You already have the right nickname for it to go all down in flames 

Plenty of other marketplaces like his old site are still up and running. Not everyone
of the owners will spend their remaining years in jail 

I would do the same if I worked for the FBI. Setup a dark market and use it as a honeypot to catch
some drug dealers, weapon dealers and so on.

I wouldnīt look for walls on Kraken. Other exchanges have more volume or are more relevant
for price discovery (we all know that certain Asian exchanges influence the market in a way
that is bigger than their actual market share).

Kraken can be neglected in terms of buy and sell walls.

I was wondering what would happen, if I discard the standard Electrum fee with a transaction like this and instead send
it with a customized small fee like 0.00005 BTC.

If my transaction gets confirmed in a day or so, everything worked out.

What would happen to the transaction, if the mempool hasnīt been cleared and my transaction doesnīt get confirmed?
I read somewhere that it will be removed from the mempool after a few days, but what exactly happens to the sent funds
and the included fee? Are both returned to the sending address? Is it necessary to accelerate the transaction (how exactly
does that work?) and if I fail to do this the transaction amount + the attached fee are lost forever?

This is just more proof that the analysts of these traditional banks have absolutely no clue with regards to
cryptocurrencies.

I strongly advise anyone to ignore these research papers at all costs - except, if you are interested in
them as a cheap source of entertainment.

edit: fixed proposition / spelling

How do you know that the mentioned persons havenīt sold parts of their holdings? It is definitely possible
that they have cashed out significant parts of their Bitcoin holdings (irrespective of what they are
claiming on platforms like Reddit or Twitter).

My ATH guess:
16/08/2018

Reasoning:
A big part of the current 2017 bull run of Bitcoin was caused by the altcoin mania and the ICO frenzy. In order to participate
in this hype Bitcoin often was and is the easiest on-ramp to get your money into the cryptocurrency system - as you know
most altcoins or tokens have no direct fiat trading pairs.
In my opinion we will see a new ATH in ~11 months (see my 16/08/2018 guess), because by then many
people will realize that many ICOs had terrible business models or were outright scams. Some of the people
will put their remaining funds after the ICO/altcoin fallout into fiat currencies. But the big majority
will shift their position into the one and only Bitcoin, which will have improved tremendously in the meantime
(2nd layer stuff like Lightning, privacy features in order to increase fungibility and anonymity).

This move from altcoins and the many vaporware ICOs will bring back the marketshare that Bitcoin lost
during the scaling debate:
https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-percentage

Additional prediction:
After reaching a new ATH around ~August of 2018, things will get really parabolic in 2019, when people realize
that the purchasing power of their fiat money has eroded even more (changes to the EU treaties, additional
stimulus programs by FED and ECB and negative interest rates finally coming to a mainstream bank near you).
In the prelude to the next block reward halving (a few months before the halving in 2020) we will
finally be able to see 20000 $ / Bitcoin.
Mainstream media coverage will explode even more at this time, which will lead us to ....

Isnīt oil consumption going to go down by a lot, if electric cars go mainstream (and electric trucks)? I donīt see the oil industry exploding any time soon, because
most oil producing countries still have giant reserves that can be exploited.

@micgoossens
Iīm disappointed that my reasoning for my ATH guess was not enough to get the desired * in order to compete for the 2nd price  
Nevertheless, you are running a great competition, which is a lot of fun! Thank you for running this promotion again  

On an unrelated note, the altcoin with the biggest price rise in the last 24 hours has the fitting name RISE.

Letīs get back to talking about Bitcoin.
This IQ discussion is not really relevant to the BTC/USD price.
Unless someone of you would link a study that shows a correlation
between high IQ and a large stash of Bitcoin.

Talking about large amounts of BTC:


This graphic really illustrates how many BTC some of the early adopters own.
Some crazy other stats as well!

What are your thoughts on this distribution?

That article is really amazing.

The two things that fascinate me the most about Satoshi are:
-his ethics and his wisdom to withdraw himself from the project to truly give it the chance to blossom
-his genius as showed in getting right the incentives for miners, nodes and all other participants

If Satoshi would indeed be several persons instead of a single individual, the ethics
part would even be more rare and astonishing.

https://pastebin.com/wXBgpf28

Youīre welcome! 

I agree that the topic of the study would be too politcally incorrect in order to get funded  
However, I disagree with the second part of your statement.

In order to use Bitcoin you donīt really need an outlier IQ. A person with a slightly sub-average IQ (letīs say 90) may not
understand the technical details of Bitcoin, but will be able to operate a Coinbase account or a blockchain.info wallet.
The same is valid for sites like Circle where the user of the service may not even be aware that the whole
project is based on Bitcoin.

