yeah it is accepted, except nobody is using it

There is a reason nobody wants to spend their bitcoin.

https://medium.com/startupph-chronic...ity-7e37ae4aa4

tldr: Bitcoin is a much better form of money and better store of value than fiat, thus people tend to spend their 'bad' money and hoard their 'good' money.

Always a great sign of cold rational economic decision making
http://insidebitcoins.com/news/paris...-project/70929

Bitcoin obviously has a ton of value around the world.I would rather get paid right now in bitcoin than Zimbabwean dollars.
However, the massive volatility is going to be a huge growing pain. I think it will be like AI summer and winters.
Of course no one cares about massive volatility when things are going up.

No most normal people invest in stocks and bonds to battle inflation. S&P 500 generated a whopping 10% annual return in the past 100 years. And if nobody uses it, it has no value. The whole point of it is that it is supposed to have value because people actually use it as money, not to hoard it. The moment the first few billion $ decides to cash out the price is going to fall off a cliff. Great store of value there.

Yeah well that is why they are actually using US dollars in Zimbabwe now, and not bitcoin. I would rather get paid in USD.

You had the perfect condition for bitcoin adoption in Zimbabwe, and barely anybody uses it there. They use USD instead. What does that tell you?

Bitcoin is a massive pain in the ass to use as actual money. And including coinbase credit card fees, it is significantly more expensive too (not counting potential losses from volatility).

A few billion? The market cap on BTC alone fell by $15 billion in 3 days this week after the China ICO ban combined with an overdue pullback. We are already on a bounce back. It is getting more and more stable each and every year as adoption grows.

The magic of BTC is in the technology of block chain. Block chain is changing the paradigm. Might as well hop on board.

for tha ppl baby!!!!!

Lol @ loading coinbase with a credit card. My god. How could you possibly invest money you don't have and think it's a good idea. Coinbase takes bank accounts. You can load USD for no fee and use GDAX to convert to bitcoin for no fee.

As for Zimbabwe being the perfect place for bitcoin...Im gonna go ahead and guess that it is far from the perfect place because of its distinct lack of a little thing called accessible internet. Despite technological advances, less than 50% of the country has access to internet. I think you can put 2 and 2 together to figure out why a country like that isn't the perfect or even an ideal place to adopt a digital currency

Ok so I want to buy something with bitcoin. I have to make a BANK TRANSACTION. Costing me transaction costs. Then probably wait for a day. Then I have to load bitcoins in a separate bitcoin address (cannot really trust those exchanges) costing me transaction costs.

Then I have to come up with a very long password (or else it can be brute forced). Then I make the transaction which is several steps. This takes 10-15 minutes to several hours before it is confirmed (unlike a credit card, which is instant). Then they need to send their bitcoin into an exchange (due to volatility and to pay suppliers etc), again going through several steps and paying transaction costs.

Yeah sounds like a real game changer to me

All because of 'muuuh bruuuh all that inflation!!111' . Even though inflation has only been like 1% a year lately.

And this can also go like this:

And all that hassle because people apparently don't understand the basic concept of investing in financial assets to protect against inflation.

You could of course save yourself all that trouble and just pay $20 for this:

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-C...ggle+investing

It's almost like this is a new technology with growing pains. So weird.

Bitcoin isn't the only option. There are plenty of coins that offer instant transactions and some that even offer instant transactions and no fees. Debit cards are being developed that you can load with a crypto of your choice and use like any other credit card. Are they a long way off from being adopted mainstream? Absolutely. Does that mean they are **** and not happening? Nope. Technology takes time. **** doesn't happen at the snap of a finger over night.

You need a new bank if you are being charged a transaction cost to send money to coinbase in USD.

Lol @ your book

And a long complicated password? You can't be serious. The password for my bank of America account is no different than a crypto wallet password except that it's shorter. They are both saved in a password manager which is backed up to physical media and the cloud. You'd have to be pretty ****ing stupid to **** all that up and lose your password. If you are still using the same generic passwords of a phrase and some numbers you memorize for your transitional banking accounts then you got some serious issues with technology in general and not digital currencies.

Enjoy slightly beating inflation tho.

So that basically means I can easily brute force your wallet. At least with my bank account I have one of those plastic key thingies to add extra protection. And account gets blocked if someone puts in the wrong password several times in a row.

And you listed another disadvantage. I need to bother with some cloud BS (which can be compromised) to keep up with my passwords. Instead of just calling up the bank to get a new one if I forget it.

Also with shorter confirmation times there is a bigger chance of double spend.

Also this tech isn't new, it has been around for nearly 10 years now.

My point is, what are the advantages? The only thing bitcoin fanatics can come up with is 'inflation'.

And I can list like 10 disadvantages over fiat.

I will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_interest

you're conflating many issues here.


