Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

My Eth tokens were mined in May of 2016, I'll be hodling until the Ethereum devs announce they've run into a problem they can't solve. Currently, though, they are making significant progress in tackling some really complicated problems, this year's development looks very promising. Maybe sell a handful at some point this year for wiping out my debt and some quality of life improvements, but only maybe.

EDIT:

Since I've told people to install Electrum, I'm going to warn people:

There is a severe vulnerability in Electrum that allows malicious websites to steal your wallet seed by merely running Javascript in your browser. If you have Electrum running, close it immediately and update the software to 3.0.4. Attackers still need to crack the wallet password apparently, so if you set a strong password then you're safer than those who have not. As always check and make sure you're downloading from the correct website and not a fake one distributing malware.

I haven't seen a case of wallet theft as of yet.

Ether having a good night. I saw this before, last summer. That's when I sold it. It's still only half way to where it was 6 months ago. Most of that other 66% is dispersed among many alts, not just one or two.

Just saw that edited in tweet pic. My response is that bitcoin has high fees precisely because it's used the most, not because it's unusable. Fees drop as usage declines and the reverse is also true. Any coin that took over as the default payment coin would have either high fees or dramatically reduced decentralization. Fees are also necessary to fund miners unless the coin has a tail emission. (like Monero) If miners aren't getting paid, then you won't have many of them and security is low.

The market cap metric is also extremely misleading. The larger the supply the coin has, the more inflated it is. Also when the coin has a large portion locked out of the market (like Ripple or DASH) that inflates the number. A whale can triple the market cap of a coin in a matter of minutes; it doesn't really mean much. Articles on the topic explain it much better than I can.

Tron's market cap was $14b and they had nothing but a whitepaper. There is A LOT of dumb money in crypto. People have no fucking clue what they are buying. A high market cap is a better indication of stupidity than anything else. Lately I've been thinking about buying some shitcoins that I think will entice idiots, then get out early.

If anything is wrong with bitcoin, it's that BTC mining is way too centralized. They delayed SegWit a full year and spam the mempool to raise fees.

edit: Dogecoin has a 2b market cap right now. Let that sink in

edit2: Laugh

Torrid said:

Lately I've been thinking about buying some shitcoins that I think will entice idiots, then get out early.

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Isn't this what everyone is doing?

Torrid said:

My response is that bitcoin has high fees precisely because it's used the most,

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Which is exactly the problem that the Ethereum devs are trying to solve while maintaining security. It's a tough cookie to crack, but with Bitcoin devs thinking high transaction fees are a feature I don't suspect that Bitcoin will maintain its spot as the go-to crypto.

Two things to remember:

1) Ethereum was created to facilitate smart contracts, and is not focused on being money. I would argue that the overall winner will likely be a token focused on being money first.

2) Even if Vitalik pulls miracles out of his ass, it's open source code and any innovations can be quickly adopted into other coins.

Bitcoin price down 11% for the day. Should be a fun day.

Torrid said:

Two things to remember:

1) Ethereum was created to facilitate smart contracts, and is not focused on being money. I would argue that the overall winner will likely be a token focused on being money first.

2) Even if Vitalik pulls miracles out of his ass, it's open source code and any innovations can be quickly adopted into other coins.

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1) The overall winner will be the one that functions best as money on a global scale -- that's Ethereum.

2) If the miracle was that it scaled Ethereum transaction volume to 1000x what it is currently while keeping transaction fees low, would Bitcoin adopt it? Open sourcing works in favour of Ethereum, not against it.

I like the idea behind Basic Attention Token. And the tech behind IOTA

Why does Ethereum function as money better than every other coin? Litecoin is cheaper to use and doesn't have transactions failing.

Ethereum still has plenty of reliability issues. It's choking on the congestion. I read this today: The Challenges of Building Ethereum Infrastructure – Jameson Lopp – Medium

Lightning is intended to scale by more than 1000x. Ethereum's Raiden is essentially just their version of lightning as far as I know.

I'm not suggesting that open source is bad. (it is in fact the opposite of bad) Actually it doesn't really matter since even if the code isn't visible Ethereum solving the scaling issue with some sort of brilliant innovation it can simply be rewritten anyway once the idea is out there. Ethereum after all is building off of Bitcoin, so it's entirely possible that another coin would take ETH's innovations and run with them.

