Just send the bitcoins from your blockchain.info wallet to the address on the paper wallet.


If you want to be extra careful, make sure that the bitcoin address on the paper wallet comes from the private key on the paper wallet. That will ensure that your friend can actually spend the bitcoins at that address. You can import the private key into a wallet and check that it generates the same Bitcoin address. Don't use you normal wallet because you might accidentally spend your friend's coins. I have a separate wallet specifically for doing this.

You can verify that the address has bitcoins by viewing it in a block explorer like blockr.io or blockchain.info.

FTFY.

It was not nonsense. I was stating the general case because I didn't want to get into the weeds just to point out that 1 confirmation means something different than 2+ confirmations.

The supply will not be reduced. The supply increases with every block whether the reward is 25 btc or 12.5 btc.

The cost of mining is the same regardless of the difficulty because the amount of electricity a miner uses doesn't change. The revenue changes with the difficulty. If the difficulty goes up by 10%, then the revenue drops by 10%.

It is a typical altcoin pump and dump. cbreum convinces people to buy the coin and then sells at an inflated price and walks away, leaving them with worthless coins.

To be honest, I don't really know if it is a scam or not, but when somebody starts promoting an altcoin like cbreum is doing, it looks just like a pump-and-dump. It probably is a pump-and-dump.

Bitcoin is intended to be trustless. If we have to trust a developer, then Bitcoin has failed. Anyway, there is no security risk. If someone commits malicious code, their commit is there for everyone to see.

Let's consider the often repeated scenario of a "whale" buying or selling a large quantity of bitcoins in order to start a trend and then profit from the trend.

TL;DR: It is not realistic. It rarely, if ever, happens -- at least not on purpose.

First, in order to buy (or sell) a large quantity, the whale must accept a price that is significantly higher (or lower) than the current price. If the price does not stabilize at the new level, then the whale loses a lot of money. There is a huge risk to just break even and the typical result is the price returning the original level.

Consider the "flash crash" in the stock market a few years ago. In this case, a trader accidentally sold a huge quantity of stocks or derivatives. The price fell dramatically and the trader got a much lower price for the assets. Then, the price immediately recovered and the trader lost a huge amount of money. Note that these dumps are never on purpose. No trader would do this intentionally because the expected result is a huge loss.

Consider what happened on the Gemini Exchange last year. A trader accidentally bought a huge amount of bitcoins and the price on the exchange spiked up to $2200. The price did not stay at $2200. It immediately dropped back to the normal price and the trader would have lost most of their money if the exchange didn't roll back the trade.

Consider the Hunt brothers in the 1980s. They tried to corner the silver market by buying up all the silver. They hoped they could sell at a new higher price. They failed and lost everything.

Second, in order for whale to profit, they must unwind the trade. That is, if they bought a huge number of bitcoins, they must then sell them. If the price rose when they bought them, then it will fall when they sell them. The trader loses in both directions.

A rational trader will not attempt such a folly because the expected result is a loss.

Also, note that what I have described here is not how a "pump and dump" works. Look up "pump and dump" here: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pumpanddump.asp

Although the statement "the biggest holders keep accumulating more bitcoins" is true, the OP is implying that the distribution is growing more unequal, and that is false.

Here is the graph that is more relevant (from http://www.bitcoinrichlist.com/charts/percent-bitcoins-owned-by-richest):



As you can see, the trend is down. Addresses are becoming more equal.

Anyway, none of this matters because addresses are not the same as people, and the number of bitcoins owned by a person is not correlated with their wealth or income.

Rimbits is a scam. Don't say I didn't warn you.


Edit: To be honest, I don't really know if it is a scam or not, but when somebody starts promoting an altcoin like cbreum is doing, it looks just like a pump-and-dump. It probably is a pump-and-dump.

The supply does not halve, the production halves. Those are two very different things. The supply increases with every block and it will continue to increase whether the subsidy is 25 btc or 12.5 btc. The price rises when growth in demand increases more than growth in supply.

No. Miners will sell at whatever price they can get. They are such a small part of the market that they have very little influence on prices.


Yes, but the bad news is that you are describing a bubble. Bubbles pop. Any increase in price caused solely by the expectation of an increase will eventually disappear when the bubble pops. Just look at what happened to litecoin.


Maybe. Maybe not. It is hard to predict what will happen to demand.

There are several ways that the chart can be misinterpreted. The following must be noted:

• Addresses are not the same as people. Most of the top 100 addresses are used by exchanges and wallet services, and they hold bitcoins for millions of people.
• Counting the number of bitcoins that each person owns is like counting the number of dollar bills that each person owns. The results have no relevance. A person with a lot of bitcoins could still be relatively poor if all their wealth is in bitcoins, and very wealthy person could own no bitcoins at all.
• Most importantly, the chart is very misleading. the reason the values in the chart are rising is that the number of bitcoins is increasing.

That statement is false. 4 years ago, the top 500 addresses held nearly 40% of the bitcoins. Today, the top 500 addresses hold less than 30% of the bitcoins. The trend is declining.

Bitcoin has turned into something out of Lord of the Flies.

Definitely, print the paper wallet yourself.

Go to https://www.bitaddress.org and click on "Paper Wallet". Print out one or more and then send bitcoins (or a fraction of a coin) to the address on the wallet you are sending to him. I recommend keeping a copy so that if your friend loses it, you can still recover the bitcoins for him.

Others will warn you about security and such, but this is a gift and the chance of losing the bitcoins to hackers is low, so don't bother with precautions that seem excessive.

The term confirmation is a little confusing.

0 confirmations: the transaction hasn't been added to a block. At this point, the transaction has been validated by at least one full node (the one that tells you that the transaction has 0 confirmations).

1 confirmation: the transaction has been added to a block. The transaction has been validated by the miner that created the block. The block has been validated by at least one full node (the one that tells you that the transaction has 1 confirmation).

2+ confirmations: Each additional confirmation after the first means that the transaction and the block containing the transaction have been validated by other miners and full nodes, and that the validations have been validated.

The halving will increase centralization in the short term because inefficient miners will drop out, leaving only the most efficient. In the long run, the profitability depends primarily on energy cost, and if one miner can get cheap energy then 100 miners can potentially get the same cheap energy.

For anyone that cares about this drama, let's see what Gavin has to say about it:

You already have the ability to fork the bitcoin repo. Everyone does.

The fact that people can't believe that Satoshi Nakamoto could be a "bit of a cunt" shows how much they worship him/her/them as a god. People don't believe Satoshi Nakamoto could be CW mostly because they don't want to believe that he could be so fallible.

Tip #1: Don't store your coins in somebody else's wallet.

It looks like they are grasping at straws now, "pivoting" in start-up speak.