ideally, i see where you are coming from, but practically, i see the potential for a lot of false positives and false negatives.

Reddit hires Ryan Charles from Bitpay and plans to issue a token on Bitcoin that's backed by $5,000,000 in Reddit equity.

Reddit CEO post outlining the plan: https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/commen...ph30?context=3

Some comments on Twitter from Ryan: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/com...velop_reddits/

Thanks all this information.


So just to make sure. I want to create a bitcoin account immediately so i could receive btc from other users. I would probably plan to cash them out say few weeks from then.


The first thing i would do is create a coinbase account, then create a blockchain account immediately? Then have the person will send the BTC to my blockchain account or would it be the coinbase account? Right now i just want to be able to create whatever acct is needed so i could receive BTC first, i do the linking of bank acct to cashout etc few week later.

Also is anyone here worried about the price of bitcoin? Its been dropping everyday it seems.

I am sure the speculators are worried but the people that think that bitcoin will solve certain problems are in it for the long run and only see this as an opportunity to buy more.

Bitcoin is a scam and a fad. Nobody really knows how it started or how much insiders have sold, or are selling now. There is no recourse for the transaction, which means it is a non-starter.

Stack your silver and hoard your bitcoin and then get back to me in 30 years and see what you have. Some of you people are beyond help. Wake up and FEEL THAT BREEZE that is life passing you by.

nothing but bulltraps all the way down, the early adopters are thanking you guys

By bitcoin account I assume you mean wallet?

I would create an electrum wallet. Have them send the bitcoins to it before coinbase. If you are really worried about being linked to gambling you could tumble the coins through bitcoinfog on the way.

To receive bitcoin all you need to do is download this program
https://electrum.org/ and run it:
Or sign up on
https://blockchain.info/wallet

I would recommend starting by using electrum since it will make you understand more what is happening than using some webpage to do the same thing.

A fad maybe. Not sure how a protocol can be a scam. Some of the exchanges are scams but bitcoin itself is pretty solid.

We know exactly how it started. There are no insiders. Early adopters made the most money but this is normal in any new technology.

Too afraid to make a prediction that is close enough in time that people will remember you?

Are you bearish short-term, long-term, both? If long-term, mind explaining why?

Anyone have any interesting websites for discussion of price analysis? Most of what I find is pretty ****ty.

Bad news = price goes down
Good news = price plummets

well im actively shorting it right now, so for TA (technical analysis) reasons im bearish short term as in at least the next month. this year we're due for a visit in the 260 to 300 region, then a bounce, not sure how high, then it depends...

read this guy's TA on btc, he's pretty good https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?ac...2;sa=showPosts


i can't find the article but there was an academic study done by a university, showing that a huge i think possibly 50% of all coins mined have never been moved from cold storage. and that those old coins started to move when the price was bubbling in dec.

the second is there is no new money coming into btc, at least not onto exchanges. i track how much $ is going into the second market BIT, which shows they havent bought anything significant for 4 months.

if you pay attention to ********, there's about $20M in long positions at least 17mil is long term longs, it used to be at 30mil in june before they got margin called during the dips. shorts are around 10k btc which is only about $4mil worth. but the short positions are constantly being closed on each dip, evidence of smarter traders than during june. hence why our short squeezes the past month or so have been relatively tame compared to previous squeezes in feb and april. kind of survival of the fittest at this point for traders, if you dont manage ur position size and risk well, you probably have been margin called many times. so i think, that at some point the whales will flush those longs.

the fact that merchant adoption means added selling pressure, miners who dump coins daily to cover electricity and depreciation of machines.

the higher the cost of mining, the bigger the cost of electricity the more coins as a % of coins mined they must sell to cover expenses. for the best mining operations at least from a news article, its' roughly $200/coin in electricity.

we have a chicago options regulatory council forget its name sometime next week, probably nothing new.

the only positive potential catalyst i can see in the horizon is the winklevoss ETF. when the etf launches, i suspect the whales on the exchanges will pump the **** out of btc price to get the general population fired up with greed.

long term (as in 5-30yrs out) im neutral about it. could go anyway, i think if it starts to threaten traditional fiat it will get destroyed by the cia or nsa or irs. australia just decided to tax btc as a commodity, theres a sales tax on all btc purchases. that pretty much destroys it's use as a transactional currency in australia.

however, as a tradeable instrument or "asset", it's definitely tradeable given its volatility, the meme factor and marketing.

also i find bitcoin an amazing asset/commodity/currency to trade for beginners given its low barrier to entry. you have access to margin trading, futures. the entire bubble run up and now we're in the extended bear market, is like the regular markets on hyper speed.

not sure if you guys know this but the 100% insurance of btc on coinbase only covers their hot wallet. it does not cover cold storage.

a lot of miners already stopped mining, there was a drop in hashrate recently a few days ago. not something i personally pay too much attention to though.

as the less profitable miners stop mining, the mining becomes more centralized to the more profitable and larger mining operations. not sure how that affects price in the short term, but fundamentally it might not be so good. makes the blockchain more vulnerable to a 51% attack.

as for the argument why a 51% attack is economically unlikely. just throwing a possible theory out there. okcoin and 796.com offers futures trading. 796 offers 20 to 1 leverage. so imagine if a miner decides to set up a massive 20 to 1 leverage short and then pulls some shenanigans.

interesting news today, russia will be fining bitcoin users.
http://tjournal.ru/paper/bitcoin-fines

so much for the theory that bitcoin will be adopted in the BRICS. russia has banned it, china has banned its use for commerce and integration with the banking system. ecuador is creating its own cryptocurrency.

Today I got emailed an article aimed at financial advisors telling them why they should care about BTC. The author said things similar to what I've read ITT: It is the future currency of the world, it is really important to young people, and other BS.

