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First Blythe Masters, Now Goldman Investing In Bitcoin
When Bitcoin first appeared, its proponents valiantly claimed that the revolutionary new digital currency was nothing more than a modernized version of a legacy non-fiat currency such as gold or silver, one which would allow global transactions seamlessly and without tracking by monetary authorities, but one which was more convenient than gold as one would never actually have to hold it - the "bitcoin" could be stored safely in virtual vaults that could be accessed anywhere in the world. Most importantly, it would be a libertarian statement of non-compliance with the fiat status quo.
Then MtGox happened and "unexpectedly" thousands of Bitcoin users found out they had been corzined, and their digital "money" - which supposedly was tracable - had disappeared forever.
Of course, fraud happens, so this humiliating incident to what was once the biggest bitcoin exchange was promptly brushed off.
But when a little over a month ago we reported that none other than former head of JPM's commodities head, Blythe Master, had reemerged from the shadows as chief executive of the Bitcoin startup Digital Asset Holdings, then all those who valiantly clung to the belief that Bitcoin is some aspiration to a libertarian, anti-status quo contrarianism, were promptly quieted.
As the FT reported then, the startup aims to be a venue for buyers and sellers of financial assets to meet and transact, switching currencies into bitcoin in order to cut the cost and time of settlement and make use of the decentralised “block chain” as a secure record of transactions."
“There is a school of libertarian ‘visionaries’ who want to imagine a world without big banks, big governments,” said Ms Masters, who left JPMorgan last April. “That’s nice, but completely irrelevant to this business model. We don’t imagine a world in which big banks and big governments don’t exist.”
“They say they want the world to change, but the world will change by adopting new technology to do a better job,” she said. Reducing the frictional costs of financial transactions is “one of the great challenges of our time”.
She was right.
And just to hammer the point that Bitcoin has become the playground of precisely those who also control fiat money in all its infinitely dilutable permutations, earlier today we learned thart Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is one of two lead investors in a $50 million funding round for bitcoin startup Circle Internet Financial Ltd.
As WSJ reports, Goldman adds its name to a growing list of Wall Street institutions exploring digital-currency technology’s potential to provide faster and cheaper financial transactions and payments.
Circle, based in Boston, uses bitcoin-based systems to allow customers to digitally store money and transfer it to and from other people and merchants.
The new $50 million injection comes on top of $26 million in prior financing founds for Circle and, according to people familiar with the deal, values the startup at around $200 million.
Goldman declined to comment about its investment beyond a brief statement in the news release from Tom Jessop, managing director of the investment bank’s Principal Strategic Investments Group. He said the investment bank sees “significant opportunities in companies and solutions that have the promise to transform global markets through technical innovation.”
It wasn't just Goldman: "Goldman’s commitment to Circle follows investments by the New York Stock Exchange, Spain’s Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA and USAA Bank in San Francisco startup Coinbase, which runs a bitcoin exchange and competes with Circle in the market for bitcoin wallets, with which users store and send digital currency."
And if it appears that bitcoin has become a free-for-all for the TBTF banks, that's probably because it is. Earlier this month UBS said it would establish a special research lab to explore financial uses for the core technology underlying bitcoin—its so-called “blockchain” digital ledger.
And then there was the Fed, whose researcher recently said that “people see that in the long run the supply of bitcoin is capped and they see it’s demand growing, so in the long run you have to expect that it might be a good investment vehicle,” he said. “You might think the same about gold, but just because something’s a good investment vehicle does not make it a good currency."
Yes, we definitely know how the Fed and the BIS feel about gold.
The good news for those who still hold bitcoins is that with the benefit and full backing of the Fed-insured Goldman, Blythe and so on, the price of Bitcoin has nowhere to go but up: after all, the venture investments of the TBTF banks must be allowed to flourish. And with documented instances of bitcoin manipulation, BTC is just the latest risk asset in the hands of a big bank.
The bad news is that any hopes and aspirations of making a libertarian statement against the status quo by transacting with a monetary medium that now has the full backing and endorsement not only of the biggest commercial banks, but the Fed itself, is now history.
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"Then MtGox happened and "unexpectedly" thousands of Bitcoin users found out they had been corzined, and their digital "money" - which supposedly was tracable - had disappeared forever."
If only I could buy large quantites of Bitcoin from the squid, and let them look after it for me!! I can only hope.
Paging fonestar & RUGAY2-- 1/10 of a bitcoin for your thoughts.
its bargain right now
Relative phrase, as PM's are too. Problem is the banksters and CB's have their claws in PM's.
After this announcement, my condolences to the Bigcoiners.
JFC ... can we just skip all this BS intermediation and get back to gold?
