No because they can't go to an exchange, sell BTC, get USD to their bank account and then go to their bank and withdraw USD. They can't do that. They will get national currency instead - in most cases.

So they use BTC as a hard currency / USD-equivalent currency. The BTC payment processors do the rest: If a payment processor can accept BTC as currency and send you a shipment of tangible assets like gold, silver, technology stuff (iphones, laptops, etc etc), it's like you have actually paid with USD and paypal. But it's not necessary to spend your BTC - you can also hold them as a safer alternative (compared to local currency that is devaluating), as some do with their hard currency holdings.

Scarcity on something that is useless in every sense, probably not. But bitcoin is not in that category.

Gold's annual production is around 2500 tons. There are a few metals which have a production that is counted in just a few tons per year, typically in the PGE (Platinum Group of Elements). These metals fluctuate wildly in their prices as their scarcity alone allows their marketcap and price to be squeezed high through a single buy, or dumped quite lower with a few not-so-dramatic moves in terms of $$$. But noone says "ohh Iridium is a pump and dump because it was $400 in 2010, $1100 in 2012 and fell to $400 in 2013". You know it's a small market and that fluctuations are to be expected.

Bitcoin is similar in a sense. Yet, beside being scarce, it also has something to offer. It can do online payments, it can preserve wealth in the long run - especially for multiple countries that run double digit inflation, it can be a diversification asset, it can bypass capital controls, it can offer banking services even to kids who are gaming and want to sell or buy a fictional item or a game account in an MMORPG - which would otherwise be impossible without using their parents bank/CC/paypal etc, it can even be considered a collectible as the first decentralized digital currency (which is a historic event analogous to the first coins or first paper notes). People are paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for a good condition uncirculated coin of 100 years ago, just because this type of coin is harder harder to find than a coin in average circulated or worn condition. In any case, as far as BTC is concerned, the scarcity factor means that not many people can hold 1 BTC - but we all know that. Which, by necessity, will make the prices go much higher.

Many people that are trading bitcoin do so from the U.S. or Europe and they have a fundametal problem in appreciating it. We do not really understand or appreciate the benefits of what bitcoin can do for countries that do not have numismatic stability or easy international transactions through banks/paypal/credit cards etc due to quotas, controls, government approvals to buy even 10 dollars worth of stuff, etc.

For an American or a European, bitcoin is a very misunderstood asset because most of its benefits are not readily visible. The same is true for gold btw - most people will prefer money in the bank rather than gold. Having numismatic stability for a few decades makes you forget that your currency is just faith-backed money that can fall over the cliff overnight just because there was an international shock, a war, some political mess, etc etc. But countries that are immersed in that kind of shit do not value their fiat - they only value land, gold, tangible assets, hard currency (if they can get their hands on it) and Bitcoin (because through bitcoin they can actually have the equivalent of hard currency - despite their government blocking access to hard currency). So, in a sense, hard currencies like the dollar are not directly competitive with Bitcoin, but weaker ones are, because Bitcoin is the medium to have access to dollars despite a government's effort to prevent the population from stacking foreign exchange or using it to store wealth, or using it to conducting international trade.

Traders are in awe when they see a nice 10-15% spread to a Chinese exchange, but they have no idea that some people are arbing 50 or 100% for selling BTCs (in local currency equivalent of $$$) in countries that have numismatic instability.

There are around 180.000 tons of above ground (=mined) gold. This is 180.000.000kg / 15.000.000btc = a ratio of 12kg per 1 btc. Or 386 troy ounces per 1 btc.

People said "oh, hubris, 1 btc is priced like gold at 1200$" but there were like 11mn btcs and 5.7bn ounces of gold. If BTC was priced in the thousandths of the BTC, or if gold was priced by the kilogram, nobody would say anything. It's all perception.

Btw, that's the ratio right now. I'm not talking about what might be mined in the future, in either gold or btc.

1 full bitcoin (1.0 BTC) is as scarce as 12kg of above ground gold. The price will readjust itself in the long run to reflect this. I'm not saying it will go to the value of 12kg gold, but price has to adjust to accommodate the scarcity factor.

