The Bubbly Bitcoin Thread -- Merged Threads

[goldbug9999]

7 minutes ago, doahh said:

It seems that Steem wants to pay people to post on their social media platform.

I posted a few articles that I wrote on a website that paid the author depending upon how many page views they got. The results were less than spectacular, and maybe that is just that I cannae write good. I earned a couple of quid but needed £50 to be able to remove the funds to my account. Reaching that target seemed nearly impossible. I find it difficult to believe from my experience on that site that Steem rewards would make it worth peoples while to post in the hope of earning some cash. If most people post a few links a day on Facebook, a dozen likes on other peoples posts and a few comments then the reward for that in Steem would almost certainly be so trivial that it would not be worthwhile (because everyone is doing it). Maybe a few who can get large followings can make something from it, but for most I would think it is not practical. Am I missing something in my thought process?

I cant see how steem works. The only source of funds to pay people is the appreciating value of the tokens since users dont pay directly. Hence they are relying on the currency appreciating at a faster rate than people cashing out their earnings. It all feels very multi level marketing and scammy, I wish they had gone for direct micro payment by users e.g. if you like a page you pay one pence to the author or whatever.

[Tom82]

33 minutes ago, goldbug9999 said:

 

Yes i can see a point to say Ripple, it has real benefits. It's a long list to get to grips with 

https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/

[doahh]

34 minutes ago, goldbug9999 said:

I cant see how steem works. The only source of funds to pay people is the appreciating value of the tokens since users dont pay directly. Hence they are relying on the currency appreciating at a faster rate than people cashing out their earnings. It all feels very multi level marketing and scammy, I wish they had gone for direct micro payment by users e.g. if you like a page you pay one pence to the author or whatever.

Is that not also true of Bitcoin? When a Steem owner cashes out they sell the token to another person who thinks it has value.

I would guess that Steem is using the posts, likes and comments in place of a Bitcoin mining rig; but other than that they are the same. Hence my thinking that the only people who will benefit are those that can make a whole heap of quality posts on a regualar basis. For most people this will never be a realistic proposition. There is always speculation though.

I'm happy to be corrected.

[markyh]

7 hours ago, goldbug9999 said:

Yout dont (AFAIK) have to "cash" out, its enough to convert to a different security e.g. another crypto, so you could in theory simply move 11k worth of funds to another crypto correlated with bitcoin (and then move it back again in a months time to get round the bed-and-breakfast rule).

Really. How the hell would HMRC ever know this? It's beyond their ability to collect all correctly due FIAT taxes with cash transactions and the self employed, let alone crypto to crypto transactions.

[Eddie_George]

5 hours ago, goldbug9999 said:

I cant see how steem works. The only source of funds to pay people is the appreciating value of the tokens since users dont pay directly. Hence they are relying on the currency appreciating at a faster rate than people cashing out their earnings. It all feels very multi level marketing and scammy, I wish they had gone for direct micro payment by users e.g. if you like a page you pay one pence to the author or whatever.

You'd be right.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1558366.0

 

[oracle]

11 hours ago, adamLancs said:

My understanding was always, that a gain is calculated for tax purposes at the moment you sell it, converted to local currency. A trade of one asset to another, for tax purposes, consists of a buy and a sell. (In your example, you are selling Bitcoin and buying a house.) So the gain has been realised and CGT is due.

But I'm not an expert.

think you just nailed it....in the "converted to local currency" bit.

if you exchange your bitcoin for a house..both parties agree on an intrinsic value outside what "local currency" is...so can't really be quantified.

if you sell your bitcoin onto the open market for GBP,and THEN buy a house with the proceeds, then HMRC are likely to ask a few questions

[GreenDevil]

I thought steem had two tokens. One which paid to the people who contribute to content. And one which is sold on exchanges.

The constributors can cash out by swopping their tokens for a dollar equivalent. ie 100 tokens for a dollar. This is not linked to the 'investor' tokens.

I guess i bought the 'investor' token.