Regards,
Cooter
Yeah, it will happen as soon as somebody invents a way to blow a million dollars worth of gold particles down a tube over 10 thousand miles long in 4 seconds. Until that happens ...... Bitcoin BTChezzzzzz.......
Bitcoin is "as good as gold" for a lot of PM dealers...
bitcoin just took a massive dump on gold for the last 5 years.
Hold that in your hands , BTChezzzz.......
Durden still misses the bigger picture of Bitcoin, and most importantly, the ease with which it can be replicated by, well, anyone (The ability to create infinite types of cryptographically secure digital currencies that run on top of or are interchangeable with Bitcoin is a strength for the libertarians who forsee a decentralized monetary system, not a weakness).
Goldman investing in Circle is akin to the New York Times investing in Google or Pets.com, circa 199X. Just because a few smart shirts in the titanic realize the ship is sinking and throw a few life rafts on the escape vessel, doesn't mean bitcoin, or more accurately, digital currencies as a whole have become a tbtf pet technology, any more than the New York Times might have taken over the Internet itself during the emergence of the Internet in the 90s.
Interesting take on that. Seriously. I'll be watching.
A new low even for zerohedge. Editorialising not fantasizing please you butthurt goldbug, how does Masters working for one startup preclude cryptocurrency from being libertarian and anti-status quo?
This place used to be subversive, now your readership is mostly statist fucking morons who think the muslims are coming, who shit on anyone rocking the status quo and pray for a republican victory in 2016. You publish the alarmist ramblings of a christian fundamentalist ffs, not exactly anti-status quo is it?
Fuck this place, ruined by a couple of flaccid tylers. Tyler, the flaccid Tyler who wrote this fanciful shit, debate me on bitcoin right fucking here in this comment section if you got the facts or balls to, I see you reply to others here ignoring me shows what a cowardly piece of ignorant shit you are.
How is cryptocurrency preferable to a tyrannical state than fiat currency or even gold?
Tyler, come out to plaaaay...
How about you throw me 10 reasons gold is less preferable to TPTB (for the sake of debate we can forget TPTB own most of the gold), and ten reasons why bitcoin is preferable to tyrannical powers than gold. Then I'll reciprocate.
The beauty of bitcoin is the bankers can come to play, but with the ongoing culture of transparency they will have a hard time using their usual manipulations on bitcoin.
Full reserve exchanges with real time audits, something unheard of in todays financial world, made possible with bitcoin.
Most importantly the power to create enormous amounts of money on a whim is taken from the hands of the corrupt central banks. There will be no BTC QE and no inflation to eat away your savings. There's a finite amount of bitcoin, this is fundamental yet some people still don't seem to grasp the implications of true scarcity.
Those are the same people buying paper gold, and they will buy paper bitcoins as soon as some bankster cunt starts selling those. Not sure if there's any way to stop them from getting fucked over time and time again, it's just the circle of life it seems, sheeple iphone zombies being led to the slaughter time and time again for the benefit of a small privileged elite class.
Why is the federal reserve still privately held? Are the american people sleeping? When I realized this debt slavery system has been going on since 100+ years and nothing has ever changed I lost my empathy for the ignorant masses, they seem content as pigs rolling in the mud with the butcher patting their fat bellies right before he slits their throat.
I'll take "how could you screw up bitcoin any worse" for $500, Alex.
Not surprised in the least:
http://debtcrash.report/entry/bitcoin-an-e-dollar-beta-test
Economist don't know what the fuck they are talking about and couldn't see the future with a map and instructions stapled to their foreheads. To that, big fucking deal about 'money'. That's only one of the features of BTC. BTC is built to drive about 450 new innovations based on it's construction. Bitcoin is a 21 million piece jigsaw puzzle that is going to take a while to finish based on increasing difficulty. When all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are finished, everyone gets a present.
Bitcoin is the first open source distributed computing effort of the development as a currency built to solve another puzzle. Other examples of distributed computing. Folding@home which helped map the protein chains of cancer and DNA. Or Seti@Home that took a tonne of data gathered from the Seti project and helped sort it out. Or LHC@Home which models class addresses in quantum physics done by CERN. Anycase, years of these distributed computing projects all looking for clues to origins and other things. In terms of Bitcoin, contains something found that in math circles is called an "abelian grape".
It's an accidentally discovered math problem rendered from previous publicly open and distributed computing projects. As a math puzzle it is so weird and difficult that the only way it can be figured out is through brute force cryptographic rendering to finish the entire set and find the big key.