Yes, pareto distribution is really a fascinating topic!

What if I told you that Bitcoinīs best use case was savings all the time?
Bitcoin is deflationary by design, which is even more extreme due to coins
that are lost forever (lost private keys, people that die with a stash of BTC
without anyone knowing about it...).

This increases scarcity, which is extremely valuable and necessary for BTC
to act as a store of value - something that most so called fiat currencies
are not!

Youīre welcome! 

https://twitter.com/btcgpu/status/912122750952652800


25th October seems to be the snapshot date.

However, I have my doubts that this hard fork will provide much value. I donīt see it
trading for an exchange rate that is comparable to Bitcoin Cash.

What are your guesses for the Bitcoin / Bitcoin Gold exchange rate? Iīd be surprised
to see something higher than 5 mBTC = 1 BTG (Bitcoin Gold).

The trading pair has been live for just a few hours with tiny volume.
I would wait until the futures market is more liquid.

Itīs too early to use this as an indication of the likely BTC2X price.

I share the same sentiment.
Bitfinex has introduced several trading pairs in the past that are questionable at the very least.

However, I wouldnīt conflate Bitfinex with Bitcoin as a whole. Bitcoin as a whole is still great.
Letīs hope it stays this way after November.

I think micgoossensīs contest is generous enough  
Congrats to harrymmmm for his great prediction!

Supply on the exchanges has really dried up, not many people
taking profits as of now. Besides, WSJ (Wall Street Journal) got it wrong as usual, they discourage
people from BTC investment and BTC makes a new ATH!

Quit mainstream media, buy BTC.
 

Is registration for LedgerX even open yet?
Besides, opening an account is heavily restricted as of now. Just look
at the criteria you have to fulfill in order to start trading at LedgerX:


If you are not based in the US you are basically unable to open an account.

You can also run FreeOTP:
https://freeotp.github.io/

(FreeOTP is sponsored and officially published by Red Hat)

It uses the same standards as Google 2FA (HOTP and TOTP) and therefore works everywhere
where Google 2FA works.

They could allow you to pick up your Trezor at the Satoshi Labs headquarter. This would remove
the counterparty risk of the mail carrier.

But this is probably not necessary if you see that the seals are undamaged.

I think they will not really die, but rather linger on for a fraction of their former value.

If a cryptocurrency newcomer asks me about my opinion of altcoins I usually gently guide him
towards these articles that destroy all altcoin enthusiasm pretty fast:
http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/the-problem-with-altcoins/
http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/the-coming-demise-of-altcoins/
http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/appcoins-are-snake-oil/
http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/its-not-about-the-technology-its-about-the-money/

These articles are a few years old, but nothing has really changed except that
a few new platforms where these coins/tokens are launched have emerged (e.g. ICOs
on top of Stellar or NEO).

You can already track the progress of the Lightning Network on mainnet:
https://p2sh.info/dashboard/db/lightning-network?orgId=1

Over 3 BTC are already in use in more than 600 open channels.

The linked website also has lots of other interesting statistics as well.


Tell me one thing on earth that is closer to sound money than Bitcoin
(to give you a tip:  physical Silver is not a correct answer).

I slightly changed the text of the meme and hope that you like
my creation  

https://i.imgur.com/iXgZrQ7.jpg

Why have most governments classified Bitcoin as an asset when it is a currency according
to you? The difference between Ripple and other scamcoins vs. Bitcoin is simple. Bitcoin has a truly
immutable supply and a predetermined issuance rate that eventually asymptotically approaches zero.
All the other scamcoins are prone to changes in supply or other relevant characteristics.

However, as we have seen numerous times with all the fork attempts Bitcoin is incredibly resilient to all
of these attacks and has proven to be immune to any relevant changes.

For further reading on why Bitcoin is superior to all the altcoins I suggest that you read the links
that I already posted in this thread yesterday:

Your last paragraph is pure conjecture. The more likely reason why Satoshiīs coins have never
moved is that he/she is dead or canīt access the private keys for another reason. I think you are giving
the government too much credit if you think that they are the inventors of cryptocurrency. I do concede
though that various government entities are probably heavily into cryptocurrency mining in order to
generate cash that is off the books.

You can follow all the action at GitHub:
https://github.com/epochtalk/epochtalk

The new forum software is still being developed as there are quite a few
of recent commits. I obviously agree that a project like this shouldnīt take so long.


