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I wonder if that is what people are not understanding. It's ALL open source. Everything. All of the code for Bitcoin, the wallets, whatever is all open source. That means you can read, copy, modify all the code, do whatever you want with it. (your copy of it)

Here is, literally, Bitcoin: github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

A decade or more ago open source was written off, now it powers almost everything. The internet. Your phone. Microsoft, Oracle et al have all embraced it. It is, paradoxically, much safer.

More open source empowering the future: www.emojicode.org/

With the utmost respect, I really wonder whether f you are talking about, Evil? An Open Source means applications such as a software development tool, or an operating system such as Unix, or some nifty graphics program, allows you to gain access to its source code, and make constructive changes to it for the BENEFITS of ALL folks.

The consequence of such an arrangement is a better software too for ALL for FREE. We are, as a society, is better for it thanks to the generosity of such dedicated people. These people are doing it to with one major aim: To make the computers work for us.

Now how is Bitcoin working to me my work easier ? And why is Bitcoin's so-called Open Source mean anything of relevance to me and 6 Billions people who have f-all to do with Bitcoin ?

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dmitri said..

"How would a mining scam even work? Dad buys a miner, sets it up, and ...what? I'm genuinely curious. Please tell me."

The mining rigs sellers promise 350% return..
Dad (usually poor) needs about1,3M rubles to buy..he borrows or sells his parents home or sells his kidney etc..

Oh. So it's a mining rig scam. The people that sell mining rigs.

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Jupiter said..

I wonder if that is what people are not understanding. It's ALL open source. Everything. All of the code for Bitcoin, the wallets, whatever is all open source. That means you can read, copy, modify all the code, do whatever you want with it. (your copy of it)

Here is, literally, Bitcoin: github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

A decade or more ago open source was written off, now it powers almost everything. The internet. Your phone. Microsoft, Oracle et al have all embraced it. It is, paradoxically, much safer.

More open source empowering the future: www.emojicode.org/

With the utmost respect, I really wonder whether f you are talking about, Evil? An Open Source means applications such as a software development tool, or an operating system such as Unix, or some nifty graphics program, allows you to gain access to its source code, and make constructive changes to it for the BENEFITS of ALL folks.

The consequence of such an arrangement is a better software too for ALL for FREE. We are, as a society, is better for it thanks to the generosity of such dedicated people. These people are doing it to with one major aim: To make the computers work for us.

Now how is Bitcoin working to me my work easier ? And why is Bitcoin's so-called Open Source mean anything of relevance to me and 6 Billions people who have f-all to do with Bitcoin ?

My point was that most people think there is a shadowy organisation behind Bitcoin; a ponzi scheme. Whereas it can't be any more transparent.

Open source software can be anything, even software you can use to hack others computers and cause widespread pain and disruption.

The vast, vast majority of open source software is ****, especially mine. It doesn't benefit anyone but the developer who had fun learning while making it.

Bitcoin is perhaps relevant to you because it solves some "problems" that money has had for a very long time. The biggest "problems" being: how to have no intermediary when transacting long distance (peer-to-peer), how to have no central authority, how to have a secure ledger, how to ensure no double-spending, and many smash-hit others! It does a *very* good job of solving these very boring accounting "problems".

I say "problems" because maybe they're problems you didn't realise you had, or maybe you did/now do, but they are not a problem for you. That's cool. Bitcoin probably won't affect you. You can ignore it.

...and yet you don't!

Honestly, it's just boring, boring old accounting made sexy through cryptography. What could be more boring than accounting?

P.S. It crashed like 15% since Friday.

This boring video again:

I just read the new on China's latest moves on Virtual currencies. The link is below...

www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-05/china-hits-booming-cryptocurrency-market-with-coin-fundraising/8874738

At the end of this new clip, it said that many regulators still are unsure or don't understand what ICO really meant, or how to deal with it !

I am thinking that is what hedge funds are like. They loop and kink and twist and turn, and they usually ended up somewhere obscure with only a post office box and no one to answer to. I do live up to a skeptic, aren't I ?

^ Yep. Ethereum, specifically ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings, similar to Initial Purchase Offerings) are snake oil.

