Small nitpick:


Email is decentralized.

It's just that spammers and general abuse fucked it up for the rest of us so that it has become unviable to run your own email server (ie. you can still run your own email server, but your emails will most likely end up in the spam folder). Incidentally one of the earliest suggested applications of PoW was trying to solve the spammer problem [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Their last audit was in June 2018 so go figure:
https://tether.to/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/FSS1JUN18-Account-Snapshot-Statement-final-15JUN18.pdf

In all fairness they do self-report their current balance sheet here:
https://wallet.tether.to/transparency

How reliable and trustworthy either of these are is anyone's guess though. Unlike crypto cold storage there's no way to verify the validity of their claims. If Tether goes under or turns out to not hold assets as promised you're simply shit out of luck.

Adresses such as the BitcoinEaterAdress can be used for Proof of Burn:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn

This might be interesting for some projects, but probably not for your own personal use.

If you want a vanity address that you can use for both receiving and spending coins, you need to use a tool like vanitygen as mentioned above. This tool generates one random private key and its corresponding address after another until it finds an address that fits your desired criteria (e.g. must contain the word "Ninja"). This process is fairly resource intensive and gets exponentially more difficult the more characters you desire, hence you're unlikely to see addresses with more than 6-7 custom characters.

If you just want an address to which coins can be sent without caring whether the coins are then spendable again, all you need to create a valid address is to have for it the correct checksum. Calculating the checksum for an address containing the desired phrase is more straightforward and much easier, hence why it's possible to generate addresses that consist almost entirely of custom characters. The downside is of course that you have no idea what the corresponding private key is.

Assuming you are serious, you'd probably be better off getting in touch with one of the major exchanges. Some offer Over the Counter trades (e.g. Bitfinex) and some might even be able to broker you larger amounts directly.

To be fair OP only asked about developing a platform

As far as operational costs are concerned you'll not only have legal costs. You'll also have accounting and customer support for example. Especially the latter is often overwhelmed even (or maybe especially) at large exchanges.

Good developers also need to be good communicators, otherwise they end up building the wrong product. That's true. There's a bit of a pitfall though -- good communicators don't necessarily need to be good developers. Hiring the latter can become a costly mistake as your project turns into a money sink. The tricky part is determining who's what. Without technical expertise or experience that's close to impossible.


Now, if you just want a pretty business website for your neighbourhood mom and pop shop that might be not so relevant. The stakes are low and the skills required are relatively widespread.

If you want to build an exchange on the other hand:

Schön zu sehen das der Thread hier langsam zum laufen kommt



Hilfe, Polizei! Ich fühle mich persönlich angegriffen!

I haven't used it myself so I don't know how well it compares to other solutions, but Jitsi might be an interesting alternative in this case:
https://jitsi.org/

No matter what conferencing software you're going to use though, just have fun OP! And kudos to you kiwis for keeping the pandemic so well contained, the numbers speak for themselves.

You mean in 2013? While often touted as catalyst for Bitcoin's growth in 2013 the Cyprian banking crisis seemed to have very little to do with it. At least to me personally the correlation, let alone causality between Bitcoin and Cyprus seemed pretty close to non-existent at best. Of all the events that happened in 2013 / late 2012 (first halving, the first high-profile websites accepting Bitcoin as payment, the advent of ASICs, China, surviving the closure of Silk Road, the crypto security bubble, the first alt coin bubble and what ever else I might have forgotten) I think Cyprus had the least impact on Bitcoin's price. Others might disagree though.



Also I don't think the utter collapse of the fiat system is all that desirable. While I'd love to see Bitcoin at USD 100k,- and beyond as much as the next guy that will be literally of little value if it barely pays for a piece of bread.

While we're luckily far from a world war hyperinflation scenario I think it's also still too soon to expect any noticable effects on the Bitcoin price from the covid-19 subventions, assuming they occur.

Additionally -- in the EU at least, I haven't been following the US that closely -- the majority of subventions are yet to come, so we haven't seen the full extend in which additional currency will get into circulation. Just like we haven't seen the full extend of covid-19's impact on the world economies.

So while I agree with your sentiment I think it still remains to be seen whether the amount being printed really is "adequate".

I doubt that many countries see chinese products as corona carriers since the risk of the virus remaining active after international transport are pretty much nil:



Unless you share a border with China, Chinese products will usually travel for weeks under very unforgiving conditions until they reach their destination. Remember we're talking about what is essentially a simple piece of RNA wrapped in fat, not some extremophile survivalist bacterium.

