Let's Talk Bitcoin

The best way to get into Bitcoin is reading Satoshi Nakamoto's paper that started everything: http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Generally http://bitcoin.org is the de-facto resource to bootstrap your cryptocurrency know-how. If you like podcasts, the folks at http://letstalkbitcoin.com are fun to listen to and informative as well. Have fun and good luck!

Capabilities to enforce regulatory compliance on permissionless chains is coming. You could, say, have zero-knowledge proofs in smart contracts that enforce that tokens representing security X can only be transferred if the receiving account has performed KYC and confirmed as an accredited investor in jurisdiction X, Y or Z, without leaking any PIIs that went Intl the verification. Or more trivially, TPL for account tagging. Microsoft's initiative on decentralized identity leveraging on the Bitcoin blockchains could be a component in this. Excellent podcast episode here: https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/what-bitcoin-did-107-microsoft-i… Not to say you're completely wrong, just that smart contracts can be used to enforce regulation rather than skirt it - like any tool the outcome depends on the intentions of the one wielding it. :)

"nearly everyone actually using it to exchange value is really just using it as a just-in-time proxy for some other currency" And this is fantastic! It demonstrates clearly that the payment processing aspect alone (without even arguing about the currency aspect) of Bitcoin is a killer application. Being able to receive international payments from any country, in a few minutes, 24/7 (no bank holidays), with extremely low fees, with zero fraud (thanks to transactions being irreversible) beats any current payment processing platform. Quite a few business and financial leaders have noted this. These are also the reasons why Bitcoin is starting to provide great competition to the remittance industry (eg. http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/in-depth-review-bitpesa)

This doesn't say what did happen (theft? lost key?) or why it happened now (feds? out of money?); it just says what didn't happen (collusion). We still don't know where the 750k bitcoins are. Two interesting theories, the second being my favorite (but both agreeing there's no way 750k bitcoins could have been stolen): http://jesse.forthewin.com/blog/2014/02/unilateral-statement-regarding… http://letstalkbitcoin.com/somethings-not-right-at-gox/#.Uw6btIWrFsw

It is largely used in black market transactions, it exists without any regulations at all, and there are almost no mainstream businesses that actually deal in it As we used to say back in the day, “don’t believe the hype.” As for business using Bitcoin, more “real” businesses are doing so all the time, including Foodler, OKCupid and WordPress to name a few: http://www.coindesk.com/10-businesses-that-use-bitcoins/. On a recent podcast of Lets Talk Bitcoin (http://letstalkbitcoin.com), it was mentioned that donations to projects, websites, etc. were the majority of Bitcoin transactions, not black market ones. It’s not a coincidence that Bitcoin first appeared in 2009, after the world economy was nearly destroyed by regulated financial institutions and government-controlled central banks. There’s certainly nothing shady about wanting a way of exchanging and storing value (i.e. money) that’s unencumbered with the legacy of how we’ve handled transactions in the past. One of the innovations of Bitcoin is that it decentralizes trust, which is just what we need these days--Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy's Last Safe Haven: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-28/bitcoin-may-be-the-glo…

Related resources: Lambda-the-Ultimate: "A Next Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform", Vitalik Buterin. - http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5003#comment-94645 Mark Miller: Agoric and the Decades-Long Quest for Secure Smart Contracts. https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/epicenter-mark-miller-agoric-and… https://agoric.com/ https://infominer.id/bitcoin-history/smart-contracts/

this is the frustrating thing to me. IRS shouldnt be allowed to stay ambiguous on basic accounting issues (listen to https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/the-bitcoin-game-53-advanced-cry… if they also want to tax it. particularly if the tax year has already passed, how does it make sense for the IRS to retroactively define tax guidance. if you dont bother to define the rules of the game then you're just pretty much barefacedly just abusing your legal power to tax whatever you want to tax for the sake of taxing.

