The world might be bigger than the US but the rest of the world follows the US pretty blindly when it comes to financial stuff. Not a lot of financial institutions are willing to go against the US because it means no business with the biggest economy in the world and most of its trading partners. Almost every trade agreement the US has includes clauses about following their anti money laundering laws. Those are the laws that would be used to prevent companies from using bitcoin.

I am not saying this will happen. I actually think the chance of the US government thinking of bitcoin as a problem have dropped significantly and are almost zero. But it is hard to ignore the amount of influence they have in the financial world.

Hearing about bitcoin for the first time and failing to immediately buy any or use any in a transaction, does not remove you from the pool of potential bitcoin users.



The early majority, late majority and laggards are not people who learned about a technology later than the innovators and early adopters, they are people who decided to actually use it later. We are barely into early adopter territory with bitcoin usage.

With both cell phones and the internet, everyone was aware of how those technologies could improve their life, and it was pretty clear from the start, many just did not adapt right away and waited for the price to come down or technology to improve.

With bitcoin, it doesn't really do anything better than anyone can already do today, there is no real reason for most people to adapt, for most financial uses bitcoins are inferior to systems already in place and the financial industry continues to advance at a quicker rate.

And they're doing the same with Bitcoin. The technology needs to improve. I've been interested in Bitcoin for a long time but just recently started using it regularly: to trade money between online poker sites. It's very much the killer app for that, because you can't reverse the transactions so you can't get scammed.

There needs to be a killer app or two for the mainstream. That would be technology improving. Whether or not there ever will be, who knows. But that's what needs to happen.

Don't be mad at me and follow me from thread to thread because you bought Zynga at $4.65 rather than listen to me. It's getting old man.

40 million people in the US used a cell phone in 1995. Adoption was incredibly rapid despite the hurdles. And cellphones are completely different in that:
- They cost money for the handset(phone plus plans), cutting out much of the population
- The require a vast network of mobile towers to be built to cover the entire population before most people can buy in

You've actually made my case for me, so thanks. Bitcoin is available to anyone who wants it with an internet connection, and costs nothing. The core network is built, and it costs nothing. No one is coming except for the illegal activity seekers and a few speculators. Imagine if mobile phones suddenly were free in 1998 and you just had to register with a provider and get delivered a free phone to get on the network. You'd have 50% uptake in a year.

The Internet is often used (bitcoin is like the Internet in 1995!!!) as a comparison by even intelligent people, but it's nonsense. Consider that the Internet:

1) Costs substantial money to subscribe
2) Requires a large network build out to even access non-crawling data transfer (and the only mainstream utility in the Internet is non crawling data transfer)
3) Requires the trillion+ dollar buildout of the world wide web to even have content to download.

None of these apply to bitcoin. Two billion people merely need to log onto their computer/phone, download an app and fund their wallet (or receive a payment). Its core usage case (value transferring of arbitrary size without an intermediary) already exists and works just fine and has for years. An apt comparison would be like the Internet suddenly being available in its current form (download speeds, costs, youtube, WWW). Adoption rates would be incredible if that existed in 1995. Comparing bitcoin to the Internet with arguments like "bitcoin is like the Internet in 1995!!!" is in terms of utility or uptake is utterly absurd. The Internet was almost on the level of basic physics - it enabled mass transfer of information of any kind from point to point instantly. It had no peer and competed with nothing. Bitcoin competes with 50+ currencies, cash, numerous instant payment networks, and a global financial network of banks. It does nothing better than any of them, exactly maybe low fee international remittances to non merchants. It offers nothing new. There is little demand for a decentralized value transfer system written on a public ledger. There is massive demand for an instant large volume information transfer system; in fact, it is a basic cornerstone of advancing civilization and had no alternative or competition.

A far better comparison would be napster or p2p file sharing generally. Like bitcoin, that was free and decentralized and only required an internet connection and a bit of software to get the file sharing happening. It absolutely exploded in a very short time.

I think you should go back and read my argument carefully and wrap your head around it. Had you done that with ZNGA...

You were thoroughly dismantled in that thread and ran away like a dog that got beaten by it's master. Same thing happening to you here. I guess you're wrong a lot?

Right. So a little over 10% of the population, even though roughly 100% knew about them. According to you, there would be no domestic growth left in that market.

There is no killer app, yet. No compelling reason for them to use it, yet. And there are no network effects, yet. If/when all of that improves, there will be more widespread adoption.

I don't know if that stuff will happen, I was just pointing out how absurd it is for you to say bitcoin can't grow because a lot of people already know about it. People knowing about something doesn't equate to them using it.

Most people knew about Facebook in 2007 but they weren't all on it yet, even though it was free to join. Grandma's didn't join Facebook until all of their family were already on it.

See Facebook. Just because somebody knows about a technology and it's free doesn't mean they will instantly use it and if they don't instantly use it that doesn't mean they will never use it.

What should I have listened to, the part where you said 'no edge' over and over and then I made over 50% on the stock? Or the part where every argument you've ever made has been destroyed by me and multiple others?

the killer app is already here, people just dont know it yet:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...-card-1505969/


you wont need any of that crap in 5 years. Just a verified address-- something you dont even need anymore in the US with amazon lockers.