What I do believe is that the trust in Chinese health-care export has decreased a lot after several governments purchasing face masks of questionable quality [1][2][3].

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/f3435779-a706-45c7-a7e2-43efbdd7777b
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-04/china-coronavirus-covid-19-medical-supplies-recalled-regulation/12105110
[3] https://orf.at/stories/3160881/ (German only, sorry)

Teufel auch, wieder was gelernt. Würde aber bei näherer Betrachtung erklären warum Satoshi's Forenaccount älter ist als die Bitcointalk.org Domain.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's money on the sidelines right now, waiting to see whether Bitcoin goes down with the stock market or keeps true to its promise as a hedge during times of financial crisis. At least the current sideways movement makes it seem as if the market is currently on the fence of what to make of Bitcoin.

Das Jahr 2050... der in seiner 9ten Amtsperiode sitzende Gott-Präsident Donald Trump hat mittlerweile auf Grund seines hohen Alters einen Status erlangt, den vorher nur die Queen of England hatte. Während die Marskolonien immer noch mit einem Hard Fork drohen um nicht mehr von der Latenzzeit zwischen unseren beiden Planeten abhängig zu sein, ist der Mond nachwievor nichts anderes als ein glorifizierter Bahnhof.

Ich habe Lust auf ein koffeiniertes Kürbisgetränk und rufe mir eine autonome Fähre um zum nächsten Starbucks zu schippern. Angeblich hatten die damals auch andere Getränke als den Pumpkin Spice Latte, aber als Kaffee durch das Massensterben der Monokulturen zum Luxusgut wurde, konzentrierte sich der Konzern auf seine Ersatzprodukte. Gewusst wie, man muss nur den richtigen Riecher haben. So wie mein Opa damals, dank dessen Investments in Coins ich heute auf das universale Grundeinkommen verzichten kann. Wie stolz der gewesen wäre wenn er wüsste das man heutzutage damit bei Starbucks bezahlen kann. Als er vor 5 Jahren starb hat er diesen Meilenstein gerade um ein paar Monate verpasst. Zumindest hatte er das Glück in genau die einzige Kryptowährung zu investieren die heute noch übrig ist. Ich betrete den Starbucks und gebe meine Bestellung auf. Hmm. Die sind tatsächlich wieder teurer geworden. Das letzte Mal musste ich nur 2,5 Dogecoin bezahlen.

I'm afraid most people are too worried about making ends meet to start thinking about investing in crypto. The only cash that could potentially move into Bitcoin right now is the one we have seen being pulled out of the stock market. I have my doubts that this money will find its way into crypto though.

Now the long term implications of the Fed and the EU trying to kick start their respective economies by injecting cash on the other hand....



Thanks for the link, I was already wondering about the source.

Traden ist mir zu stressig

Und um guter Trader zu werden -- falls es sowas abgesehen von der Glückskomponente überhaupt gibt -- muss man doch um einiges mehr an Zeit (und Geld) reinstecken als es mir wert wäre. Crypto ist so schon volatil genug, das muss ich nicht mit Anfänger-Trading moves verschlimmbessern. Hodln ist da doch viel gemütlicher

Sounds very much like a scam.

Maybe it's different in the UK, but that would be the first time that I've heard of a crypto exchange getting involved in the taxation process. Individual crypto-investors usually have the responsibility to self-report taxable events.

And as already mentioned by gentlemand, withdrawal fees are usually in the single digits.

Good point. Honestly I wonder how well the service sector worldwide is going to recover from this. I'm afraid we'll see a lot of consolidation once this whole mess is over, with big companies strengthening their grip on the market as small business owners run out of reserves.



Definitely. While we're luckily not in an end-of-the-world scenario the unavoidable long-term impact doesn't seem to be priced in yet. Especially since a market bust has been long overdue for now, even without a pandemic going on.

I think it's the opposite way really, ie. a large cause of China's economy contracting being that all of their trade partners are economically crippled right now.

While I suspect that China will be quicker to get their production back up than most of the west, their market is likely to be impacted by decreased international demand. Both because China's main export markets will likely (a) take a little longer to recover and (b) try to increase domestic production wherever possible as to decrease the dependency on international trade.

To be fair there's a lot of conflicting information out there.

I'm still not sure whether 5G was created by a Skynet-like AI to brainwash the human population, causes Coronavirus to crash the global economy or merely kills trees in its vincinity.