Interesting. A lot of those were already "zombies" years ago: https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/rise-of-the-zombie-bitcoins You probably need to exclude those for your calculation... but how would you know for sure? If we filter the top 100 for only addresses created or used in the last 2 years, then 26% would get dropped. This amounts to 867,448 out of 2,958,041 coins gone, or ~30%. I'd like to see how that distribution at the top of the page changes according to various filters like that. Is there a site where I can get a list of current addresses without needing to scrape, or do I need to download the entire blockchain?

Up to 25% lost for good according to this source: https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/rise-of-the-zombie-bitcoins & https://seekingalpha.com/article/4082979-many-bitcoins-lost-forever Also many wallets are simply unspendable due to transaction costs.

I hope this podcast helps...https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-297-the-death-… please let me know if it does/doesn't

And another amusing little wrinkle to this is that this recent btc pump and dump appears to have been driven in large part by an actual admitted ponzi scheme with no pretensions of appearing otherwise. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bitcoin+mmm https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/mmm-global-republic-of-bitcoin-c… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMM_(Ponzi_scheme_company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Mavrodi

The block size debate is very active among the Bitcoin community right now. There are strong opinions for and against raising it. Here is a good podcast episode with opinions representing both sides (Gavin Andresen and Peter Todd): https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-217-the-bitcoi…

"For other purchases like gasoline and miscelaneous expenses, the family is excited to try WageCan, a brand new bitcoin wallet and DebitCard that allows you to make purchases with the card at any establishment that accepts MasterCard." https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/introducing-the-uncoinventional-…

>As just one example of what drew me to Bitcoin, Bitcoin holds (or used to hold) such tremendous promise for the developing world, and to people who are shut out of traditional banking. Vastly overstated benefits. http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-133-the-digital… First 20 minutes goes into detail on how useful Bitcoin really is in the developing world. In short, if you've got access to a data plan and a smartphone you're not going to be unbanked. And if you are unbanked, you're not going to have access to a smartphone and a data plan. Bitcoin is only actually useful in countries with the infrastructure to support it.

I tend to shudder when people talk about bitcoin being "cheap". There's a massive amount of energy wasted to maintain the public ledger. It became much more clear to me how this impacts the cost of transacting bitcoins after reading this article: http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/how-many-bitcoins-does-it-cost-to… ...and particularly after seeing this graph: https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction I'm more excited about proof-of-stake, as there isn't this arms race to throw more and more computing power to generate bitcoins. I'm not sure why it hasn't seen more adoption, but I will admit that I don't pay a lot of attention to the cryptocurrency space...

In the long run it doesn't make much sense at all. [0] [0]http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/how-many-bitcoins-does-it-cost-to…

I've already had this debate with Tim in private (we're friends). Some of his analysis of transactional use is quite misleading. For instance: http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/a-marginal-economy-versus-a-growt… Here he compares bitcoin to m-pesa which is a deeply misleading comparison. The former has a floating price, the latter is a money substitute and its price is fixed against the currency which is substitutes for. This is why I've suggested to Tim that it is total purchasing power transferred that should be measured, and I think I have convinced him of that.

I would agree with you, except for tree chains. Tree chains could eliminate scalability issues: http://letstalkbitcoin.com/ltb104-tree-chains-with-peter-todd/

Techcrunch took the article down. It is now available here: http://letstalkbitcoin.com/maidsafe-wildly-successful-crypto-crowdsale…

This idea in this blog post is not novel...it is actually an idea called "Distributed Anonymous Corporation" which was described in this blog post last september: http://letstalkbitcoin.com/bitcoin-and-the-three-laws-of-robotics/

It seems it is too early to state with any certainty that MtGox are also a victim here. http://falkvinge.net/2014/02/28/the-gox-crater-crowd-detectives-reveal… http://letstalkbitcoin.com/the-ghost-in-the-machine-at-mtgox/

