To be clear, your article assumes that Bitcoin's market cap (about 210 trillion after all BTC has been distributed, or lower if you account for lost coins) will become about the same as all money that exists in the whole world including savings (excluding dividends).  That would require the total collapse of all forms of fiat money and of all other cryptocurrencies.  Are you really saying that's a reasonable scenario to expect for a currency currently handling only a few hundred thousand transactions per day and using up vast quantities of electricity in the process?

User: Xavofat
Position to Apply: Hero Member
Posts Start: 1116
Address: 3Pym9KT5wHNyK4Yt1Wci442dDmamYwRRBz

The web is already barely workable, or at least horribly centralised.  The few big companies - Facebook and Google (Alphabet) mainly - are gathering information from users on almost any website they visit due to AdSense, Facebook share buttons, FB's automatic phone setting saying that they'll track your phone activity outside of Facebook, etc.  When not using Facebook or Google, other services in widespread use (like Cloudflare) show that it's becoming harder and harder to run a website really independently.

I think it's a government's responsibility to step in when a monopoly has become so bad it's causing serious damage to society.  There's nothing really wrong with making Facebook pay to use news articles when its services are at risk of becoming a monopoly over the sharing of information (because of the slow death of newspapers).

Alternatively though, the websites could be treated properly as platforms rather than publishers, in which case Facebook should not be curating content for you using their algorithm, nor should they be removing content which is not illegal.  Only in that situation would it be understandable for Facebook to claim that they cannot pay for hosting news articles.

The '1 trillion market cap' thing isn't quite true because of the fact that a large proportion of the coins mined early on have been lost, creating artificial scarcity.  However, perhaps the best boost that will come out of this is if Bitcoin approaches the market cap of silver, in which case it'll be difficult to treat Bitcoin based on its original purpose (as a P2P electronic cash system) rather than a digital asset which seems to be how it's most often treated now by speculators.
Amusing.  Doesn't that defeat the whole point of Bitcoin, to have a digital currency without the need for banks as an intermediary?

'Printing money' is misleading.  Most money never exists in physical form, it only exists in the form of loans from commercial banks, where money is created as a number on a computer.  There is some regulations on how much money can be created by banks - they have to hold some capital in case people default on their loans - but central banks create only a tiny proportion of money in the modern economy.

The 2008 financial crisis has clearly shown that banks do not hold enough capital to back up the money they create when there is economic hardship.  Hence why Satoshi included in the genesis block an article from the Times: 'Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks'.

This seems a hugely exaggerated claim.  Firstly, whenever I have paid for something in Bitcoin it has been through Bitpay, and this 'internal ledger' thing you're talking about seems to be made up.  All I did was send Bitcoin to the address Bitpay gave me and Bitpay then has the option for the company of whether they want to keep the Bitcoin or convert it to its fiat value, providing stability for accepting Bitcoin payments.

Also, even in a scenario where what you're talking about became a reality, there wouldn't be a problem since most transactions are P2P or to and from exchanges rather than with merchants.  That would create demand for space on the network and thus transaction fees.

Right now, the transaction fees being paid make up approximately 1/6th of the block reward - even in the very unlikely scenario that the sum of transaction fees paid to miners decreases over time, there would still be some transaction fees and miners would not be 'mining for free'.  The amount of hashrate directed to the network would decrease and the difficulty adjustment within 2016 blocks would keep the reward appropriate.

No, it's built to be pseudonymous, but it's very difficult to keep transactions pseudonymous because many people have revealed some kind of identifying information about themselves in connection with their address on the Internet.  Especially with exchanges that have KYC in place, governments and others can draw connections between known Bitcoin users and the people that they are sending Bitcoin to.

Satoshi did not claim that Bitcoin is an anonymous system, rather that the possibility to be anonymous or pseudonymous relies on you not revealing any identifying information about yourself in connection to the Bitcoin address you use.

This kind of news does make you wonder whether the HODLers will keep their coins even if the price soars further.  Those who were in early enough may be tempted if the price is so high that they could be rich just by selling or by taking profits.  If that starts to occur, there's a risk of a fall in BTC's value when dumping takes place.

Another risk is that the new HODLers which make up that percentage are the ultra-rich like Elon Musk, who are capable of manipulating the market just through tweets and announcements.