Where is he placing it, time-wise?

That 1% actually happened back in May 2014. BTC was around 7bn marketcap and DRK was ~70mn.

Same for March 2015, when BTC was around 3.5bn marketcap and newly rebranded DASH took off to 35-38mn. I think it peaked at something like 1.1%.

Yeah, it's not regulations, it's capital controls. Banks run out of euros.

1) What type of money are we talking about? 1k, 5k, 20k, 100k?

2) I'm asking (1) because, right now, bank withdrawals are like 400+ euro per week, so that's 1600+ per month, so if he was here in Greece, he would be able to withdraw at least as much. If he isn't here, he can use someone who is here and an ATM card to withdraw the money for him and then get it out with various methods. 1 month = 1600+, 10 months = 16.000+.

3) As for DASH or BTC, it would be possible in the following way: Find a Greek who is willing to sell DASH or BTC for a bank deposit in his account. Then your friend wires the money to that BTC/Dash seller and he gets BTC/Dash in exchange. This scenario sounds unlikely though, as most wouldn't trade their crypto for money in a bank account that can be withdrawn very slowly. Also there is risk of scam (seller of DASH/BTC keeps the money and doesn't give DASH/BTC).

The problem with Greek capital controls is that Greece has the euro as its currency. What that means, is that when the country run out of euros, it did not hamper only international transactions but also local liquidity. Most countries which have their own currency and which happen to run in foreign exchange reserves deficit, will simply impose capital controls on good imports, bank capital exports etc. Capital controls won't affect local liquidity in local currency, thus in these cases the local economy can still trade local currency with BTC and then BTC can be used for cross-border trade. For Greece its different because euro is both the national currency and the foreign exchange currency - so when it runs out, both "wells" dry up, so when you don't even have cash in hand, and when your bank deposit is next to useless, how can you buy crypto?

4) Another option for taking the money out, is to find a local company that sells assets and accepts money in their bank account as payment, instead of cash. An asset can be anything valuable*. So, you go to a car dealer, buy a used expensive car, drive it out of the country, sell it in Italy or Germany and cash out. The risk of losing resale value is low because car prices are probably lower here right now than other places in Europe. Solutions 2 and 4 don't involve DASH.

* Some were buying jewelry but this is wrong because they are veeeery overpriced compared to their metal composition.

The fundamentals are even better. Auction ended, btc miners have dumped a ton at elevated prices (so their dumping munition is much lower for future rises) etc.

Cryptsy should have thousands of BTCs and BTCs-worth of altcoins there. They probably have millions or even tens of millions in funds. Surely they can't have used it for staff payment (?).

Of course they'd blame something... upgrades, malleability, self-imposed verifications etc etc. But what have they done with the BTCs?

Seriously now, what the **** did cryptsy do with all those BTCs stored there?

Huobi might be crashing at 2900 but it is extremely thin up to 3300.

It seems like it was yesterday at 230 and now 460...

Fixed it 

The miners.


Money velocity of multiple dust transactions = spamming the blockchain and bloating BTC.


Can I make a script right now and start spamming the blockchain when it is in low-utilization days, with almost zero fee tx's? The answer is yes. Even with 1mb limit. And it will be far easier to do that with 10mb limit. And that's irregardless of the mining fee. You cannot simply implement a higher blocksize without enforcing a system that prevents cheap malicious use of that capacity to self-destruct BTC. It would be an idiotic move of epic proportions and people would then say "so, we are at the mercy of script kids right now?" and then claim BTC devs are incompetent for not having foreseen how their actions are enlarging the blockchain by the tens of gigabytes, and how they (or the miners) must take action to prevent this kind of spamming, and how useless these devs are for not preventing it in the first place through fee competition in a much more limited block size, etc etc.

Terabytes of blockchain that are to be filled with junk, with near zero cost, does not equal scaling but an open-wide attack vector to destroy BTC.

It was a matter of minutes... 419 finex

By the look of things it might take minutes, or a couple of hours

The later he has to cover it, the better

Traditional money moves way too slow.