Again.. I'm not sure about this because it's been a long time since I've read about how the forks and stuff work, but I think any miners can decide if they want to make changes, it's just a matter of if other miners accept it or not.


Also to the hash power. A bunch of miners have been produced which is making the hashrate increase. Back when the hashrate was 10% of what it is now.. these miners didn't exist so BTC was in a sense still secure because there wasn't anything that existed that could attack it.

Now if the hashrate decreased to that same 10% .. the network would be ****ed because there's a huge supply of power that isn't in use that could be plugged in at anytime to take control of the network. These machines would all pretty much be worthless and have no use for anything else so they aren't going anywhere.

The way mining works these days it's not like the old days where a guy might run his GPU and lose $10/month just to support the network. These farms have hundreds of thousands- millions/month? in electricity that they sure as **** aren't going to be flipping the bill to support the network. They will shut down.

New technologies almost always tend to thrive in a vice environment. Porn led the way for VHS, the Internet, DVDs. The old mechanisms work fine for things, but illegal or quasi-illegal activities tend to push the limits more. Right now Bitcoin has a lot of friction for onboarding and offboarding, which means it's use cases become more limited when that is required, which will push it towards areas where traditional banking cannot work as well (drugs, gambling, porn). Those areas will thrive. Of course, there are other areas, but as the pie grows, the greater incentives grow to reduce that friction, which opens up new areas.

That is probably one of the biggest myths out there. Porn sure played its role but it definitely didn't lead the way. It was also not illegal which is why it compares very badly with the role Silkroad played in the advancement of bitcoin.

Bitpay alone say they now process 1m/day in transactions. http://blog.bitpay.com/2014/11/18/bi...is-coming.html

Anyone who argues that Bitcoin's preferred method of transaction is to conduct illicit activities today (as in, december 2014) is just plain wrong and disingenuous.

WRT to value, bitcoin's infrastructure as a blockchain of payment systems and personal bank accounts is still in such an infancy stage that how anyone could draw any conclusive determination for its outlook is just baffling.

Bitcoin in a vacuum should be worth $5/coin right now. Without people buying/selling/holding the new mined coins there is no way it could see any prospect as a viable system for people to transact with. In a lot of ways, a lower price at this stage in development is fantastic for its development as a payment system (first).

Analogies don't need to be exact to hold. It was an illicit activity (and in fact was illegal in many places), and it provided a much bigger improvement of value (magazines, dirty theaters) than mainstream experiences (cable, movie theaters). Silk Road provides a much bigger improvement in buying drugs than say paying some online store with Bitcoins vs. a credit card. The biggest edges are what are going to drive value first, and the obvious use case of drugs and gambling will lead the way here.

If Bitcoin is only used in black/grey market activities, and gains any significant traction, it would be a huge success. With the amount of people who participate in such areas, it would easily expand out of those areas and the whole need to have onramps and offramps disappear.

Please stop bull****ting about how the hashrate is at risk of randomly dropping by 50% or how the next halvening is going to threaten the security of the network.

In a lot of ways, centralization of mining has been insanely beneficial to the overall health of the network. By cutting out the retail sale of mining rigs, there has been faster deployment of overall mining by established hardware manufacturers.

all credit to Puppet who is really the first and only guy whose I've seen provide a reasonable simulation for hashrate in the future
original thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=295270.0

What does everyone think of sidechains? It seems they will allow Bitcoin to be much more robust, while allowing innovation and competition on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin would in effect become the reserve currency for every sidechain, which will also boost Bitcoin's value significantly.

The illegal/illicit part of porn had absolutely zero impact on the advancement of VHS or the internet in its early days. That is why there is no analogy to speak of.

For the record, 51% attacks are far less important as a means for price implosion. There should be much greater concern for any serious money deciding to come in and manipulate this market lower. The long term buy and holders would love to lend out coins (in a riskless manner the way equities are) for a return to let people short them. A measly 4 million bucks takes bitcoin to 300 on bitstamp (11.3k coins). That plus good 'ol fashioned panic selling, to which bitcoin is incredibly prone to, makes it pretty damn easy to destabilize this whole thing.

