OT: Bitcoin
- Thread starter Dawgpoundrock21
- Start date
Guy on tigerdroppings money board was pumping bitcoin saying its the future of currency when it was like $40. People on there blasted him saying it was a scam. Dude said he had over 1,000 coins years ago. He is having the last laugh thats for sure
Can someone give a synopsis of exactly how bitcoin works? Gotta admit I really am too lazy to look it up and some of y'all are pretty damn good at explaining **** in layman terms. Best I've been able to figure out to date is that it's either a cutesy little buzzword for the millennial set or a way to launder money, with my best guess being the money laundering
Even a layman's explanation is tough. I've got a friend in software development who can explain it to me in a way that makes sense in that moment, but after five minutes I'm confused again. When it emerged it was a completely new concept that has no previously existing points of reference or comparisons.
Basically it's an intangible currency whose value is derived from the efforts of "miners" who confirm transactions to support its decentralized nature. That description doesn't even begin to scratch the surface, but that's about the best I can do.
Its a completely absurd system.
Its basically investing in beanie babies in the 90s for current day tech nerds.
- intentional scarcity creates demand.
- no inherent value.
- belief that item(beanie or bit) will be worth more in the future than present.
The idea is really cool- transactions are all verified thru multiple computers within the network and recorded in a public ledger for all to verify. This is great and all, but bitcoin is supposed to be a currency and not a speculative investment.
As a currency, it fails horribly.
- Barely anyone in the world accepts bitcoin for payment. Seriously, like .00001% of businesses accept it.
- Goods and services arent priced in bitcoin. Even though its a 'currency', it is directly tied to the current value of other currencies. It isnt a unit of account.
- Its volatile as ****. Who would ever accept their checking account dropping by 500% without doing anything or accept their mortgage jumping 500% suddenly? The Zimbabwean dollar was retired back in 2009 for a reason(well, many actually)- an economy cant exist with such instability in its currency.
And bitcoin is a laughably terrible investment. Short term- its great. Clearly it can make people wealthy beyond their imaginations seemingly overnight. But that doesnt mean **** when you look at bitcoin as a long term investment(which it shouldnt be since its a currency). Invenstable assets should create cash flows in the future. Bitcoin is not that, at least not right now in its present state and the currently known ideal.
Bitcoin is an absolutely fascinating story. From the group of initial discussion participants back in the early 90s, to the secrecy of Nakamoto, to the ideal state of currency where private for profit manipulation(banks) is removed- its all a really cool idea and incredible system. The idea of a global currency without ties to a government has a lot of appeal. It also has a lot of downside.
Its basically investing in beanie babies in the 90s for current day tech nerds.
- intentional scarcity creates demand.
- no inherent value.
- belief that item(beanie or bit) will be worth more in the future than present.
The idea is really cool- transactions are all verified thru multiple computers within the network and recorded in a public ledger for all to verify. This is great and all, but bitcoin is supposed to be a currency and not a speculative investment.
As a currency, it fails horribly.
- Barely anyone in the world accepts bitcoin for payment. Seriously, like .00001% of businesses accept it.
- Goods and services arent priced in bitcoin. Even though its a 'currency', it is directly tied to the current value of other currencies. It isnt a unit of account.
- Its volatile as ****. Who would ever accept their checking account dropping by 500% without doing anything or accept their mortgage jumping 500% suddenly? The Zimbabwean dollar was retired back in 2009 for a reason(well, many actually)- an economy cant exist with such instability in its currency.
And bitcoin is a laughably terrible investment. Short term- its great. Clearly it can make people wealthy beyond their imaginations seemingly overnight. But that doesnt mean **** when you look at bitcoin as a long term investment(which it shouldnt be since its a currency). Invenstable assets should create cash flows in the future. Bitcoin is not that, at least not right now in its present state and the currently known ideal.
Bitcoin is an absolutely fascinating story. From the group of initial discussion participants back in the early 90s, to the secrecy of Nakamoto, to the ideal state of currency where private for profit manipulation(banks) is removed- its all a really cool idea and incredible system. The idea of a global currency without ties to a government has a lot of appeal. It also has a lot of downside.