Is postponing your retirement until after the next block reward halving a too daunting prospect?
I expect huge price increases in the run-up to the next block reward halving and with your holdings
you are likely missing out on another million $ or more if my prediction is correct.
It is obviously entirely possible that you will have to endure a prolonged bear market until then.

Bitcoin is closer to sound money than Silver.

Just take a look at the following chart (the URL contains "gold", but the chart is actually about silver):
https://www.statista.com/statistics/253293/global-gold-production-since-2005/

Silver mining can easily be increased. Imagine what all these mining companies would do
if the silver price increases substantially. They would simply ramp up their mining operations
and this would increase the available supply, which would drive the prices lower again.

On the other hand you have Bitcoin with a hard-cap on total supply (please donīt repeat
the terrible fork argument again, because these forks have nothing to do with the real Bitcoin
and will have less and less impact in the future) and an issuance rate that is going to go down.
Even if the Bitcoin price would double tomorrow nobody can simply decide to ramp up production,
because the block reward is fixed. It is not only fixed, it is set to decrease in the future
until it eventually asymptotically approaches zero.

I agree that your argument from yesterday that Bitcoins are not truly fungible is justified,
but there are people that work actively on projects that intend to make Bitcoin more fungible.
However, I would argue that this disadvantage compared to Silver, which is easily fungible is
compensated by various other advantages like the fact that large amounts of wealth can
be transported or transacted easier using BTC or that BTC is not subject to a supply response
as I have already explained above.

Then you will appreciate the following two facts:
1. Venezuela (the country with the largest proven oil reserves) will issue a cryptocurrency called the PETRO in a few weeks
2. Russia (the country with the 8th-biggest oil reserves) will issue a cryptocurrency called the CryptoRuble in a year

Both countries are responsible for a big part of global oil exports. To me it looks more likely
that they will demand PETRO/CryptoRuble as a payment for oil than Gold/Silver payments. Gold/Silver payments
for mineral reserves are not happening anytime soon while cryptocurrency payments for mineral reserves
are just around the corner.

Both countries obviously are incentivized to do this, because it potentially enables them
to circumvent international sanctions. It is already known that you will be able to exchange
the PETRO for other cryptocurrencies. This will allow everyone of us to buy a few PETRO
backed by real barrels of Venezuelan oil.


It will eventually happen!

The author of this book posits exactly the same prediction as Torque.
https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Alternative-Central/dp/1119473861

How high will the BTC/USD price go at Bitfinex when all people will try to buy Bitcoin
in order to get their funds off the exchange? This could provide us with
a crazy BTC/USD price rise (at least temporarily) if this is indeed the end of Bitfinex
and Tether.

I remember that some people floated the theory that parts of the recent Litecoin price
run-up where caused by people, who wanted to withdraw from exchanges in a reasonable
timeframe during the recent Bitcoin network congestion and therefore bought LTC with their funds.
This encouraged new investors, who saw the LTC/USD price gains and piled their funds
into Litecoin, which also increased media coverage, which resulted in even more investors.

This could get really crazy if this is indeed the end of Tether.

Never a dull day in Bitcoin land 

Wouldnīt a removal of bad actors (letīs assume that Tether is indeed a fraudulent operation and not legit
for the sake of argument) from the Bitcoin ecosystem be a good thing for the long-term future of Bitcoin?
If the big nefarious actors (e.g. fraudulent exchanges) are removed from the market this would
increase the likelihood of the approval of things like a Bitcoin ETF or even better news like the inclusion
of Bitcoin into the SDR basket of the IMF.

Besides, this could allow a user like BobLawblaw to retire with a much bigger nest egg
if this pushes Bitcoin above the 25000 $ threshold (or even higher) temporarily.
This of course assumes that other exchanges will still follow the price rise of the BTC/USD trading
pair of Bitfinex to some extent (e.g. due to arbitrage bots).

This was just a rumor that was spread by some people. It was also during the peak of Bitcoin
network congestion with 200k+ unconfirmed transactions. I could be wrong, but I remember that
the Ethereum network had similar problems with congestion during this time due to stuff like CryptoKitties?

I think there is at least a bit of truth to the rumor, because using LTC you could cash out your whole
balance from an exchange for less than 1 $ while Bitcoin confirmation times and transaction fees were through the roof
due to the spam attacks by the nefarious actors from the BCH fan club.

edit: I should clarify that I was talking about a period of time that was a few weeks ago and
not any current price action

You can verify where most Tethers are located using the Tether rich list:
https://wallet.tether.to/richlist

Usually, the USDT/USD trading pair on Kraken roughly had a trading volume
of 1M $ per day. Today the trading volume has already crossed 4.5 M $.

