Bitcoin and virtual cryptocurrencies

Some very big money organizations and governments are changing their stance on Bitcoin. May lead to more stability.

How high can Bitcoin go, tho? Some people think the bubbles gonna pop overnight, like gold just did.

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bitcoin (and the darknet) was created by the alphabet soups to launder money and sell their drugs… it’ll continue to inflate until they crash it for their own benefit and pump the next one (monero?)

it has no inherent value other than criminal activity and speculating for profit.

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I have to greatly disagree.

Bitcoin has inherent value in its use and advantages compared to traditional money. I agree that it is not backed by something physical, but neither fiat money are. There are no currencies currently in the world that have any “inherent” value in sense that it is backed by something physical, because gold standard was left in Bretton Woods after 2WW.

Inherent or not, the value behind the bitcoin is this: it is electronic cash system that doesn’t need any central authority. There is strong advantage in this. You don’t need to trust any 3rd party with disposal of your money. You really can own the money. No limits, no business hours, no needed contracts, no account confiscation. No state monopoly on printing more notes to cover state debt. That means no inflation whatsoever. Simple and agreed rules and properties for the currency so everyone knows what to expect in the long run.

The value in bitcoin is in the use. And there are numerous uses: I’ve paid for goods numerous times. You can transfer value to other part of the world in few minutes for a fraction of a cost that you would otherwise pay for service like Western Union (WU charge about 3-7%, but with bitcoin you’ll pay few dollars per transaction). There are valid and legitimate uses for bitcoin like sending remitances (a transfer of money by a foreign worker to an individual in his or her home country). It helps individuals in some countries to have means for transferring money electronically (using mobile phones) when bank accounts (and debit cards) are impossible to get.

This myth that it was invented for criminal activity and laundering money is attempt to defame bitcoin. There is no trace of truth in this statement. It was created by team of professional cryptographers as a result of multiple inventions from different fields of IT development (namely hashcash, distributed timestamping, probability theory and public key cryptosystems). Yes they were inspired by inability of current money to serve as public resource. After 2008 worldwide CDS (and synthetic CDO) crisis money were misused by banks and government revealing that individual can’t trust any of them (see Cypriot crisis). This was motivation for them to create this experiment in 2009. There were many (now forgotten) attempts to create real internet currency before which were unsuccessful because of technical difficulties or government intervention. Finally bitcoin succeeded and proved that it can stay and provide safe solution for electronic cash payments.

I’m around bitcoin since 2011 and can tell you that I’ve heard about “bursting bitcoin bubble” and “colapsing” so many times that it is not longer funny. All those guys were wrong. Bitcoin is here to stay.

If you have the time, I recommend reading about earlier attempt - e-gold. It is fascinating story how government stopped this very promising project with fabricated charges. Bullion and Bandits: The Improbable Rise and Fall of E-Gold | WIRED The fight for bitcoin (or electronic money not dependent on government in general) is not much different from fight for legalization of marijuana.

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I have a broker that can acess most exchanges without me needing accounts there, I use to do a lot of arbitrage, but I personally use kraken, finex, stamp, and polo, i used to use btc-e for many years until recent events @legalcanada I gave up on the houbi and ok coin a over a year ago, I only use them through a broker now.

Made heavy profits on dash and eth also this year.

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you only think you own it, can almost guarantee there are engineered exploits and weaknesses known only to few. many peoples bitcoins were stolen/lost/etc who i’m sure thought it was 100% secure. bitcoin was contacted by (and received investment from?) in q tel (aka the CIA) very shortly after creation (by a unknown creator btw). to determine the purpose you need look no further than it’s uses. 95%+ of transactions are either speculation, money laundering or paying for criminal activity.

these are my opinions, reached by (i think) very sound logic, so to dismiss it as an “attempt to defame bitcoin” is ridiculous. i could care less about how other people view bitcoin.