At $15k per coin, I think it’s likely time for that dude to cash out about half of it and retire to the beach or a mountainside. Unreal amount of money.
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Yea, I had a small amount of money in a couple of underperforming stocks that I was going to use to speculate on bitcoin. There's lots of information about the technology, but not so much about how to actually buy and sell bitcoin. I basically decided it wasn't worth the trouble.
There are tons of exchanges and the most popular one is coinbase (https://www.coinbase.com/). You set it up like any brokerage account and make trades. Pretty straight forward if you want to get into it.
I worked in the payments industry for a good while, now I work for a financial institution. Here are my thoughts on it. And this is from a practical standpoint and not an investment standpoint.
-The concept is pretty cool but hard to understand for a regular joe. It would be an ideal payment system if we as a country or the entire world literally started over from scratch on how we transact.
-With that said, what I struggle with is it doesn't necessarily solve a problem. It's more of a preferred method of how to transact. A lot will tell you it's a perfect system that can't be compromised. That's false.
-Anything having to do with payments/people's money will take years to gain mainstream adoption. Payments is a weird dinosaur like that. See how slow Apple Pay has taken off. 15 years ago, everyone was saying that checks wouldn't be around today. They still are. I don't use them per se but they're still around is my point. Lastly, a LOT of startups, companies, etc have tried to end cash. Cash is still around and will be king for quite some time.
-Now with that said, I'm not saying Bitcoin won't be the main method of payment one day. It just wont be any time soon. I'm thinking 10 years at a minimum.
-On the other side of the point above, Bitcoin threatens the very existence of all payment networks and processors, Ie: Visa, MasterCard, Discover, Vantiv, First Data, etc. Those gorillas aren't going to make it easy for Bitcoin to take over the payments market.
It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next ten years. Not exactly sure if I'd invest in it now. Most people don't remember when it went to **** a few years back and a lot of people lost a lot of money.
-The concept is pretty cool but hard to understand for a regular joe. It would be an ideal payment system if we as a country or the entire world literally started over from scratch on how we transact.
-With that said, what I struggle with is it doesn't necessarily solve a problem. It's more of a preferred method of how to transact. A lot will tell you it's a perfect system that can't be compromised. That's false.
-Anything having to do with payments/people's money will take years to gain mainstream adoption. Payments is a weird dinosaur like that. See how slow Apple Pay has taken off. 15 years ago, everyone was saying that checks wouldn't be around today. They still are. I don't use them per se but they're still around is my point. Lastly, a LOT of startups, companies, etc have tried to end cash. Cash is still around and will be king for quite some time.
-Now with that said, I'm not saying Bitcoin won't be the main method of payment one day. It just wont be any time soon. I'm thinking 10 years at a minimum.
-On the other side of the point above, Bitcoin threatens the very existence of all payment networks and processors, Ie: Visa, MasterCard, Discover, Vantiv, First Data, etc. Those gorillas aren't going to make it easy for Bitcoin to take over the payments market.
It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next ten years. Not exactly sure if I'd invest in it now. Most people don't remember when it went to **** a few years back and a lot of people lost a lot of money.
One of the reasons I haven't invested in any. I do however have some cash in a few different alt coins, that have more purpose/solve a problem/or at least bring new tech to the table.
It's backed up by the investments and labor of individuals who build rigs to confirm the transactions. Much more tangible value than today's major governmental fiat currencies.
There’s a pretty good documentary on Netflix about it. Gives a lot of the history of the guy ‘Nakamoto’ who basically built the system but nobody knows who he is. It all happened in the interwebz of 4chan and Reddit and the like.
I personally like the system and think it could be done but I highly doubt the world will ever be fully accepting of it. From a finance side, it’s a neat case study.
Also of note, there was a bag hack in the system for one of the biggest markets of bitcoin and supposedly someone figured out how to steal it. I only saw a bit of the headline but goes to show nothing will ever be completely secure. Someone will always figure out a way to game the system.
