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Secure with the full faith and backing of...

...   ...   ... Which government again??

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The concept of bitcoin is highly suspicious, at least it is to me.
You have a program that "mines" for bitcoins, when your program finds a bitcoin, you get to keep it or trade it.
Imagine replacing the "virtual" mine that "someone" created with a real mine. Lets say you had an island with 10 acres of land, and you had 21 million metal coins in the form of laundromat tokens, and you called each one a thingcoin. Then, you buried each thingcoin in your ten acres of land. First you dig super deep, drop some coins, then bury it. And you drop more coins, and bury them, and you keep on doing that until all 21 million coins are buried. Then, tell people to mine the coins, physically. As people find the thingcoin, they get to keep it or trade it. Its easy at first, and gets harder as the easier ones are found. Now, you have people trading laundromat tokens/thingcoins and the valuation is rising up to where one laundromat token is worth $1,800 US Dollars. That's bitcoin.

Now, the thing I think is the catcher in this scheme is that the creator of the bitcoin project has the ability to create more bitcoins just by running a program and it just generates it and puts it in his wallet. Now going back to my laundromat token mine, lets say the value of the thingcoins reaches $2,000 US dollars. The creator of the thingcoin happens to have 10 million thingcoins he kept outside the island and in a safe in the living room of a house in New Jersey. He can just sell the 10 million thingcoins on the market in exchange for as many US dollars as possible, thus draining all thingcoin banks.

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Ok, well how about we actually have that intellectual discussion?

The problem is that you are trying to view it from the perspective of being another type of currency and therefore it's usefulness depends on how it behaves as a currency in a traditional sense.  That's the reason why you are having trouble with it.

The best way to really describe cryptocurrency is as an internet protocol for currency.  Email, FTP, and The World Wide Web are all applications that operate on the internet.  Cryptocurrency is just another one of those things but instead of sending messages, files, or webpages, it is designed for sending money on the internet.

You have to think of Bitcoin as a transport mechanism for currency and not currency itself.  I don't see Bitcoin as a replacement for traditional currency but rather something that very much goes hand in hand with it.  The analogy would be that you can send a message via a physical letter or you can send it via email.  The message is the same, but the method of delivering it is different.

The other thing people have to understand is that cryptocurrency is a new concept.  It may have characteristics of many other long established tools but it's not going to necessarily fit into any of those particular molds perfectly.  It's the mix of things that it can do that make it interesting.  

Yes, you can send money over the internet using PayPal but can you seamlessly transition between currency types instantly in a nearly fee free manner?

Yes, you can use a bank to store value but can you put that value in a brain wallet beyond the reach of any individual or organization and retrieve it simply by remembering an alphanumeric sequence?

Yes, you can buy something person to person with a check but can you ever have near 100% certainty on the spot that the check won't bounce or isn't fraudulent?

Bitcoin is not the best at everything but it has some interesting features that are both useful now (as described above) and could be built upon in the future for applications that have not yet been envisioned.

As far as the fluctuations go, it matters less than you think.  You don't actually have to hold Bitcoin for any significant period of time to use it.  Retailers who accept bitcoin can (and do) have it automatically converted to cash the second it hits their account so that they never carry exchange rate risk.  Individual users can be in and out of Bitcoin only as long as they need to be to facilitate the transaction.  Holding on to significant amounts of Bitcoin long term is only for speculators, it is not essential to the usefulness of Bitcoin.

The one thing I will grant is that it's still at a very immature stage and it's got a long way to go but you can't ignore the 8 years of history already behind it and the numerous stress tests it's survived to get to this point.  The bubble has been popped several times now and it's still here.  Any reasonable person has to admit there is more to it than just tulip mania at this point even if it  does eventually fail.

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This is the big part you're missing - it's mathematically impossible for anyone to create more Bitcoin outside the mining reward.

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No.

Coinbase has a $15k / week withdrawal limit and charges a 1% fee.

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I bought a 1000 when they were absolute trash novelties.  I'll cash in at some point.

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The creators of Bitcoin and everything that has to do with it, can create how it works "from the beginning" when they designed it. You can create Call of Duty with an endless life option if you wish. How? Create a cheat code. Who created the cheat code? The developers. Why? For the software testers. Why is it in the code? Someone forgot to remove it before it got to the production version. It's a back door.

Think of a datasource (the mine in bitcoin world) as a database with billions of records but only 21 million are the magic records (bitcoins). Each one has a unique key. You as the creator of that database can format the key so you you know what the key values are going to be. So with bitcoin, you have this "value" to search for which results in a bitcoin. There is this virtual world where all these values are mined. But if you created that virtual world, you could alter the program so 1. no one ever finds a bitcoin. 2. everyone finds a bitcoin every 5 seconds. 3. only certain miners are able to find bitcoins and everyone else can't, and 4. you can generate bitcoins on the fly. The developers have the backdoor key. They can make you think that its mathematically impossible, just like in a video game. I can't have endless life option. It's impossible. That's true. I can't. But the developer who created the back door, knows how to.

