitalism<-->Marxism. Anarchism doesn't exist on that spectrum, since it opposes all hierarchical relationships.


I completely agree. For me, it mostly boils down to property ownership -- hence my handle. It's funny to me when people argue that those from the monied, property-owning classes -- who idly collect rent, profit and interest from the poor, and don't labor -- are "hard-working." Then we're told the people slaving away for shit wages out of desperation are lazy because they don't have money.


I'm ambivalent about UBI. It would provide relief to the poor and add some sense of sustainability to a system I'd prefer to see eradicated. It requires enforced taxation and centralized redistribution, which I oppose. I prefer mass revolution, where tenants and workers take their spaces back from the capitalists. I worry that a middle-of-the-road approach like UBI would inevitably appease the desire for mass revolution, in the same way that Democrats pacify the working poor while selling them down the river in the long term. These things seem inherently anti-revolutionary.

I suppose that's why Theymos took it a step further by removing Newbie signatures entirely and demoting Jr. Members who haven't received merit. Now all those farms of Newbies and Jr. Members have no incentive to post garbage. They have no signatures.

It at least forces the costs of spamming higher. Spammers either need to buy merit -- which is in lower supply now that the initial airdrop is long over, so it should be harder to get for shitposters -- or they need to buy a Copper membership for 0.002+ BTC.

Are the costs high enough yet? Maybe not, but I think we should wait and see. In my own observation, the forum's been getting more readable now that the merit system is established. I think that trend will continue under this policy.

As long as tokens are built on decentralized platforms, I think it'll evolve into a two-tier space.

Tokens would be issued and redeemed by companies and brokers, who might have a KYC mechanism to comply with securities regulators. But since no entity has control over the underlying blockchain, they can't stop a secondary P2P market from developing where investors can buy and sell without KYC requirements. I would opt to invest on the secondary market, preferably using decentralized exchanges, to avoid trust and privacy breaches.

What if people encrypt their communications, though? How would the mobile phone service providers or ISPs know that Bitcoin transactions are taking place? That seems like the first step.

Also, I think wireless mesh networks could be relevant here. It's an infrastructure for routing that doesn't need to be centralized.

There's a lot of contradictory information out there regarding FBARs and Bitcoin. The IRS continues to avoid issuing official guidance and practitioners disagree on the law's application to cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency exchange accounts.

One thing that's for sure is the FBAR is only for financial accounts. It doesn't extend to your Electrum wallet, or any other cryptocurrency wallet --


But there's more ambiguity with regard to the FBAR and foreign exchanges. Here's one perspective:


Here's another:


If you do decide to report your holdings on an FBAR, then for maximum account value, they want the highest value at any point in the year. You need to convert each balance to USD to determine that. The maximum account value isn't necessarily the highest amount of BTC you had at any one time, though it might be. Here is the IRS guidance:

Hmmm, this doesn't read like a sponsored press release at all!

The proof is based on the fact that a share of commissions are given to OKB (OKEx platform token) holders. They claim $5M gets distributed, but how much of it is just distributed back to themselves? I don't see the token listed on Coinmarketcap, and I can't find anything about its distribution.

Further down in the press release:


Sounds legit...

They do that with fiat money, too. In a world where so many identities are stolen everyday for financial crime, it's becoming obvious that identity verification is not the answer. Plus, cash doesn't even leave a paper trail; Bitcoin does.


There are lots of other legitimate ways that terrorists can make money. Should we ban them all?


Segwit didn't really alleviate the congestion and Lightning isn't widely used yet. The overall transaction load just drastically dropped in December, when the price peaked. I'm hopeful that LN will shoulder a lot of throughput once adoption takes off, but Segwit's block size bump was just a small, linear increase.

I'm pretty sure it'll be delayed or rejected. Both outcomes would probably have a similar negative effect on the market.

As I understand, the physically-backed structure is similar to the proposed Winklevoss ETF which was also recently rejected by the SEC. Their statement at that time seemed like a pretty sweeping condemnation of the underlying market, which they paint as easily manipulated. I don't see why their opinion would have changed over the last two months. Nothing has changed.