I personally like the system and think it could be done but I highly doubt the world will ever be fully accepting of it. From a finance side, it’s a neat case study.
Also of note, there was a bag hack in the system for one of the biggest markets of bitcoin and supposedly someone figured out how to steal it. I only saw a bit of the headline but goes to show nothing will ever be completely secure. Someone will always figure out a way to game the system.
Would you care to counter the comments I made, or are you gonna just stick with all of it being completely incorrect?
The most recent hack was in NiceHash. They provide payments to the miners in the form of bitcoin. It is not an exchange (think paypal). As far as usefulness goes it absolutely does have a use. It isn't subject central bank risk, or political risks. There is only a finite amount of it. Let's say you are trying to conduct business in a country with it's own currency say Zimbabwe. You are heavily exposed to political/central bank risks. Bitcoin decentralizes that risk. However it does expose you to speculator risk, but that exists already in highly volatile currencies. I'm fairly certain there are ways to buy it on margin which brings about another animal. CBOE and CME begin selling futures on it next week. This is going make things go haywire for a little while. I dont' currently own any but i'm in the process of opening an account today. Am I betting my life savings on it? no.... and as far as money laundering goes. Dollars are used to transact drugs, weapons, contract murders, atom bombs more than anything else in the world. Money doesn't kill people or launder itself. Businesses are not inherently bad. People are bad. Money is used as a tool to transact good, bad and everything in between
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Don’t really care about commenting because I’m to busy cashing out some BTC right now. Im taking the day off.
I think you nailed it glfr. No way in hell I’d give up $1,200 to some unidentified individual(s) to hold in a “cloud” for an internet credit that buys me nothing I can use.
It's not Beanie Babies.LOL. It is a form of currency.It is often used (Not always.Often.) to purchase items off of the internet. The reason (often) is so that there is no record of the transaction on your bank account.Why wouldn't you want your bank/pay pal/CC to have no record? Because (often) you are buying and receiving( Mostly through the mail. ) "goods" that you shouldn't be mailed ( Think steroids/opiates/weed/). So when the postal inspector shows up. At least they can't subpoena your bank records. With the internet. This is a resource that will be used until they come up with something better.But I would agree the Beanie Baby comparison is way off.
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Jesus- the beanie babies reference was directed at investing in bitcoin, not using bitcoin as a currency.
I identified the 3 reasons why investing in bitcoin is like the 90s craze of beanie babies.
I did not mean to imply the use of bitcoin is like the beanie babies craze, which is why i specifically said 'investing' in the earlier post.
I see that my post wasnt clear and i transitioned between bitcoin investing and bitcoin transactional use a lot, which didnt help.
Exactly. Thats the irony in all this- currency speculation exists everywhere, but faith and an official known cash manager(the gvt) has led the USD to be more trusted...at least as of now.
you also don't have to hold it on the "cloud". And as far as stocks go... they are held in a so called "cloud" as well. There is a registration with a name on it held at your brokerage firm and your clearing firm unless you actually hold the physical certificate. The security measures are finally catching up, but it took a while. If you think your money is "secure" then you are pretty stupid. How many people's credit info was hacked this year? 150 million people. birthdates, social security numbers, any line of credit that you have ever opened in your lifetime. Anything can be "hacked" or stolen for those creative and smart enough with motive.
From a simplified (yeah, this is simplified) technical perspective:
Bitcoin relies on two computational principles: hashing and public key cryptography.
Hashing: Hashing simply takes a string of letters/numbers/binary data and converts it to a number with a fixed range. For example, a (very bad) hash might be to take all the numbers, add them up, and take the ones digit. So the hash of 1234567 is 8. A good hash function has several important properties. The first two are that they should be fast to compute and that you always get the same answer (if you need randomness, it must be placed in the message before computing the hash). The hash function should also not be invertible (I cannot figure out your message is 1234567 from the hash of "8")8). The hash function should also give a very different answer for a slightly changed input. Finally, I should not be able to easily find another input into the hash function that gives the same output. Easily is defined as anything simpler than a brute force search of all possible inputs.