Not a bad two days, bought some neo on the lows, cashed out for 20%, then swopped for steem. Up 20% on that too.

[goldbug9999]

7 hours ago, GreenDevil said:

I thought steem had two tokens. One which paid to the people who contribute to content. And one which is sold on exchanges.

So how to people turn their earnings into cash (fiat) then ?.

Edited September 7, 2017 by goldbug9999

[goldbug9999]

14 hours ago, markyh said:

Really. How the hell would HMRC ever know this? It's beyond their ability to collect all correctly due FIAT taxes with cash transactions and the self employed, let alone crypto to crypto transactions.

Well the idea is that you move 11ks worth of funds between cryptos every year and keep a record of it, this means you accumulate CGT relief in the event you want to cash out a large sum in the future. Obviously the onus is on you/us to keep those records as, obviously, hmrc arnt going to go out of their way to make sure you get your full relief.

[J1mb0]

I've been in Bitcoin and Crypto for around 4 years and I never saw such mainstream potential as is being generated bu the Waves Platform.

Burger King are starting a trial for 'whopper coin' which is an asset token on waves & the platform, itself, just formed a partnership with Gazprom Bank.

Exciting times!

 

[adamLancs]

1 minute ago, J1mb0 said:

I've been in Bitcoin and Crypto for around 4 years and I never saw such mainstream potential as is being generated bu the Waves Platform.

Burger King are starting a trial for 'whopper coin' which is an asset token on waves & the platform, itself, just formed a partnership with Gazprom Bank.

Exciting times!

 

I'm a fan of Waves, there's actually a lot of work gone into, but the Burger news I heard quite some time ago.

Being able to create your own tokens without needing to be a computer geek is a big plus.

There's a lot of fluff ICOs, they seem to be rising exponentially, you can see the scammers lining up to line their pockets with free money. ( see https://www.icoalert.com/)

But many of the older projects are still plugging away trying to build something useful. They got just enough money to build up a company but not enough to disappear and retire.

[Eddie_George]

2 hours ago, J1mb0 said:

I've been in Bitcoin and Crypto for around 4 years and I never saw such mainstream potential as is being generated bu the Waves Platform.

Burger King are starting a trial for 'whopper coin' which is an asset token on waves & the platform, itself, just formed a partnership with Gazprom Bank.

Exciting times!

LOL! Putincoin.

It's just another pump and dump ICO where the developers take a cut. Just one of many scams designed to relieve people from their money.

 

[doahh]

37 minutes ago, Eddie_George said:

LOL! Putincoin.

It's just another pump and dump ICO where the developers take a cut. Just one of many scams designed to relieve people from their money.

 

Have just been taking a first look at Waves, they seemed like they have a reasonable platform (on paper) and having the Moscow stock exchange building on their infrastructure must count for something. Do you have more information on why you think this is a scam?

Edited September 7, 2017 by doahh

[Eddie_George]

3 hours ago, doahh said:

Have just been taking a first look at Waves, they seemed like they have a reasonable platform (on paper) and having the Moscow stock exchange building on their infrastructure must count for something. Do you have more information on why you think this is a scam?

There are hundreds of these altcoins - over 1100 according to this website. https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/

All of them say they're the next best thing. 99% of the developers create a token and keep a portion for themselves with little more than a pdf with some nebulous business plan to back it up. Many are also centralised, so the tokens can be created at the controller's will, or transactions censored.

It's getting really silly now.

Many of these projects could be built on top of Bitcoin and the developers could help improve the Bitcoin protocol, but oh no, there's easy money to be made by building your own, using flash marketing to bamboozle "investors" who are naive about how the technology works, and cashing out to buy Lambos.

Take for example IOTA which has a "market cap" of almost $2 billion, where today security researchers revealed a vulnerability that they found easily. https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-iota-9a6a9ddc4367

Are you savvy enough to cut through the marketing ******** and vet both the technology and the business model?