1- if you believe that bitcoin or digital currencies are an instrument that is supposed to defeat inflation or outperform other asset classes, you're interpretation of its use case is simply wrong. The entire purpose of storing digital currencies is to possess the ability to transfer things of value without the consent of a third party, 24/7/365. The owner does not need permission from a company or government to transfer value.

2- it is actually very hard to brute force a wallet. You are confusing 2 different things here. Nowadays, almost no one uses a password encrypted wallet.dat file to execute transactions. You'd need physical access to the encrypted file, which is almost impossible to do on android and iOS, and hsms. There are wallet generating derivation strategies that the network trusts which are even more difficult to break-- because word libraries are different across wallets and seed lengths are different. To use this as an argument that digital currencies are untrustworthy because of that is simply ignorant and indicative of your superficial understanding of how any of the technology actually works.

the best people have come up with is generating individual private keys encrypted a using common library of lyrics, songs, and words. This is called a "brain" wallet and hasn't been popular since 2013. doing this, you can randomly bump into a single private key that has been already used.

I am saying this because every single time the discussion will end there. Because bitcoin fanatics cannot give a good reason why to use bitcoin over fiat in everyday transactions that are legal.

Yeah except it is more of a hassle to use bitcoin, and I can perfectly buy everything I need right now. I don't need to ask permission from the government to buy something on amazon or in the grocery store.

I agree with your argument if you mean illegal items like drugs. Bitcoin is perfect for that, except that market isn't big enough to support a large valuation.

What if someone steals your phone or gets on your pc? It is still a security weakness. Because if someone steals my bank card it is much harder to do anything with it. And it is physical.

If someone gets my credit card info I can quickly get it blocked and reverse transactions.

But if everyone has a potentially valuable wallet file on their computer or phone that can be brute forced in a day or two, burglary and stealing phones will get a lot more lucrative.

And there is still the chance of losing passwords. The stress alone of having $10-15k in an account and potentially losing it all if I forget my password would cause me to not use bitcoin.

also last post before i bow out of this thread and let the plebs fight again with arguments from 2013


1/ ach deposit to gemini/gdax/bitstamp- completely free, 3-5 days on stmap/gdax, instant deposit on gemini
2/ setting a limit buy order- completely free on gdax (0.1% maker on gdax/bitstamp)
3/ withdrawing bitcoin to your own wallet- completely free on gdax. IDK about other 2
5/ ach out money back to bank- completely free

bitcoin is not a currency.


no one recognizes it as a currency

not the fanatics
not the irs
not the pboc
not the cftc
not the cfpb
not the sec


when you realize this, you may also realize how dumb your arguments are for comparing it to fiat.


paradoxically, you can walk into any major metro area in the world and purchase goods with bitcoin. Like dental work, sex, furniture, art, cars, islands, etc.

You really think that will stay free? How do they make money if it is free. They are attracting customers obviously to then later charge them money.

Same thing with websites like youtube or ebay. Once you lured in enough customers, you jack up rates.

Also here it says:
https://www.bitstamp.net/fee_schedule/

minimum fee of $7.5 and 0.05% deposit fee. So if I want to buy something, total transaction costs are .05% plus 0.25% trading fees, plus I have to wait like a day to make the transaction. Then vendor has to exchange it for fiat, and wait another day or so to get it in his bank. Paying at least another 0.25%. But let's say he does it in larger volume and only pays 0.2%.

So before paying miners, we are already paying 0.5%.

And those miners need to make money at some point. The more miners the more secure bitcoin is... Very low transaction costs is bad incentive for people to mine bitcoin.

Also 60% of bitcoin miners are in China, something to think about.

oh boy arguing with bitcoin fanatics is really like taking candy from a baby.

From wikipedia:

I will quote your comment here:
Sounds like a currency to me.

And yet practically nobody is using it! I guess this is because it is not a 'currency'.

Actually no you can't brute force **** unless you build the world's largest quantum computer that doesn't exist and then wait many many years. So good luck with that. Might still give you better returns than your Roth.

Again you are wrong. Cloud backups are an option.the fact that you can CALL a bank and get a new password to your money is super safe. Sure buddy. If I know all your info (which is not hard to get, welcome to 2017) I can call the bank, have your email reset to mine and get a new password. Sounds ridiculous doesn't it? Here's the thing. That's significantly more probable to happen vs someone "cracking" my password.

Shorter transactions do not equal double spends like they do with traditional banks. Blockchains with fast confirmations use different ways to prevent double spends. There's algorithms for that.

Jesus Christ man 10 years? 10 whole years? Man so long. 10 years isn't ****

I'm not going to waste my time explaining advantages to someone who is going to blow them off with the same ****.