My example hash fails on the last two properties. The number 12345670 gives me the same hash value even though I added a 0 to the end, and I can also give you the number 44 to get the same hash. Good hash functions are developed by teams of mathematicians and undergo rigorous mathematical proofs of their properties.
The invertibility criteria is not just a function of the hash function, but also of how it is used. For example, if I want to make a prediction of who wins the Gator Bowl, but I don't want to reveal it to you until after the game is over, I can give you the SHA-256 (SHA means Secure Hash Algorithm, and 256 is the number of bits in the output hash) hash of my prediction, which is 003e761d9dbff59ed59224db58962d8600c3521729fe6ec8ead0c196ac912aca. The only problem is that the input space I used was small. Namely, you can try a few variations of team names (mississippi state, msu, M-State, Mississippi State, Lousiville, UL, louisville, etc.) and you'll eventually find my answer. The solution is to add a little bit of randomness to my answer. I can put in Mississippi State-XXXXXXXXXXXX or Lousiville-XXXXXXXXXXXX where the 12 Xs are a 12 random digits, I can hash the answer and you will have to brute force through around 1 trillion combinations to get my prediction. In reality, I can put way more than 12 digits on my prediction at a very low upfront cost and make my prediction uncrackable. Once the game is over, and I want to prove I was right, I provide you with Mississippi State-867930519417, you hash the string, and see that I was correct. The final hash property (not being able to easily find another input that gives the same output) means that I would not feasibly be able to find an input of Louisville-XX...
What does this have to do with Bitcoin? Suppose you have a list of all of today's transactions, along with a hash value that corresponds to yesterday and days before transactions. You can concatenate all the data to get PREVIOUS_HASH++Transaction 1++Transaction 2++...+Transaction Last++Mining Transaction++NONCE. The miners have to determine what "NONCE" is. Nonce means number used once, and in this case the miners are trying to find a NONCE that when added to "PREVIOUS_HASH++Transaction 1++Transaction 2++...+Transaction Last" gives you a hash that is below a certain value. A simpler idea is to find a hash that has a certain number of leading zeros. This is the difficulty level. My hash of "Mississippi State" above had two leading zeros (each digit in the has represents 4 bits, so the first 8 bits out of 256 bits were 0s). For bitcoin, you would have to find a nonce that gives a hash with far more zeros at the beginning. Let's say the first 32 bits need to be 0. It doesn't matter what the final 226 bits are. You will have to try around 4 billion nonces to find an answer that has that many leading 0 bits. For example, Mississippi State-2847158813 has a SHA-256 hash that begins with 8 leading zeros (verify it yourself here: http://www.xorbin.com/tools/sha256-hash-calculator).
This number, 2^32 which is around 4*10^9, is not large enough for bitcoin (this is an extremely small number in computational standards. Your phone could find a solution in less than a couple minutes). I think bitcoin is around 10^19. If you have a single computer computing 1 billion hashes per second, it would take on average 317 years to find the nonce. However, there are millions of processors constantly mining, so a nonce is found, on average, every 10 minutes. If you find the nonce, you claim your bitcoins and publish your nonce. One other thing is that someone else cannot steal your nonce and claim it for himself because one of the transactions in the block will be the coins you award to yourself for mining (the "Mining Transaction" contains your bitcoin address). Since your bitcoin address (more on that later) is different from someone else's address (and should be because if you have the same address they can steal all your coins) and a hash value will radically change with a change in input, the nonce they find will be different from yours because there will be one transaction different.
Public key cryptography:
Public key cryptography allows me to encrypt or sign data with a private key and anyone can decrypt or verify my signature with my public key. Someone else cannot generate a signature or encrypt data with my public key and have it appear as if I signed or generated the encrypted data. Public key cryptography is computationally expensive, so the only time it is used in bitcoin is in signing transactions and verifying transactions. Even then, the transaction itself is not signed, rather the hash of the transaction is signed. For bitcoin, the public key also acts as the address, which indicates who are sending and receiving bitcoins. I can generate a public key/private key pair and have someone send me bitcoin (or mine) and put the public key as the recipient address. I can later spend the coin because I have the private key required to spend it.