Have you ever traded on the AIM stock exchange? Well, that place is like the Wild West. The cryptocurrency space is like downtown Caracas in comparison.

By all means speculate on a few, but be prepared to lose all your money.

[oracle]

7 hours ago, Eddie_George said:

There are hundreds of these altcoins - over 1100 according to this website. https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/

All of them say they're the next best thing. 99% of the developers create a token and keep a portion for themselves with little more than a pdf with some nebulous business plan to back it up. Many are also centralised, so the tokens can be created at the controller's will, or transactions censored.

It's getting really silly now.

Many of these projects could be built on top of Bitcoin and the developers could help improve the Bitcoin protocol, but oh no, there's easy money to be made by building your own, using flash marketing to bamboozle "investors" who are naive about how the technology works, and cashing out to buy Lambos.

Take for example IOTA which has a "market cap" of almost $2 billion, where today security researchers revealed a vulnerability that they found easily. https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-iota-9a6a9ddc4367

Are you savvy enough to cut through the marketing ******** and vet both the technology and the business model?

Have you ever traded on the AIM stock exchange? Well, that place is like the Wild West. The cryptocurrency space is like downtown Caracas in comparison.

By all means speculate on a few, but be prepared to lose all your money.

all very dotcom now isn't it?

just like internet companies used to be, they are all the next greatest thing, and the fact is 90% of these are going to fail,just like dotcom.they will be utterly wiped out. Even the ones that DO have a good plan and business model will take a 70-90% dive in value as the mania ends,before they come out the other side and go on to be the new "FANG" coins...or maybe BELTcoin(bitcoin etherium litecoin tezos)

you want proof, then just look up a technical chart of companies like amazon pre 1999 and then through the crash to 2010 or so.

even better example is one of our own(or was)...ARM holdings, good business model,- designs microprocessors then licences out..nearly every mobile these days has an arm designed chip.and profitable.

  in 1997 stock price was about £1

in 1999 it was £12 something

in 2001 it got to 87p.

[Tapori]

Very interesting. Good discussion. So is this a bubble that will collapse? Or is this the acceleration phase and Bitcoin will hold it's value at a certain high cap? Will BitCoin be viable considering it's scarcity post 2021? What of it's implementation in daily goods purchasing?

Will the other coins be used and maintain their current values if not increase? How will these coins be used to purchase goods? What determines their value? The usability, the belief in it by enough people?

I think it's also important to stress our biases - If you don't have any BitCoin there is always the urge to see inherent flaws to justify that "you haven't missed out," but I can see that many holders of BitCoin here, have some very wise strategies; most never expected it to rise this fast but knew of it's potential but are not overly exposed. Good.

on BBC Breakfast Michelle Mone's (the bra Braonness) said her partner is selling dubai property via BitCoin, mentioned Branson has bought a stake in BitPay and that she expects BitCoin to be 10k possibly by December. That's 30 Bitcoins to buy a flat in Dubai. Insane. Bubble? perhaps. But then it may indicate it's yet to reach potential?

I think we will see a big pump up and then a deflation and then ramping up once 2021 passes by with BitCoin (no more coins issued I believe?) being adopted as wider payment in the next 5 years with greater tax/gov oversight. The problem is do you want every payment you make scrutinized? How long does payment take?What of refunds for products? What of transfrerrabiliy to other currencies  esp. in a recession? How does BitCoin provide anonymity if it's value is inherent in the trace-ability of it's payments? have i misunderstood this?

Whether we like it or not, BitCoin or A DIGITAL currency (Gov or Bank based) is here to stay; The banks are already well into processing what this will be like.

Whether it's Bit, or one of the countless others, or a company backed coin, or anything else, the blockchain as a concept, is here to stay.