If I understand your post correctly, you are making a mistake.

1. Total Tether issuance (USDT on OMNI + USDT on ETH) = ~2.3 billion $
2. Total BTC in Bitfinex cold-wallet = 140,443 BTC = ~1.63 billion $

Even if all these Bitcoin would belong to Bitfinex, which they do not, they would
not be enough to cover all the outstanding Tether at the current Bitcoin price.
You also assume that all these Bitcoin belong to Bitfinex, which is obviously not true, because
these are mainly user funds. If people sold Bitcoin at 3000,5000 and so on the profits
may not have gone to Bitfinex, but to other users of the Bitfinex exchange.

Of course it is possible that I misunderstood your post or that Bitfinex
has substantial cryptocurrency holdings in other currencies than Bitcoin (e.g. big holdings of
ETH or some of the tokens that they list).

Random speculation:
Personally, I suspect that they obviously
acccumulate tokens like RLC or RCN before they list them on their exchange.
It is simply too easy to make money by buying up a random token and then making
profit after you list it on your exchange (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DUT-ULkWsAA9Pxt.jpg:large).

Bitfinex main income should theoretically be coming from trading fees and not from selling
Bitcoins directly.


This is exactly what many people including me predict what will happen in the case of a Tether collapse.
The prices of all cryptocurrencies on these exchanges will go completely parabolic, because of people
that desperately try to exchange their worthless USDT for another cryptocurrency.

Possible. However, I think this is the wrong approach. Letīs say Tether is exposed as a fraudulent enterprise and
the price drops of USDT drops to nearly zero. People currently have more than 300M $ of USDT on Poloniex according
to the Tether rich list. Why would the Poloniex cold wallets matter in this situation? They are under no obligation to
redeem the 300M $ of USDT for anything. The same applies to Bittrex, Binance, Huobi and so on in my opinion.

Let me illustrate my point using a further example.
1. We are in the November of 2017 and Bob decides to sell 10 BTC for 100k $ on his favorite exchange, Bitfinex.
2. Bob decides that altcoins are the future (poor Bob   ) and wants to withdraw his 100k $ to his favorite
altcoin exchange, Poloniex.
3. Bitfinex has no working fiat withdrawals at this point in time and Poloniex has no fiat banking relationships either.
4. Luckily there is this internet money called Tether.
5. Bob has read on the Tether website that he can "Get the joint benefits of open blockchain technology and traditional currency".
6. Bob is fascinated by this technology and he withdraws 100k of USDT from Bitfinex to Poloniex.
7. Bob dabbles in altcoins and after losing nearly all of his investment he just wishes that he could
turn back time to just keep his Bitcoin on a hardware wallet and never send them to a sketchy exchange.
8. After reading a post by realr0ach he rails against his fate even more, because even buying physical silver
would have been a better choice than dabbling in altcoins  (#in Physical Silver we Trust).

Ok, I admit that I got a little carried away here  

But the gist is that the cold storages of all the altcoin exchanges are not relevant for the
backing of outstanding Tethers, because they are under no obligation to give their users anything
for their USDT if the price of USDT decreases enormously.

Of course ideally even the Bitfinex cold wallet would be irrelevant for the backing of Tethers,
because the outstanding USDT should be backed by actual fiat money in real bank accounts.

Various outcomes are possible. It is even possible that Tether is completely legit and will continue
to thrive for a lot of years.

Personally, I think it is more likely that authorities of some state will put an end to this business.

There are enough precedents.

E.g. take a look at the history of E-Gold:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold

Especially this quote:

The bold part from the quote could also be applied to Tether.
Additionally, it is noteworthy that these companies had previously cooperated successfully
with regulatory authorities and even that couldnīt save them in the end. Tether
has not really cooperated with any regulatory authorities as far as I know.

I could be wrong on all of this, but in my opinion Tether will eventually
end up as a successor to E-Gold and LibertyReserve.

I was completely agreeing with you until your last sentence. Why do you think that they canīt control it?
They can easily shut down Tether using the same tactic that the US authorities used against
E-Gold (of course the central banks wonīt do it themselves, they will let the usual authorities do their
bidding).

Take a look at my earlier post where I described how the Department of Justice and the
Treasury Department simply changed their definition of a money transmitter to a vague definition
that fits literally every business that is somehow related to money transfers.

Correct.

However, I think that it is highly improbable that Bitcoin Cash will gain any network backing whatsoever.