Any good wallet will allow you to manually set the fee rate without worrying about the size. For beginners, I suggest Electrum. It has a slider that allows you to choose based on how urgent your transaction is. For increased precision, I manually enter the fee -- I prefer to pay very low fees and wait for confirmation -- and then I click "Preview transaction" to confirm it has the correct satoshi/byte rate.


Each block will vary regarding how many transactions it includes, based on how many transactions are waiting in the mempool and how large they are. On average, it tends towards ~2000 or so transactions per block. So if I see, say, 1500 transactions pending at 2 satoshis/byte or below, I generally assume 2 satoshis/byte is adequate to get confirmed in the next block, though occasionally it can take a bit longer.

That explanation is completely inadequate. Why do bitcoins need to be "things" at all? This is a requirement you invented without reason. You say, "if we now ask what actual thing outside the database is owned by Peter, we face an inherent contradiction."

Owning bitcoins doesn't entail owning "things outside the decentralized ledger." Why would it need to? The whole point is that they're a native currency in a monetary network. If you have a balance at a bank, you don't have a "thing" to show for it either -- only numbers in the bank's database, numbers on a screen. Do dollars have no value when they're just numbers in a database? What matters is what other people will pay for them, not your circular proofs that depend on your cherry-picked definitions.

Also, let's take a look at the definition of "thing."


How are bitcoins not "things?"

Correct. I think that mining speculation -- and thus energy consumption -- are tied to price, which is tied to adoption and speculation about adoption. Eventually those two things will converge, but for now it's a gold rush that assumes future exponential adoption.

Lightning may bring renewed utility and micropayments to Bitcoin, which could certainly foster adoption and drive price up. Not only that, but Lightning requires that users lock up BTC to use the network or collect fees from it. That can lessen available supply on the market.

With that in mind, I don't really see the mining arms race slowing down anytime soon...

Obviously, no coin has a 100% correlation to BTC. That would be too easy for traders to exploit, as all altcoin markets are less liquid and more volatile than BTC. They all move independently sometimes.

A lot seems to ride on the underlying longer term trend of BTC. When Bitcoin is in a bull market like last year, altcoins alternate between positive and negative correlation with BTC. But in a crash -- and this is the important takeaway -- altcoins will fall with BTC, and they'll fall harder. Exceptions exist but they're very rare.

Bitcoin transaction fees are based on transaction size, not amount. We measure fees in "satoshis per byte" -- a satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC. Users compete for block space -- higher fee transactions get confirmed faster than low fee transactions.

This is the tool I use to check network fees. It shows how many transactions are waiting to be confirmed at various fee rates. Right now, 2-3 satoshis/byte will probably get confirmed in the next block. Earlier in the day, you needed closer to 7 satoshis/byte for the same confirmation speed.

Bitcoin is a "thing" just like the others, which is why it's generally treated as property or currency. The fact that you can only fathom bitcoins as "numbers" is just a function of your own limitations.

And bitcoins definitely can't be created out of thin air. You can spin up another new cryptocurrency out of thin air, but not bitcoins. People across the world run Bitcoin nodes that enforce the protocol. They completely ignore any attempts to print BTC out of thin air.

But on a fundamental level, decentralized exchanges seem incompatible with fiat money. A decentralized exchange should be trustless -- multi-sig contracts or similar can secure the trade. This can be extended to stablecoins, but stablecoins are funded with money that has already been deposited into the cryptocurrency ecosystem. We need to solve deposits and withdrawals to/from the fiat ecosystem.

How can this work with trusted third parties, like with bank transfers? How can a decentralized protocol verify that a P2P cash exchange actually occurred? It seems like these things require arbitrage mechanisms to settle trader disputes that can't be done on a trustless or decentralized basis.

With so many potential products in the pipeline -- Citi's DARs, the ETFs, BAKKT, Bank of America moving into cryptocurrency custody, and now Nasdaq entering the fray -- it's obvious there's going to be a regulated Bitcoin securities market.

This acquisition sounds promising, though I'm sure it'll be a while before we see anything approved and launched.