One flaw in BitCoin i can see thus far (not saying this flaw ruins value per se or stops it rising - just a terrible observation) is that I sincerely hope it isn't like Disney Dollars:

"You can't buy weed and pussy with disney dollars" (Well, I guess now it's only technically the second; Expect Spearmint Rhino issued coins soon then)

3:44+

 

Edited September 8, 2017 by Tapori

[evetsm]

VISA processed 141 billion tx in 2016. That is 4471 tx/sec! A blockchain such as bitcoin would need 1.49 GB blocksize to process this, and it would grow blockchain by 214 GB every day, and 78 TB every year

And this is where BigBlockers like bitcoin cash are aiming !? They are deluded. They have no clue.  By definition that kind of scaling requires not a blockchain but a database. Go and use Paypal.

A blockchain is for secure payments first. Digital Gold settlement layer. To spray broadcasts all over the net to nodes to facilitate decentralization is expensive and time consuming but necessary. The reward is security. If you want to scale a blockchain use less secure sidechains or extensions like Lightning Network.

Edited September 8, 2017 by evetsm
Add

[evetsm]

1 hour ago, oracle said:

all very dotcom now isn't it?

just like internet companies used to be, they are all the next greatest thing, and the fact is 90% of these are going to fail,just like dotcom.they will be utterly wiped out. Even the ones that DO have a good plan and business model will take a 70-90% dive in value as the mania ends,before they come out the other side and go on to be the new "FANG" coins...or maybe BELTcoin(bitcoin etherium litecoin tezos)

you want proof, then just look up a technical chart of companies like amazon pre 1999 and then through the crash to 2010 or so.

even better example is one of our own(or was)...ARM holdings, good business model,- designs microprocessors then licences out..nearly every mobile these days has an arm designed chip.and profitable.

  in 1997 stock price was about £1

in 1999 it was £12 something

in 2001 it got to 87p.

Bitcoin already had some specatacular crashes in price. I think one went from $30 to $1. But I don't see it as a bubble or a ponzi, I see it as s-curve adoption over the longer term. Like tvs, microwave ovens, cars, etc. All had growing pains,  all eventually had ubiquitous adoption and then reached a permanent plateau.

[goldbug9999]

34 minutes ago, evetsm said:

  all eventually had ubiquitous adoption and then reached a permanent plateau.

Ubiquity is the key, there is a threshold of mainstream acceptance that is required to make certain ideas viable. Many dotcom ideas were good ideas but just too early, even the likes of ebay and amazon took a long time to get traction. Its the same with the alts now, theres a lot of good ideas but the vast majority require a degree of mainstream awareness and use of cryto that we wont have for another 5-10 years. I can only see a dozen or so of the current crop of cryptos surviving long term.

Edited September 8, 2017 by goldbug9999

[J1mb0]

11 hours ago, Eddie_George said:

LOL! Putincoin.

It's just another pump and dump ICO where the developers take a cut. Just one of many scams designed to relieve people from their money.

Many of these projects could be built on top of Bitcoin and the developers could help improve the Bitcoin protocol

No. Putin Coin is a cut & paste scrypt clone. Nothing to do with Waves Platform - or do you just despise all Russians?

ICO can, and has been used as a more transparent way of funding project development and your knee jerk reaction displays ignorance frankly and makes you sound like one of those Bitcointalk 'Taliban' types who are stuck in a different timeline. Do you expect the developers, lawyers, fintech specialists and senior management of crypto projects to sit on the streets with begging bowls? Are you happy for development to crawl along at glacial speed with work being done with one or two devs living with their parents?

The worlds first legally approved and regulated ICO was just launched in Canada - on the Waves Platform.

http://betakit.com/after-launching-fully-compliant-ico-impak-finance-hopes-to-be-a-model-for-regulators-worldwide/

As for Bitcoin - yes it's great and it was the prototype but have you tried to deposit funds to an exchange or through a gateway recently. Have you used or set up things like Counterparty that sits alongside the Bitcoin blockchain? It's a bit of a nightmare. That said, I don't know of any public blockchain project that is targetting disrupting the payments business of EMV like Visa. It's a different space.

The only thing I would agree with you on is the need to research, research and research before dipping your toe in. However crypto feels to me, right now, like the Internet in the mid nineties.