Just take a look at the development of active BCH addresses:


Since the start of January the number of active BCH addresses has dropped from ~295000 to ~51000.
This looks like a dying coin to me. This is probably also the reason why the spam attacks on the real
BTC blockchain have stopped or at least decreased in intensity. With every day that passes it makes
less sense to prop up BCH and therefore attacks on BTC become also less interesting.

In order to be fully transparent I admit that the active Bitcoin (BTC) addresses have also dropped in this time
frame, but not by such a big percentage.

If anyone is interested in how these spam attacks were actually conducted take a look
at these findings.

Evidence #1 (a typical block full of spam transactions):
https://blockchain.info/block/00000000000000000182aabc399d2daec86b50d510701a5fd098793a4eadead4

Relevant statistics:
Block #470824
78 transactions
0.32951528 BTC transaction fees

An example of a likely spam transaction from this block:
https://blockchain.info/de/tx/91c66f0dc1f130646cad7ab1701d3e944d97549602f2804daaa3370eb44afccf

The block in question contains multiple of these transactions with a ton of inputs.

...

Evidence #2 (a more legit block):
https://blockchain.info/block/0000000000000000019ac8d7d0543caf8e3e02b2a350eea35eb92bcb961da7b2

Relevant statistics:
Block #470825
1752 transactions
3.4972579 BTC transaction fees

As some of you may have noticed this was the block that was mined right after
the block with the spam transactions.

If we assume that the fees paid in block #470824 are the typical cost for a spam attack you could
also do other interesting analysis (e.g. calculating how expensive these
spam attacks on the blockchain actually are per day/week/month). A potential problem could be that
some of these transactions with a ton of inputs could actually be legit transactions
(e.g. an exchange that consolidates a ton of small deposits).

I can corroborate this theory.

https://www.trustnodes.com/2017/12/15/warrant-canary-bitfinex-employee-disappears-rumors-swirl

Bitfinex employee Chris Ellis removed the warrant canary from his
Twitter account back in December.

If anybody is not familiar with the definition of a warrant canary, here is
the definition from Wikipedia:

Besides, until then Chris Ellis was making multiple
tweets per day and suddenly his Twitter activity completely stopped:
https://twitter.com/mrchrisellis

Irrespective of this I have to agree with Torque, the proceedings that follow a subpoena can
take a long, long time and stalling tactics are definitely viable...

I donīt think this will have a big impact on the market at all.
I hope someone of you got a few buy orders filled.

Isnīt it possible that your friend simply didnīt had the money to buy
BTC even when the Bitcoin price was low? I guess a few people that believed
in Bitcoin simply missed out due to not being liquid enough to invest.

Iīm not sure from which country you are, but even in a wealthy country
like the US the average person is not exactly having a lot of money
that is available for investment.

63% Of Americans Don't Have Enough Savings To Cover A $500 Emergency

Maybe you should reconsider and gift him a few mBTC  

Bitfinexīed on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/958420215301394432

Bitcoin surged 43 % in the 48 hours after the delivery of the subpoena.

Back then everybody attributed the price action to the launch of the Bitcoin
futures if I remember it correctly.

Iīm still sure that we wonīt see a real decrease in the Bitcoin price.
I think we will stay above 10k.

I have been monitoring the action on the Tether Rich List and there
have been some big movements of USDT in the last days.

Tether Rich List as of now:
https://wallet.tether.to/richlist

Tether Rich List from 3 days ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180128114237/https://wallet.tether.to/richlist

Notable changes:
-1DUb2YYbQA1jjaNYzVXLZ7ZioEhLXtbUru (Bittrex) had outflows of more than 71M USDT
-1FoWyxwPXuj4C6abqwhjDWdz6D4PZgYRjA (Binance) had outflows of more than 92M USDT
-1Po1oWkD2LmodfkBYiAktwh76vkF93LKnh (the smaller address of Poloniex) had outflows of nearly
50M USDT and contains less than 2M USDT now

No known Tether address of an exchange has received inflows of similar amounts of USDT, which
makes it likely that they are going back to Tether or Bitfinex.

Maybe this is not even related to the recent Tether news/FUD, but due to an
outflow of money from altcoins. Could this be the beginning of the end of the altcoin bubble?
Iīd argue that many people finally realize that investing in Ripple, Stellar or similar shitcoins
wonīt double their money in a week.

Another possibility is that these are funds that were raised by ICOs that use USDT
to launder their money or as a way to exchange their proceeds to BTC. After all
Bitfinex is one of the exchanges were you could arguably easier get rid of ICO proceeds
compared to more legit exchanges like Gemini.

Wait, are you telling me that I will never become an Aryan superman?



I looked up that Aaron Russo guy.


Seems legit.

