Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Discussion Thread

[elasalle]

I think it depends on your perspective. I


I don't think the CBOE futures will have much impact. The CME futures the following week are more likely to have an impact in my opinion.

As far as what's going to happen, your guess is as good as mine. I've seen theories both positive and negative for the price that seem plausible. I've also seen speculation that the futures will help stabilize the price. So really, no one knows.

Welcome Bitcoin to CBOE. Now you will face the wrath of Short Sellers as well.....

 

[ValueAnalyst]

Shorting Oil, Hedging Tesla

Post on potential use case for Tesla. I'm not knowledgeable on the topic to comment, but I'd be interested in your thoughts on this.

 

[MikeC]

Yes absolutely use GDAX over Coinbase when doing any kind of buying, selling or depositing. Free trades with limit order, which is so simple to do.

For those who don’t know. You login into GDAX with your Coinbase login info. It’s literally owned by Coinbase.

I opened a GDAX account with my Coinbase credentials but it doesn't show my balances. Do I have to transfer them from Coinbase to GDAX or something?

 

[Reciprocity]

I opened a GDAX account with my Coinbase credentials but it doesn't show my balances. Do I have to transfer them from Coinbase to GDAX or something?

Yes, takes 2 seconds.

 

[Bebop]

I opened a GDAX account with my Coinbase credentials but it doesn't show my balances. Do I have to transfer them from Coinbase to GDAX or something?

Yeah, you have to deposit and then choose coinbase wallet to get money from. Instant and free.

 

[MikeC]

Anyone here have any thoughts on bitcoin core vs. bitcoin cash?

Lots of drama on the reddit forums. It really does sound like Blockstream has co-opted bitcoin but as a TSLA investor I’m familiar enough with FUD that I’m skeptical of anything I read when large amounts of money are at stake. I’m curious to know what other TSLA investors are thinking is going on here?

 

[dhanson865]

Anyone here have any thoughts on bitcoin core vs. bitcoin cash?

Lots of drama on the reddit forums. It really does sound like Blockstream has co-opted bitcoin but as a TSLA investor I’m familiar enough with FUD that I’m skeptical of anything I read when large amounts of money are at stake. I’m curious to know what other TSLA investors are thinking is going on here?

I have coins from 2011 so I have both BTC and BCH. As far as I'm concerned short term it's just more coins for me to sell for USD. Long term it seems the BCH team has a more usable coin.

Best case for me is the two coins get to price parity after I've sold my BTC, then I claim my BCH and start selling it as needed when it gets to $15,000 plus per coin.

So hopefully it's clear where my bias is, I have coins and I want to sell them to get USD. I want out of both of them.

I don't think the blaming blockstream "FUD" is FUD. The outstanding transactions for BTC were insanely high with insane fees being used. I commonly saw tx recently over 1000 per bit fees the comparison to my last load is

258 bytes fee: 0.00010062 BTC (39 per byte) 17,560.00 exchange rate - fee ~$1.77 (actual transaction I did recently)
258 bytes fee: 0.00258000 BTC (1000 per byte) 17,560.00 exchange rate - fee ~$45.31 (imaginary transaction comparing rates I've seen in the pool lately)

To send a few hundred dollars I paid more than $1.77, I could have mailed a real world physical check from my old school checking account for less. Someone else was sending transactions with more money in them but they were paying 25 times the fee per transaction size. If I wanted to send during that backlog and used that tactic I'd have paid over $45 to send the money which would be absurd in my view.

The only way I've gotten my sub $2 fees to work is using the viabtc accelerator service (free but takes time and effort to put your tx in the queue). If that didn't work I'd be forced to spend dozens of dollars more per transaction to push my transaction ahead of the hundreds of thousands sitting there gumming up the queues.

Check out TradeBlock and watch the bottom right section in the fee/size column. The majority of those fees are going to someone other than the sender and the recipient of the transactions. Who is profiting from the high fees?

I guarantee you I wouldn't be buying BTC in this environment. And every time I try to use my BTC I feel like it's a major hassle with an actual gamble that costs me USD every time I send BTC.

edit: holy crap I just saw a few large transactions go through at 2942 per. I can't even begin to understand why people are willing to pay such high transaction fees.