[J1mb0]

1 hour ago, goldbug9999 said:

Ubiquity is the key, there is a threshold of mainstream acceptance that is required to make certain ideas viable.

That was the point I was trying to make. You can't get much more mainstream than Burger King - and nothing else in crypto has come remotely close.

[doahh]

14 hours ago, Eddie_George said:

...

Take for example IOTA which has a "market cap" of almost $2 billion, where today security researchers revealed a vulnerability that they found easily. https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-iota-9a6a9ddc4367

Are you savvy enough to cut through the marketing ******** and vet both the technology and the business model?

Have you ever traded on the AIM stock exchange? Well, that place is like the Wild West. The cryptocurrency space is like downtown Caracas in comparison.

By all means speculate on a few, but be prepared to lose all your money.

Thanks Eddie, that was a very good link that highlights your point extremely well. While looking into Waves I found this discussion which raises concerns about the centralisation that is a part of their model. It clearly states that some of the advantages of using an immutable blockchain have been lost in that platform and that it is susceptible to modification by the developers. This would seem to remove one of the primary purposes of blockchain technology, that it is not susceptible to control by individual third parties.

[Eddie_George]

3 hours ago, J1mb0 said:

No. Putin Coin is a cut & paste scrypt clone. Nothing to do with Waves Platform - or do you just despise all Russians?

ICO can, and has been used as a more transparent way of funding project development and your knee jerk reaction displays ignorance frankly and makes you sound like one of those Bitcointalk 'Taliban' types who are stuck in a different timeline. Do you expect the developers, lawyers, fintech specialists and senior management of crypto projects to sit on the streets with begging bowls? Are you happy for development to crawl along at glacial speed with work being done with one or two devs living with their parents?

The worlds first legally approved and regulated ICO was just launched in Canada - on the Waves Platform.

http://betakit.com/after-launching-fully-compliant-ico-impak-finance-hopes-to-be-a-model-for-regulators-worldwide/

As for Bitcoin - yes it's great and it was the prototype but have you tried to deposit funds to an exchange or through a gateway recently. Have you used or set up things like Counterparty that sits alongside the Bitcoin blockchain? It's a bit of a nightmare. That said, I don't know of any public blockchain project that is targetting disrupting the payments business of EMV like Visa. It's a different space.

The only thing I would agree with you on is the need to research, research and research before dipping your toe in. However crypto feels to me, right now, like the Internet in the mid nineties.

Wow, it seems like the altcoin pumpers are signing up especially to this forum to shill their investments.

Haha! I had no idea there was a real Putincoin. I was joking that Waves is probably controlled (or will be controlled) by Putin.

ICOs are scams. If an open-source project is worth its salt, then developers will develop for free. See the myriad of projects on github (including Bitcoin and Monero). ICOs are a way of bypassing securities laws to ensnare gullible investors - and even if there are good intentions, getting all the money up front provides no incentive to follow through on a project.

Oh, and if an ICO needs to be approved and regulated why not just list it on a stock exchange and get professional investors to buy into it? Ah that's right, more sophisticated investors might do their due diligence.

 

[goldbug9999]

Heres another dodgy ICO ..

https://www.presearch.io/uploads/WhitePaper.pdf

Looks like a good idea until you get the bit where they tell you they have no actual search engine yet

Phase Three

○

Engage community

○

Begin building fully-decentralized search engine

○

Continue engaging the community

 

[J1mb0]

15 minutes ago, Eddie_George said:

Wow, it seems like the altcoin pumpers are signing up especially to this forum to shill their investments.

No. Been on here for years - changed my email/forgot my password. You are as free with your opinions, backed by evidence/links or not.

Oh, and if an ICO needs to be approved and regulated why not just list it on a stock exchange and get professional investors to buy into it? Ah that's right, more sophisticated investors might do their due diligence.

I imagine you were still on prestel/teletext well into the millenium pooh poohing the Internet as a 'scam'.