But then I started reading about his movie about the American tax system and I have to admit that Iīm definitely
sympathetic to some of his views:



Damn it, Iīm starting to like Russo after I dismissed him initially as a
conspiracy theorist. Has anyone watched the movie (America: Freedom to Fascism)?

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16954366/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-mining-asic-chips-samsung

Big companies like Samsung are entering the cryptocurrency mining arena.
The future doesnīt look particularly bright for Bitmain if all the established chipmakers
will start to produce ASICs. And donīt even get me started on the future of BCH 

This prediction is extremely unlikely in my opinion. Many long-term holders, who took
profits during November/December are going to buy back way before that number. Besides,
institutional money will hop in way before that. 2.5k / BTC would be below the break-even
point for most miners...

Too many people are directly incentivized to prevent BTC from falling to 2.5k.

I go out on a limb here and will say that we will never see 2.5k again.
I will be buying BTC with all my remaining fiat money way before 2.5k myself.

Because they expect it to outperform other assets?
Because some will be aware of the huge impact that the next block reward halving will have on the BTC price (the months before the halving will be a crazy bull market if you ask me)
Because they are down with stock investments and try to turn around the year by gambling on BTC?
Because there are specialized hedge funds that invest exclusively in cryptocurrencies? Do you think they will invest all client funds in Ripple? Of course they are going to allocate money to BTC.
Because the stock market could run out of steam when the central banks of the world stop expanding the money supply?

Let me know if you need more reasons why institutional money would go back into Bitcoin.
I was just getting started.


I could be wrong, but as I said I will commit all my remaining fiat money if I get
the ability to buy BTC in the 2800-2900 $ / BTC range.

Bitfinex is actually even trading above the Korean exchanges.
The Korean exchanges had premiums of more than 20 % to the Western exchanges
not long ago.

My theory is that Bitfinex need to prop up the price on their own exchange to
prevent a cascade of margin calls that would cause a bloodbath. Meanwhile
price points arenīt really defended at other exchanges like Bitstamp that offer no
margin trading and therefore donīt need to fear a cascade of margin calls.

Off-topic:
If someone of you speaks Spanish and needs a distraction from the BTC price,
you can read the official whitepaper for the revolutionary Venezuelan cryptocurrency
- the PETRO - at the following website:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4363861-Whitepaper-Petro.html#document/

If anyone prefers the English translation:
http://elpetro.gob.ve/Whitepaper_Petro_en.pdf

A few quotes:



And here I was thinking that the Venezuelan people were looking for food and other things that
are necessary for survival.


This quote could be interesting for realr0ach 



The whitepaper even contains a reference to Tether (!).

...

To top it all off Venezuela is obviously going with the standard scam launch scheme:
1. Pre-Sale
2. ICO on Ethereum

Good post.

What if I told you that actually a Bitfinex employee (bfx_drew) (accidentally?) blurted out exactly this
a few weeks ago?



Most of us know that it is highly unlikely that institutional investors
have wired 2.2 billion $ and 85 M € to a sketchy entity like Tether.
However, it is entirely possible that Tethers are actually backed by cryptocurrencies.
E.g. exchanges like Binance make a ton of income in trading fees, but they collect
it in various altcoins and not in fiat and they surely would prefer to hold it in a stable coin
like USDT instead of random altcoins.

That this could be a problem in the event of falling prices is obvious as
@bitserve correctly pointed out in his post.

A few months ago someone asked me how even BTC storage solutions like
a cold wallet can be secure when anyone can theoretically guess the private
key of any wallet.

Today I discovered this beautiful illustration 



If anyone of you is trying to guess a specific Bitcoin private key, I guess
you can safely stop this endeavour now.

I expect the same, because there are too many parties that are incentivized to keep
Bitcoin above the average cost of mining a single Bitcoin. Therefore the downside risk from
the current price level is minimal. Of course it is possible that some miners try to bankrupt their
competitors by driving the price lower and mining at a loss for a while, but if a situation
like that would occur it would only be temporary anyway. The upside potential is probably limited too for now
after the parabolic rise at the end of 2017.

Other developments like the decay of the major altcoins and the upcoming block reward halving
in 2020 will drive the BTC price to new highs again.

I personally intend to withdraw all my personal investments that are not in Bitcoin right now during
2018 and commit 100 % of my investment portfolio to Bitcoin going forward.

Therefore I would actually be pretty content if the price would remain below 10k $ for a few more months
until I get that sorted out.

Why would I want to keep savings in fiat when any potential gains are inflated away anyway...

We both agree that the current system will eventually be replaced by something that is based
on sound money (after all fiat money is the historical anomaly).