I've always said the same. Third comment on page 2 of this thread:
www.seabreeze.com.au/forums/General-Discussion/Chat/Cryptocurrency?page=2

The next drama on the horizon is Tether.

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evlPanda said..
This boring video again:

There's also another boring flick I have watched twice now on Netflix.

"You can bank on Bitcoin"

Silk road really messed things up in the early days.

Wave comes in, wave goes out, long wait until next wave. Each wave comes up the beach further than the previous. The tide is coming in.

Really interesting read. Includes analysis of the fractals that match the gartner hype cycle.
medium.com/@mcasey0827/speculative-bitcoin-adoption-price-theory-2eed48ecf7da

So looking at dipping my big toe in on the cryptos and wondering what exchanges you guys have ended up using. Initial looking sees the fees are pretty huge -

ie to get from AUD to a wallet means fees anywhere from 2% up to 6% via ccards or bank transfers
to actually get bitcoins on the couple exchanges ive looked at has buy sell spreads of up to $100.

So are there any reasonable sites out there that youve found or is pretty much the state of the market right now?

State of the market. It's the "Australia Tax". You either pay low exchange rates, but high fees, or vice versa. Expect 4%.

Note, however, that if you use a local exchange with high exchange rates their *buy* rate is also higher, about 4%. So if you ever convert back to $AUD it mostly evens out.

I used CoinJar (local) and Coinbase (U.S.). The former can do bank transfers; 2 business days (sooooo sloooowww)The latter only allows credit card for AUS and $200/week for the first month or so, then it "trusts you" and caps it at $2k/week.

IMPORTANT: Cryptocurrency is not like normal currency (these days). It is digital cash. If it is on an exchange then you don't own it. You don't keep it in a bank. Exchange $ to crypto and then move to a wallet. Play around with a small amount first, learn what a "seed phrase" is and how it works. Learn what addresses really are. Make a few transactions here and there. Then, only when you feel you understand it, convert some more.

Paper or hardware wallets for safe storage. A decent smartphone wallet for small amounts.

Tip: The currencies can be volatile (main reason Wall St. is getting interested). Bitcoin has gone from 5 to 3 and back to 4.5 in 6 weeks. Look up "Dollar Cost Averaging". hitbtc.com/BTC-to-USD

A good starting point:
en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page

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Bara said..
So looking at dipping my big toe in on the cryptos and wondering what exchanges you guys have ended up using. Initial looking sees the fees are pretty huge

I use Coinspot & their Aussies, fees are fairly high but I think it's a good place to get started.

Your relying on the demand buying in high to drive the low up. Someone takes the loss

The people that take the loss are the ones holding the now weaker currency. If currency A goes up in value against currency B then whoever holds currency B has lost the value of their money, relatively.

The IMF had a very interesting talk about it a few weeks back: www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2017/09/28/sp092917-central-banking-and-fintech-a-brave-new-world

It is not a fad. It is not a ponzi scheme. It is not tulip mania. It is not going to go away. It is money 2.0

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evlPanda said..
The people that take the loss are the ones holding the now weaker currency. If currency A goes up in value against currency B then whoever holds currency B has lost the value of their money, relatively.

The IMF had a very interesting talk about it a few weeks back: www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2017/09/28/sp092917-central-banking-and-fintech-a-brave-new-world

It is not a fad. It is not a ponzi scheme. It is not tulip mania. It is not going to go away. It is money 2.0

Yes I agree it's money 2.0 but the price on any day is determined by a market that is best I can tell pretty damn disfunctional right now. The past few weeks have been both amazing and worrying at the same time.

There are very clear signs of price ramping behaviour and in other markets this is dealt with by short selling. I'm yet to discover a decent way of shorting bit coin but when the big boys do this volatility will be more two way and timing will be everything.

Seems like the recent rises are coming from jap buying and I wish I could understand the drivers for this much better but no one publicly at least seems to either. The trader discusions and forums I've come across are naive at best.

Interesting times for sure.

Call me up, put me down:
www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/033115/it-possible-trade-bitcoin-options.asp

I've had plenty an entertaining debate with traders. Man they boast and boast about previous successes. They almost always end up wrong. Especially the TAs. Don't hear from them again.

