i'm confused about what qualifications you're looking for that grant me the privilege of speaking common sense?

i took an interest in crypto because the amount of money flowing into altcoins is amazing. so i followed most of the relevant people on twitter and started reading the links and tweets they're posting.

it actually baffles me. it seems like everyone knows full well that everyone else is just in it to make money but they don't understand the consequences of that.

some of these ICOs are even more baffling to me. it's just amazing that some of these people are getting away with funding their companies this way. there are tons of cool projects and interesting ideas which have currencies shoehorned into them for no reason other than that company is also printing the currency.

a perfect example is the company virtue poker which is here on 2+2 to promote their blockchain poker room. they're holding an ICO for VPP, the currency for their poker room. someone please explain to me how the value of their currency has any correlation with the success of their poker room. it seems to me that they are completely independent.

let's pretend the bellagio declared that they are no longer going to create poker chips and there are now a fixed number of chips in existence. and bellagio chips are now a new currency called $BELL.

are all of the altcoin investors going to flock to the bellagio and clean out the cage and then expect tourists to give them $120 for a black $100 chip? i can't believe they would be that stupid but it's not very different from an online casino doing a token sale.

and of course the bellagio wouldn't be this stupid, unless of course they printed an extra 100M chips for their own vault, had thousands of people promise to buy these chips in advance, and by the way, the bellagio hasn't actually been built yet. then it becomes a pretty awesome idea.

Sorry but that seems bull****.

First of all you have to buy bitcoins. It's actually harder than to get money in a poker account and it usually involves higher fees. BTW, there is usually zero fees when funding a poker account with a debit card, contrary to most bitcoin exchanges. Then when it's time to cashout, you pay some fees, or you are lucky to find a player to player transfer if the site, like most major sites, doesn't accept btc withdrawal, and then you pay at least 3% fee. You can also withdraw to your neteller account and pay a 5% fee to get money in btc, great. And finally, you pay again some fees to change your btc into actual useful money.

As for sending money abroad, it's useless at the moment. Right now, a bank wire transfer cost a few $ in fees, and the exchange rate is close to the FX rate. You can also use services like Transferwise for similar price and excellent FX rate. It takes only a minute to do with zero required computer skills and Joe Schmoe receives his money directly in his bank account between one and 3 days later.

On the other hand, bitcoin requires you to change your money in BTC before the transfer. Not an easy task, it requires some time to find the good exchange, getting your documents verified, etc. Then pay some fees to actually get bitcoin. IF you have a large amount you kind of have to trade your order instead of dumping it at the market rate. You then pay more fees to send the btc. Joe schmoe has to do the same process in reverse. Finding a local exchange, get his ID verified, and exchange BTC to local money. If he doesn't live in a big country, he WILL get royally screwed on the exchange. Check the prices and spreads of btc exchanges in Thailand if you don't believe me.

As for shopping, why the **** would anyone buy stuff in btc with the constraint of changing your money in btc before, rather than buying straight from your card with almost always no fee whatsoever, great convenience and buyer protection?

Sounds like the stock market

I use will use Crypto for its intended purpose, to put my money where I want to gamble with it, because of stupid USA laws and the very politicians that I vote for will not lift a finger to regulate and tax internet gambling.

As such, I see it as just a way to move money for a fee, not an investment.

yes. I wish we could separate the discussion about crypto as a commodity/ investement, from much more interesting how will cryto be used now, 3 years, 10 years?

I think back to the very first time I heard of and touched what was the internet .

At that time it would be impossible for me or anyone to forecast at that time how the internet would change a range of social and business issues over the next 15 years.

I feel sort of like that about crypto. I dont think its possible to forecast the social and business issues it will impact.

Though, I'd put my money on it being bigger than and an in more areas that are currently even being considered by all including the smartest folks in the field.

Not as impactful as the internet as a whole, but has the potential to be up in that neighborhood of cosmic shift.

LOL at the majority of the words ITT being from some guy who obv missed the boat on bitcoin going from 500-4k(5k at one point)+ over the past year. Clearly hes was debating investing in them so hes been reading bitcoin twitter and knows bitcoin is a ponzi scheme at this point. Sitting around watching it go up the past year its certain to him its a ponzi scheme hes so happy he didnt invest hes on the internet posting his facts about bitcoin to help spread the word.

yellowfever is very wise! i watched the parabolic rise and asked myself "why is this happening?" all of the reasons forecast a future of instability and no real long term future.

indeed i have no intention of investing in bitcoin now, far too late imo, but there's certainly money to be made right now in riding the waves and trading ****coins.

problem is there are real guys with real experience in markets like these who are already 50x better than i will be a year from now. don't see how they won't just pillage me.

add to that, the institutional money is starting to creep in. guys with big wallets and a lot of experience and their stated goal is to skim as much until the thing crashes.

I spoke at a Bitcoin Foundation conference in 2013 about bitcoin and online gaming. At the time, speaking as an unfrozen caveman lawyer, I got to ask as many questions of the participants as I wanted, and saw the utility of irreversible, near instant transactions, which were then relatively cheap, for igaming customers and operators. Except for the 'relatively cheap" part, which stumbled this spring but has since been addressed, those attributes of blockchain payments still hold.