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you didn't fucking invest wisely, you got lucky, just like the degenerate gamblers at vegas that "wins" every one in a while.

You guessed correctly, thats it. If you would have lost 10K you sure as shit wouldn't be posing about it now would you.

"investing in bitcoin" is dumber than "investing in gold"

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The creators of Bitcoin and everything that has to do with it, can create how it works "from the beginning" when they designed it. You can create Call of Duty with an endless life option if you wish. How? Create a cheat code. Who created the cheat code? The developers. Why? For the software testers. Why is it in the code? Someone forgot to remove it before it got to the production version. It's a back door.

Think of a datasource (the mine in bitcoin world) as a database with billions of records but only 21 million are the magic records (bitcoins). Each one has a unique key. You as the creator of that database can format the key so you you know what the key values are going to be. So with bitcoin, you have this "value" to search for which results in a bitcoin. There is this virtual world where all these values are mined. But if you created that virtual world, you could alter the program so 1. no one ever finds a bitcoin. 2. everyone finds a bitcoin every 5 seconds. 3. only certain miners are able to find bitcoins and everyone else can't, and 4. you can generate bitcoins on the fly. The developers have the backdoor key. They can make you think that its mathematically impossible, just like in a video game. I can't have endless life option. It's impossible. That's true. I can't. But the developer who created the back door, knows how to.

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Whats arfcom thoughts on Ether?

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The creators of Bitcoin and everything that has to do with it, can create how it works "from the beginning" when they designed it. You can create Call of Duty with an endless life option if you wish. How? Create a cheat code. Who created the cheat code? The developers. Why? For the software testers. Why is it in the code? Someone forgot to remove it before it got to the production version. It's a back door.

Think of a datasource (the mine in bitcoin world) as a database with billions of records but only 21 million are the magic records (bitcoins). Each one has a unique key. You as the creator of that database can format the key so you you know what the key values are going to be. So with bitcoin, you have this "value" to search for which results in a bitcoin. There is this virtual world where all these values are mined. But if you created that virtual world, you could alter the program so 1. no one ever finds a bitcoin. 2. everyone finds a bitcoin every 5 seconds. 3. only certain miners are able to find bitcoins and everyone else can't, and 4. you can generate bitcoins on the fly. The developers have the backdoor key. They can make you think that its mathematically impossible, just like in a video game. I can't have endless life option. It's impossible. That's true. I can't. But the developer who created the back door, knows how to.

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The creators of Bitcoin and everything that has to do with it, can create how it works "from the beginning" when they designed it. You can create Call of Duty with an endless life option if you wish. How? Create a cheat code. Who created the cheat code? The developers. Why? For the software testers. Why is it in the code? Someone forgot to remove it before it got to the production version. It's a back door.

Think of a datasource (the mine in bitcoin world) as a database with billions of records but only 21 million are the magic records (bitcoins). Each one has a unique key. You as the creator of that database can format the key so you you know what the key values are going to be. So with bitcoin, you have this "value" to search for which results in a bitcoin. There is this virtual world where all these values are mined. But if you created that virtual world, you could alter the program so 1. no one ever finds a bitcoin. 2. everyone finds a bitcoin every 5 seconds. 3. only certain miners are able to find bitcoins and everyone else can't, and 4. you can generate bitcoins on the fly. The developers have the backdoor key. They can make you think that its mathematically impossible, just like in a video game. I can't have endless life option. It's impossible. That's true. I can't. But the developer who created the back door, knows how to.

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Whats arfcom thoughts on Ether?

Quoted:The creators of Bitcoin and everything that has to do with it, can create how it works "from the beginning" when they designed it. You can create Call of Duty with an endless life option if you wish. How? Create a cheat code. Who created the cheat code? The developers. Why? For the software testers. Why is it in the code? Someone forgot to remove it before it got to the production version. It's a back door.

Think of a datasource (the mine in bitcoin world) as a database with billions of records but only 21 million are the magic records (bitcoins). Each one has a unique key. You as the creator of that database can format the key so you you know what the key values are going to be. So with bitcoin, you have this "value" to search for which results in a bitcoin. There is this virtual world where all these values are mined. But if you created that virtual world, you could alter the program so 1. no one ever finds a bitcoin. 2. everyone finds a bitcoin every 5 seconds. 3. only certain miners are able to find bitcoins and everyone else can't, and 4. you can generate bitcoins on the fly. The developers have the backdoor key. They can make you think that its mathematically impossible, just like in a video game. I can't have endless life option. It's impossible. That's true. I can't. But the developer who created the back door, knows how to.

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Whats arfcom thoughts on Ether?

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I have two reasons why I'm not in the Etherium camp.

The first is that the creator, Vitalik Buterin, is what Arfcom would consider the classic Autist. He's the most intelligent developer I've ever seen, bar none, but his ability to grow the community around Etherium that it needs to succeed is lacking. I don't trust that he won't make a terrible decision because it makes sense technically but damages the coin's reputation.