I realize that this, just like a 51% attack, is still incredibly unlikely, but it's far more likely on relative basis than the attack especially given the number and size of private transactions that take place off market. Shorting $10M worth of coins on public markets to knock out half of bitcoin's market cap would be pretty smart if someone were just about to take part in a private purchase at a much lower rate from say a federal government seized bitcoin sale that took place off the exchanges. Then people who would love to catch that falling knife just bid it all back up only for that person to dump it all back in.

Come to think of it, this seems far easier than I originally thought even if it is still extremely unlikely.

What would be the extreme cost. They have a warehouses full of doorstops that no one wants to buy or anything.. they just sit. Network hashrate drops and now they can start up the miners again and **** up the network.

This would be very cheap to do, and a very good reason would be if they were invested in some other crypto things that would stand to gain big if bitcoin went under.

Your a dumb **** if you can't understand wtf I was saying. NOTICE HOW YOUR CHART SAYS ASSUMING $400/btc!?!?!?! Go ahead and make a chart that says assuming $100/BTC and see WTF it looks like. Then also make a chart for a year and a half down the road when the block reward halves at $100 BTC.

The difficulty level dropped today. This is a good indication that the mining industry margins are tapped. If the price of bitcoin falls from here.. wouldn't that be a good indication the ****ing hashrate is going to drop you dumb ****.

I'm not saying BTC is going to fall.. as a matter of fact.. this may be a great buying opportunity because people have to buy btc instead of mine them. But, that is how BTC works like a ponzi.. if the price falls.. it goes to ****.

If you want to argue differently, you tell me what the hashrate would do if it went to $5. I know that is extreme but I'm making a point. There's a certain threshold level where BTC won't work. $5 is way below it. Is $50 below it? Is $100 below it?

BTC may goto $5000 and it's not going against anything I've said. I'm saying the **** doesn't work when it goes below a certain threshold especially combined with reward halves.

Tapped because asics are now down to 28/20nm fabrication process and have to compete against Apple, AMD, Nvidia et al. for chip manufacturing, which basically means they can only produce chips a few times a year or because you are so convinced that they are losing money so one two week span of static hash rate must be because suddenly because everyone in the industry is taking a complete blood bath and all decided to stop deploying at the same time?

Again, stop bull****ting. I'm so sick of reading your bull**** in this thread.

This isn't just a 2 week thing.. look at the trend. https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

It's fine.. I guess we'll just let the numbers do the talking. I'm betting that if BTC slides from here, so does the hashrate.

what kind of fees and commision should i expect when buying say 100 bitcoins?
thanks in advance

depends on your timeframe, over a week you can get away with 0,5%-1%

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-pric...fficulty-drop/

Well I guess someone agrees with me

Where are you getting free electricity to run idle miners?

LOL at reading that and thinking that he agrees with you.

Come on, Tom, clearly a 0.62% drop in hashrate is the end.

need some help here guise

what the **** is he saying?

Surprised to see no mention of https://bitreserve.org/ itt. I would be interested to hear thoughts of bitcoin supporters. They are currently raising $5m in series A funding.

It seems like an interesting idea. However Halsey Minor isn't a guy who I would want to trust with my money.

he's saying "Mastercard good, bitcoin bad"

it seems we've mostly left the "first they laugh at you phase", and we're now entering the "then they fight you" stage.

Why?

What is the best way for safely storing bitcoins that are not for everyday spending? The best I can come up with is a paper wallet stored in a safe deposit box, but I want to know if there's a better suggestion. Coinbase has a "vault" where you can make it more difficult to access coins (2 diff email address confirmations and wait 48h), but they're based in the US which makes them less appealing than a number of other sites. If you had $250k in bitcoins, how would you safely store them?

i use Multibit and the following steps...

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...ostcount=15628

feel free to pm me for some help or more details.