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Ethereum exists because it enables developers to write smart contracts better than Bitcoin in the near-term. Zcash will exist because it will attempt to do privacy better than Bitcoin in the near-term, and the token gives you access to the anonymity protocol.
People bought bitcoin because they thought it would be worth more tomorrow. And a lot of people got lucky. But we're not seeing real people use bitcoin. And we don't know what problem it solves. Now, blockchain, I think, is a genius advancement in technology.
At its core, bitcoin is a smart currency designed by very forward-thinking engineers. It eliminates the need for banks, gets rid of credit card fees, currency exchange fees, money transfer fees, and reduces the need for lawyers in transitions... all good things.
I view Bitcoin as the more democratic version of money and value transfer because no one controls it... I expect the Internet to be around longer than any nation-state, so a nation-state-backed currency is actually less safe than an Internet currency in my mind.
Just as the web democratized publishing and development, Bitcoin can democratize building new financial services. Contracts can be entered into, verified, and enforced completely electronically, using any third-party that you care to trust, or by the code itself.
Bitcoin as a globally distributed public ledger - that's the thing I'm most excited about going forward. Thinking about how to use Bitcoin in new and innovative ways. In the meantime, we have the boring uses of Bitcoin that are in the process of going mainstream.
Bitcoin is amazingly transformative because it's the first time in the entire history of the world in which anybody can now send or receive any amount of money, with anyone else, anywhere on the planet, without having to ask permission from any bank or government.
With greater extensibility and programmability, bitcoin can evolve to enable transformations in how all forms of property are secured and exchanged, how voting and governance function, including spilling into the automation of commercial law, audit, and accounting.
Every investor around the world wants to invest in U.S. markets because they're regulated and they're licensed. They're trustworthy; they have confidence. If you take that away, the global economy will take a hit like nothing else. We want to create that for Bitcoin.
We can divide bitcoin people into two camps: one that goes along with the existing system and wants it to work complimentarily with the existing system, and then the other half is basically religiously opposed and wants to invent a libertarian, regulation-free world.
As more wealth and political power is amassed - as bitcoins rise in value - Congress and various lobbying groups will be influenced to an ever greater extent by the interests of Bitcoin owners who - in turn - will lobby to keep the Internet and Bitcoin alive and growing.
MaxCoin is competing for the crypto buck, if you will. So is Bitcoin, so is Dogecoin. Alt-coins are proving to be formidable because there's a solid community behind it, there's a use for it, and it's got a great market capitalisation. I think that's going to be a winner.
In the future, I expect to see bitcoin mining in places where electricity is free or cheap. You could put solar array in the Arizona desert attached to bitcoin miners, and instead of trying to ship that electricity all over world, you could ship Bitcoin all over the world.
Bitcoin is valuable as a currency because of the economic efficiencies the bitcoin network is already creating as transactions flow over it. As with the Internet, more applications will flourish which will make the bitcoin network, and thus bitcoin as a currency, valuable.
Everyone, it's okay to say the word 'bitcoin' and acknowledge that it is the actual platform that is driving this innovation that we're all building on. It's also okay to say 'the bitcoin blockchain,' or 'the blockchain,' if you're afraid that people will think you're weird.
People have been scared off Bitcoin by the fact that you needed to put your money in an unregulated overseas platform that has been cut off by banks and scrutinized by the Fed. We are looking to remove the pain points and create a way to invest that is faster and more secure.
Bitcoin is probably the most portable money in the history of the world. I can download any amount onto a thumb drive and walk across any border without any problems. Or, I could commit to memory a line of code that I can then input into the network and save or spend Bitcoins.
I am not excited about Bitcoin. I think it's an outrage that, in an era of global warming, there are racks of servers next to the Columbia River. I wish I could explain to the salmon that we've created a dam generating hydroelectric power so that we can generate a fake currency.
Gemini is a spot bitcoin exchange. To use it, you sign up with Gemini.com and undergo the initial standard review process, similar to what you'd encounter at a traditional bank. Once you're through, you can ACH or wire cash to the platform, then begin buying and selling bitcoin.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a form of money that's a stable field that the government can't destroy and can't distort. Because its creation is governed by the laws of mathematics. It can't happen any faster or slower than a certain rate, and it all sort of self-adjusts.
What's really happening is that every bank in the country is experimenting with the blockchain and experimenting with bitcoin to figure out where the value is. For the first time ever, they're working hand in hand with startups. Banks are asking startups for help to build products.
Bitcoin may herald the dawning of a new age in currency. It holds superior traits as a form of 'good money.' As a tangible form of asset (its core tangibility being its mathematical basis), it could become an incredibly important building block for the 21st century's global economy.
When asked to explain this space, I often ask people to forget pretty much everything you've heard about blockchains, crypto-currencies, and bitcoin, and instead dumb it down a lot and think about something no more complex or intimidating than good old-fashioned database technology.
Isn't the purpose of bitcoin mining simply to get rich - or not, as the case may be? Well, at 21, we are less concerned with bitcoin as a financial instrument and more interested in bitcoin as a protocol - and particularly in the industrial uses of bitcoin enabled by embedded mining.
Bitcoin is both disruptive from a technology perspective, but there's a tremendous power of social good behind it. So you can both build a cool business or have a great investment return, and there's the promise of potentially improving the remittance industry or banking the unbanked.
Polychain is investing in blockchain assets. We do not invest in private companies or hold shares in private companies. We invest purely in tokens or digital assets, and those include assets that people are familiar with, like bitcoin and ethereum, as well as very early-stage projects.
Bitcoin is two things which share a name. One, it's a payment system, and two, it's a currency. You use the Bitcoin payment system to send bitcoins as currency from one account holder to another. The transfer is instantaneous, carries no fee, works anywhere in the world, and is private.