The second is that Etherium's central purpose - encoding contracts using formal logic - is something that I think some people believe they want, but no one actually wants. Consider that a judge's job is often about the intent of the parties and determining if one of them is acting in bad faith. With an Etherium contract, intent is irrelevant. If you write a contract with buggy logic (and no code can be written that is free of bugs), you're betting every penny you put behind the contract that it cannot be exploited. That's terrifying.

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I've been calmly and rationally responding to threads about Bitcoin for the past six years on this forum, and the same people keep repeating the same ignorant assertions over and over.

This is what I do for a living - I have audited the Bitcoin Core codebase; I have submitted patches to it, and I have written alternate implementations of several portions of it (blockchain parsing, transaction generation and validation, a multi-coin mining pool command & control protocol, etc.). I know what the fuck I'm talking about here, and you don't.

Pretty much every part of what you've said above is grossly incorrect. You are completely ignorant of what Bitcoin is and how it works. Just stop. You're embarrassing yourself. I'm done being nice about this.

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you didn't fucking invest wisely, you got lucky, just like the degenerate gamblers at vegas that "wins" every one in a while.

You guessed correctly, thats it. If you would have lost 10K you sure as shit wouldn't be posing about it now would you.

"investing in bitcoin" is dumber than "investing in gold"

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1KQmeTsDsA

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I can't see holding onto that many for that long.  It's too high risk for me.  I would cash out half and ride the rest until retirement time.

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This is the Iraqi Dinar thread, right?

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so for those of you who are experienced trading/buying/selling/withdrawing..  tell me if this is how it works:

Lets say I bought 10,000 litecoins 5 years ago. I sat on those coins for a few years and decide I want to cash them out today, all $240,000 usd worth.
I make an account at an exchange, say poloniex. They welcome my 10,000 LTC deposit with open arms, and I promptly exchange them for bitcoins.

Now I have $240,000 worth of BTC, roughly 137 of them. I want to transfer to coinbase so I can convert to usd. Now what?
poloniex has a withdraw limit of $2,000 usd per day though.
So I'm stuck doing $2000 withdraws for the next 120 days?
Ok say I verify now it's 10k per day. Now it'll only take me 24 days of withdrawls at 10k. All the while the price is fluctuating like mad.

So it finally gets to coinbase. Now I have to verify some more and say I'm at 25k per withdrawl.
I still have to wait another 10 days of 25k withdrawls to get my money out of coinbase.

Is this really how it works? How in the fuck does anyone get any money this way?

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Bitcon (call it what it is) has no long term value and has repeatedly lost 80% of its value every 2 years since is popularity.

Bitcon is the next silver, only worse. Silver is a suckers bet... Bitcon can make you broke.

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I believe in the arfcom rule of investment:

By the time it appears on this site. It's too late.

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Bitcon (call it what it is) has no long term value and has repeatedly lost 80% of its value every 2 years since is popularity.

Bitcon is the next silver, only worse. Silver is a suckers bet... Bitcon can make you broke.

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I have two reasons why I'm not in the Etherium camp.

The first is that the creator, Vitalik Buterin, is what Arfcom would consider the classic Autist. He's the most intelligent developer I've ever seen, bar none, but his ability to grow the community around Etherium that it needs to succeed is lacking. I don't trust that he won't make a terrible decision because it makes sense technically but damages the coin's reputation.

The second is that Etherium's central purpose - encoding contracts using formal logic - is something that I think some people believe they want, but no one actually wants. Consider that a judge's job is often about the intent of the parties and determining if one of them is acting in bad faith. With an Etherium contract, intent is irrelevant. If you write a contract with buggy logic (and no code can be written that is free of bugs), you're betting every penny you put behind the contract that it cannot be exploited. That's terrifying.

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I researched it quite a bit back in 2012. Tried convincing my dad to diversify 1% of his portfolio into cryptocurrencies. He actually yelled and screamed, threatened to kick me out of the house when I brought up the rational arguments posted here to the ignorant ones; which come from nothing more than decades of institutional conditioning under the USD. Its amazing how people can get violently emotional over something that shakes their understanding of the status quo. I wanted to buy my self but I was a poor college kid and unable to do so. Litecoin was affordable but I didn't fully understand purchasing.

Now I have some cash to play with. I've been gearing back up on my stock market research, almost completely forgot about crypto. I'm thinking now I should restart the gears on understanding this market once more. Lots has come about and changedn that I need to catch up on. I used to get a lot of my research links for thedailypaul.com (now gone). Currently zerohedge is useful; anyone have any good sources for research points? I'm looking to invest 1000 FRN's. I might just play a full spread on some altcoins instead of mess with stocks. What are good strategies?

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I vaguely remember researching it several years ago and deciding that the company that was pushing it had way too much control over it for my liking.