That's fine, its still early and who knows what will be invented. I'm just saying there's more to bitcoin then it replacing USD if USD ever collapses.

Look at Counterparty.

- Decentralized exchange
- Token creation and distribution
- Dividend payments to token holders in btc or any Counterparty currency
- Trustless betting (binary and CFDs)

It's all free to use and layered on top of Bitcoin's blockchain. It's still quite new technology so feel free to wait it out until more end to end solutions are created, but the interesting stuff is here.

http://www.coindesk.com/amagi-metals...ace-us-dollar/

Counterparty looked cool in the beginning, until it became clear that it was absolutely pointless. It will probably be gone fairly soon, or some of its functionality just implemented directly into bitcoin. It's tiny dev team is pretty stubborn though so who knows how long they stick around.

Counterparty does tend to out develop everyone else, despite its tiny team, so you may be right about them sticking around.

I'd be interested to hear why you think Counterparty is absolutely pointless if you have the time to type it up.

About the collapse thing, I agree that 100 years is a long time, basically anything can happen, imagine the internet at birth to 100 years after it started.

I think if anyone tries to rate USD collapse % they are basically talking out of their ass, it could be 99% it could be 1%. Saying that it is 10^-200 or so ("aliens landing and only stealing coconuts") is ridiculous though, I think its definitely above 0.001% and could easily be like 50%.

I def think I have a way higher chance of seeing a US dollar collapse in my lifetime than winning 1 lottery if I bought a lottery ticket every day. (say at least 0.001% vs ~0.000001%)

It's not even hard to imagine a plausible scenario over 100 years: China etc. gets stronger economically than US -> US not world reserve -> Electronic money systems allows people to freely choose how to denominate -> USD slowly stops being accepted -> Bank run

Of course nobody here knows what the real probability of a usd collapse is. What makes you think china becoming bigger economically than the USA, the USD stop being the world reserve and an electric money system that allows people the freedom to choose how to denominate would lead to businesses stop accepting usd or a bank run? Seems like a massive leap.

Btw, the fear people have of the usd no longer being the world reserve are way overblown in terms of how it would effect the US.

Eh I don't feel like typing out a whole thesis like I do for equity position trades in the trading thread. I spend a lot of time on those, whereas here it's just the stance I've taken on counterparty through research. For one I agree regarding the dev team, which I pointed out initially. It's really their best chance at survival, to develop things faster than anyone else.

That said I will say one of their largest challenges. Their main attraction is to provide alternative uses for bitcoin by taking advantage of the blockchain in creating trustless systems. The problem is that in doing so, counterwallet requires the usage of another cryptocurrency altogether (XCP) when one could simply replicate the platform using BTC itself and be superior immediately. This type of usage is great and all, but it can be made larger and better by building it using BTC directly. After all, XCP as a currency was really only created to allow the creators some type of profit in programming things out since there is no actual business model beyond that.

Sounds good. I'll quickly respond as well.

Saying "do it with btc" and actually getting it done with btc are two different things entirely. When someone presents a way to add additional functionality directly to Bitcoin, or new functionality is added via sidechains, that will definitely be something worth looking at and it might replace Counterparty entirely. Agreed. That said, I'm not foregoing my Camry today because flying Camry's will be on the way tomorrow.

The reason XCP was created is because bitcoins, as they stand today, are unescrowable to the level required in order to facilitate trustless betting (I understand there is multisig, but it's not the same thing).

I assure you that the Counterparty founders did not find a way to do Counterparty with bitcoins just to swap in XCP at the last minute in order to ensure that they would profit. If they had, certainly somebody else would have come along over the last 6+ months and announced their simple way to do Counterparty with bitcoins that these scammers had glossed over.

Adam Back has been talking about sidechains since at least April, but still no sign of them, and he's working with heavy hitter Bitcoin core devs and they have some funding too. This is of course not a slight on Adam, but rather I am extrapolating that it must be one a hell of a project (this doing Counterparty with bitcoins thing) if Adam and co have had at least a few guys working on it for over 6 months without much progress (I may have missed an update though)

All good points. To clarify on something though, I definitely am not accusing them of being scammers. Creating the alternate currency had the dual benefit of providing the platform to build on top of bitcoin while also giving them some funding, however small, to focus on this day to day.