There are hundreds of millions of foreign day laborers who have a cell phone. They work the oil fields in qatar. They work construction in the US. They are freelance coders in India. They pick fruit in argentina. etc etc etc.

Bitcoin isnt going to help the people who are dying of starvation in africa. That's a job for Bill Gates; not bitcoin.

Graphs like this are something you would find in a Picketty or Reich book. I would think in the last year we have less new users and more have dropped out than the year before. However, the total number of users grow and fall in spurts. It could even still go to zero if a flaw is found in code or a new coin is so much superior people switch. Some good news is we don't have a bitcoin yet with a small mining reward. Some more good news is a lot of coins are lost, it may be as high as 1% a year. More good news all the crooks and bad sites are slowly failing away. Some bad news Russia, China and many other countries are cracking down on bitcoin. Some good news I think people that start with bitcoin will got give up on it entirely, they are waiting for a rise to get more involved or a fall to buy more. Most every investor has heard about bitcoin, Cramer, Kudlow, Griffith RT even has a ticker. There is no doubt in my mind if bitcoin lasts 30 years it will be very strong. That is just my opinion an educated guess. Even Russian and Chinese may not sell their coins they may hold them for trips to the USA. If I was a hedge fund I would destroy 1 million bitcoin as a publicity stunt.

Even without any big company using Bitcoin, it has a lot of upward potential.

which could be the reason why you aren´t running a hedgefund

###

One bitcoin sportsbook has introduced the possibility to keep your balance denominated in $. By doing this they use the advantages of bitcoin (instant deposits & withdrawals, no payment processors who take a big cut, no country restrictions) while eliminating the main problem with bitcoin for gambling purposes (volatility). Nice idea in my opinion, though it probably won´t be a killer application because solutions like this probably appeal more to professional punters than to the casual gambler. And poker sites in particular are obviously hugely dependent on a new influx of casual players.

Besides from that, are there any news regarding the introduction of BTC deposits at pokerstars?

These applications are useful because they drive demand for other infrastructure. Imagine if Bitcoin was used by a large number of gamblers for deposits and withdrawals and that's it. Bitcoin ATMs become much more profitable and common in such a scenario. This makes it easier for non-gamblers to acquire Bitcoin for speculative purposes. There are side effects. Making it so people can get and hold Bitcoin, even if they immediately divest of it, is a huge benefit, as it drives other use cases that otherwise wouldn't be big enough to matter.

I wonder if back in the day Mark Zuckerberg looked at his marketing results for facebook and said to himself, "hmm, the survey says almost 10% of the american population is very familiar with this thing. It looks like there no more room for growth. It might be time to give up on this thing."

"Hence, from a cryptoeconomic security standpoint, one can in some sense say that proof of work has virtually no cryptoeconomic security margin at all (if you are tired of opponents of proof of stake pointing you to this article by Andrew Poelstra, feel free to link them here in response)."

https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/01/28/p-epsilon-attack/

If I set up my own multi-sig wallet on copay, and their site goes down, are my coins then lost? I don't see how else one gets their coins out of a multi-sig copay wallet without access to the copay site.

You can setup your own server and have your Copay client connect to it.

@Toothsooter :

Your arguments make a lot of sense, but it seems to me you ignore the true revolutionnary nature of blockchain tech / decentralised money .

It allows people to really *own* easily transferable value, as opposed to just owning a symbol of it. That's what so revolutionnary with that tech ; it's not so much about speed, cost of transaction or anything else really.

Will bitcoin reach mass adoption ? Nobody knows. There are good arguments in both sides to be made...

Will decentralised money change the world's economy in the future ? Yes.
With absolutely no doubt imo. US and Euro QE policies are working hard to get us there sooner than later...

This is great and all, but nobody ever seems to think about how mining just ****s it all up. You need a lot of constant buyers for the next 10+ years for this thing to hold any sort of price.

He said decentralized money. Proof of Stake coins don't require mining.

Did coinbase really do a massive pump/dump? The price of btc was falling so they come out with a To The Moon statement and claim they are approved in CA and NY and get a big run up to 300.. Then it sells off and we learn they are in fact not approved in CA or NY.

Why did they rush it and put it out there before they were actually approved?

No, it's simply the fact that a lot of morons buy into hype, and it was obvious that there was no fundamental reason why Coinbase operating as an exchange instead of brokerage would have any significant effect on price.

Approval in NY or CA is irrelevant, it's just not anything that adds that much value.

They got what they wanted, though, lots of attention.

Your right.. it was just a lot of morons. I wanna know why the hell coinbase would blatantly lie and say they had the big money states on board. If coinbase had said hey.. we have a licensed US exchange but right now we are only in Mississippi.. they wouldn't have gotten the price rise like they wanted. I find it strange a "credible" company is playing games now.

I guess this information has not helped the price:
http://www.coindesk.com/70-bitcoin-s...w-enforcement/

Or this: http://www.coindesk.com/research-11-...ms-since-2009/

Last one for now: http://gizmodo.com/bill-gates-digita...not-1682346647

I imagine this negative press will be floating around for a few days brining the price down further.