I never really understood the reason for doing this. If you want to convert a certain amount of pay into BTC every month simply setting up an account with an exchange and sending the $ amount you want to buy over every month, works out to be the exact same. The only thing I can think of is the Bitwage path is automatic, but manually buying on an exchange isn't exactly hard and probably results in less fees. Both paths require you to provide your banking and personal information so there isn't an advantage for either one.

One payment processor, Bitpay, has said they don't sell their coins on the open market. They have private buyers for them.

You seem not to understand that the market won't tollerate the idea of two chains. Both chains will be worthless.

Any stake older than 101 blocks before the current block is irrelevant in bitshares, just as any work performed prior to 6 blocks before the current block is irrelevant in bitcoin, as a general guideline.



Work is defined by hash rate.  Stake is defined by number of units of the native currency.  Both are quantifiable.

Ok.  Go ahead and break it.  You have nothing at stake and nothing to loose.  Don't talk about it.  Do it... and if you dont, then you yourself have proven that it can't be done.

And the counter argument:

http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/08/Nothing-at-Stake-Nothing-to-Fear/?r=bytemaster

Until POS or DPOS is completely broken these issues are just theoretical and I don't think POS (or DPOS) or POW can be broken... at least no one has proven it yet. 

It is possible, by requiring stake to be bonded for many consecutive blocks, and by choosing signers
using randomness extracted by long-past (in blocktime) blocks, to force the attacks described above
to rewrite long stretches of history. This is often described as “preventing short-range attacks”.
It is clear that this does not address the costless simulation issue; after all, if it’s easy to change
history, it’s easy to change long stretches of history. However, proponents argue that since for
an honestly-created history, long stretches of blocktime correspond to long stretches of real time,
any revision of so much history is sure to contradict the history as remembered by participants in
the system. Thus such an attack would be detected, recognized as an attack, and the new history
rejected.

If this is implemented correctly, there is no problem with this, except that it changes the trust
model from that of Bitcoin. New users who encounter multiple histories are no longer able to
distinguish them on their own; they need to ask existing participants in the network (which may
include friends and family, large corporate entities with reputations to maintain, public websites,
etc.) which history they know to be the true one. This is not a distributed consensus! It is a different
sort of consensus, which may be formed amongst always-online peers in a decentralized way, but
depends on trust for new users and temporarily offline ones. It is correspondingly vulnurable to
legal pressure, attacks on “trusted” entities, and network attacks.

I have seen a lot of similarly honestly thoughts that BTC will never go under 500, under 400, under 300, under 200. Reality is everything is possible.

That 10 million figure just goes to show how ludicrously tiny this whole thing is still. There's a bizarro disconnect between the amount of noise generated and what's actually occurring in terms of market happenings.

There are tens of thousands of people who could single handedly drive things through the floor or the roof.

The CRA forces banks to make loans in poor communities, loans that banks may otherwise reject as financially unsound.

And then you have the anal retentive bungholes that just come back with capitalism. Well shithead, capitalism is what really ruined the US.

How can such a country with all it's power, technology and resources be kicking families out of their homes because the banks were highly un-regulated and given bad loans?

One ECM jammer or global power surge and bitcoin will be dead. Something like bitcoin crash can happen after 51% attack as well. For now I would rather believe that bitcoin could be de dead than it will cost more than $1000 again.

I seem to remember someone who considers himself quite the financial guru making this exact same declaration just before the price hit the $90's.

Never say never