Bitcoin Foundation Boss Urges Cautious Investment (bbc.com) 59
The head of the Bitcoin Foundation, Llew Claasen, has urged people to invest "no more than they can afford" in the crypto-currency. From a report: He was speaking at the TEDGlobal conference in Tanzania about the potential for Bitcoin in Africa. Billions lack access to formal banking, but the uptake of mobile money means many are willing to embrace alternatives. Bitcoin had been adopted in Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya, he said. The digital currency had particular resonance in countries with volatile economies, he said. "It offers people a chance to protect their savings from government abuse of monetary policy. A lot of people in Zimbabwe are interested in it as an alternative financial system, but that is not an easy thing to do formally as we don't want to be perceived as wanting to disrupt economies," he told the BBC. The Washington-based Bitcoin Foundation is a non-profit organisation that promotes the use of Bitcoin around the world.
Note (Score:3)
Bitcoin isn't any less volatile than said countries' volatile economies. While I certainly hope it's going to become very stable, I doubt it.
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The fact that a bank or an exchange is robbed does not devalue the currency. Bitcoin, unlike any fiat currency, has not be counterfeited.
Bitcoin is going up because people see it as a store of value, as a way of taking their money out of an unstable market (Venezuela, China are two prime examples). If BTC is ever adopted on a large scale it's value will be 100 times if not 1000 times as much as it is now.
Personally I think there will be multiple currenc
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Peoples accounts are hacked. Bitcoin is not. The fact that a bank or an exchange is robbed does not devalue the currency. Bitcoin, unlike any fiat currency, has not be counterfeited.
And how exactly does any of this reduce the risk for using bitcoin?
If banks were getting robbed A LOT, resulting in people losing their money, then using banks would be a considered a high risk. Victims could care less about the value of a dollar when all of their dollars are stolen. People also aren't investing in bitcoin for it's anti-counterfeiting crypto, which tends to be a moot point when sizeable exchanges are getting hacked.
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Use Case: You want to convert your fiat money into BTC (or another cryptocurrency)
- Send fiat to exchange
- Wait the 4 day hold
- Convert to BTC
- Send BTC to your wallet (don't keep it in the exchange).
As time goes on, and more professional exchanges are created, thefts will become fewer. You can't compare the sophistication of Gemini with say Mt. Gox. Regardless Gemini and all the others do not have FDIC protection (and
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that is only true where the quantity remaining hold a utility value, if the supply dries up significantly then people simply stop using it which causes the opposite, a massive downward spiral in price.
Why would the utility value drop if supply dries up even by 10%.
Right now BTC is divisible to 100,000,000 (a satoshi). It would be a trivial fork to allow subdivisions of a satoshi.
So, imagine BTC = $1,000,000. In that case a satoshi would be worth a penny.
Let's say that is too great a value for operations. (I would assume other coins would be handling minor transactions such as a cup of coffee.) As said earlier, it would be trivial to change the definition of a satoshi from 1/10^8 to 1/10^16
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Bitcoin has a hardcoded limit to the amount of coins that can circulate. As coins are lost or wind up in the hands of criminals, their value as a currency for legitimate purposes diminishes.
And if criminals horde gold or US dollars how does that affect gold or the US dollar? It doesn't.
BTC's hardcoded limit was to mimic gold where the amount of new gold found is dwarfed by the amount of gold held in reserve (and in circulation).
Best figures I have are that gold reserves and in circulation are around 200,000 tons and the amount found each year is around 2500 tons.
Re:Note (Score:4, Insightful)
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Came here to say that... (Score:4, Informative)
Day Low 4,201.1899
Day High 4,616.8999
52 Week Low 571.6600
52 Week High 4,616.8999
I know some countries are *relatively* unstable when compared to Dollar/Euro/etc but compared to bitcoin they are relatively stable. They may take big hits on occasion and suffer unreasonable inflation but those are usually singular events or extend over months/years. With bitcoin your gas and grocery money could become just grocery money on the way from the bank to the grocery store.
Not to mention all of the other issues surrounding bitcoin logistics in a 'developing economy'.
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If I am going to have a currency that is unstable, I would rather have Bitcoin, which tends to be unstable in an upward direction, than in any government fiat currencies, which tend to be unstable in a downward direction. Since its introduction in 1973, this is the number of years that the Nigerian naira has risen in value: 0.
Re: Came here to say that... (Score:2)
It's amazing to see how rapidly the price has risen. When BTC started, I mined 24 of them and promptly forgot about them. When the price hit $600, there was a story on this site and I donated them to EFF instead of realizing the asset and dealing with the tax issues. I don't regret donating them, but I do see that it would have been more valuable to have waited and donated the later. EFF doesn't really get the coins, as I understand it. They get the dollar value of the coins from a third party processor.