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bitcoin and all other cryptocoins suffer from an inherent flaw which is the centralized development process (plus scalability). last i used bitcoin transactions took over 30minutes to confirm even with high fees, which makes it almost useless in a real world scenario. adolfcoin is a cryptocoin anyone can contribute to (so long as it adheres to the fuhrer process) and anyone can fork or w/e. the github was shoahed and i’m not sure where the white paper is atm

https://fuhrerbunker.adolfcoin.camp

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No there are not. If there were any flaws in the core code we would have already know about that. Market cap is currently 123 bln. USD that means that hell lot of engineers took a look at the code and verified it is solid. There were 8 years of very intensive testing.

You are linking two separate things that are not connected. Security of the protocol itself that is 100% safe, cause you can’t break through encryption and find key to bitcoin address you don’t own. Completely another problem is implementation of online services (online wallets, online exchanges) that will always have some weaknesses because of nature of software systems connected to internet. There are always hackers waiting for slightest mistake. But if done well, damages from hacker’s attacks can be mitigated.

First, there is no proof for what you are saying. And second, I can easily argue that cold cash is also regularly used for criminal activity so that is not any reason to tar on bitcoin.

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those are valid points but i do disagree encryption is unbreakable. i mean i use pgp but i don’t really believe its unbreakable either. and i’ve nothing against bitcoin, i fully plan on speculating for profit myself soon. thinking monero too. but very new to the market. well i mined some a long time ago, when they were worth nothing, but i do not have them :frowning:

edit: i also totally agree about fiat too, it’s a huge ponzi scheme. i liked the idea of money being worth so much manhours of work, abolishing usury and all interest unearned through work, profiting off war, etc

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I wanted to trade on BTC but it’s very volatile, which is good if you know what you’re doing. I have been doing ForEx for a while and you lose and you win, the trick is to try and win more than you lose. But my real talent is in sales & marketing. Trading on BTC is for the people that has been there since the beginning. I mean you can only look at oscillators and indicators of what the index is going to do, but in the end knowing the story form the beginning is always better to aim for a certain profit. Or in my case at least. With BTC it’s very unlikely like with the dollar, to fluctuate because Allan Greespan had egg whites for breakfast… The way i see it, you can only be a technical and not a fundamentalist when the moves come and go…

@legalcanada people have been using USD since the begginning of time to pay for their murders and drugs and kidnappings… So if there’s something to look at is that. People always want to demonize what they don’t understand.

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There is big difference in trading and investing in BTC. You are right that with volatility there is a lot to gain and a lot to lose. I can’t recommend that to average people because timing can be very tricky. But that shouldn’t put you off investing. To people asking me about how to invest nowadays into Bitcoin I have this advise that helps to avoid any speculation.

It is all right to invest into BTC for longterm (say 5 years). There is very high chance that bitcoin value will increase and that is because nowadays it is for common people pretty hard to get and the know-how you need (how to buy bitcoin, how to manage it, send it and how to store it) is big scare off factor. Today only sophisticated investors (IT experts, bankers, enterpreneurs) buy bitcoin. In about a year (it was already announced by CME) there will exist means for common investors without any knowledge of bitcoin inner workings to invest into it. And this will drive prices much higher because demand will increase.

So what investing strategy to choose when bitcoin is so volatile? Choose some small amount (that you can risk) and make it fixed for each month… Say, I’ll invest 100$ into bitcoin each month. Then choose hard calendar date. Say each 1. of the month. Make this your personal investment rule and buy for fixed amount the very same day each month no matter where the price is. This way you’ll get nice averaged price for the year. You’ll eliminate risks of timing and have very conservative strategy to invest into bitcoin.

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I hear ya, it’s good cos’ you don’t need physical storage to have the money other than a flash drive for backups or so… Gold would be the safest choice in order to “store” some money for the future, but then you are subject to theft/burglary, in the end it’s just more of the same, nowadays they want your ID as a part of the requirements to buy BTC sometimes, and even an ID and a pic of yourselves holding the ID It’s ridiculous, they are trying to regulate something that was bornt to be anonymous… Banks investing in BTC is just a government scheme to regulate the BTCs like they were legal tender.