Yes, the article has changed, unless I'm going crazy. Previously the link pointed to a different blog post (not on Tumblr) which speculated that MtGox had used custom code to generate private keys for their cold wallet, failed to test it thoroughly, and then discovered that a bug had caused the private key to not match the public address. I was speculating under that assumption. EDIT: On second thought, I may have confused it with this link posted elsewhere in the thread: http://letstalkbitcoin.com/somethings-not-right-at-gox/#.Uw7zifldUVR

The interesting thing is that MtGox failing should have zero impact on the USD value of the Bitcoin, particularly if those Bitcoins were stolen and still in circulation. Indeed, if the hypothesis in http://letstalkbitcoin.com/somethings-not-right-at-gox/#.Uw7y-_RdVvB is true, that the Coins were actually LOST from the Cold-wallet because of a EC bug, or other error - then it's possible that losing 740K coins will drive up the value of the remaining coins.

On that note, I want to point people to Protoshares and the concept of DACs (Decentralized Autonomous Corporations): http://protoshares.com/ http://letstalkbitcoin.com/bitcoin-and-the-three-laws-of-robotics/ http://letstalkbitcoin.com/dacs-that-spawn-dacs/ The use of the word "corporation" is kind of wonky to me and the whole concept took me a little time to wrap my head around it, but these are the types of things we can expect to see with blockchain technology and hopefully IMO eventually the abolition of states worldwide.

Here is a article I read earlier today talking about how they are basically trying to patent BitCoin's features http://letstalkbitcoin.com/jpmorgan-chase-building-bitcoin-killer/

well I certainly didn't mean to imply that you were full of hot air. :) and although I agree with you about nicotine but I'm personally more interested in the idea of consuming medicinal plant oils this way as a form of relaxation therapy because it would seem that cannabis prohibition is rapidly evapourating in the United States. I suspect it'll be a lot more difficult for scientists to find any medical evidence that this form of vaping is harmful, that is once they're finally able to conduct research into it. One problem with conducting this kind of science however is that different varieties of cannabis have different profiles of cannabnoids and turpentines, so what science would really need first is a way to determine what genetics are what. This is why I'm so excited about the work that is being done to track the genetics.. here is a fascinating interview with a leading scientist about this if you're interested: https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/episode-73-distributed-consensus… When it comes to aesthetics though I think we're on the same page about those portable smoke monstrosities.

There are thousands of videos popping up on YouTube with how much money these people have 'made' on MMM Global, it's sad to see; https://www.youtube.com/results?lclk=week&search_query=mmm+global+… It's very likely a big part of the price increase, many of the local MMM sites advertise that they're bitcoin-only and all of the exchanges are extraordinarily shallow so small surges in demand really move prices. Here's a pretty good article from a mid October predicting the huge run-up based on interest in MMM and how they reward posts to social media where people show off how much they've "made": https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/mmm-global-republic-of-bitcoin-c… If anyone pays for better website analytics, I bet you'd find a pretty striking increase in the MMMGlobal rankings in the past month or so that corresponds pretty strongly with bitcoin price. One more note is that the exact same price runup happened in July with Litecoin based on a different Chinese ponzi scheme: http://www.dailytradingprofits.com/4669/was-litecoin-pumped-by-a-chine…

This is really not a very practical picture of bitcoin's capabilities outside the developed world. In the developing world, bitcoin is very difficult to spend or cash into local currency, even assuming access to a capable smartphone/pc with internet and the technical skills necessary to manage and securely store bitcoin >Vendors in the middle of Africa do not need a bank account and credit card merchant account to sell products online. Plus they can distribute the earnings to their family members working across the country with their mobile phone, without their family needing accounts. The "middle of Africa" is pretty much the quintessential example of a region where bitcoin is completely impractical. Poor internet infrastructure, high rates of computer illiteracy, limited access to capable computers... bitcoin simply isn't the answer (yet). Consider this guy who went over to Kenya in the name of a bitcoin charity effort, only to be sobered by the reality of the situation on the ground. http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-133-the-digital…