Ya no possible way to do this chessmate you got me.

No, I think drugs/poker/illegal **** is the best (only) bitcoin utility argument.

And those markets are HUGE. Bitcoin, for example, has completely transformed the online gambling industry. The days of waiting weeks for paper checks or payment processors getting seized are long gone. The idiots arguing for no real world value for bitcoin are just wrong.

Do-

Bitcoin's biggest problem it solved was double-spending. Why do banks take multiple days to interact with other banks when sending your money? Part of the process involves making sure you haven't simultaneously sent that money to another bank as well or to every bank. The BoA has to contact JP Morgan etc. They could make this as instant as an email right now but they don't as it leaves them open to fraud and counterparty risk.

Bitcoin solves this by decentralizing and distributing the ledger among nodes. It rewards the people writing to the ledger with Bitcoin and then all the nodes agree on what the right state of the ledger is. With no Bitcoin, no one will have an incentive to act truthfully when writing the ledger. You can never fully be in consensus without the time consuming task of every stakeholder interacting personally with every other stakeholder.

Instant cross-border remittance - as possible as we will probably ever get available today through paypal. Here is a board member of Paypal interviewing the President of paypal. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ktorpey.../#330bd3a363b5 regarding why blockchain good, bitcoin bad misses the mark.

Distributed ledger of all internal transactions - already exists with ever major MNC.

Ease of accounting - Triple entry accounting is not easier. Its much easier for me to do my taxes in excel than it will ever be through any future blockchain.

You are conveniently leaving out the value of decentralization. You can say decentralization doesn't have much value, thus blockchain doesn't either. I can definitely see that argument and its why I don't put all my money in blockchain tech. You cannot say blockchain has value and decentralization doesn't however.

Half a % of the worlds population is ~45 million people. If you don't think there is a very likely scenario where 45 million people end up embedded in the crypto industry out of sheer interest then I don't know what to tell you. There is very little chance of bitcoin/alts going to 0 at this point.

If that 45 million is exclusively poker/drugs/illegal activites, that is still pretty large.

Blockchain solved the problem, not bitcoin, because theres hundreds of other crytpo that do the same exact thing. Why? They have one thing in common: blockchain. So explain to me why these banks would buy bitcoin to do these transactions when they can just agree to use one crypto thats developed for them? They wouldn't, and they won't.

1. You might need a token, but there is no reason at all why that token should be bitcoin
2. You don't need a token. Some other blockchains don't use tokens at all.


Not to the degree of certainty blockchain has. Humans make mistakes, blockchains don't.

And that's probably the exact same as a corporation that employs 20000 people?

Um well you can have a decentralized protocol but central control. Take bitcoin for example, a small group of mining pools own all the hashing power, a small group of people decide by fiat where to take the protocol, and a small group of exchanges handle all transactions into and out of fiat currency.

There is value in a distributed, decentralized ledger. There is no long term value in bitcoin.

look at this post i made six months ago about the online drug market sizes. They are super tiny in relation to crypto market cap.

And the worldwide illegal drug industry is roughly 360 billion a year, with bitcoin capturing or expanding that less than 1%. Bitcoin can't even take over the thing it's best at. It's basically an all around failure any way you slice it.

Security of the blockchain is done through an accumulation of computational power such that in order to create a dishonest state of the network you would have to outpace that accumulated work. This accumulation is the pooling of computer resources from network participant running mining nodes. These nodes only participate to get the currency. Otherwise no one cares and the network dies.

Bitcoins exist in the same way IP addresses exist. They aren't really an address, just space in a network that you can transfer ownership of.

A link to that would be interesting thanks. As far as I have read there were several bugs during the early years of Bitcoin. Luckily the honest incentive structure made people at each juncture decide to act honestly compared to the DAO hardfork and possible Parity hardfork upcoming.

Thanks, I wasn't naive enough to believe it didn't completely exist. But good to know it makes up a small % of market cap. It seems to be one of the main talking points for teh bitcoin haterz

That's proof of work. There's proof of stake as well. Ethereum is moving away from miners altogether and some blockchains are working on different types of transaction consensus. But, basically, bitcoin is being left in the dust regarding development and the infinitesimally small chance it will gain widespread adoption is getting smaller by the day.



Yes I understand how bitcoin works.

I'll see if I can find it for you.

Eddy,

I found some of these claims dubious so I did some research.

1. Are merchants adopting bitcoin?

07/17 Business Insider article: Merchants aren't accepting bitcoin

A few notable merchants that stopped accepting btc in the last year:
Steam
Microsoft seems to be going back and forth
Stripe
Miami Bitcoin Conference


2. What discounts are merchants offering for paying w/ discounts?

13 Major Retailers that accept Bitcoin

Expedia accepts bitcoin for hotel bookings but I couldn't find a discount for using it.

I found Overstock was giving a big discount but they seem to have discontinued that:
Bitcoin blooper adds up to brief 85% discount at Overstock

Egifter - no discount I could find

Newegg - no discount

Shopify - doesn't offer a way for it's merchants to offer a btc discount.

I gave up after checking the first 5. Maybe you can point out others that do offer a discount.

3. Do VPN services offer a btc discount?

I'm not going to quote and link everything. I searched for vpns that accept btc. Of the top 5 accepting btc none of them offer a discount for paying w/ btc. My search for vpns that do give a btc discount came up empty.

4. Artists accept btc?

Looks like there are artists beginning to accept btc but I couldn't really find much information. Of the two artists you mentioned, Mariah Carey (and apparently several other artists) went w/ Monero. I'm not sure how that's bullish for btc.