Then the author said that he used to pitch FAs on how important twitter would be for them to acquire assets and how he used to "get laughed out of the room" when he said this. He then suggested that FAs are successfully acquiring assets via twitter and how BTC will become that essential.


For the record, I do not disagree that BTC may become as useful to FAs as twitter is.

Maybe you are confused what is good news.

Last year we had a few runups centered around Mt. Gox. Mt. Gox was able to run up the price through fake dollars being put into their system, buy coins, and dump out the coins. Think about it this way:

You have GoxBucks and GoxCoins. GoxBucks got inflated through hacking, giving a hacker more cash in his account. He buys coins with all the GoxBucks he has and converts the GoxCoins into Bitcoins. This drives the price up. But it wasn't real money coming into the system, it was fake money. So the sellers had nothing, and were screwed. You drive the price up like crazy this way without needing any money to do this. Other exchanges followed due to arbitrage until the coins and cash ran out at Gox.

Now we need to unwind the price that was inflated from the Gox runup, which was not real. Not surprisingly, we are getting near a price before the massive runup. Of course, the people who got in high are distraught and similar to before, we have them giving up and taking losses. This pattern happened a lot in the last downturn, people go through the stages of grief until they hit acceptance and sell off. The last downturn had things stay low for a long time. Something like 90% off the peak for a LONG time.

Right now, there is no compelling case for Bitcoins in the present other than darknet markets or speculation, and speculation is not good with anyone with a short time table or impatience. Long term speculators are still there, as they can see the compelling case down the road. But most people don't have that vision or time horizon. Lastly, I believe we are seeing an evolution of the market toward a larger class of investors who are buying directly from miners and merchant processors off the exchanges. They see that vision and want in, but don't have coins, so they are happy to keep the price low by funding Bitcoin businesses to take coins from the early adopters (BitPay, Coinbase), while giving them access to coins at a cheap price. The entire business model is in the secondary market for them, and the merchant adoption stuff is just a cover. And people fall for it. You have early adopters with significant wealth that grow impatient and want toys for their money, and they'll part with it to hand off to the larger investors who want in, but not at inflated prices.

So I think we see 2014 as a bear year for Bitcoin continuing into 2015. Infrastructure will be built as coins are transferred to the investor class, as they will have an incentive to get it done. The price will only rise when adoption of holding coins increases. Try to figure out what will drive that and you will find the next explosion. Bitcoin has great name recognition at this point and you aren't going to get adopters by spreading the name any further. People either are on board or they aren't at this point. I don't see too many undecided, unless they have a compelling reason. We have run out of small time visionaries. We need actual use cases and big investors to get in the game before any rise happens again.

Tom,
what do you see being the first use/adoption for bitcoins other than the poker/gambling type things like today? remittance?

https://hypron.net/bitcoinwisdom/

anybody watching the carnage today?

Three years ago I was marking Gambling as a huge use case, although I admittedly am biased. Even with just as a transfer mechanism to avoid high costs of fraud that the industry has today. Remittance goes into that as well. None of these use cases drive value up that huge, although they do drive things becoming more comfortable. Once a large enough ecosystem is established, there becomes less need to go back in and out of fiat on any end of that.

Black markets are still huge and will continue to grow IMO.

Reverse remittance type situations might make sense as well, whereas I am some citizen of a country with poor banking set up, and I want to buy something online, I can walk into a store and buy Bitcoins for fiat and use that to send to an entity overseas.

Distributed ownership of securities and other assets is also somewhat interesting.

I think many of these use cases will exist where people don't even realize they are doing anything with Bitcoin before common ownership takes off. I can also see something where there exist some kind of market that doesn't exist today or some business model that wouldn't work today, particularly for low value transactions. I could see games or forums reward members for participating positively or winning, while charging membership fees or fees for buying items that could be done very easily with Bitcoin. Something like that is interesting to me.

So it's hard to tell where exactly it's going to take off. Still love this quote:

Again, my visions are clouded my by American-centric viewpoint. I could be overlooking how it could be more useful in developing countries as I just don't understand their perspectives and needs as well.

I think this has a lot of potential. Even though all the new merchants accepting bitcoins brings downward pressure on the price right now, it seems like it is a necessary step for your reverse remittance. Eventually those online companies could expand to new customers overseas who dont have credit cards. If their only option to buy something is with bitcoins, it obviously could create a lot more demand.

Can you expand what you are talking about here?

I havent heard of anything being implemented like this, but really think this could have potential. I remember hearing of the idea to charge some minuscule amount to send an email as a way to stop spam emails. It would be small enough that nobody would really be affected except for spammers. I think filters are good enough now that it would never be implemented, but I thought the idea was cool and would have worked if bitcoin was around then.

The idea of rewarding people is even better.

Assets and securities.
https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/

Companies that float their stock on top of the blockchain, as opposed to the traditional exchanges. Both OverStock and Reddit are looking into this.

I don't get why so many ITT like the idea of using bitcoin for online poker because it is anonymous. That is the reason so many on these forums don't like Bovada.

If this store allowed these people to use either USD or BTC wouldn't a huge majority use USD since it is incredible stable compared to BTC? I see no benefit for those people to use BTC because of how unstable it is. They can just use USD and paypal or some other similar service and avoid the risk of a BTC drop (even if they do get charged 1% to use a paypal type service it would probably be worth it to them).

Paypal has already made this posible using USD and I am not aware of any games or forums doing anything like this. If this does exist or will start soon you still have to wonder why wouldn't the forums just pay in dead presidents.

I'm not saying Bitcoin is useless or its only place is the black market and other illegal activities, but lets stop pretending it will be the next world currency and there could never be another Mt Gox again.

Wouldn't this kinda be like selling a really unique item in a one-day yard sale as opposed to selling it on eBay?