You mentioned that you're in the US. Selling the BTC back to USD is a taxable capital gains event. Continuing to hold the BTC (in the case of lending) is not. However, the receipt of interest payments is taxable, generally at your ordinary tax rate.


You're comparing apples and oranges; they're both percentages but that's about all they have in common. You just made $2,000 profit but didn't realize it. If you continue holding BTC (and lending it out) and it drops below $8,000 you will incur losses. In that case, if your intention was to preserve USD capital, selling and paying the 35% would be much better.

A better way to think about this: If you're going to hold BTC regardless of price movements, are the (taxable) interest payments worth the counterparty risk of lending out the BTC? Presumably the interest receipts would be in BTC since that's the collateral -- so the goal is to gain more BTC. The temporary USD capital gains/losses are a totally separate issue because you can't hedge or realize the USD value while you're locked into a loan contract.

Also, that 35% is the rate on the net of all your trades in the year. You can keep reinvesting the profits from each trade into the next, so you don't need to think of it as a 35% tax on every single trade. So you should make an additional consideration: If you realize $2,000 profit now, you will have 25% more investment capital than you had before. You can keep compounding on that if you trade successfully -- which can earn much more money than interest payments on your principal.

It's not surprising given the hype. Millennials invest heavily in pot stocks, too.


Which companies were those? The company that does our retirement/profit sharing plan is super conservative. Small but steady gains. They don't even allow us to put our personal 401ks into anything remotely risky. I need to quit my job before I can roll it into anything bitcoin-related.

Maybe we could have a Press board in the altcoin forum (though that seems unlikely).

I have noticed that mods have been heavy-handed at times in the Press section, so it depends what day you look. Sometimes there's a decent discussion going and a thread just gets deleted instead of being moved to Altcoin Discussion. I'm fine with the rule, I just wish they didn't insta-delete threads like that.

How are "mutual merit transactions" weighed in this model, such that they would appear as isolated satellites? For instance, Coin++ and CarlOrff appear completely isolated. But if you look at CarlOrff's merit summary, he has sent merit to/received merit from other people besides Coin++ (albeit less).


How? That will just decrease the available supply of sMerit. Unless you're talking about redistributing their sMerit to other people?

Personally, I give away most of my sMerit, but I always try to retain some in case I find a really noteworthy post. I've been receiving less and less merit, which means I've been spending less and less.

While I generally land in the "small blocker" camp on most issues, I'm not convinced that block size increases are unsustainable per se. I just think that 1) consensus change is harder than people think and 2) we should offload as much transaction volume as possible offchain (LN, drivechains, etc). The problem with big blockers is they believe there is only way to scale a network. Don't fall into that trap.

One of my gripes with Gavin Anderson and Mike Hearn and their mindset was that they assumed that improved future tech would easily address today's bandwidth and latency shortcomings. I don't think they were necessarily wrong about that, but I'm not willing to decide that on a leap of faith, or risk unnecessarily increasing orphaning rates and squeezing lots of nodes off the network.

I just want to see hard data suggesting a block size increase is safe from that perspective, and I want to see it done on reasonable timeline (like 1-2 years instead of a few months if we're talking about a hard fork or UASF).

Remember, this is Bitcointalk, not Altcointalk. The OP seems focused on altcoin exchanges.

Bitfinex and Binance are some of the highest volume BTC exchanges, but you should consider adding these influential and high-volume exchanges to your list:

• GDAX (Coinbase)
• bitFlyer
• Bitstamp

You might consider adding KYC information for each exchange -- some require it, some do not.

Simple in code perhaps, but not in terms of adoption and network compatibility.

Hard forks ought to be adopted on a timeline of years, not a few months, and that's assuming there is general social consensus to adopt the fork. Otherwise you risk mass confusion and financial loss: the network could split, the blockchain(s) could be repeatedly reorganized and -- perhaps most notably -- trust in the Bitcoin network to reliably reach consensus would be lost.

I'm not fundamentally opposed to hard forks and UASFs, but I am quite disappointed that people think they should be adopted on such compressed timelines. I think the rushed mindsets characterized by all the hard fork attempts and the BIP148 UASF are real affronts to the expansive and diverse nature of our network.

That was my first thought as well. It seemed like Tyler Winklevoss was just being provocative.

Then again, Gates actually said, "I would short it if there was an easy way to do it." That's a pretty dumb thing to say, given that regular retail traders can easily short CME futures on E-Trade, etc.

I'm guessing Bill doesn't want to short BTC for more sensible reasons...

Anyone have a link to his comments? All I could find on the mailing list was this post, which doesn't really lead to that conclusion.


That's pretty exciting. I recall Dandelion is purportedly supposed to provide significantly improved privacy guarantees. The devil's in the details, though. We'll see how the new proposal holds up after Bitcoin devs are through poking holes in it.

Franky is trying to bombard the reader with meaningless jargon to obfuscate what backward compatibility is. Let's look at what it means:

It doesn't matter whether legacy nodes fully understand new scripts. What matters is that both versions retain interoperability (compatibility). Necessitating that every node validates every aspect of every transaction would entail hard forking and breaking compatibility every time you wanted to add a new consensus rule.

Regarding backward compatibility, what matters is that new rules don't break consensus. If Segwit compromised the integrity of Bitcoin (regarding supply, etc.) then its blocks would be rejected by legacy nodes. Older nodes still check newer blocks against their consensus rules. They are simply continuing to propagate valid transactions and blocks, even though they may not fully understand them.

