They can be regulated by proxy by licensing and taxing miners' electrical consumption, and crypto exchanges that transmit fiat. But bitcoin, ether, litecoin and most other protocols (although not Ripple's XRP, which is a true token created administratively) just hash data using known algorithms (such as SHA-256). Use of such algorithms cannot be restricted in nations with any kind of rule of law. (Only poverty can do that, such as is found in Cuba and N. Korea.) Nor can the digital products of such algorithms (bitcoins, ethers, litecoins) be banned for the purposes of commerce. Not being fiat, to use such products to obtain goods and services is to engage in literal trade, or barter. The only regulatory potential there relates to tax enforcement, not suppression.

What bothers me is that I attempted to buy shares of a market on Augur and following the steps signed a message. The message cost 10 cents in Ether as gas and went to the address I cited. But no Ether was sent and Augur recorded no change in the market and my attempted purchase of Yes shares went nowhere. So I'm just wondering what happened, and why so many other people apparently did the same thing. I guess I'm just missing some big obvious piece of the puzzle, being (like nearly everyone) new to Augur.

https://etherscan.io/address/0xd5524179cb7ae012f5b642c1d6d700bbaa76b96b

Apparently they are signature transactions, no Ether sent, just a little gas.

Doesn't such a market lack even the definition of a full share?

Just what I was looking for, thanks!

I cannot find a good site (or any site) that tracks the rate of SegWit adoption. Anyone know of one?

They are dropping (for the moment anyway) and probably will fall further once the Lightning Network is up and running. But remember in a rising market retailers will hold their bitcoins anyway. Those who can afford to will hodl in a falling market and those who cannot afford to will not accept bitcoins in the first place. Still, there will be merchants who will indeed incur fees as they panic and convert to fiat. In effect they will be day-trading.

Find it here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2018/06/01/ibm-will-beat-bitcoin/#4a1bb443696c

Interesting article, but not in a good way. First, author Panos Mourdoukoutas starts off with the usual blockchain-without-bitcoin mantra, ignoring the fact (as so many others have) that the whole point of blockchain technology is that it provides for *immutable* data registration. As has been countered since this pseudo-argument first emerged, if you don't have immutability, then in many if not most cases you might as well just use a conventional database and indeed a conventional database could be better. But the author also seems to have missed the point of the person he interviewed, David Drake, Founder and Chairman at LDJ Capital, who observed (no doubt correctly) that ". . . most initial coin offerings are centralized businesses using a decentralized solution [and] IBM falls in the same category and certainly has a real business operations that is far more efficient than 90% of the current cryptocurrencies that don't have an operational revenue history like IBM.” In other words, IBM can beat most post-Ethereum ICOs and, as he said, "Ether and Bitcoin are decentralized solutions without companies running them."

So no, IBM won't beat Bitcoin. It will beat many non-immutable blockchain "solutions" with its own non-immutable blockchain "solution" -- a solution, that is, to the problem of would-be competitive non-immutable blockchains. It will then use either (or both) the Bitcoin and Ether blockchains to register their own hashes of their own transactions and label them as such as a kind of legal public notice.

In other words, all blockchains lead to immutability. And probably, soon enough, all databases too. After all -- why not?

You make good points about merchants with razor-thin margins -- which is the condition of a lot of merchants, probably most by far. Those merchants would not be able to afford the risk of holding the bitcoins and so would miss out on any appreciation in their value after a sale. Clearly such businesses would only put a Bitcoin logo on their door if they thought it would bring in more business. It it was too much hassle too soon without benefit they would take the decals off.  I'm not sure what you mean that use of a payment processor defeats the purpose. The purpose is to increase sales and profits. If passing their bitcoins instantly through Coinbase for transfer to their bank account still results in enough more money to make the effort worthwhile, they would do it. I've made the point in other posts here that merchants might increase the feasibility of bitcoins by stipulating that there are absolutely no returns on bitcoin sales -- all sales final, and it would say so on the receipt. Also, bitcoin pricing could be highly flexible -- when the BTC price is rising, prices for BTC sales could be lower than the cash/credit-card price. When the BTC price is falling, such prices would be higher, maybe a lot higher -- ruthless pawn-shop rates.

I suspect that such merchants will eventually realize that, while BTC has volatility risk, it also has benefits that might be of unique value to them, more so than a chain or big box.

Good point, but I think the Lightening Network should eventually resolve the fee problem, and as I understand it fees are already a lot lower than they were during the last feeding frenzy. Eventually SegWit will become the dominant address format, helping to keep fees under control. But also, if Bitcoin fees do go sky high, more and more people will be willing to use Ether or Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin instead. Excessive Bitcoin fees will eventually go away completely because fewer and fewer people will be willing to pay them and will know how not to.