Bitcoin is a different beast for sure. It's not a stock, and it's not a currency that's "backed by" anything. It's simply an invention that could be used as money. "This could be used as money!" And it is a very good form of money indeed. Hell, it accounts and audits itself.

I have been using it more and more with colleagues. Like cash. Fixing up balances for drinks, shared accomodation and so on. Phone App to phone app. It's easy and it works. It's pretty good money.

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evlPanda said..
Call me up, put me down:
www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/033115/it-possible-trade-bitcoin-options.asp

I've had plenty an entertaining debate with traders. Man they boast and boast about previous successes. They almost always end up wrong. Especially the TAs. Don't hear from them again.

Bitcoin is a different beast for sure. It's not a stock, and it's not a currency that's "backed by" anything. It's simply an invention that could be used as money. "This could be used as money!" And it is a very good form of money indeed. Hell, it accounts and audits itself.

I have been using it more and more with colleagues. Like cash. Fixing up balances for drinks, shared accomodation and so on. Phone App to phone app. It's easy and it works. It's pretty good money.

A liquid options market needs the ability to short the underlying so that options can be "synthesised" (put call parity etc etc). this is the missing link that will make this a serious financial market. until then it is prone to massive manipulation from one side only - the buy side - which is why weve seen the ramping in recent weeks i suspect. there may be nothing to stop this for some time actually so the sky could be the limit but rest assured the likes of you and me and those day traders will be the last to know when the game is up.

If you'd bought the top 4 cryptos when this thread was started, your gains/losses would have been (based on $US prices)

And if you buy them now what will they be in 6 months?

I don't think anyone has a clue.

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Bara said..
And if you buy them now what will they be in 6 months?

I'll update the table I posted on April 16

PS: Maybe buy the ones that aren't just clones of the original - those that are applying the blockchain model beyond currencies.

big wigs running bitcoin prob pull out and make large sums and crash it !
Ill still have my 50bucks ;-)

There are no bigwigs running Bitcoin. It's a technology not unlike, I dunno, bricks. There is nobody behind "bricks". People make and use bricks but nobody is controlling "bricks".

In a nutshell: Someone invented something that could be used as better type of money. Some people bootstrapped its value. Now it is money with value.

Here's a fiver that your fifty will be worth the same in two years.




As for other uses for blockchain technology they are limited. Don't fall for the hype. It's a big, very inefficient database. Money is its killer app because of the insane security a blockchain provides.

Who decided to create Bitcoin Cash as a spinoff? Who?

The technology? Who decided how many coins can ever be mined. What about all the lost coins on crashed hard drives or usb storage thrown out. Are those coins lost for EVER.

Unlike gold which if you throw it out it can be found again by somebody, and actually has a purpose in the real world.

Isn't the whole point of Bitcoin the lack of transaction fees, so why are there now fees at all the main coin exchanges. Sure they are smaller now but how long till they increase if BTC becomes mainstream. They are all scraping their %, which is not what BTC was originally about.

Mining BTC is dead.

PS: I don't know ****.

Who is to say Google Home 3 or Alexa 4, or your Samsung Galaxy 12, Apple Iphone 11.713 can't smash out 250,000,000 Exahash per second and destroy these simple blockchains in the future.

Oh you mined BTC and ETH. That's nice. I mined Virtual Carbon nanotube-based crystal honey dialectic vomit coins. I mined it on my IPhone 11.714.

At the end of the day Bitcoin has been a huge investment for so many people. Do you Holdr or get out? I only have XXXBTC.

Bitcoin spammers ...

Crypto is nuts.

I only started a few months ago with $10k. Turned that $10k to $52k profit. Basically a newbie can play this market if you do your research. That's like being paid $20,000/mo for spending a few hours a week reading/analyzing some alt coins to buy. Technically, it's not profit yet, since I haven't sold to aussie dollars but still :P

This whole thing sounds like dot com bubble but I've done some calculations and we are perhaps halfway though, so plenty of time left (a few years) before an epic crash that will only leave a few blockchain firms standing.

I find that just listening to what others are shilling on chat groups 80% of the time lead to big gains.

I'm a member of a couple of telegram groups and as a newbie I've made a lot of money just by listening to the crap people are shilling on the groups.