All of this was laid out by Satoshi long ago. Bolding by me for emphasis:


It should be noted that soft forks are not backwards compatible by definition, as many people wrongfully claim. As soft/hard forks are currently defined in Bitcoin development (side note -- not a fan of these definitions since they are orthogonal to network compatibility), a soft fork simply means adding/restricting consensus rules.

It's completely possible to incompatibly soft fork -- for example, if 51% of miners do not enforce the fork -- in which case a soft fork is not backwards compatible.

An incompatible soft fork and a hard fork are not particularly different, hence my distaste for the above definition.

If Bitcoin becomes a global reserve currency -- supplanting the USD in international settlements -- it could greatly improve the position of developing/exporting countries (the Global South). This is because USD monetary policy and the neoliberal international debt system are used to extract massive amounts of wealth from poor countries.

Consider the World Bank: It doesn’t lend money in domestic currency. It only lends USD, which is then used to buy US and European exports. This creates massive high-interest debts held by developing countries. So, eliminating USD hegemony would certainly level the playing field. It would end the implied incentive to purchase US exports over others and it would mitigate the debt bondage relationship.

And if Bitcoin or some other currency became a global reserve currency, it would also neuter the effect of US sanctions, which would help several poorer countries economically.


The issues I laid out above concern global geopolitical and macroeconomic dynamics. No altcoin projects remotely address these issues, and anyone that claims they do are just scamming you.

The only solution is global market adoption of a decentralized currency (like BTC or something else) that can end US economic hegemony by displacing the USD as a reserve currency. It's not a matter of technology. It's a matter of adoption.

A "bubble" implies a zero sum situation. In a bubble -- similar to a Ponzi scheme -- early entrants profit at the expense of late entrants. When the bubble collapses, late entrants lose their shirts.

Anyone who bought at $2 and sold at $15,000 profited greatly. Consider what will happen if the price returns to $2 now!


Sure, that applies to any investment instrument. But there is a difference between an overvalued asset and a bubble. An overvalued asset will usually revert to the mean based on its fundamental value. A bubble will just collapse to zero.

Based on history, Bitcoin is no bubble.

It's impossible to know the exact network hash rate at any one time. But since we know the difficulty and the rate at which blocks are being mined, we can deduce an estimate.

Christian Decker provided a good response to this question a few years ago:

It depends on the consensus rules of your network. Based on Bitcoin's rules, a transaction so large would be rejected by the network completely because it's too large to fit into a block. You would need to manually split the data into small enough transactions (<1MB each) and then pay the appropriate fees for each transaction.


In Bitcoin (and virtually all blockchains), the block size (or block weight) limit is just an upper bound. Miners can publish empty or partially-empty blocks if there aren't sufficient transactions to make full blocks.

MoneyTrigz and company had no intention of ever filing suit. He only involved himself because he's desperate for social media attention.


Since it's a non-event, it doesn't affect the price. If the lawsuit were actually happening and the media piled onto the "Bitcoin.com vs. Bitcoin angle" then i could see it having a negative effect on the market.

Others have mentioned Coinbase, which is obviously the most common method. If you're not in a country supported by Coinbase or your credit card won't work there, you can try Bitstamp. They charge a flat 5% fee for credit cards.

I would avoid credit cards, though. Cash advance fees are pretty high. In comparison, ACH deposits to exchanges are usually free, and wires are cheaper.

I've never heard of these services/companies. This author seems pretty desperate for content.


I don't think the inability to do instant low-value payments is really hindering adoption anyway. I think 2013 and 2017 were just waves of adoption on a continuing exponential trend -- an S-curve, if you will. I think reliable decentralized money is reason enough for exponential adoption.

Futures contracts are agreements to buy or sell at the contract expiration date. So, if you buy contracts at $9,000 and hold until expiration at $14,000 you will have profited by $5,000 times the number of contracts you held.

Both the CME and Cboe bitcoin futures are cash-settled contracts, so there is no BTC collateral involved whatsoever. People believe that for this reason, there will be manipulation. In reality, it's difficult to manipulate that way because the collective market can arbitrage the price spread by simultaneously longing futures and shorting spot (or vice versa).


They're only a scam insofar as all futures markets (or ETFs for that matter) are scams. These markets are intended to track the spot markets. For risk and compliance reasons, many investors/entities cannot or will not participate in BTC spot markets. Futures markets -- and potentially ETFs -- are an avenue for those people to get exposure to the market.

I recommend Delta (smartphone or desktop app) for daily portfolio tracking. It tracks most exchanges and visually looks good. It summarizes current portfolio value in both $ and BTC, shows your individual positions and changes over the last 24 hours, and has a watching tab for coins of interest. They have a much better privacy policy than Blockfolio, which is the next best alternative.

In some sense, the Ripple protocol is decentralized. That is, if Ripple (the company) disappeared today and took their validators offline, the network would still persist. However, as it stands, Ripple (the company) is essentially a central authority with significant control over the network.

I would consider it highly centralized. It depends on a trusted network of validators. As one commenter here points out:

Also, XRP is not mined. It was centrally issued by Ripple (the company) and the supply is highly concentrated under their control. I think they control more than half the supply. That's a big part of why people call it centralized.


In some protocols (like Ripple or masternode coins), not all nodes are created equally. If Ripple (the company) wanted to censor a bunch of transactions or fork the protocol to new rules, I'm sure they could.