I also agree that doing it directly with bitcoin is no small task. I think more than just Adam Back and his colleagues are working on this, and it should come at some point. After all, we do know it is possible on bitcoin, but I agree that doesn't automatically mean it will happen until people get it done. My initial post was just that Counterparty will be made pointless as it stands at some point in the future -- and I said probably in saying that, because nothing is certain.

All that said, I won't argue against a speculative long on XCP just because of the brief points I made. I just think it will most likely be considered pointless at some point in the near future, we shall see though. Rather see those developers work on bitcoin, rather than build a separate currency off of it.

Looking to buying some BTC, anyone selling ?

anybody selling stellar for pokerstars?

Thread for trading is here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19...s-only-504897/

Vitalik outlines some of the issues that sidechains have in this piece for Bitcoin Mag: http://bitcoinmagazine.com/12349/sid...ges-potential/

why is there so little discussion about apple pay?

i'm surprised to see that nobody really cares about it despite the fact that the bitcoin community is very pro merchant adoption. and this system is vastly vastly superior to bitcoin for PoS payments.

i dont have an iphone. lots of people dont have an iphone. iphones are expensive. apple pay probably isn't a decentralized p2p payment network + store of value... i dont think bitcoin competes with apple.

Same reason nobody is discussing Google wallet.

https://imgur.com/2QJwyMY

Apple Pay is superior to bitcoin for merchant payments in person. Nobody can dispute that whether they have an iPhone or not. The reason it's not worth debating is because paying for a T-shirt from Macy's is not what make or breaks bitcoin.

i'm not saying PoS payments will make or break bitcoin. i am aware that bitcoin can be used for much more, and i think these uses of bitcoin (smart contracts, namely) are much more important than its use as a currency.

i'm saying that for a community as vocal about pushing BTC for PoS payments, there hasn't been any discussion on the release of a competing payment system which is much more convenient and much more user-friendly.

this infographic fails immediately because the fact that bitcoin can be sent by SMS on any phone is not relevant to this discussion.

"bitcoin has the potential to be the great equalizer," the graphic drones on. what does this have to do with how it fares against applepay?

applepay is not about sending money to any individual in the world -- it is a PoS payment system. so it makes sense to make a fair comparison of bitcoin as a PoS payment system. and right now it's lagging behind because it's nowhere near as easy to use as applepay will be.

How many people use bitcoin as an in person payment system now? In person payments isn't one of bitcoin's strengths.

Getting people to start using their phone for payments is possibly a good thing for bitcoin. Then maybe bitcoin can be plugged into the backend of these mobile phone payments, making it as easy to pay with bitcoin as dollars via applepay or androidpay or stripe.

I don't think applepay affects bitcoin much at the moment.

Is the bolded true? It doesn't seem possible to send/receive bitcoin on a non-smart phone, but I could be wrong.

Being first in the market is a pretty big deal.

https://www.kipochi.com/
http://txtcoinsnow.com/

What is ApplePay are first in the market for? It's possible to pay bitcoin via smartphone already.

Bitcoin is a currency, ApplePay is a payment method, they aren't in competition with each other. At the moment, ApplePay uses dollars to pay merchants; maybe in the future, they'll allow payments in bitcoin/euros/other currencies.

I don't think anyone has said that one of bitcoin's advantages is its ability to allow in person payments to merchants, possibly a third party company will be needed to make that a viable mainstream option.

The point of the graph is to show that Bitcoin is a global technology reaching billions of people while Apple Pay is available to a tiny fraction of that number. Even if Apple Pay catches on like wildfire, it's going to be a very long time before it is able to any effect on Bitcoin at all.

Just got my invite to Circle. Less than 1min later I had $10 ready to cashout:


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