True, but I guess he had his convictions at the time that the price was headed downwards from 500. Probably would've been smart to at least partly buy back at various price points on the way down. Still riskier than buy&hold though I think.

I don't know, Bitcoin is wild but that doesn't mean the tops and bottoms are easy to recognize. They're easy in retrospect, but when it's happening you don't know if you're selling too early and it'll never be lower than this price again. Obviously people aren't leaving tons of money on the table, so if these opportunities existed the smart money would be on it.

Maybe you have a good read on it and can do it, but it takes some sort of skill that isn't trivial.

If I do trade it will be with less than 25% of my BTC holdings. 50% is already in cold wallets and not to be touched for a while, and I might throw some more in there soon.

lol the haters are funny. If you notice some stupid thing people are doing with their money, most people don't care or if anything feel bad. It takes a lot of butthurt to feel like you want to see people lose money.

sell, sell, sell.

Will someone please outline what issues would take Bitcoin to zero?

A flaw in the protocol
Huge hacking of very popular wallet service
Anything else?

I had a similar feeling to this as Mastercoin when I first heard of it "hey, this is trying to solve an interesting problem in a creative way, but I don't see how it would work". Also got the same scam feeling from protoshares being the funding mechanism of it as Mastercoin. I saw his original presentation and thought it was interesting (bitshares), but wasn't sure of implementation. It seems less scammy than Mastercoin from what I see and at least it doesn't act as a parasite on the blockchain, so I'm giving it some credit until I learn.

Hacking of popular wallets happens every month, no one cares.

-Huge flaw in protocol causing forks
-Nothing useful getting built on top of it
-Governments crippling/changing it
-Flaw in encryption/SHA/etc...

Given that all transactions are traceable, could such an anti-crime/anti-money laundering system be implemented as I describe below?

Say there is a theft of funds from a particular bitcoin address. Let's say that some central authority, perhaps the US government (after btc becomes mainstream), officially recognizes it as stolen funds. Henceforth, any btc derived from that address is tainted. The US government (and anyone who wants to stay in their good graces) declares that it will not accept as payment any tainted funds. Obviously, tainted btc will be worth less than untainted btc because of this. Applications are written to make it very easy for regular users to tell which addresses are tainted, and whether they own/have received any of these*. Businesses set their terms such that they are not obliged to recognize payment from tainted funds, since it's easy to check beforehand. Pretty soon, the value of tainted funds plummets. Those addresses are effectively taken out of circulation until the US government/a recognized authority on bitcrime recovers or clears those funds. This greatly disincentivizes bitcrime of all kinds. But it will also influence non-government approved activities in the gray areas involving btc because of the potential risk that government will decide to blacklist those. Because large economic players (and the US govt is the largest single entity of them all) have the ability to taint bitcoins power on account of their economic heft, they start to be able to regulate the use of bitcoin quite capably.

*The thieves would have to dump their btc very quickly before their funds got tainted. But then users would adapt, and recently-transacted bitcoins would probably have a cooling-off period before they are accepted for large transactions. Also, the "credit reporting"/"anti-taint protection" firms might employ predictive models to ensure that their users' don't unwittingly accept bitcoins that are not yet tagged but might get tagged in the future, offering taint insurance for a fee.

Illegality could prevent it from being mainstream, but make it 0? Eventually people start buying, if for no other reason to speculate on the government behaving different in the future.

If banks decided to make bank transfers reversible, it might kill Bitcoin as there would be no way to safely buy/sell Bitcoin (much like paying with CC can be chargebacked).

I'm guessing this would be enormously difficult for banks to execute so don't think this is likely at all but it might be a possibility.

Forks assume certain miners don't accept blocks, no? I really only have superficial knowledge on the tech aspects.

@tom and the other two who ansered:

My assumption is that miners will go along with random regulation as this goes hand in hand with their economic self-interest.

Alt-coins will not have the same fate, because the user base will be smarter the second or third time. Perhaps the 10th time

Or drug lords will create their blockchain that can never be changed at all. My main point is that there is a HUGE market for illegal goods. Digital currencies is definitely an innovation for them. Anonymity or plausible deniability is a MUST HAVE. If Bitcoin can't provide those (or loses them), there WILL be an alt-coin which will serve this niche.

That's where i see potential value.

I'll consider anything under $1 to be 0 for practical purposes. I agree that a large number of cryptonerds will keep using it no matter what.

A payment method with a cooling off period will really, really, struggle to get anything other than niche adoption for online or IRL purchases.

Near-instant, publicly verifiable, non-repudiatable transactions can provide a great strength. Building on this protocol to enable repudiation, escrow, whatever is what will increase adoption by merchants.

am I the only one who feels like a failure/idiot because I'm not financially retired right now?

heck even bitcoin seems stupid because of how ridiculous altcoins have done this week.