The crazy thing is that in bitcoin a validly recorded transaction is itself the bitcoin. If the ledger has a transaction with me as the recipient for 1 bitcoin, I have 1 bitcoin. If I want to spend that 1 bitcoin by sending it to you, I can take your address (public key), the number of bitcoin I'm sending you, and the hash of my bitcoin (that is, the hash of the previous transaction that contains my public key as the recipient). I concatenate them together, digitally sign them with my private key, and broadcast the transaction to the bitcoin network. They are entered into the ledger, which the miners are using as an input to generate their bitcoins. Once the miners have found the nonce, the transaction is final (there are possibilities of a what is called a blockchain fork, but that's beyond the discussion here). You can check the ledger and see that you are the recipient of 1 bitcoin from me. If I ever try to spend that bitcoin again, the hash of the bitcoin I am trying to spend can be checked against the ledger and you can tell that I am trying to double spend and reject the transaction.
I can combine multiple bitcoin inputs and/or generate multiple bitcoin outputs. For example, if I have two 1-bitcoin hashes and want to send you 2 bitcoin, your transaction will have two input hashes and the resulting transaction will indicate you have 2 bitcoin. If I have a 2-bitcoin transaction and want to send you 1 bitcoin, I send you 1 bitcoin and send myself 1 bitcoin; it's a single transaction have the same input hash, but there are two outputs, one for 1 bitcoin to your address and one for 1 bitcoin to my address, and I can verify that the sum of the outputs is less than the sum of the inputs so it is accepted into the network. If I do something like send you 1 bitcoin and forget to send myself the remaining bitcoin, the remaining bitcoin becomes part of the transaction fee and miners can claim it. If I send you 2 bitcoin from a 1 bitcoin block, the network will reject the transaction.
Lost bitcoins can never be reclaimed, or could only be reclaimed if you can generate a private key corresponding to the public key of the lost bitcoin. If someone comes up with a feasible way of doing this, it will be the end of bitcoin unless a new public key system is developed.
Bitcoin relies on two computational principles: hashing and public key cryptography.
Hashing: Hashing simply takes a string of letters/numbers/binary data and converts it to a number with a fixed range. For example, a (very bad) hash might be to take all the numbers, add them up, and take the ones digit. So the hash of 1234567 is 8. A good hash function has several important properties. The first two are that they should be fast to compute and that you always get the same answer (if you need randomness, it must be placed in the message before computing the hash). The hash function should also not be invertible (I cannot figure out your message is 1234567 from the hash of "8")8). The hash function should also give a very different answer for a slightly changed input. Finally, I should not be able to easily find another input into the hash function that gives the same output. Easily is defined as anything simpler than a brute force search of all possible inputs.
My example hash fails on the last two properties. The number 12345670 gives me the same hash value even though I added a 0 to the end, and I can also give you the number 44 to get the same hash. Good hash functions are developed by teams of mathematicians and undergo rigorous mathematical proofs of their properties.
The invertibility criteria is not just a function of the hash function, but also of how it is used. For example, if I want to make a prediction of who wins the Gator Bowl, but I don't want to reveal it to you until after the game is over, I can give you the SHA-256 (SHA means Secure Hash Algorithm, and 256 is the number of bits in the output hash) hash of my prediction, which is 003e761d9dbff59ed59224db58962d8600c3521729fe6ec8ead0c196ac912aca. The only problem is that the input space I used was small. Namely, you can try a few variations of team names (mississippi state, msu, M-State, Mississippi State, Lousiville, UL, louisville, etc.) and you'll eventually find my answer. The solution is to add a little bit of randomness to my answer. I can put in Mississippi State-XXXXXXXXXXXX or Lousiville-XXXXXXXXXXXX where the 12 Xs are a 12 random digits, I can hash the answer and you will have to brute force through around 1 trillion combinations to get my prediction. In reality, I can put way more than 12 digits on my prediction at a very low upfront cost and make my prediction uncrackable. Once the game is over, and I want to prove I was right, I provide you with Mississippi State-867930519417, you hash the string, and see that I was correct. The final hash property (not being able to easily find another input that gives the same output) means that I would not feasibly be able to find an input of Louisville-XX...
