The "govt" as you write it wont "ban" bitcoin.


Currently the only real threat to bitcoin in the western world is the SEC/DOJ. They've decided to take apart the drug rings and illegal securities; that to me is bullish because it acknowledges that there is room for regulation. In the silk road case, bitcoin si really only an afterthought. Everything else we will see coming miles away (e.g. executive/senate/house/lobby/banks/etc.).

And I am not going to quote all those previous arguments in the past few pages about comparing internet vs bitcoin.


All I have to say about that is that it is completely revisionist history to assert that the internet was always going to be ubiquitous and revolutionary. A complete joke to make that argument. People had no conception about how information could be digitally distributed over computers in a real time manner.

You mean at some point the black market will figure out they dont need to hire anyone to ship physical cash around the world or country and they can just use bitcoin???

Yeah, I'd say that is insanely powerful.

Nearly anything illegal gets away because a black market is created to fill demand.

But take my gf, for example, if common sense doesn't do the trick. I told her exactly how to download torrents safely while she is in the USA but doesn't want to anyway because its against the law. If it were legal, she would. Does the law stop everyone? Of course not.

All I was saying was that there would certainly be a reduced demand and fewer use cases for bitcoin if the govt banned/blacklisted bitcoin. Surely you aren't so dense as to not see that?

And don't get me as a bitcoin hater, I own a ****ing hoard of bitcoin. And I don't think a ban is realistic either I was just responding to a fairly dumb comment reply you made to someone else acting like nothing would change the day after an imposed ban.

Bans are far less powerful than you think. Either there is a disruptive use case for Bitcoin, in which case, it won't matter if there is a ban, or there isn't, and it is screwed even if legal. Laws aren't in a vacuum and outlawing things that are useful and popular aren't good policy for politicians. Look at how things are swaying with gay marriage and pot as popular opinion swings around. If Bitcoin helps people do things better, people will circumvent the law, and if they get enough benefit, eventually more will use it anyway. And then the laws change. Politicians are not morons.

Will Bitcoin be as popular if it were just banned through law? Probably not. But it really doesn't matter at this point, it would still have plenty of room to grow massively more popular than it is today.

Comparing bitcoin to the internet is one of the popular dumb things bitcoin supporters do. Another one is comparing bitcoins market cap with that of companies. Both of them don't make sense at all.

why?

I'm not the biggest fan of comparing both the internet and bitcoin.


For me, Bitcoin is a lot like wikipedia. I remember when people first started using it, there was an enormous social and academic backlash against using it as a source of information. In highschool, we were straight up banned from even acknowledging that it was a legitimate source of information. Yet, wikipedia single handedly caused the extinction of encyclopedias and transformed the roll of the modern library. Bitcoin has a lot of those same characteristics and ceilings as a technology, but I dont like comparing it to the internet because it lives in the internet and cannot ever become larger than it.

My issue with what toothsayer says is that he is completely presenting a revisionist history of the rise of the internet. Its patently false to assert that it was always going to be; always going to take off.

wikipedia didn't do this, the internet did. If there was no wikipedia, there would still be no encyclopedias.

Hey all so i finally created a coinbase and blockchain account and will be going to request a withdraw via bitcoin from winning poker network. i deposited via skrill and was told i could withdraw btc.


For my blockchain account, i put 2 factor authorization with my iphone with google authenticator. I also see settings on blockchain where i could check restrict TOR and some other things. Should i do anything like that or leave it like it is?


My other question is for coinbase i see you have to verify a phone number and bank account. At the moment im in mexico so i do have a mexican cell number. For the phone number verifcation, would you suggest using the mexican cell number or would you suggest i use my goolge voice number? I use my google voice number to call to usa/canada for free here in mexico. When i call to someone here in mexico, i obviously use my mexican cell phone. I would like to know would it be an issue putting my mexican cell number to confirm? Or should i put my google voice usa number for it. The thing is i know coinbase is a usa site and thus i do have a us bank account but i wanted to know if its fine to put my mexican cell phone number for my iphone to verify me or just go with google voice number. Issue with google voice though it isn't a good 2 factor authorization so im using google authenticator now with blockchain. I assume i can use google authenitator as 2 FA with coinbase? That way i dont have to receive sms text each time or a voice call each time?

You are comparing a physical infrastructure that provides the only efficient way to transfer information between computers to a protocol to store and transfer value that already can be done efficiently in other ways. You could even argue that existing methods are already more efficient. If you want to compare bitcoin to something internet related then compate it to Napster. Bitcoin supporters dont like that comparison because Napster got hammered by regulations which is something they don't want to associate bitcoin with. But it is a much more valid comparison and still a very positive one if bitcoin can avoid the death by regulation.

No, it was pretty obvious the internet could do things better from the start. Just for example, being able to send messages (or emails) instead of letters going through the postal service was very revolutionary at the time. It took a long time for the internet to be available and reliable to everyone, but everyone knew that as soon as it become available to them they would benefit from it, and everyone knew as connection speeds improved they would benefit from it even more.

Bitcoin does not do anything better than we can already do today, unlike the internet in 1994, and even if Bitcoin improves, it still will not do anything better than we can already do today.