If the BTC suffers loss in the next five years it will be cos’ of the seven dwarfs (dwarves) trying to get a grip on it. And they will.

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i am not trying to “demonize” what i don’t understand or “tar bitcoin” or “defame bitcoin” or whatever else you want to accuse me of, i’m merely stating my opinion. no need to attack me because it’s different than yours. i happen to think you’re wrong, and are more likely the one who doesn’t understand. i’ve followed bitcoin since it’s inception and mined it before it was worth a dollar.

with bitcoins potential uses and applications, to think manipulation or control from state sponsors or other malicious actors is not happening is naive. the only reason it’s as valuable as it is is because rich and powerful people want it to be for their own benefit and once it no longer benefits them they’ll crash it.

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i’m having trouble verifying with kraken… it’s been processing literally since may … is there any easier way to get market rate??? quickbt.ca will only sell $200 a day i think… can i buy bitcoins from you over paypal? :smiley: what’s your opinion on bitcoin cash

edit: i found a canadian exchange (QuadrigaCX) which allowed me to verify instantly thru equifax online and canadians are able to fund accounts instantly (because we have interac online). i’d highly recommend it to any canadians interested in starting bitcoin. register here

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www.virwox.com

Easy to use, with paypal…

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VI used to mine ltc specifically on its own its scrypt mining alt coins not sha 256 for mining btc. I used to log onto mining pools that would take a small percentage. hold the coins i got paid in usually ltc or btc.

There are many forums on reddit, videos on you utbe but I have honestly forgot more than most people know about it. I stopped mining in 2014 and started trading.

If you have free power it could be worth mining some alt coins with low difficulty levels, other wise you have to spend big money on latest hardware before the difficulty catches up.

Brand new is usually pre-mined second hand from china when concerning Asic chip miners etc

I don’t know if it is worth mining anymore with out researching myself.

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there are coins like XMR / monero and many others like ripple etc have a look at the poloniex website exchange site, look at the coins on offer, then look at the difficulty calculators on places like btc wisdom and other sites, there is a new btc-e its at btc-e.nz :wink:

Word of warning dont leave coins or money on exchanges while sleeping unless insured and check if its insured in crypto or only if held in USD etc :wink:

Hope that helps @Viva_Mexico, my last trades were buying btc around 5500 usd and selling around 7500 usd and then rebuying at 5500 and selling at 6500 over the last couple of weeks :sunglasses:

Currently sitting in fiat euros and usd

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Where the real money used to be was in doing arbitrage using bots.

Buying at one exchange sending to another selling for profit, cashing out or buying another coins like ltc returning funds and rinse repeat.

deposit usd or euro, buy btc or ltc or other coin, send to other exchange sell for profit, rinse repeat, for me it was but btc send to arbitrage sell buy ltc to send back the funds trade btc ltc ratio, send btc back and over and over and over.

:laughing::laughing::laughing: infinity

on btc-e watch out for the usd to Russian ruble and Canadian dollar opprtunites

@Viva_Mexico

The margins have got tighter and tighter but the opportunities still open up from time to time

@lotus give me your full spec i will see what i can come up with ideas for you but i like over the top machines :joy:

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@Herbie do you have any experience with cryptocapital?

so i’m watching the exchange and ive seen many of these orders lately, quite a few multiple hundred thousand dollar buy orders but these ones are all very similar and it has me confused what the implications are? does that mean someones expecting it to rise? or someones just buying and selling coins to themselves to manipulate the price? or idk, i’m very new to this, what’s your opinions?

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without even looking I can almost certainly say they are bot buys.

A computer program running an arbitrage opportunity, as it buys there its automatically selling somewhere else.

The bots put identical buy and sell orders on the book to keep the price between those margins and gobble up everything in between, usually selling on another exchange somewhere for small profits on each coin.