What does this have to do with Bitcoin? Suppose you have a list of all of today's transactions, along with a hash value that corresponds to yesterday and days before transactions. You can concatenate all the data to get PREVIOUS_HASH++Transaction 1++Transaction 2++...+Transaction Last++Mining Transaction++NONCE. The miners have to determine what "NONCE" is. Nonce means number used once, and in this case the miners are trying to find a NONCE that when added to "PREVIOUS_HASH++Transaction 1++Transaction 2++...+Transaction Last" gives you a hash that is below a certain value. A simpler idea is to find a hash that has a certain number of leading zeros. This is the difficulty level. My hash of "Mississippi State" above had two leading zeros (each digit in the has represents 4 bits, so the first 8 bits out of 256 bits were 0s). For bitcoin, you would have to find a nonce that gives a hash with far more zeros at the beginning. Let's say the first 32 bits need to be 0. It doesn't matter what the final 226 bits are. You will have to try around 4 billion nonces to find an answer that has that many leading 0 bits. For example, Mississippi State-2847158813 has a SHA-256 hash that begins with 8 leading zeros (verify it yourself here: http://www.xorbin.com/tools/sha256-hash-calculator).
This number, 2^32 which is around 4*10^9, is not large enough for bitcoin (this is an extremely small number in computational standards. Your phone could find a solution in less than a couple minutes). I think bitcoin is around 10^19. If you have a single computer computing 1 billion hashes per second, it would take on average 317 years to find the nonce. However, there are millions of processors constantly mining, so a nonce is found, on average, every 10 minutes. If you find the nonce, you claim your bitcoins and publish your nonce. One other thing is that someone else cannot steal your nonce and claim it for himself because one of the transactions in the block will be the coins you award to yourself for mining (the "Mining Transaction" contains your bitcoin address). Since your bitcoin address (more on that later) is different from someone else's address (and should be because if you have the same address they can steal all your coins) and a hash value will radically change with a change in input, the nonce they find will be different from yours because there will be one transaction different.
Public key cryptography:
Public key cryptography allows me to encrypt or sign data with a private key and anyone can decrypt or verify my signature with my public key. Someone else cannot generate a signature or encrypt data with my public key and have it appear as if I signed or generated the encrypted data. Public key cryptography is computationally expensive, so the only time it is used in bitcoin is in signing transactions and verifying transactions. Even then, the transaction itself is not signed, rather the hash of the transaction is signed. For bitcoin, the public key also acts as the address, which indicates who are sending and receiving bitcoins. I can generate a public key/private key pair and have someone send me bitcoin (or mine) and put the public key as the recipient address. I can later spend the coin because I have the private key required to spend it.
The crazy thing is that in bitcoin a validly recorded transaction is itself the bitcoin. If the ledger has a transaction with me as the recipient for 1 bitcoin, I have 1 bitcoin. If I want to spend that 1 bitcoin by sending it to you, I can take your address (public key), the number of bitcoin I'm sending you, and the hash of my bitcoin (that is, the hash of the previous transaction that contains my public key as the recipient). I concatenate them together, digitally sign them with my private key, and broadcast the transaction to the bitcoin network. They are entered into the ledger, which the miners are using as an input to generate their bitcoins. Once the miners have found the nonce, the transaction is final (there are possibilities of a what is called a blockchain fork, but that's beyond the discussion here). You can check the ledger and see that you are the recipient of 1 bitcoin from me. If I ever try to spend that bitcoin again, the hash of the bitcoin I am trying to spend can be checked against the ledger and you can tell that I am trying to double spend and reject the transaction.