50 Cent did accept some btc for a 2014 album but hasn't accepted btc for any albums since. I'm not sure how that's bullish or shows adoption. He's put out albums since and didn't continue to accept btc.

5. Discounts on prescription drugs?

My search here came up nearly empty. I did click thru and look at some sites but couldn't find any stating they offer a btc discount. I did find this post on Reddit. Perhaps this is the type of discount you're referring to?


TLDR:

I didn't find any mainstream online merchants offering btc discounts (unless you want to count getting 15 unexpected oxys in the mail). Everyone of these merchants does offer a discount, in the form of cash back, for cc payment. perhaps you can link some of the many merchants offering significant btc discounts?

Decaptain,

A quick google led me this https://bitcoinwarrior.net/bitcoin_deals_and_discounts/ and a couple other sites offering bitcoin discounts. Also he never specified any of the top merchants offering discounts

Confirmation bias. Emotion.

Confirmation bias + Emotion = ?????

I regularly use http://www.napsgear.net and get 20% for using bitcoin. They have 30% off specials multiple times per year and it stacks on top of it.

One time I used it 2014-2015. Spent a bunch on there ordering for a group of friends and I. My friend who bought bitcoin during the 2013 bubble and held on sent his only 3 bitcoin for me and I gave him fiat when it was like $200-300ish a coin. He texted me that small order cost him $60k when it was at its $20k peak.

Since when have banks paid someone to do something for them that other people will do for free? Banks are incentivized to use public blockchains as it would be less costly compared to building an equally secure one from scratch. Censorship resistance works both ways, banks get to play too no matter who wants otherwise.

1. Correct. It doesn't have to be Bitcoin. It has to be something with the same core qualities of Bitcoin, however. Re: PoS I am really skeptical of current implementations as well as the Casper implementation, so I keep more of my cryptoassets in PoW coins than PoS, but a lot of smart people disagree and are on board so I keep some PoS exposure as I am not an expert.
2. https://www.multichain.com/blog/2015...kchain-debate/
Here is an argument that you could use a tokenless blockchain in an entirely trusted system with pre-approved miners to improve on current database implementations. Its an interesting take and I believe requires a bit higher level of DB background than I unfortunately have to gauge the possibility and improvement over legacy systems he proposes.

Blockchains aren't AI. They are notebooks. Someone has to write in the notebook and that is ultimately a human.

Stakeholder centralization is a concern of Bitcoin, as one of the known attack vectors is based on gaining a dishonest majority.

Just because Bitcoin isn't perfect now is not a valid argument that it has zero value. Its an argument that if its main issues are fixed then its value should be higher than it is now.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/



Juk

Today was the biggest single day drop in the history of the dow (as you well know). It was a perfect day to take fiat out of the stock market, and put it into BTC to "preserve wealth".

Instead BTC continues to crash.

I would think that if this BTC crash coincides with a stock market correction, that's even more bearish for BTC. Anyone also see it that way? Had BTC had a substantial correction today that would have been quite interesting.

I thought this was pretty well written out Irockhoes, well done

I can make my own bitcoin in the comfort of my home. It would be factors cheaper for a bank or group of banks to develop a crypto than buying bitcoin to accomplish their goals. Not only that, they can set the price of their own crypto which is kind of a big deal when you're dealing in multi hundred million dollar transactions. Not so good that the billion dollar transaction you just sent is worth 980 million 16 hours later when it gets confirmed to have reached the other end lol.

That said, what's stopping the US government from making a crypto and just setting the value at $1USD and calling all other types of crypto counterfeit currency? You clearly haven't thought this through.



It depends what you want out of it. There's no reason crypto has to be decentralized or anonymous at all.

R3 Corda is the one that comes to my mind. No tokens. Distributed Ledger.




That's not my argument. My argument is that it is a failure for what it was designed to do. Could that change? Well sure, as I've admitted, but it has to also outpace development that is taking place at a rapid pace in other cryptos and other ideas to maintain its hegemony, or it will be left behind just like Netscape was. The odds of that are so poor that I will take bets on bitcoins price in 10 years.

Didn't sell anywhere near what I thought I should last month and it feels bad because that mistake of lacking self confidence to pull triggers like that, always been a huge problem for me

Can someone tell me if there are any issues having gambling sites send btc to bittrex or binance? Thus instead of giving the site your btc address... then once you receive it and then send it to bittrex or binance, you have the btc sent directly to bittrex/binance? I believe coinbase would have issues with this and i heard accounts have been closed because of this. But does anyone know if bittrex/binance has issues with this?

and I think this is well argued as well.

see, some higher level dialogue in this thread!

anyways I get your point that the advantages of bitcoin are solely related to blockchain, and you can strip that out and ditch bitcoin altogether at some point.

my knowledge base is way behind in the space but I still think its like internet stocks in 1998. There will be huge winners and losers but damn if I can spot the next amazon and id rather wait until they all blow up and buy them in 2002. Or in this case 2019.

Given the circumstances and FUD surrounding bitcoin I don't think the Dow drop was significant enough. Historically though major financial meltdowns have usually resulted in bitcoin gains

You can't claim adoption is progressing, many merchants are accepting it and offering discounts, when none of the top sites are accepting it or offering discounts. Less sites, large and small, are accepting btc now than there were a year ago.

Lol at your link of 36 merchants (that no one has ever heard of )out of 100's of thousands of online merchants as proof of anything.