I would not recommend withdrawing directly from WPN to a web wallet, but a blockchain wallet is probably okay. I haven't heard of them blocking gambling transactions like coinbase has. It's generally best practice to use a desktop wallet like https://electrum.org/ to store large amounts so you control your coins instead of trusting a 3rd party like coinbase or blockchain.info but people are gonna do what they want. In order of increasing security but decreasing convenience it's something like 3rd party wallet < phone wallet like mycelium < desktop wallet like electrum < hardware wallet like trezor < paper wallet

I think coinbase texts you not call so I'd use whatever phone is more reliable for that and wouldn't worry about whether its US/Mexican. I prefer Authy over Google Authenticator since they save an encrypted backup of your keys (if you lose or wipe your phone and forget about Google Authenticator it's a huge pain in the ass to circumvent the 2FA for all your sites). Other people will say this is a security threat since Authy is saving your keys but like all things security related its a security/convenience trade off.

Processing gambling deposits/withdrawals is clearly done better with bitcoin than any other method TODAY.

To say that it won't do anything better than we can do today in the future is just LOL. Online tipping is pretty easy at this point, but probably not a great example. Reddit was going to issue stock in its company through bitcoin but stopped not because of a problem with bitcoin(it's clearly the easiest method to do this) but because of cumbersome laws and regulations. I think online voting is a very real useful application that bitcoin could help with in the future that solves a lot of the problems with any other centralized closed source system would have.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/que...voting-systems

+1

It's similar to people telling me I should invest in company xyz since they will be the next Google or next Apple.

Who needs the internet when we have radio and tape recorders. Letterman doesn't stop laughing about the whole internet idea the whole two minutes of that interview. (And there are many similar interviews that look stupid now, see the recent BMW superbowl ad.)

I remember laughing at the idea of twitter when someone first explained it to. And it seemed to me (and whichever article I was reading) that the idea of blogging was super dumb, who was ever going to read that ****.

I'm sure you could go back to 1995 and find lots of articles and interviews where the internet was considered a joke/dumb/useless. Probably lots of other cases where the internet was considered a place with just porn/scams/criminal activity, not something that regular people would ever sign up for.

Most people laughed at the first cars when they came out. Who'd ever use those expensive loud smelly things that keep breaking down, when horses were a better mode of transport in every way.

Easy to see the future with the benefit of hindsight.

Voting is working on the Nxt testNET, and will be on mainnet in a few weeks. Super simple GUI based way to create blockchain voting based on assets/Nxt/accounts, with possibility of selecting multiple options, and even allowing gradient voting, so you can vote something 4 out of 5. All decentralized blockchain based.

Among many other things, it will allow Nxt companies to have voting on any decision via asset weighted voting, and Nxt developers can easily find out what the Nxt holders want via Nxt weighted voting. (Quick teaser showing it in action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhJgz6hpHXg)

I would love to see those articles from 1995 that said the internet is useless. I think you are confusing the internet and the world wide web.

The internet and web are conflated in most people's eyes. Perhaps I do mean the web and not the internet.

Found this:
http://www.techhive.com/article/1559...edictions.html

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

"Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet's continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."
Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, 1995

Also this:
http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-sto...nirvana-185306
Pointing out all things that will never happen due to the internet, most of which have.

And that article and quote are from 1995 when the internet/web were beginning to take off. Earlier, there would have been more people who dismissed crazy claims like shopping on the internet.

And let's not forget that TCP/IP was created in 1982. 13 years before that Bill Gates/Letterman interview. I would guess that by 1995, many people thought the internet was going to be something. But in 1988? Not so much.

And to those that say that Bitcoin does nothing better than existing payment platforms, try this:

-Take you debit card over to McDonald's and order yourself a Mcdouble.
-Pay with your card.
-When you get home, log into your bank account
-Does the transaction show as cleared?
-Does it show as Pending?
-Does it even show up yet?

Now take some bitcoins that you have in your electrum wallet. Send a fraction of those coins to Nitrogen sports.
-Wait about 10 seconds
-Does the balance appear in your nitrogen account? (hint: yes)
-Does the change show up in your electrum wallet? (hint: yes)
-Are you able to place sports wagers with that coin? (hint: yes)

Now let's go behind the scenes:

What was the transaction cost on your $1 Mcdouble? (hint: ~25 cents or so)
What was the transaction cost on your Nitrogen transaction? (hint: up to 6 cents, maybe less depending on what you put in)

From the above example we can clearly see that bitcoin does some things better than the existing technology.

Now do people care? That's a different story. We still got our cheeseburger instantly, even though the payment didn't go through yet. And McD's didn't charge us an extra 25 cents to use our card. So, no, I didn't care about either of those things.

Coinbase exchange seems legit FYI. I've never used another exchange but liquidity seems solid and spreads are pretty tight. No fees now either.

I'd like to get into trading but I really have no idea how to predict where the price is going. Anybody have any tips or experience with that? What about just market making and making money on the spread?

If you don't know what you are doing, I wouldn't recommend trading.

Thank you for that deep insight.

I want to learn.