I can combine multiple bitcoin inputs and/or generate multiple bitcoin outputs. For example, if I have two 1-bitcoin hashes and want to send you 2 bitcoin, your transaction will have two input hashes and the resulting transaction will indicate you have 2 bitcoin. If I have a 2-bitcoin transaction and want to send you 1 bitcoin, I send you 1 bitcoin and send myself 1 bitcoin; it's a single transaction have the same input hash, but there are two outputs, one for 1 bitcoin to your address and one for 1 bitcoin to my address, and I can verify that the sum of the outputs is less than the sum of the inputs so it is accepted into the network. If I do something like send you 1 bitcoin and forget to send myself the remaining bitcoin, the remaining bitcoin becomes part of the transaction fee and miners can claim it. If I send you 2 bitcoin from a 1 bitcoin block, the network will reject the transaction.
Lost bitcoins can never be reclaimed, or could only be reclaimed if you can generate a private key corresponding to the public key of the lost bitcoin. If someone comes up with a feasible way of doing this, it will be the end of bitcoin unless a new public key system is developed.
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It does solve a problem. The federal reserve is constantly printing money and thus devaluing your money. By putting that value into a stagnant resource, that value is preserved. That's one of the main reasons why bitcoin has gone up and will continue to do so.
It is a store of value. It's whatever folks are willing to pay to store their assets in something that has no centralized governing authority. It's like putting your money under a mattress that can only hold a certain amount of people and it's "hidden" from authorities.
How much would you pay to put your money under that particular mattress?
How much would you pay to put your money under that particular mattress?
mstateglfr is a 17ing idiot. You can buy stuff on AMAZON with bitcoin.
1. Buy an Amazon or any other variety of giftcard through gyft.com using bitcoin.
2. Buy stuff using the Amazon giftcard.
So yes, you can absolutely buy lots of **** with bitcoin.
If you're gonna be a **** and be all "bUt tHeY dON't tAkE dIrEcT pAyMeNtS!1!!"....
Overstock, Newegg, shopify all take direct payment. Here's even a nice list that was SUPER DUPER HARD to look up:
http://spendbitcoins.com/places/
1. Buy an Amazon or any other variety of giftcard through gyft.com using bitcoin.
2. Buy stuff using the Amazon giftcard.
So yes, you can absolutely buy lots of **** with bitcoin.
If you're gonna be a **** and be all "bUt tHeY dON't tAkE dIrEcT pAyMeNtS!1!!"....
Overstock, Newegg, shopify all take direct payment. Here's even a nice list that was SUPER DUPER HARD to look up:
http://spendbitcoins.com/places/
What are the fertilizer companies accepting dollars or bitcoins to aid in the growth of Poppy plants to make the heroin. How many soldiers are stationed in afghanistan protecting certain areas for political interests that are growing poppy plants. stop thinking small. Bitcoin isn't evil. People will trade anything of value to get something else of equal value. The guy growing the poppy in Afghanistan probably traded goats to acquire the land. Those goats are hard as F to track
Ok let me rephrase. On a macro level it doesn't solve a big enough problem for the masses. YET. It may in the future but it doesn't today and it won't for years. Like I said earlier, everything in payments moves extremely slow. I can come up with a thousand little problems that Bitcoin may solve but it has to solve a big enough problem for it to be widely adopted. It doesn't at this point in time is my point.
Also, I'm not saying that people don't use it. Obviously people are but when I say it doesn't solve a big enough problem yet, I'm saying that people will continue to use their traditional methods of payment until something new comes along and solves an existing problem for them.
Apple Pay's whole deal when first came out was that you don't even have to pull out your wallet to pay anymore. Just use your cellphone. That's a great idea in theory but what happened is that all the Apple people tried to use it a few times at merchants and figured out that it's not universally accepted. So it really doesn't solve a problem because everyone knows that you can swipe/dip your card and the transaction will go through. Usage decreased. Now that online payments and p2p payments have risen, Apple is changing it's position and veering away from a brick and mortar sales pitch. My point is that Bitcoin is similar in the fact that it can solve all these hypothetical problems, but it will be years before it's an actual relevant tool to transact because it does not solve a big enough problem for people today.
I'll see your chart and raise you...
I looked into BitCoin a little while back, got really frustrated trying to understand it, which drove me away. Old adage about "Never invest in something you don't understand."