 

[Bebop]

Anyone here have any thoughts on bitcoin core vs. bitcoin cash?

Lots of drama on the reddit forums. It really does sound like Blockstream has co-opted bitcoin but as a TSLA investor I’m familiar enough with FUD that I’m skeptical of anything I read when large amounts of money are at stake. I’m curious to know what other TSLA investors are thinking is going on here?

Bitcoin Cash is an absolute fraud, is centralized and what they call in the crypto community a sh*tcoin. There are plenty of other crypto to support. Bitcoin Cash is not one of them. Hard to trust in Roger Ver to be honest...

Once the lightning network gets implemented onto the bitcoin network (sometime in 2018) then it would make bitcoin cash a useless fork.

 

[dhanson865]

Bitcoin Cash is an absolute fraud, is centralized and what they call in the crypto community a sh*tcoin. There are plenty of other crypto to support. Bitcoin Cash is not one of them. Hard to trust in Roger Ver to be honest...

Once the lightning network gets implemented onto the bitcoin network (sometime in 2018) then it would make bitcoin cash a useless fork.

Bitcoin Cash is the pre segwit bitcoin with bigger blocks. It's no more centralized than bitcoin was pre segwit.

 

[dhanson865]

If you think lightning networks solve bitcoin issues yet complain that BCH is somehow centralized you need to watch this. It's not a perfect video but it covers the reason why lightning networks aren't a good solution.

 

[Bebop]

The whole point is who is behind Bitcoin Cash. Not it’s utility.

Especially after that debacle that happened with the launch on Coinbase.

Roger Ver together with Jihan Wu, the co-founder of the company Bitmain, are pushing Bitcoin Cash hard. Why? Hmm...Well for starters Bitmain is :

• the world’s largest mining equipment company
• based in China
• and owner of two large bitcoin mining pools including Antpool that commands 13%, a large chunk of hashrate in the world

You will discover many interesting links and realise the dangerous power struggle between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.

Especially the close ties between Roger Ver and Bitmain, the mining company - which now only accepts Bitcoin Cash as payment for their products. A clever push, considering how much influence they already hold in the cyrpto-verse.

Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork of Bitcoin, supported largely by Chinese miners. So this centralization gives them a lot of power over the blockchain’s behavior.

So I’m not saying support Bitcoin. I’m saying support any other crypto other than Bitcoin Cash. It’s not going anywhere.

I’m super interested in the upcoming fork that is Bitcoin Interest, coming in late January 2018. I think that might be more valuable and trustworthy than Bitcoin Cash.

 

[Bebop]

And the Bitcoin Cash Plus Fork on January 14. I’m also interested to see how that comes out.

 

[SebastianR]

On the whole cryptocurrency topic, my key beef is that - while bitcoin is sufficiently secure - it has massive shortcomings that result in a) wasted energy for mining, b) market dominance by specialist mining hardware c) scalability issues. In short, it is a brilliant idea, not perfectly executed.

What do I mean? Watch this talk from two days ago (blockchain theme starts at 41:30)

34C3 - Resilienced Kryptographie - english translation

The original German video is here:

34C3 - Resilienced Kryptographie

These guys are professors for cryptography and explain quite well the challenges of bitcoin, litecoin & co.

How to fix this mess? I did love the idea of Professor Weiss to develop a cryptocurrency that is a) cryptographically really robust, b) doesn't waste energy through unnecessary computations (=low fees), c) is designed in a way that GPUs/ASICS don't help to gain disproportionate market dominance and d) (re-)use the required crypto calculations for the currency to secure the web / web traffic as a contribution to "the public greater good".

Anyways - I'm back to lurker mode... On you guys go with your flame-ware on which bitcoin derivative is better

PS: On the snarky side, I chuckled when Prof. Weiss talked about Bitcoin and said it is "sufficiently secure amateur cryptography that would have earned a mediocre passing grade for one of his students"

 

[pz1975]

Does anyone know of a video or article that really dumbs down the whole cryptocurrency concept? I mean the real basics of it. Whenever I read about the subject I feel like the authors either assume the reader truly understands the origin/purpose/fundamentals of Bitcoin/cryptos (I imagine 99% of the population doesn’t) or they really don’t know themselves.