Iīm not one of these hardcore libertarians, who is dreaming of a world without any taxes. I just
happen to disagree with the current level of taxation in my own country (I live in one of the
European countries, that is rather wealthy for now, but has a ridiculously high level of taxation) and most other countries.
There is this weird phenomenon where the state grows continously, but never shrinks. This obviously
leads to an ever-growing demand for more money where the state needs to extract more money using
taxation and a growing deficit.

If your politicians also follow a ridiculously stupid immigration policy, which exacerbates the whole
situation even more by introducing hundreds of thousands of people, who wonīt be living
off productive work but off government transfers the outlook is pretty grim (you are probably
able to guess my country right now  ).

Obviously.

But if you add billions of QE and other dubious interventions by central
banks all over the world you arrive at a stock price of ~280 $ for
a stock that should be worth less than 50 $.

Tesla isnīt the only zombie company that is producing terrible numbers and is
just kept afloat by artificial liquidity.

From Twitter:

 

The backstory (from Businessinsider):

Instead of trusting random posts with conspiracies about Gox moving coins you could
just check for yourself in the future. This little website tracks every movement of
coins from the relevant BTC addresses (they even track the MtGox BCH balances).

https://www.cryptoground.com/mtgox-cold-wallet-monitor/

Regarding the current rumors the roughly 8.2k BTC from MtGox have been moved to the following
address:
https://blockchain.info/address/1LncfoCX1yzuiW3hzejarvgZ1WahnAQ4o4

Unless this is the address of an OTC buyer/institution or exchange the coins havenīt been sold yet.

I also donīt think that r0ach is a member of Mensa, but I still think that his IQ would probably be sufficient for
a membership.

His focus on topics related to Jews/Judaism and similar stuff is of course over the top, but his
analysis of certain aspects of the economic system is actually pretty spot-on. He certainly
has a talent for identifying various scams in the economy (e.g. some of his comments with
regard to the real estate scam, the nature of fractional-reserve banking or some of the shenanigans
in the stock market).

What he doesnīt understand is that metals (especially silver) are subject to a supply response.
If the silver price would increase substantially, miners around the world would simply ramp up their
operations, which would cause the price to revert to previous levels.

Bitcoin doesnīt have a supply response. Even if the miners would ramp up their operations after a price increase
and the total hashrate would double or triple in the next year we still wouldnīt see the mining of a single additional Bitcoin
apart from the already expected number of Bitcoins.

It is not too late to sell your silver stash for a stash of Bitcoins.

Letīs assume that your theory is correct for a second. What exactly is the argument why silver will have higher gains than Gold
in this scenario? The industrial usage?

Where exactly is the counterparty risk in Bitcoin? Of course theoretically the big miners could collude to blacklist
your coins or try to double-spend, but in reality the incentive structure of the system disincentivizes fraudulent behavior.
If a miner would actually perform a fraudulent act like that the whole trust in Bitcoin would be gone and they would
be sitting on hardware and other infrastructure that is now worthless instead of making a fortune by continuing to play by
the networkīs rules (and they obviously would have to write off hundreds of million of $ in investment).

This is one of the ingenious elements in Bitcoinīs design. The incentive structure ensures that
the only powers that could theoretically cheat the system stay honest.

The only counterparty risk I see is if you store your coins with an exchange or some other kind of service. But
everyone here heavily dissuades newcomers from doing this with the common slogans like "Not your private keys,
not your coins" and similar stuff. Of course some people choose to ignore this advice, but they get
Bitfinexīed or Goxīed sooner or later.

Could be a blood bath.

Or it could be the prelude to a huge pump fueled by 250M $ of new Tether:

If you think this is bad, you should take a look at the Currency Exchange subforum.
Obvious scammers have been using self-locked threads (they lock their own threads after every bump)
for months in attempts to scam unsuspecting newbies.

The problem is known to the administration and yet these users are still allowed to post,
because this apparently is also covered by "free speech" and scams are not
moderated all over Bitcointalk.

In my opinion this is even worse than the conspiracy theories posted by various guys here, because of
the financial damage that it causes.



Do US dollars have a hard cap? No.
Do US dollars have a predictable issuance schedule? No.
Do Chuck E Cheese tokens have a hard cap? No.
Do Chuck E Cheese tokens have a predictable issuance schedule? No.

Do Bitcoins have a hard cap? Yes.
Do Bitcoins have a predictable issuance schedule? Yes.

Therefore it is either stupid or disingenuous to lump Bitcoins in with these obvious
scam projects like US dollars or Chuck E Cheese tokens.