I'm not going to continue with this so I'll leave you with this. Enjoy your measly was returns for a few years. I hope you find your way into something stable before the next stock market crashes and the masses move to crypto. Actually I take that back. I hope you lose every single penny

An 7-8 digit password into your wallet can be relatively easily cracked. You don't need some million dollar supercomputer. Especially since most people will use a combination of common letters and numbers.

It is pretty hard to get into my bank account. You need my physical pass (if I lose it I can immediately block my account) and my pin number. And then the transaction can potentially be reversed if you are quick.

And if you call the bank they will send the pin number to your house address. You cannot easily change your house address.

So then to get into my bank account, you need to somehow get all my personal info (they often ask for latest transactions made as well, which is hard to figure out), you need my bank card (and not have me block it if I lose it) and you need to then somehow fish my pin number out of my mail box before I do it. And if you do all that, you need me to not pull back the transactions. I can also figure out who you are because you actually need to send the money to your account with your name attached ot it (since doing it by ATM will be very slow). So hard to steal and stay anonymous.

ANd you sound very emotional man, calm down.

Also it sounds like you have a very ****ty bank that you can just get your pin number sent to your email.

Btw as for shorter confirmation times:
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/qu...at-have-shorte

Didn't you think bitcoin would have done that if it was so easy? It is obviously a huge disadvantage.

See number 2 is another cost, payment processors need to charge you for % of transactions they get screwed over by frauds.

I wouldn't either if my arguments were crushed as badly as yours.

Dfgg, People have been making your arguments since Bitcoin was 5$. Read the Bitcoin thread and see. You don't like Bitcoin, don't use it or buy any then, nobody cares.

Just because tens of billions have been poured into this in a very short amount of time by speculators who barely understand it (or use it), doesn't prove me wrong.

Probably popular with money launderers as well before crackdowns started happening.

Also I am not arguing it is a complete sham. I would think that at $5 it was a great investment. I am still kicking myself for not buying monero a year ago.

Probably anywhere under $100 would be a good investment. Just that it is terribly overvalued and overhyped at $5000.

I actually rode this up from $80 to about $400.

I will stop arguing now because it is a waste of time.

open a spreadbetting account, and bet on it going down. simple.

There's like 10 trillion in offshore bank accounts/hidden gold.
Crypto can't be seized by governments so it's superior to a offshore bank account.

Now btc has problem of volatility/downside risk, if this stays high an offshore bank account is still better then pouring all ur tax-evasion money in crypto, however a % of this money in crypto is smart . when volatility disappears, all this money will go in crypto. For everyday people as well, everyone with a lot of money needs a % in crypto as part of optimal portfolio allocation/ hedge in case ur government seizes everything or normal markets crash. The % isn't that high and most people won't bother but this still warrants a high mcap. Seems very unlikely to me btc succeeds as a world wide currency but who cares, it doesn't need to. Unseizable store of value+gateway into the blockchain that already toke over Venture capital and will take over many more industries = high potential.

This seems almost like a religious debate by now. #protip to everyone: u don't have to pick one side and defend it religiously, get angry when people disagree. Its better to keep both sides of the argument in your head at the same time, and assign probabilities to all scenarios. U don't have to be a believer/hater, u can be both. See all the pros, see all the cons, be prepared for all scenarios and capitalize on the current opportunities. When you find yourself angry when some1 disagrees with you it's a sign that u don't have full confidence in your own opinions. Stay open minded, see the world for what it is instead of how u want to see it. People pick a narrative they like and then stick with it, this is really bad. Better to be always switching between sides.
There are people who are big btc believers but have no position, there's also people who think it's all a massive bubble but make millions exploiting it anyway, don't let ur opinions lie in the way of actions

I don't think it is a good hedge against a crisis. A lot of speculators will panic and jump out, and liquidity is pretty poor with bitcoin. So the price could crash hard on relatively low volume. Especially if there is no wave of money to fill up that gap.

Besides in a crisis, especially after a bubble has popped money is actually destroyed rapidly, so deflation is always a bigger risk than inflation. People did not understand this in 2011-2012. So gold went up quite a bit.
Fed prints a ton of money, and usually that just fills up the hole that was created by debt being written down or rapidly being paid off. And it strengthens banks balance sheets (so doesn't go into the economy).

You saw this in gold price, everyone panicked because of QE, but gold is now up only about 20% since 2008 adjusted for inflation. While S&P 500 return adjusted for inflation is about 100%:

https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/

Seriously doubt people will fall for that again the next crisis, especially if there is a bubble that popped.

Honestly monero would be a much better bet now if you think anonymity is very important. Some good arguments why monero is superior to bitcoin:

https://www.monero.how/why-monero-vs-bitcoin

The only people who would lose their bitcoin because they forgot their wallet password are people who do not understand how to use it, like yourself.