Bitcoin discussion thread - Page 52

On January 17 2018 08:38 Korakys wrote:
I think the ideal cryptocurrency would have an expiring blockchain. Say if a coin hasn't been transacted in 3 months then it is deleted forever. (You would have to make the coins indivisible for this to work.) This would prevent the blockchain from becoming too unwieldy for daily use.

Other things I would have: an oracle network that would sense what the major fiat currencies are worth and automatically buyback or create coins to keep the price stable with a composite of them; a minimum transaction fee to prevent high-speed trading; and a multi-tiered network like Dash has with its Masternodes.

The key factor to make cryptocurrency useful is making it unprofitable to invest in, the profit should come from confirming transactions.

On January 17 2018 18:04 PoulsenB wrote:
If bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency wants to become a mainstream financial instrument it will have to get regulated at some point. People may not know or deny it (because "regulation is bad waaaaah"), but banks and governments' financial institutions do huge amount of work on things like preventing scams and money laundering or stopping funds from going to terrorists organisations or sanctioned entities. If cryptos get big enough to be a widely used currency alternative there will be people who will try to scam and exploit their users. Governments and banking systems might not be ideal, but they do provide safety nets for the financial systems they oversee.

On January 17 2018 08:38 Korakys wrote:
I think the ideal cryptocurrency would have an expiring blockchain. Say if a coin hasn't been transacted in 3 months then it is deleted forever. (You would have to make the coins indivisible for this to work.) This would prevent the blockchain from becoming too unwieldy for daily use.

Other things I would have: an oracle network that would sense what the major fiat currencies are worth and automatically buyback or create coins to keep the price stable with a composite of them; a minimum transaction fee to prevent high-speed trading; and a multi-tiered network like Dash has with its Masternodes.

The key factor to make cryptocurrency useful is making it unprofitable to invest in, the profit should come from confirming transactions.

On January 18 2018 00:12 ShoCkeyy wrote:
Also hot tip, don't take advice from Trevor James and Bitconnect. It's run by a 17yr old who has no actual knowledge in the space.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7r0ftz/cryptonick_is_deleting_all_of_his_bitconnect/

In a menacing turn of events yesterday, Bitcoin investment lending platform BitConnect abruptly announced it is shutting down its lending and exchange services. But while this sudden “curveball” might have come as a massive surprise for thousands of gullible investors, the writing was on the wall all along.

The company, which made its foray into the cryptocurrency scene with an initial coin offering (ICO) in late December 2016, swiftly cemented its position as one of 2017’s best performing currencies on CoinMarketCap. Indeed, during its heyday, BitConnect boasted a market cap of over $2.6 billion and a value exceeding the $400 mark.

But despite its meteoric growth and burgeoning user base, the investment platform attracted a swarm of naysayers with its suspicious business model, which vocal critics repeatedly labeled a Ponzi scheme.


Guaranteed to earn investors up to 40 percent total return per month, BitConnect followed a four-tier investment system based on the sum of initial deposit – the more cash you put down, the bigger and faster profits you could rake in.

Regardless of the stake though, investors were promised a one-percent return of investment (ROI) on a daily basis. To this end, the company had developed its own proprietary “trading bot and volatility software” that would turn your Bitcoin investment into a fortune. Or so the information provided on the website suggested.

This meant that salting $1,000 away into your BitConnect investment account could net you more than $50 million within three years, assuming the scheme does indeed live up to its promise for one-percent interest compounded on a daily basis. Needless to say though, many deemed this model unsustainable.

Among the first ones to voice his concern with the company was Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. “If [one percent per day] is what they offer,” he said on Twitter back in November, “then that’s a [P]onzi [scheme].”

Despite these warnings, BitConnect continued to pick up momentum.

Indeed, the company relied on an aggressive marketing strategy on all fronts. Putting aside its extensive digital and event marketing efforts, the company had enlisted a large army of multi-level affiliate marketers to recruit new investors, who could then work their way up by bringing in even more new investors – and so on and so on. In the real world, we call this a pyramid scheme.

On January 18 2018 00:32 KwarK wrote:
Bitconnect was always a ponzi scheme. Consider

1. To buy in you need to give them good money (bitcoin), however your investment is denominated in bad money (bitconnect coin)
2. 1% daily returns, denominated in bad money (bitconnect coin)
3. Pyramid based referral systems and bonuses, also paid out in bad money
4. Significant disincentive to turn your bad money back into good money, because bad money compounds which makes it worth more good money in the future

What you have here is a system that pays out colossal returns to anyone who buys into it, but the returns are paid out in monopoly money and you have to buy in using actual money. The entire thing only works as long as you believe the promise that you can one day trade your monopoly money back for real money, and at the same exchange rate you bought in at. But that's mathematically impossible. The best case scenario is that the total amount of bitconnect coin are backed by the total bitcoins received for them, such that if the bitconnect coins in circulation are doubled then the bitcoin denominated value of each bitconnect coin halves.

Let's imagine the same system with gold and dollars for a second. A thousand people each buy in with 1oz of gold for $1,000. The central bank is now holding 1,000 oz of gold, and the people collectively have $1,000,000. They're promised 1% daily returns, denominated in dollars, by the central bank. After 72 days the people collectively have $2,000,000, but the central bank still only has 1,000 oz of gold. Therefore the absolute best case scenario here is that gold is now $2,000/oz if you want to cash back out. What bitconnect was doing was equivalent to the central bank promising that the dollars would be worth the same amount of gold in the future, even though the number of dollars was increasing and no gold was being created. They promised to create gold from air.

It only works for as long as the users don't ever try to turn their dollars back into gold in any significant volume. The system makes it irrational to ever convert back because the dollars create more dollars daily and have referral bonuses whereas the gold doesn't do anything so why would you want to have the gold when you can keep dollars and have more dollars worth even more gold tomorrow. But, of course, you can't convert your dollars back into even more gold tomorrow because there's only so much gold in the system. The exchange rate you were promised doesn't really exist. The people running the scheme will cash themselves out at that rate until there is no more gold, and then you'll be left with the paper.

On January 18 2018 11:01 KwarK wrote:
I bought in again at $11k and sold out again at $12.2k. But I'm not interested in holding, I just do arbitrage these days.

On January 18 2018 11:01 KwarK wrote:
I bought in again at $11k and sold out again at $12.2k. But I'm not interested in holding, I just do arbitrage these days.

On January 18 2018 19:52 pmh wrote:



What do you arbitrage then,between the future and btc or between btc exchanges themselves?

On January 18 2018 17:28 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:
This ridiculous 72 hour delay coinbase does for transferring cryptos to a wallet.When i've logged into my coinbase account with 2 factor authentication, when i have sent money to that wallet before, when i am only sending 150 USD worth of crypto to the wallet, when i've already authorised my account with ID.When you can't even speed up the transaction because coinbase support is too overloaded and the autoresolve crap doesn't work (no webcam).

Does GDAX do this? Can go coinbase>GDAX>wallet and not have the ridiculous delay?