I just included Ethereum because it is a leading crypto, nothing stealthy intended. I should add that I bought Ethers during their presale and have been hodling ever since. If it's a scam it's an incredibly good one. But it is not a scam.

But how did it get expensive in the first place? There was positive information which led to FOMA and worked as a domino effect and bitcoin appreciated in one or several days. This is indeed worthy of attention. Whether it is a problem in this case depends on whether you held on or sold before the appreciation. But it is my point that the problem is actually just one of perception. If you bought a bitcoin and transferred it for a good or service before the spike, that spike has not really hurt you. It may irritate you, but you paid a price for it that you decided was a good price for your immediate purposes at that time.

I know that this subject has been discussed many times before, but lest we forget when yet another conventional financial journalist, investor, money manager, perceived thought-leader et al pronounces on why Bitcoin will fail because it is too volatile to be used as a currency or store of value:

• Each Bitcoin transaction is a zero-sum game -- one party benefits to the same extent that the other does not benefit. So one party is guaranteed always to be fine with the volatility. And neither party knows for sure (or at all) who that beneficiary will be.
• The purchaser of a bitcoin has still spent the same amount of fiat no matter what the volatility after the purchase.
• The premise that the aggrieved party could have done this or that instead of send someone a bitcoin that later appreciated in value has no more merit than to say that that party could have bought a stock or bond that later did well too. In each case, they simply did not have the information needed in time. Shoulda coulda woulda is not a valid argument.
• If Bitcoin were impractical as a currency, the dark web would not use it. There would be no Bitcoin-using dark web. 
  
• Many things have been used as currency. Anything tradeable and of proven long-term value (like gold) or expected shorter-term value (like packs of Kent cigarettes in communist Romania) can be used as a practical currency, and have. Before WWI, travelers checks had the rate of conversion printed on them because it was expected that the gold-back currencies backing them would be stable. And so they were. The fact that fiat currencies require electronic conversion-rate signs today shows that their stability is entirely an illusion. They are not stable.
  
  

The argument that Bitcoin's volatility specifically negates its value as a store of value is clearly false as well. Stocks and commodities and their futures (as well as the effective interest rates of some bonds) are highly volatile. The mantra is that you accept their risk in exchange for growth. Fine. But volatile Bitcoin has growth potential too -- lots of growth potential. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum, as systems of decentralized, immutable, economical, sustainable, and perfectly legal data-registration means that everyone will become their own notary public. The implications for intellectual property protection are arguably beyond what we can now imagine.

Underlying all of Bitcoin's volatility is an unchanging protocol that is proven to work -- and expected to grow.

It fell a lot more than this between Jan 2014 and October 2015. This time the process is a lot faster. If you can afford it, hold. If you can't afford it, you shouldn't have been in in the first place. Declines like this are good, and I for one like them. 

I wrote that "Most people not in the crypto community won't hear about it for months or possibly years" and I think that is true. It's the same with SegWit, alas. Sure, the crypto community knows about them and like you many are optimistic. I'm optimistic about them myself. Expect the public to know about them about the same time the news media -- including Time and the New York Times -- stops saying again and again and again that "Bitcoin miners solve a series of complicated mathematical problems."

Don't hold your breath.  

Don't expect this to have any positive effect on bitcoin prices. Most people not in the crypto community won't hear about it for months or possibly years. Most in the non-crypto world have yet even to hear of SegWit -- when Coinbase announced its own SegWit implementation, the community was dancing in the streets. And around the world the bitcoin price promptly crashed.

It has gone live in Beta. Here is the link: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/lightnings-first-implementation-now-beta-developers-raise-25m/

It is likely that many (and eventually all) stocks and bonds will be controlled by blockchain-based ethereum-style smart contracts -- sort of like how Augur's Reputation tokens are controlled by such a contract on the Ethereum blockchain. You can transfer, buy, or sell the Augur tokens as freely as you want, but they remain under the control of the original contract. Such contract-controlled stocks and bonds might be usable as currency. But would their volatility alone prevent such use? No! In fact such use could increasingly be the market for such stocks and bonds -- a decentralized worldwide stock/bond/futures market. You stop at a Quickie Mart for some beer and cigarettes. You slide your card, and some fraction of the present or future value of your share or bond or its future dividend or interest payment is deducted. Depending on economic conditions, the merchant's own contract will either instantly trade the share/bond/dividend/interest for cash or credit or bitcoins or ethereums or whatever. Or maybe the contract will keep the payment for the moment.

I don't see why this arrangement wouldn't work. The volatility is just another variable, like the futures price of hops and tobacco.

Are those new coins with real anonymity more stable than bitcoin?

Your answer has earned you $1,000. Paypal or bitcoin?