Augur hit $110 today after their crowdsale in 2015. Has anybody used it to place a single bet yet? Vitalik puts his face on this stuff to sell tokens. This kind of stuff is why I sold. It could be legit, but it's rubbing me the wrong way. Sia and LBRY were usable almost right away. It amazes me that the coins that are actually usable have lower market caps than scam whitepapers but I guess it shouldn't.

Ethereum handles more transactions per day than every other cryptocurrency combined. Of course it's choking on the congestion, the solution to the scaling problem isn't fully realized yet, and I don't see Lightning Network as the thing that solves it.

So both Wells Fargo and BoA/ML have banned GBTC and BTC futures from their trading platforms. They claim it's due to the funds not being suitable to trade but it seems to be more that these traditional banking institutions feel threatened and are trying to undermine cryptocurrencies.

Instead of embracing them and trying to leverage them they are trying to ban them. Doesn't seem like a smart move on their part.

James said:

Ethereum handles more transactions per day than every other cryptocurrency combined. Of course it's choking on the congestion, the solution to the scaling problem isn't fully realized yet, and I don't see Lightning Network as the thing that solves it.

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That's not true unless you exclude ripple: Cryptocurrency charts - Market Capitalization, Transactions last 24h, Avg. transaction value, Active Addresses last 24h ...

Also Ethereum handles far less in terms of value. Using bitcoin, if you pay a high enough of a fee, you can be confident that the transaction will go through at least. A failed transaction can leave you wondering if you need to resend it or not, which is not a good situation to be in if you don't trust the other party.

Since Ethereum is a smart contract platform first and a coin second instead of the reverse, it requires more resources to do the same tasks. From the article I linked:

On other chains you can generate as many addresses offline as quickly as you want and if they are never used, it’s no big deal. But with smart contracts, each newly generated address must be posted as an event to the blockchain. As such, it costs money, takes time, and is a blocking operation.

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That adds to the number of transactions on ETH's blockchain and dramatically reduces privacy. Also ETH handles more transactions because they raised the block size, not because of some innovation. Lopp mentions that disk I/O prevents him from using spinners on his ETH node, so ETH raised the block size high enough to force new nodes to use SSDs, with a blockchain that's 600+ gigs and climbing at a rate far faster than Bitcoin's chain:

Running an archival Ethereum node requires a ton of disk I/O since you’re executing every smart contract ever performed in the history of Ethereum and updating the state on disk. It’s common knowledge now that if you try to sync an archival node on a machine with spinning disk drives, it will never catch up to the tip of the blockchain — there simply aren’t enough IOPs available. Thus, you MUST have a solid state disk to run an Ethereum node.

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Not really looking at the value of transactions, I believe cryptocurrency as a whole is still in a very early speculative stage. I agree that the Ethereum chain hasn't really innovated yet beyond the Smart Contract framework that it can't really take full advantage of currently, but I believe Casper and Sharding will be the real deal when they drop.

Ripple's high transaction volume is a whole different ballgame, imo, and not a trend I suspect will last when a standard global cryptocurrency is determined.

First, fuck you guys

Second, thanks you this thread I got my feet wet a week ago. Now I'm starting to read white papers and trying to get into the other exchanges. I have coinbase, trying to get Binance or Bitfinex. Is there any other exchange(s) I should look at? What process do you use for a hardware wallet?

so I just got my first pool payout that is above the dust number.. I had what I thought was my coinbase btc wallet number... I don't see my little payout in my wallet, so I rechecked and the random number for "send" is different now?

Sorry for nubness

Xadion said:

so I just got my first pool payout that is above the dust number.. I had what I thought was my coinbase btc wallet number... I don't see my little payout in my wallet, so I rechecked and the random number for "send" is different now?

Sorry for nubness

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Payment on kano's pool won't be sent out from the last block until the pool hits another block. Kano puts all the payouts in the pools mempool to keep down fees. Sometimes he'll send out payments with a $1.00 fee to send out.

If you are talking about the receive address in coinbase. You'll get a new one I think every time you log in. You can check all the addresses associated with your account under the tools tab in coinbase.