To expand on this, there is statistics to show the sheer amount of transaction fees currently being paid.  With a current block reward of 6.25BTC and transaction fees averaging around 150 BTC per day, the transaction fees are already worth about 1/6 of the block reward (based on 144 blocks in one day = 900 BTC).  That is more than enough to incentivise miners and prevent a 51% attack.  Further, if Bitcoin is scaled up in the future (e.g. with larger block size or shorter block time, or with upgrades like Taproot and greater SegWit usage), even though there would be less demand for space in a block and therefore lower transaction fees per byte of data, there would still be significant enough transaction fees to incentivise miners.

As Bitcoin stands the mining power directed to it is estimated to be as high as some of the top 30 countries for electricity consumption globally.  A moderate decrease that may occur when miners are more reliant on fees will not stop the Bitcoin network being secure.

Since the block reward halves every 210,000 blocks (~4 years) half of all Bitcoins that will ever be mined were mined by around the start of 2013, at which point the price was as low as $15.  It's no wonder, therefore, that a large proportion of Bitcoins are either lost or not in circulation.  Where this becomes a problem is if just a small percentage of these early miners begin to unload coins, the price will fall significantly.  I expect that many of them, rather than having coins which will just never enter circulation as the article implies, are biding their time and selling a bit at a time, which will increase the supply alongside the million or so new coins that will also enter the market before the next halving.

I definitely disagree with the 78% figure because a significant amount of BTC is being held by people who are waiting for ideal times and by exchange cold wallets.

One thing missing from this list is the use of passphrase protection for hardware wallets.  If a TREZOR or Ledger is compromised there is a risk of the thief exploiting vulnerabilities in the device to steal coins, especially if there is a large sum of money in the wallet.

With passphrase protection, the user can prevent physical attacks from taking BTC by:

1. Storing a passphrase somewhere very secure e.g. a bank safety deposit box or underground
2. Not remembering the phrase yourself

That way, a thief would be unable to take the coins through a physical attack as they could not coerce you into revealing a password to a computer, PIN for a hardware wallet, etc.

In this way a user could have a 'current account' (not passphrase protected) and a 'savings account' (only accessible by temporarily getting your passphrase out of its safe place).

Exodus has a great UI but I don't think I'll be investing in its IPO.  It markets itself primarily as a wallet rather than an exchange so considering that most people are using other wallet services including Electrum, hardware wallets (which I know can be used with Exodus but generally aren't), and exchanges as wallets (such as Coinbase), I think the scope for them to earn money is limited.  I also think that like ICOs, it may get an inflated price at the start which peters out soon after.

The Exodus website's FAQ and the CEO's statement in a Reddit thread don't address dividends at all, nor does it state on its website how much revenue it earns, so finding out how much revenue Exodus earns is seemingly just speculation.  That lack of transparency is another reason why I will not be investing.

In some other countries, including here in the UK, the blow of the pandemic to employment has been reduced, or at least delayed, by government support for those who are unable to work.  In the UK the government pays 80% of wages for anyone who is unable to work due to the pandemic through the Job Retention Scheme (the furlough scheme).  Similar systems have been set up in Germany and France.

The biggest cause of fraud is the fact that the US government has a difficult decision to make.  As unemployment rose to around 15% in the US in April compared to less than 5% in the UK, there became a very difficult balance, as underfunded services for dishing out unemployment benefits were overwhelmed, between having appropriate security measures in place and being able to give the people who need it most their money.  There's also the problem that the poorest people in society may find it the most difficult to prove that they deserve unemployment benefit.  Because there's no support for people in work to prevent them losing their jobs apart from the small 'stimulus cheques', the US system is a kind of 'whack-a-mole' approach that leaves it open to all kinds of fraud.

There is some fraud in the furlough schemes, but as far as I know it's not on this kind of grand scale and people have generally kept their jobs so far.  The decision to use population-wide support for the economy like stimulus cheques (which have also been given to US citizens that I know here in the UK despite them being permanent UK residents) is not an efficient way of dealing with the pandemic and is causing a lot of trouble for ordinary workers who are worried about losing their jobs.
I think the best thing governments can do is prosecute people who are believed to be engaging in this kind of fraud.  That means opening up courts properly - I think that restrictions on courts opening fully and trials with juries do more harm than good.  Blockchain may not have much of a role to play because the problem is not verifying where the funds go, it is determining whether they were obtained fraudulently.