Augie, Iget it, you feel at a disadvantage in trading/investing against guys 50x smarter than you or with big institutional money.

Fine, none of that concern about holding long-term value detracts from BTC or other cryptos as a means of transaction. This thread is about an expansion of customers' available uses for alt-coins to access gaming at one operator.

When I spoke at the Bitcoin Foundation in2013, something like 85% of ALL blockchain transactions were driven by one gaming company. I told the owner of tha company that his game was the most boring, stupid game I had seen in a long time, but clearly popular among BTC holders because they got something to do with their coins. At that time the USD price was about $70. Clearly holding long term would have been better than gambling, but there was a provably fair, easily played gaming opportunity and people took it.

You miss that, subject to mining fee costs, the price of a bitcoin has almost nothing to do with its utility; a single BTC is highly divisible and fractional amounts are as easily sent as whole coins. That a $400 value deposit formerly took a whole coin and now may take .1 coin doesn't change the blockchain's utility as a payments system.

Expansion to acceptance of a host of cryptos expands the range of customer options to deposit, the subject of this thread, other than your derail, do you have anything to say about that?

it's a very very smart idea! i'm glad they're doing it.

i love WPN, been playing there for years, and i have a feeling that WPN is investing in crypto as an alternate revenue source. i hope they bought thousands of bitcoins when they started using it and made a fortune.

it's brilliant for them on multiple fronts: easy deposits for their customers and it's a way for them to acquire coins without paying a vig. they can hold ones they like and quickly sell the ones they don't.

WPN also has a huge potential additional revenue stream in processing customer cashouts. if they're savvy enough, they can sporadically delay or expedite cashouts to use customer money to margin trade.

it's probably highly unethical but who's going to stop them? the customer is already eating the volatility so it would be hard for the customer to even notice.

this is my entire point, so i don't know why you think i've missed that.

If you understood how to read an entire sentence, instead of ignoring the part you did not get, it may have been clearer to you that price does not affect utility, as a payment channel.

The bitcoin blockchain works as a payment channel whether a coin has a value of $40, $400 or $4000, (again aside from transaction fee issues.*)

(*Fortunately, developments such as the Lightning network may mitigate the rising cost of mining transactions.)

I can't say whether a price of $400, $4000 or $3000 or $20000 is a long term value proposition. Price is a function of demand, if people want to store value in BTC the price will rise as the aggregate value rises . If demand for BTC as a store of value falls, the market price will fall.

btw, investment or storing of value in BTC is highly democratic; it also doesn't matter to prospective investor whether heor she can only afford a fractional portion of a coin as an investment. If a whole coin increases 25%, so does an investment in a fractional coin investment.

what's next, are you going to explain to me that bitcoin is digital currency which only exists online?

No,

“I’m not going to answer any more of your questions. I hope you won’t take this personally, but .... ‘What’s the sense of wrestling with a pig? You both get all over muddy . . . and the pig likes it.'”

---- 1948 Saturday Evening Post

You completely ruined your own argument and any credibility with this post.
"far too late imo" - what point is the best entry point for a Ponzi scheme? Oh in that regard it's not like a Ponzi scheme.... The green is for envy, not moderatorship. You should be looking at it as a technology, not a trade. Evaluate it on that basis. And yes, the reason you feel like you're being talked to like a 5 year old (and very nice, adult responses by the way!!!) is because you come off as ideologically against cryptos as you think the fanatics are for it.

i truly feel sorry for you geniuses who are trying to prove me wrong by catching me on using the word "ponzi-esque."

i can just picture you reading the directions on the box of a microwave meal and then collapsing on the floor in a shame spiral and screaming "WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?!?!?!"

from this moment forward, forget i used any words with a "z" in them. here's my opinion on crypto currencies: you can make money on them now and until the bottom falls out, which will happen almost instantly. i'm not currently investing because i don't think i'm savvy enough.

i made a post in the bitcoin thread in the finance forum on this subject actually. i think the bitcoin zealots are actually expressing an anti-american, anti-capitalism, and open borders ideology that's framed within the currency.

i'm curious exactly what ideology you think that i follow.

i do look at it as a technology. the level of the technology in no way justifies the current price.

additionally, when the technology itself is a currency, that creates a bizarre link with finance which is inescapable.

there's one rule that everyone knows. you aren't allowed to build a money printing machine in your garage and print $100 bills. literally everyone knows that rule.

now there is no rule against me printing augie bucks in my garage because until 10 years ago, it was an absurd idea that i'm going to print my own augie bucks and then a bunch of people are going to accept them as currency, creating a parallel economy. literally nobody saw that coming.

so i'm very interested in this technology but the technology is currency, which is weird. i'd say the technology is analogous to the garage money printing machine and as soon as these garage printing machines start causing economic issues, the government will move into action swiftly and decisively.

i think the only conclusion for a technology that's also a currency is for it to be dominated by the government.

True - it can only be a good thing for poker players if drug lords and other criminals are allowed to launder their money anonymously on these gambling sites.

I wouldn't be too optimistic wrt the future of these sites however (or at least the sustained use of these currencies if they want to continue to be legal).

What about Sklansky bucks?

best post in thread.

sounds like the next hot ICO

They'll never circulate.

I lol’d ty

Touché Sir

Well said Gzesh, also

Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

― Mark Twain