Reddit (btc, bitcoin, ethereum), coindesk, cointelegraph, zerohedge, and slack channels (coinfund) are your best bets for various articles

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-0...pital-controls

What percent of people buying Bitcoin now would still do so if they could not sell it for X years... Seems like people are buying not for utility but because it will go higher, the tulip thing?

Why is BTC better than my credit card?

Most people would probably be better off if they could not sell it for X years...

It's not. The better question is why is it better than gold or my national currency

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

Anyone who understands bitcoins and banks understands this is no surprise, and it can only go higher over time (with possible short-term downswings, of course)

Someone posted somewhere today:
"If you don't understand bitcoin, you shouldn't be investing in it."

That about sums it up. Along with satoshi's quote from way back in the day:
"If you don't understand me or don't get it, I don't have time to explain it to you, sorry"

Read up on it, invest in it, use it. Or, don't, and get left behind in this world that is changing rapidly.

Awesome leads. I have some reading material for the rest of the day now, thanks!

There are billions of dollars of currency out in the world looking for a safe place to go that hasn't been overbought already. BTC fits nicely.

Back in October when BTC was about $600 I posted that it (post#18892) would go to $917 within four months and people were skeptical, but it did. IMHO Bitcoin is not really about replacing credit cards at all. It acts more like gold as a place to go to avoid currency instability especially for investors in Asia and Africa. The BTC price did not rise much in 2015-early 2016 because it lacked credibility but it is gaining that with time so the price should continue to rise especially when transaction speed is improved this year. It is not risk-free of course. The main risks are a serious software security breach or a major government finds some way to block trading or for some other reason the transaction speed slows to a crawl.
Just my opinion.

In my mind the SEC needs to authorize bitcoin ETFs and other standard investment vehicles for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This will make it easy for the average person to hold (technically they won't hold it, but it will be similar to them holding shares in any other company) and also make it easier to tax capital gains/losses. As it stands now, monitoring bitcoin activity and taxable events is very difficult. If there are ETFs, it will at least be easily taxable for those who hold in those vehicles.

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I know a lot of people that would buy a bitcoin ETF but won't buy bitcoin because of the learning curve and security risk and just can't be bothered to learn about it. Majority of the time I tell someone about bitcoin they ask if they can buy it through their trading account.

^ this is why I think it can easily go up to 10k if ETFs are available.

I have no idea how an ETF would actually work. What kind of derivatives could they use to track BTC. If they held baskets, the nice part would be it would be easily audited. If it is baskets though and someone wants to invest 20 mil in BTC.. does that make the price of the BTC ETF spike, but not physical BTC? The fund would still own the same amount of BTC, but the price would be much higher. It's not like the ETF is going to be buying and selling BTC as people buy and sell the ETF. I'm sure I'm missing something.

As you can see by the GBTC chart, it is a massive rip off.

liquidity.

There wont be any other American who has as much liquidity as the Winklevoss brothers do & are willing to create a s-1 application.

GBTC charges 2% management fee, a complete joke, and an ETF would most certainly charge less than half of gbtc. They dont own the bitcoins in their trust, the investors do.

Simply, no one else has has the right corporate structure or liquidity to submit a reasonable and worthy s-1 application. Even if you consider there are like hundreds of gold/silver deliverable ETFs it seems very unlikely for the SEC to approve an application for a niche application that cannot handle the demand that bitcoin could create/generate.

who else has the corporate structure to buy/sell bitcoins non-otc
who else has the liquidity (1% of all bitcoins) to meet initial demand
who else has the proprietary hardware modules to move bitcoin

no one in america besides the winklevoss bros do. This is not to say that i believe that the SEC will ultimately approve the coin etf, but rather there wont be anyone else today or within even 5 years from today who can submit a stronger application than the winklevoss bros already have.

I think you should be cautious with this rationale.


COIN could trade at a premium over actual bitcoin simply due to the sheer asymmetric difference between an investor buying shares or buying bitcoins.