Just last week I made 20% profit just from putting some money on an alert from this free telegram pump and dump bot that showed huge volume being put into XLM

Chris's Noisy Hot machines on sunday extra today , Radio National

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Windpasser said..
Who decided to create Bitcoin Cash as a spinoff? Who?

A consortium of ****wit investors, charlatans, and miners. Ver, Wright & co.

Let me just illustrate to other programmers out there how messy this was. They forked the code, altered a few lines, but reformatted all the code. Now, run a compare on that so you can support both chains as a wallet, exchange and so on. Sheesh.

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The technology? Who decided how many coins can ever be mined.

Satoshi Nakamoto. But nobody knows who that is/who they are. Or, were.

Without a doubt he/she/they/it mined the first few blocks, and have not touched those coins since. If they did alarm bells all over the world would go off, including one on my phone, and ...I don't know what would happen actually. They haven't. It is widely speculated they lost or destroyed the private keys, and/or are dead.

It's very handy that bitcoin has no real inventor, just a faceless pseudonym. It matches the narrative of decentralised and trustless.

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What about all the lost coins on crashed hard drives or usb storage thrown out. Are those coins lost for EVER.

Yes.

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Unlike gold which if you throw it out it can be found again by somebody, and actually has a purpose in the real world.

It does, but it's limited. I can't do anything with it. Can you? Salt is more valuable to me.

Most of gold's value is because it is used as a store of value, because people believe gold is valuable. Notice that gold isn't "backed by" anything either.

If you lose a $50 note, and it is eventually found by someone (in the distant future), it is useless. And let's not forget that the vast, vast majority of our money is stored digitally, and is probably debt. What is that actually worth? It has no intrinsic value at all.

The Mona Lisa has no intrinsic value. It is priceless.

Nation states, religion, culture, and money are all stories we collectively tell ourselves and believe in. It's how we cooperate on a scale other animals can't come close to.

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Isn't the whole point of Bitcoin the lack of transaction fees, so why are there now fees at all the main coin exchanges. Sure they are smaller now but how long till they increase if BTC becomes mainstream. They are all scraping their %, which is not what BTC was originally about.

Indeed one of the features of Bitcoin is its low or even free transaction fees. There are many more.

Bitcoin's popularity has seen the mempool (new and uncleared transactions) fill up to maximum, first starting around the beginning of 2016. To say there has been heated debate about how to fix this is a massive understatement. Death threats have been had. The Bitcoin Cash fork was an attempt to simply use bigger block sizes, kicking the can further down the road. The Bitcoin Core team (what you know as bitcoin) are taking the approach of creating efficiencies instead, and a second layer.

At time of writing it was 135 bits to have a transaction in under 10 minutes; 50c. At time of writing there is a lot of trading going on. I've personally moved large sums for 10c over the last few weeks.

The second layer is the most interesting development by far. The Lightning Network offers to create instant transactions that happen "off chain"; they don't go into the mempool at all. At the end of the hour/day/week/month all transactions are counted up and done as a single transaction on the main chain. Not unlike balancing the till at the end of the day. This is where bitcoin will actually start to challenge visa, master card et al. There are betas already being tested, but realistically it's two or more years away because the development teams are, understandably, really, really, really pedantic.

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Mining BTC is dead.

Far from. There is more computing power put toward it than the rest of the computing power on earth combined. And it increases every day.

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

Links:

Bitcoin transaction fees: bitcoinfees.earn.com
Satoshi Nakamoto: www.linkedin.com/pulse/id-known-what-we-were-starting-ray-dillinger/
Lightning Network: bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/understanding-the-lightning-network-part-building-a-bidirectional-payment-channel-1464710791/
Hashrate: blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate

Gold is the traditional standard store of value because it is such an inert substance. It does not readily undergo chemical reaction so gold will always remain gold. No rusting (i.e. oxidation), no decomposition, etc. It remains gold with any effort or external influence. Zero fragility.

Bitcoin is the polar opposite in the sense of the infrastructure required to keep it running and therefore it's fragile.

All true. But gold is hard to buy, transfer and store. It's heavy. Damn heavy. It's not very good as a currency.

Bitcoin was certainly not intended to be used as a store of value, it's just turning out that way : \
Odd phase it's going through.