The flaw in this oft-repeated fallacy is that it ignores the fact that money is a medium-of-exchange. Value is produced and consumed in an economy. As long as borrowers can produce enough value, loans can be repaid. It doesn't matter if there is a finite amount of money -- money is a tool used to exchange value. A loan can potentially be paid back using the same dollar over and over again.

While end-to-end encryption is the ultimate solution to government/corporate spying, you can't store the world's email in a distributed block chain.

I don't know about brokers in the U.K., but buying $500-$2000 of stock at an online broker in the U.S. is relatively straightforward and cheap.


You have to admit that someone promoting the stock of a pharmaceutical company on a Bitcoin forum looks a lot like pump-and-dump.

“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”


― Robert J. Hanlon

Mining is an integral part of Bitcoin. Bitcoin began when Satoshi mined the initial block, known as the "genesis" block.

Perhaps you could try mining on paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3dqhixzGVo

It is possible to loan bitcoins with interest, so I don't see your point.

In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with interest. Having money now vs. later has value, and people are willing to pay for that value. People should be allowed to pay interest in order to obtain a loan.


Also, the term "usury" generally means charging an excessive interest rate, though in the past it meant charging any interest (perhaps because any interest was considered excessive).

Is this a pump and dump?

He donates his bitcoins when he creates the transaction with nLockTime, and that can be done at any time. He can give the transaction to the beneficiary anonymously at any time before his death.

BTW, there is no concept of a wallet in the Bitcoin protocol. A wallet is just a collection of addresses and their private keys, sometimes represented by a single "seed".

Another way to accomplish what you want to do might be to use OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY, which can be used to prevent an output from being spent before a certain time. By sending bitcoins to yourself using a transaction with OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY, you can make it so that you can spend the bitcoins at any time, and somebody else can spend the bitcoins after a certain time with a special key.

Your idea can easily be implemented right now:

1. Create a transaction that moves the coins to the potential recipient's wallet and set nLockTime to a date in the future.
2. Don't publish the transaction. Instead, give it to the potential recipient.
3. If the coins have not moved by the specified date, then the recipient can publish the transaction and receive the coins.
4. If the coins have already been moved, then the transaction is no longer valid.

You could even use this to prevent losing the bitcoins in the first place. If you create such a transaction that sends the bitcoins to yourself, then you must lose the private keys for both addresses in order to lose the bitcoins forever.

This must be satire, or trolling. Otherwise, it appears that this person is the ignorant person. He seems to believe that the value of the gold bar is in its appearance.

Anyway, other than demonstrating how soft gold is, it was a pretty boring video.

I have and I have never had a problem.

Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

Relying on basic income is a trap that far too many people will fall into.

The issue is that there is no way to know if coins are lost or not. I have coins that I have not touched in years, but they are certainly not lost. If they were confiscated, I would consider that theft.


That is theft, whether it is sanctioned by a government or not.

In contrast to the apocalyptic predictions of the Luddites 200 years ago, we are all much better off now.

A common misconception is that if PoW is more energy efficient, then Bitcoin will use less energy.

The reality is that the cost of PoW depends on the value of the block reward. So, if the cost of PoW goes down because of the increased energy efficiency, then economic incentives will cause mining to increase until the cost of the energy returns to the value of the block reward.

The way to reduce the amount of energy used for PoW then is to increase the cost of the energy or to reduce the block reward.

The guidance is fantastic. Basically it says,

• 1. Crypto-currencies are not money, so we don't really care. I don't expect this to last, but the impact of it going away is low.
• 2. Holding or sending money (but not crypto-currencies because they aren't money) for someone is money transmission. Basically no change here.
• 2. Trading crypto-currencies, even for fiat, is not money transmission because nothing is transmitted. Yeah!

Current estimates say that SHA-256 and ECC will be broken in less than 20 years, assuming that current hurdles are overcome and the number of qubits double every year.

Assuming you have a situation where you can mine bitcoins profitably, then mining may give you a better return than simply buying them. On the other hand, mining is much more risky.

To determine mining returns in the past, you can use past equipment and electricity costs to determine mining costs, and compare those to mining income determined from historical difficulty data.