But even if it does trade at a premium, you have to examine the liquidity that COIN shares will offer. Winklevoss have openly stated that they own approximately 1% of all bitcoin, and if you assume that they will offer all of those bitcoins as shares (very bad assumption) even then the market for buying bitcoins OTC may not track that of the bitcoin share price at COIN because of the fact that there is not enough liquidity of shares being offered.

Another reason why you shouldnt expect COIN to trade at a massive premium is because the share's NAV is rebalanced everyday. So theoretically lets say there is a +10% price difference between COIN and bitcoin OTC vis-a-vis during the day's trading period. Well at 4pm when gemini runs its auction to determine the ETF's NAV, and lets say again that the intraday OTC auction ends at +0.1%, well guess what happens. the value of COIN's bitcoin gets rebalanced down to +0.1%. This balancing will happen everyday. So its possible for COIN to trade at a sustained premium over the actual price of bitcoin without actually impacting bitcoin's otc price-- much like how gbtc currently trades.

What's more likely to happen is that investors will see an ETF that is backed by actual bitcoin as an validation of it's technology/value/commodity/currency/wtfever because the USA govt said its good to go. And a lot of people on the sidelines will go out and buy bitcoin OTC because they now believe that its something that wont ever be expressively illegal to use in the USA.

Why wouldn't the ETF not just hold bitcoin? (Obviously there's security concerns but is that a deal breaker?)

What do you mean by baskets? Baskets of bitcoin derivatives? Why?

Are you familiar with ETFs and creation units? Why do you think this model wouldn't work for a bitcoin ETF?

I would hope they do hold BTC. Baskets as in there's so many BTC per share, and you have the right to redeem your BTC if you own a certain amount. They can also sell more shares as long as they back it with the same amount of BTC per share. What I'm saying is, if someone makes a 10 mil buy on COIN, how do they come up with 10 mil more in BTC? I guess they don't have to because someone sold the COIN to them, but then will just the price of COIN go up and not the price of actual BTC?

Also, COIN almost looks as a type of exit strategy for Winklevoss. They seem to have been saying they will be using their existing BTC to back the fund. If that's the case, it means they are essentially selling most of their BTC.

sounds like you should read up on what an ETF is

1- how much do you think winklevoss bros have spent setting up Gemini alone?

2- no **** they will actually hold btc. That's exactly what the etf is designed for

3- there will be a threshold on how many shares you need to possess to actually be able to redeem its associaTed bitcoin. Although I just cannot imagine how anyone with a brain or a fund handling tens of millions would ever elect to redeem it

4- they will issue an initial set of shares, as per whatever they decide to do. Currently every single share listed will be backed by 0.1 btc

5- yes I'm positive winklevoss are looking to exit. Because they've only invested in ridiculously risky bitcoin related businesses (21co), spent minimum 20m on Gemini just to pass up collecting the 0.5% fees on COIN because they want to exit.

Seriously just put 2 more seconds of thought into your posts and you'll realize how stupid your thoughts are.

SEC decision should be comming in the next couple weeks.

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Have we reached a top?

Not when ppl still believe bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme:

https://www.ft.com/content/b5d66ed8-...b-680c49b4b4c0

using blockchain: btc wallet says $693.18

when withdrawing i am hit with a $10.26 fee. subtotal then says $688.47 - bringing my total payout to $678.21

$693.18 minus $10.26 = $682.92 - why is this number not my total payout? $4.71 goes somewhere, it almost seems unaccounted for. Can someone explain?

Usually with wallets there is a option to send the maximum possible without having to manually input every digit. When you do this, you dont have to worry about USD.

The fee seems high, but its likely you just have a lot of unspent addresses and your total tx size is pretty big.

hey could you post the text of that article? I'm interested in reading it but it is paywalled

As a tip, you can google any article from ft, wsj, etc and it will evade the paywall.

Here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=Bitc...obile&ie=UTF-8

Why not just have bitcoin2 etc? it is all make believe and without any actual utility.