Once all 21 million pieces are figured out the cracker jack box opens up and there's a prize inside. Only way to get the prize inside is to cooperate and develop more efficient computing in terms of energy usage and sheer horsepower. Which is already happening with the asic thumb drive units that are being shipped, the speed of the asics should follow the usual development curve with the re-engineering the idea of the CPU and is already finding it's way into the cellphone market to to supersede the closed source the intel/amd market to offer cheaper, faster, smaller and a more accessible cpu platform much like the legacy Motorola 8088 business model.
Far superior to anything that is' currently offered in terms of market offerings based on the open source model. With faster cpu's and better efficiency (2000% better in asic designs) it leads to better options in terms of developing everything from medical equipment, AI, fuel systems, robotics and practically anything that runs, flies, floats or drives today. Point blank, whatever you believe is a neat gadget today will be so antiquated in ten years as a by product to render the abelian grape it will overshadow anything being done today.
BTC is a seed. It is built to give an option to migrate to instead of crashing and burning, it is also built to drive the technology curve by using greed to move it faster since not everyone operates on altruism and it functions as an international trade mechanism versus shipping IOU's for gold and silver (this current economic system started with that, dollars backed with gold, this is where we all are...up shit creek). To finish the entire puzzle, the technology to finish the puzzle has not been invented yet. It is built to create a chain of events that link developments that spawn from it to move earth from the current level of type 1 (shit hole back water), to type 2 (respectable)...maybe type three if the timing is right.
The currency aspect of it is the minor piece of it, that's just the carrot to get the horse to move with the cart. The secondary and tertiary by products by development of finishing the set is more important so people know what to do with the cracker jack prize inside the puzzle. Knowledge is useless if gained without effort and this is the starting point.
Thanks, insightful
Evidently, in addition to his many other accomplishments, Obama solved this one too and is in the process of giving you your present.
http://wildmanhangout.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/nobel.jpg
That is hilarious...... is what I would say if I was a beer swilling moron who does not think the dems and gop are two puppets attached to the same body.
But you have fun
"is what I would say"
Actually, from the looks of things around here, I'm convinced that you'll pretty much say anything to draw attention upon yourself.
"Reducing the frictional costs"
http://www.businessinsider.com/blythe-masters-bitcoin-startup-ceo-2015-3
Looks vaguely familiar with friction...
"Problem is the banksters and CB's have their claws in PM's."
Not mine. The garden is still wealthy, as I just checked. It is well armed as well.
Liberty is a demand. Tyranny is submission.
Enrich and arm your garden well. When tyranny comes, just smile and take names for the fourth "R":
The Four Rs
Rejection: Stop Paying, Stop Obeying, Stop Playing
Revolution: It is inevitable, so prepare, as they are.
Restoration: Restore the Constitution as the "Law of the Land, and the American people, country, and money under the Constitutional republic.
Retribution: The guilty must answer for their crimes against the American people, the Constitution, our money, and humanity.
Didn't the Americans all end up on shitty little reserves as alchoholics ? The ones that survived that is ?
Mt. Gox is completely irrelevant. It's like some gold bugs being swindled for storing their gold remotely at a vault that rehypothecated their deposits and went bust. It's like comparing MF Global to all the other brokerages. When you hold your wallet at a service like Mt. Gox, you still bear personal responsibility for doing your own due diligence on that counterparty. BitCoins are glorious for transacting online, and I can't wait until a more easily anonymous coin gains traction. Anyone who has tried to buy things online without being personably identifiable knows the banks have you by the balls.
This is pretty much spot on. Gox is to bitcoin and MF Global is to gold ownership.
Increasingly the Gox situation is look like it was a government set-up. It'll probably be years before we know the whole story, but what we do know is that dirty DEA agents were involved in at least some of the shenanigans that happened.
Spot on? Not really. Gox was just part of a long line of questionable events in Bitcoin's history, but it still proved that Bitcoin is not out of the reach of either hucksters, government, or big banks. The bigger picture is that Bitcoin actually plays right into the hands of the banksters, who have been pushing towards a cashless and fully digitized society anyway. I would not be surprised if Bitcoin was a creation of the NSA all along, designed to condition people into supporting the shift away from cash, or to fool gung ho libertarians into promoting a currency mechanism that actually works against their interests. What better way to defeat a rebellion than to trick that rebellion into working against itself?
Yes, spot on. The Gox scam was the same as the MFG scam.
You can pull this scam with anything if the "bank" has ownership/title/control of the underlying asset, which is exactly what Gox had with people leaving BTC in their Gox account, exactly what MFG had with people's CME gold purchases, and exactly what US banks have under Dodd-Frank now that depositors are unsecured creditors. This scam has nothing to do with the underlying asset, bitcoin or otherwise, and everything to do with the structure of the asset's ownership.