I need a 101 level teaching to feel like I can really get my head around it for proper analysis and understanding.

Thanks.

 

[ggr]

PS: On the snarky side, I chuckled when Prof. Weiss talked about Bitcoin and said it is "sufficiently secure amateur cryptography that would have earned a mediocre passing grade for one of his students"

The crypto primitives used were already in existence and standardized, and there was nothing special about using them. But this is definitely a "sour grapes" comment; putting it all together into a working system was nothing short of brilliant.

 

[dhanson865]

Does anyone know of a video or article that really dumbs down the whole cryptocurrency concept? I mean the real basics of it. Whenever I read about the subject I feel like the authors either assume the reader truly understands the origin/purpose/fundamentals of Bitcoin/cryptos (I imagine 99% of the population doesn’t) or they really don’t know themselves.

I need a 101 level teaching to feel like I can really get my head around it for proper analysis and understanding.

Thanks.

It's a grand experiment with real money. Any overview / 101 style article is going to either be super wrong, super outdated, biased, or overly technical. That's just the nature of the beast.

If you don't have any that you already own and you don't have money to waste I'd just sit back and watch and laugh about it.

If you try and pick a winner now it's riskier than buying junk stocks on the stock market.

And until there is a solid, hey that makes perfect sense winner none of the cryptos matter to the average joe. And what they'll be good for later is anybody's guess.

 

[swaltner]

I like the Computerphile videos for explaining computer related topics. Enough info to get an idea about what’s going on, but not so much you get lost in the weeds.

Here’s another that gets a little more in-depth, but still avoids the actual underlying math

 

[neroden]

I am not sure which cryptocurrency or cryptocurrencies will end up being a big hit.

I am sure that BTC in particular is a bubble which will collapse, because I've looked at it in enough detail to know that it has too many fundamental technical flaws to survive. BCH probably will too, since it's not much better.

But I honestly couldn't tell you about Ripple, Ethereum, Stellar, Monero, Zcash, etc...

 

[Bebop]

I really think Ripple will take off and is going to replace the likes of western union and SWIFT. Which will not exist anymore at some point.

there is big opportunity for big gains over the long run by HODLING. Seeing how they are focused on banks and big financial institutions, there is a lot of utility to use Ripple for these folks. I see either Ripple or Litecoin as being an actual currency type. Bitcoin is going to be digital gold as a store of value do to its deflationary design.

Ripple is one to look at and research if anyone hasn’t.

Hope some of you folks bought Ripple. It has gone to the moon since this post. Even at $3, it's still insanely undervalued.

Loads of good news that is bound to increase price further.

Confirmed news for 2018 (with sources) • r/Ripple

-------------------------------------

Also Tron (TRX) is another serious one to look at. currently at about .10, up from about .3 just last week. The white paper, the team, the CEO are extremely solid. I'm loving the vision behind Tron. It really will disrupt many industries especially entertainment and content creation like platforms such as YouTube. A decentralized internet. imagine a decentralized YouTube style platform built on the Tron protocol, that would be crazy crazy disruptive.

波场[TRON]

TRON (TRX) A Second Chance at Bitcoin | Oracle Times

-----------------------------------------

 

[ZeApelido]

Hope some of you folks bought Ripple. It has gone to the moon since this post. Even at $3, it's still insanely undervalued.

Loads of good news that is bound to increase price further.

Confirmed news for 2018 (with sources) • r/Ripple

-------------------------------------

Also Tron (TRX) is another serious one to look at. currently at about .10, up from about .3 just last week. The white paper, the team, the CEO are extremely solid. I'm loving the vision behind Tron. It really will disrupt many industries especially entertainment and content creation like platforms such as YouTube. A decentralized internet. imagine a decentralized YouTube style platform built on the Tron protocol, that would be crazy crazy disruptive.

波场[TRON]

TRON (TRX) A Second Chance at Bitcoin | Oracle Times

-----------------------------------------

Thanks for the TRX tip. I bought Ripple at 0.23, unfortunately only a piece of about 6 altcoins I put into. Great returns, but when does it near "true value"?

I have no idea how to attribute value to these currencies!