I don't think there's a strong connection.  The historical value of gold derives from its physical properties including:

1.  The fact that it is the least reactive metal.  It can be kept in storage for thousands of years and never rust.
2.  The fact that it is appropriately scarce.  Storing the right amount of value in other metals (excluding silver, which is also traded as a store of value), is difficult.
3.  The fact that it is shiny and beautiful, it's a show of wealth like in jewellery.

Those intrinsic aspects of gold will remain and so its value will never be very low.  Unlike gold, Bitcoin is easily replicable in the form of altcoins, but these generally do not get much traction unless they are hugely different to Bitcoin, so it has value in its scarcity and security.

Yes, that's presumably why they haven't banned BITMAIN and some major Bitcoin related companies started in China (like the Huobi exchange).  They just ban the most egregious of speculative crypto use (including ICOs) and then allow people to keep using it in contexts that they are sure are legal.
Yes, every 2016 blocks the network adjusts its difficulty to keep the average rate of blocks being mined at approximately one every ten minutes.  This is usually about two weeks, but if the hashrate was halved it would take twice as long per block until the next difficulty adjustment.  The reward for each block, however, would increase because higher transaction fees would be required to include a transaction in the now less frequent blocks. 

One significant problem is that most mining pools are based in China.  The only mining pool not based in China with a significant percentage of the hashrate (about 10%) directed to it is Slush Pool, from the Czech Republic.

If Bitcoin pools and mining and everything was banned in China (assuming they know where all the people running them are), the remainder of the world's miners would redirect to smaller pools, removing the Chinese monopoly on mining and ultimately making the network more secure by getting rid of the risk of small groups in China reaching the 51% attack threshold (which BITMAIN approached in 2018).
Bitcoin is intertwined with the free Internet.  Its users and HODLERS often have libertarian ideals and a fairly small amount (which the Chinese government could easily focus on) use it for crime.  Even though Bitcoin transactions cannot be directly prevented, China could create a culture of fear around using exchanges and accessing Bitcoin related websites.

More important than the fact that the majority of mining takes place in China is the fact that the majority of ASIC devices are manufactured by one company: BITMAIN, which is a Chinese company.

The restrictions on BTC in China are not necessarily because China doesn't see any benefit in BTC business, but because the government wants to suppress any attempt to access the free Internet.  If a monopoly like BITMAIN is operating in China they will be more interested in controlling as much of the company's activities as possible rather than restricting BTC as a whole.

This account was hacked and I recovered it this week using an address posted and quoted on a thread three years ago.  I am posting here to have somewhere more secure with an address of mine in case a problem occurs again.

There wouldn't be any point exchanging only $1 for Bitcoin.  You won't be able to send it anywhere due to high transaction fees on the Bitcoin network right now, and most exchanges will not take a deposit that low.

Depending on your country, your best bet will either be to sign up for an exchange like Coinbase, for which you will need to spend a $25 minimum deposit, or with P2P trading like on LocalBitcoins, where you can trade with bank transfer or cash.

It is alright to avoid using a credit card but in particular you shouldn't use PayPal because transactions with Bitcoin are against their ToS and there will be very high fees dealing with PayPal because of the high risk of people reversing their transactions.

Apple hasn't done anything.  What this really shows is that Bitcoin-related companies are the people who are innovating in crypto payments rather than billionaires like Musk and Tim Cook.

It's a little unfortunate though that this expects people to be using Bitcoin primarily as an asset rather than a currency.  It is similar to if you deposited gold and a card agreed to spent fiat money for you based on how much gold is in your account.  Ideally, Bitcoin's transaction fees and confirmation time will become low enough that an intermediary like BitPay won't be necessary to spend it at retailers.

As recently as 2012, a large proportion of Bitcoin transaction used zero fees.  If the block size was large enough to accommodate the number of transactions that people freely wish to send over the network, there would be no fees or almost no fees.  It is understandable that as the amount of users increases and the block reward halves, the transaction fees would increase somewhat to incentivise miners to keep the Bitcoin network secure, but not to the extent that it has.  That is a trade off we have decided to make to avoid centralisation from increasing the storage required to run full nodes.

Really where the dilemma comes in is the fact that the amount of storage required to run a full node can only increase.  The only way that this will not cause a problem is if the typical amount of storage people have on their PCs increases at a faster rate than the amount of data on the blockchain, which so far it has.

I agree with the OP.  Many people who need Bitcoin the most are in poor countries paying extortionate fees.