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We??? (Score:3)
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Maybe Llew Claasen is Satoshi Nakamoto.
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"we don't want to be perceived as wanting to disrupt economies".
He might not intend to do that but I am not wholly convinced that it would be a bad thing...
Too late (Score:2)
Damn. Now you tell me? I just invested 2.38 MILLION Dogecoins to buy a single Bitcoin!
errybody buy BitCoin now! (Score:2)
Don't hesitate. Cash in your 401k and buy BitCoin. Ask your parents to give you your inheritance in advance and buy BitCoin. Get a second mortgage and buy BitCoin. Do it now and you will be rich beyond dreams of avarice.
And please don't sell any until at least the close of business a week from Friday. KTHX
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Don't listen to him. I have a much better deal available.
You've heard of Bitcoin, right? You know how expensive a Bitcoin is? It's now at USD$4600 for a single coin!
You like dogs? Well, did you know there's a crypto-currency called Dogecoins? The mascot is a nice Shiba Inu dog! And here's my deal: unlike those expensive Bitcoins, my Dogecoins are really much cheaper! What if I told you that for a small investment of USD$1000 can give you 550 Dogecoins? Wouldn't you be interested? If you are, send me an emai
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I'll give you 1101 Dogecoins for your $1000.00 investment. That's two for each DogeCoin that scammer offered you plus one because I'm such a nice guy.
Please email me at not_a_scam_like_the_other_guy@gmail.com
No More than You Can Afford TO LOSE (Score:5, Insightful)
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You can borrow money to invest it. That practice was a contributor to the great depression and strict controls were put on it afterward. But you can buy bitcoin on your credit card, which is the same thing.
If you've got $100 and you lose it you might have to go to the food bank this month. If you've got $100 and you lose $1000 you paid for with your credit card, you've got a problem that's at least a hundred times worse.
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"$1000 divided by $100 equals a hundred times worse."
Epic Pivot.
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Going from "I can't afford to eat today" to "I've had my possessions repossessed due to a debt I couldn't pay, and I still can't afford to eat today" is a lot more serious than just a numerical factor derived from $1000/$100.
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As a store of value it can be considered an investment. It's an "investment" for those people trying to hedge against their currency collapsing (see Venezuela).
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It fluxates (sic) worse than Zimbabwean Dollar.
Not at all. The Zimbabwe dollar looses value every day. The Bitcoin gains value every day.
Hyper inflationary loss may be easier for some to understand but it is far worse than something that becomes more valuable every day.
The only concern is "Will it last? I expect not. Not forever anyway. I wonder how long it will continue going up and what it will do when it finishes.
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He forgot the most important part... (Score:2)
"Never invest more than you can afford."
"To lose"
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Exchanging currency is a gamble too. Even stable currencies like the pound, dollar, euro and norwegian kronor can double or half relative to each other. Used to be £2 = 1$, now it is around £1 = $1.20. The pound and euro used to be £1 = 1.5 euros, now they are almost the same. The Kronor has bounced between £1 = 8 NOK and 12 NOK
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Early last year, I put a little into bitcoin to see what would happen and sat back and watched. Yesterday, I took back my initial payment plus interest. It now owes me nothing and is still worth $700. I wish I had put in more.
If it goes down the pan, I will have lost nothing. If it carries non at this rate or goes down, I will still only have a bit of a Bitcoin that cost me nothing.
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If i have $100, I can't invest $10,000 in anything
Perhaps he is talking to banks? That is exactly what they do. For every $ they get, they invest many times. That is why, when banks fail, they do so big!
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It offers nothing (Score:1)
"It offers people a chance to protect their savings from government abuse of monetary policy"
If the global economy fucks itself, what's your shitcoin going to buy?
Not a goddamned thing.
Investing in guns and ammunition is a better and smarter investment. That's how stupid fucking Bitcoin is, that implements of destruction are a better investment.
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Simple, buy guns with bitcoins after the local fiat goes into an inflation spiral.
Meanwhile... (Score:1)
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>> That's without even looking at the point that the Bitcoin network can handle, at most, seven transactions per second, under ideal conditions.
This IS a huge issue, and one that needs to be fixed. Generating fixed sized blocks every 10 minutes was and is a major design flaw in the protocol. It doesn't fit with the scale required to meet the financial needs of 8 billion people.
I'm hesitant to call 30 seconds an acceptable window for initial transaction confirmation. 10 minutes is a joke, and the ho