Bitcoin is absolutely the Wild West of finance, and thank goodness. It represents a whole legion of adventurers and entrepreneurs, of risk takers, inventors, and problem solvers. It is the frontier. Huge amounts of wealth will be created and destroyed as this new landscape is mapped out.
Activists need to educate themselves about the power of crypto currencies like Bitcoin, invented in 2009, and use crypto to leverage the success of their independent media gains to tip the balance of power away from the troika in ways that could never happen by backing a political candidate.
Because the supply of Bitcoin is limited, the price of Bitcoin is going to have to increase and increase very substantially over time. My advice is that if you're interested in Bitcoin and excited by Bitcoin, then buy some Bitcoin and hold onto them, and you're likely to do very well over time.
Applying criminal law to the exchange of bitcoin on behalf of ransomware victims would create a morally shocking result of re-victimizing a victim. All lawfully operating digital currency exchanges would thereafter refuse to exchange bitcoin for ransomware victims for fear of criminal culpability.
Just like the Internet disrupted the publishing industry, we're going to see Bitcoin micropayments creating some very interesting opportunities for pay-as-you-go, pay-based-on-time online businesses and, frankly, some risks as well to the traditional business model as to how things get sold online.
Through decentralized cryptography, Bitcoin eliminates the need for banking intermediaries, significantly lowering transaction costs, and could liberate poverty-stricken economies around the globe by providing access to capital to the one-third of humanity that is excluded from the financial world.
The blockchain concept was pioneered within the context of crypto-currency Bitcoin, but engineers have imagined many other ways for distributed ledger technology to streamline the world. Stock exchanges and big banks, for example, are looking at blockchain-type systems as trading settlement platforms.
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer, decentralized form of money, as durable as the Internet itself. Remember, the Internet - or DARPA, as it was originally called - was created as a fail-safe, global network with no 'single point of failure.' If one part goes down, data takes another route, and nothing is lost.
It is one thing to think gold has some marvelous store of value because man has no way of inventing more gold or getting it very easily, so it has the advantage of rarity. Believe me, man is capable of somehow creating more bitcoin... They tell you there are rules and they can't do it. Don't believe them.
Coinbase is 'the' brand in the Bitcoin space. Their founder Brian Armstrong was amongst the first good entrepreneurs to emerge in this space. While others championed ideological or underground/illicit interests, Brian saw an opportunity to change the world for the better and build a big business out of it.
Well, bitcoin is a currency. Bitcoin has no underlying rate of return. You know, bonds have an interest coupon. Stocks have earnings and dividends. Gold has nothing, and bitcoin has nothing. There is nothing to support the bitcoin except the hope that you will sell it to somebody for more than you paid for it.
In our early experiences with bitcoin, we found how few people were building bitcoin exchanges the right way. They really weren't taking the regulation seriously; they were taking it too much like how you would approach something when you're 18, full of the excitement of youth and throwing caution to the wind.
When you drill down, blockchains are really a shared version of reality everyone agrees on. So whether it's a fully immersive VR experience, augmented reality, or even Bitcoin or Ethereum in the physical world as a shared ledger for our 'real world,' we'll increasingly trust blockchains as our basis for reality.
In the aftermath of the oh-so-predictable crash, the Bitcoin fanatics have begun marshaling out excuse after excuse for why this non-investment investment lost so much of its value so fast. One was that hackers attacked some of the exchanges for Bitcoins and crippled it. Really? A hacker can wreck an entire market?
The IRS issued guidance for virtual currencies on March 25, 2014 that stated virtual currencies, including Bitcoin, are to be treated as property for federal tax purposes. This requires capital gains on virtual currencies to be recorded and reported. The Bitcoin Foundation says this could lead to unrealistic reporting.
Until part of your paycheck is regularly paid in Bitcoin, I'm not sure how it would really go mainstream. I can imagine places in the world where there are not functioning banking systems or payroll systems, where it could go mainstream first because you're not trying to replace the way people are already doing something.
In 2017, people have realized there isn't going to be one crypto to rule them all. You're seeing vertical solutions where XRP is focused on payment problems, Ethereum is focused on smart contracts, and increasingly, bitcoin is a store of value. Those aren't competitive. In fact, I want bitcoin and Ethereum to be successful.
I do not understand where the backing of Bitcoin is coming from. There is no fundamental issue of capabilities of repaying it in anything which is universally acceptable, which is either intrinsic value of the currency or the credit or trust of the individual who is issuing the money, whether it's a government or an individual.
Privacy is an age of universal email collection and spying, with millions of CCTV cameras and warrantless spying pervasive; privacy has become virtually nonexistent and, therefore, extremely scarce and desirable. Bitcoin can be a completely anonymous transaction that maintains the user's privacy beyond the reach of any authority.
Exchanging bitcoin on behalf of ransomware victims should not be construed as criminal activity by the exchanger, not as a matter of law nor as sound policy. Such an interpretation would set a precedent that would surely cause real harm to the public, to the blockchain ecosystem, and to the financial services industry as a whole.
A new product, technology, or innovation - such as Bitcoin - has the potential to give rise both to frauds and high-risk investment opportunities. Potential investors can be easily enticed with the promise of high returns in a new investment space and also may be less skeptical when assessing something novel, new, and cutting-edge.
After two years working with bitcoin and blockchain companies and corporate leaders, we identified that a significant issue hindering the widespread, global adoption of blockchain is the inability to quickly connect with the right combination of partners for testing and deployment of the technology to address real-world business challenges.
With Bitcoin, every transaction is publicly verified, so many risks are eliminated, including chargeback fraud or 'friendly fraud.' This is when a customer purchases something online with a credit card; waits to receive the goods or service, then requests a chargeback refund. The bank then forcibly takes the funds out of the merchant's account.