Theoretically I would agree with the bolded part of the quote, but in practice
Bitcoin will be fine.

Letīs imagine the (likely) scenario in August 2024:
1. The Bitcoin block reward is only 3.125 BTC / block at this time (oh, no, adversarial mining is a real danger now!!)
2. BTC is trading for 120000 $ / BTC.
3. This means that the block reward is actually higher in terms of fiat money than it is now (375k $ / block vs. ~94k $ / block now)

Even though the block reward may be lower measured in BTC it will be much higher in $. And miners obviously
have to pay their electricity, their staff and their hardware in fiat money (unless Bitmain is still
accepting only BCH for their miners    ).

The doomsday scenario where the block reward halvings make adversarial mining more attractive are therefore
not really realistic. Besides, my estimate didnīt even take into account the revenue for miners that is generated by
transaction fees, which will likely be higher than it is now.

E.g. BitMEX that has been running its own for-profit trading subsidiary on its own platform...

Regarding realr0ach, most of you are getting to worked up over his posts.
Just grab a cold beverage of your choice and print out your own realr0ach Bingo card and follow
the thread

Of course Antonopoulos has done great things for the public
awareness of Bitcoin. However, he is also busy shilling for Ethereum
and has even written a whole book on it:
https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Ethereum-Building-Smart-Contracts/dp/1491971940/


Except ICOs as a way to enrich the founders of the respective projects, Ethereum
has spawned jack shit.

I canīt take anyone seriously, who recommends newbies to stay in Bitcoin
for "the principles" while shilling Ethereum at the same time.

And donīt get me started on the sketchy Ethereum pre-sale.
A good read regarding the pre-sale is this Medium article:
https://medium.com/hasufl/ethereum-presale-dynamics-revisited-c1b70ac38448

https://qz.com/1099546/population-growth-africans-will-be-a-third-of-all-people-on-earth-by-2100/

Africa had 140 million inhabitants in 1900, 1 billion in 2010 and the "medium
scenario" of the UN predicts a population of more than 4 billion people in Africa
in 2100.

It doesnīt seem particularly likely that the standard of living will improve significantly
in Africa, because every progress is destroyed by the rampant overpopulation.

This kind of population growth isnīt sustainable on a planet with limited resources.

The author really has no clue whatsoever if he claims that Ethereum is "the distributed ledger
technology underlying cryptos".
He should have at least rephrased it to "the distributed centralized ledger technology underlying 99.8 % of all ICO scams".

Circleīs plan looks like a terrible idea, too. What could possibly go wrong by running
a stablecoin on the buggy Ethereum blockchain, which already has a size of more than
a terabyte and no plan for scaling.


Yes, because Ethereum is known for its binding contracts  


Yeah, this seems like a viable use case. Zimbabwean fruit sellers were the killer app that crypto needed all along!


A stable-coin scam on top of a real estate scam  

The whole article is a disgrace for the BBC. I could have easily picked various other
quotes that make absolutely laughable claims that are at odds with reality.

Discard BBC, buy BTC.

Iīd stay away from BitMEX. They are definitely a shady operation (they run
their own in-house trading arm that is trading on the same platform as the users)
and using 100x leverage is crazy as well.

On an unrelated note, I read an article today that has a price
prediction for ETH that I can fully agree on - 0 $  

The collapse of ETH is inevitable

According to this Reuters article NXMH is a subsidiary of South Korea’s NXC Corporation:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-exchange-bitstamp/european-investment-firm-buys-digital-exchange-bitstamp-in-all-cash-deal-idUSKCN1N314I

Market cap is down to ~95 billion $.

I still think that the drop below a market cap of 100 billion $ is only temporary.
Too many parties are incentivized to keep the price above the level that is necessary
for a 100 billion $ market cap.

This is the reason why it is so great when you have high linguistic ability as a man.

Men have a weakness for visuals in general while women have a weakness for
soft words. If you have a certain playfulness with language, you can seduce literally
any woman. As you already pointed out most men donīt have this level of linguistic ability,
which makes seduction so easy for the men that possess that skill.

I doubt that most centralized hubs will process transactions out of
benevolence - they will take a cut from every transaction. Even if the
Lightning Network works in practice (which is doubtful) and even
if somehow it manages to gain traction in the African countries you still
have the problem of funding LN channels in the first place.

It would not be of much use to people in poorer countries when LN
transactions are dirt cheap (which they probably will not be when
the liquid LN hubs will be run by banks and exchanges), but to get started
you would need to pay a 20 $ fee for the funding transaction on the BTC
main layer.