Fork is when a blockchain diverges based on different rules on what is valid. Some people think one side is valid, and others think the other is. For example, right now there is a 1MB maximum block size. Say 80% the miners decided that 10MB should be allowed. 20% still obey the 1MB max. The 80% mine a long blockchain, but the clients and old miners reject this, and honor the old miners smaller blockchain. Anyone who uses an updated client uses the new blocks. This can mean you pay 1BTC to someone in fork 1, and 1 BTC to someone else in fork 2.

Seems reasonable, if Bitcoin changes away from Bitcoin, an alternative could take off.

Obv it wouldn't be good, but could always buy with cash from other people, or there are BTC atms going up.

And I don't see the bank transfers being reverse ever a possibility because it wouldn't only hurt bitcoin, it would hurt anybody who sells anything.

You should reread my post.


I am aware that Gavin/The foundation are no rulers ("in theory"), but they have a huge influence (the modern more humane version of a ruler) and people will swallow all changes unless it is something completely ridiculous.

Read this: http://allaboutfrogs.org/stories/boiled.html

So effectively they have power. Afaik Gavin is the only or one of few working on BTC. Sure, there could be replacements, but you have to understand the uneducated masses (i include myself there) will always choose "gavin approved" over "random programmer".

Anybody who thinks the foundation is a good willed charity is naive. I have no beef as they at least partially represent the interest of every BTC holder who want a good ROI.

This is the main reason why i am not a bear towards alt-coins in general, but bullish only on BTC atm.

I'll add that mass adoption by illegal activities is worse than non-adoption, as this will reduce the ability to exchange for flat currency, as the exchanges will be targeted by law enforcement.

I believe success / permanence will come from;
1. stable price
2. ability for bitpay-type processors to exist in a stable environment
3. ???
4. large merchant adoption

The question is what is ???. ?

Will consumers demand the ability to pay with their bitcoin? Only if they have bitcoin, or want to create a layer of perceived insulation between themselves and the merchant. Will the network effect take over, and create the tipping point to push merchants to adopt?

Will merchants demand the ability to receive bitcoin? Contrary to some misinformation in this thread, most online payment methods are pretty cheap in most parts of the world. Merchants will most likely demand it when they believe they are losing customers by not accepting it. This will require some critical mass, or a leap of faith by - say - amazon.

As I say above the use of BTC by criminals or others to avoid tax, avoid detection, etc will give BTC a great start, but to become the currency of the internet it will need something more significant.

Or maybe I'm missing something. Do to the BTC advocates here believe that to succeed it needs to become a viable online method for b2c?

what do you guys make of this? mostly gibberish to me.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=337294.40

Yeah definitely, draconian restrictions on bitcoin from all major governments would cripple bitcoin but I doubt it would go to 0 or stop being used. Ironically, it would be used strictly for the things the government doesn't want it to be used for.

And a weakness in SHA2 also has the potential to be crippling, but unless it's a major vulnerability (which afaik is extremely unlikely to ever be found) then bitcoin can safely and smoothly transition to SHA3 or whatever other hashing algorithm is the most robust at the time. Even a major vulnerability might be salvageable w/ a fast protocol change, although it might mean a rollback and it would really rock people's confidence in the system.

The vulnerabilities in other hash functions like SHA1 were not major, but rather theoretical in nature. With SHA1, weaknesses have been discovered but they still haven't produced any actual collisions in practice and nobody using SHA1 has been compromised.

If anything that might make bitcoin more appealing since it'd be the only way to make a non-reversible payment online. I doubt it would happen anyway. Even if it does there's always cash and localbitcoins.

Just looked over Bitshares/Protoshares. Here is my rough understanding. If anyone knows more, I'd love to know.

Protoshares seems like a scam-ish-like Mastercoin funding mechanism done through mining rather than direct investment, although miners sell to investors, so seems less scammy, although I don't understand the point of this.

Bitshares is a highly flawed idea that is basically a fractional reserve banking system equivalent in cryptos. You have bitshares that are assumed to have some value. You can transfer them for futures contracts on various commodities, including Bitcoins, although there are no Bitcoins or values involved, you just are betting on the "price". How they determine the price or winner, who knows, it isn't outlined. You put up collateral in Bitshares and are forced to cover shorts if it drops too much.

Of course, this is highly dependent on value of Bitshares. If they drop too much in value, the shorts must cover their positions. So as long as Bitshares don't drop, no problem really. But if they do, the whole system collapses. And everyone is left holding bags.

This seems like it's trying to be Mastercoin's most flawed concept, but without anything redeeming, but at least not parasitic like Mastercoin.

I would definitely avoid this. Although it could be a speculation play if you want to try to leave someone else with the bags.

FWIW, Coinbase finally responded to my support ticket. It took 13 days, but they resolved the issue pretty quickly.

Ya, I consider the same thing, my point wasn't to nit over what counts as 0.

I received a response after 4 days.