You want to keep your bitcoin? Keep it in an offline wallet, not in an online exchange in a giant pool they control.
You want to keep your gold? Keep physical at the bottom of a local lake, not as an account entry at a commodities firm.
You want to keep your fiat? Cash under the matress, not as digits in a ledger where you're in fifth position as a creditor.
The threat from the scammers is the same regardless of asset class. If you don't have it under your direct, immediate control, it's not yours, it's theirs.
Spot on Seek. If you can touch it, someone who wishes to take it will have to touch it. If they try to touch it in your presence, you have the opportunitty to register your opinion of said touching. Make the thieves admit their position. In range if possible.
If only this Tyler bothered to do five minutes of research on bitcoin he would see how embarrassing his criticisms are. Alas, it might hurt his gold holdings, so fear it is.
Mmm, no, not spot on. No one ever claimed that gold or fiat were not prone to scams or manipulation. We all know they are, But when Bitcoin arrived out of nowhere, promoters were lavishing the "currency" with outrageous claims, including the claim that people would not lose bitcoins due to traceability. As it turns out, that claim was garbage, along with most claims surrounding bitcoin when it was originally introduced. Bitcoin wallets are also bullshit. Trading gold or even fiat during a crisis scenario for goods is at least possible. Show someone a bitcoin wallet during an economic crisis and people will laugh in your face.
runningman18,
Let me see if I am understanding your conspiracy theory: While The Powers That Be and their Central Banks every day spew out digitally created currency units by the Walmart customer enema-load and hand it to their friends, they intend to trick the world into accepting a limited-supply currency whose seignorage is anonymous and competitive on a global scale by any actor? This new trojan horse currency can be sent from a randomly created key to some other randomly created key anytime anyplace without anybody's permission and this is somehow more nefarious than the current system of CreditCard/ACH/SWIFT etc? Sure, I'll buy that for a dollar.
The Bitcoin Network doesn't know and doesn't care if you are a huckster, government, big bank or the fucking Mother Theresa. As long as you are in possession of the correct private key you are allowed to spend funds. Much like if you are in possession of gold or cash. What, are we supposed to ask pretty-please to our bank if we are allowed to send or receive funds? Fuck that.
And yet the big banks including Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs seem to love the idea of Bitcoin as a vehicle for their continued fraud. Why is that? If Bitcoin is so untouchable by the grimy fingers of the banks, why are they embracing it? Not one bitcoin cultist seems to be able to provide a concrete answer to this simple fucking question, they just go on blindly believing in their garbage crypto that has solved absolutely nothing as far as bank control is concerned.
Dunno, maybe the banks are realizing that they can save money using bitcoin compared to the jumble of intermediaries of the status quo. For a bank to diversify and even place a tiny bet on a long shot is not unheard of. On the other hand, many other banks, if they know you are a bitcoin trader, will shut down your accounts.
This may come as a shocker but commodities such as bitcoin are inanimate, they have no soul. They have no say-so as to who or what owns them. The grimy fingers of the banks, like everybody else, can own some bitcoin if they find a willing bitcoin seller or if they mine the coins themselves. Would I rather that you, the people, owned all the bitcoins? Hell yeah, I would. But that's not really up to me, now is it? I do, however, believe that the hard limit to the currency will stand the test of time.
Anyways, I hardly use banks at all anymore and couldn't care less what they do now that there are a growing group of businesses that offer goods and services in exchange for my bitcoin. But stick to YellenBux or bullion if they are better at fulfilling your everyday needs...
They don't love the idea of bitcoin, where did you get that from? There were a lot of shady account closures connected to people buying BTC. Maybe they realized it's like tilting at windmills.
Taking part in a $50 mio investment is like peanuts to them, they are dipping their toes, there's a big difference to being "in love with the idea" as you said.
As far as bank control is concerned, here is your answer to this simple fucking question. Bitcoin solves the problem of arbitrary money creation. It also enables you to opt out of any given fiat money system, which would take away the banks control over your funds. If you willingly keep money in your bank account while ranting about how bitcoin solves nothing, you are part of the problem.
I hope fonestar becomes rich off of bitcoin. I'll be able to tell my buddies how I used to downvote him and call him a shitcoin troll on ZH. /s on the 1st part.
the funniest thing coinstar did was reincarnate himself as RUGAY2 , i thought it was at first a play on R2D2 , but then i realized milliondollarbonus was trolling the ghost of fonestar.
in russia they call it BLIYATCOIN.
digital cash is coming , bitcoin's endoresement by goldman is like a kiss of death. ive met a lot of bitcoiners and done a hole fuck ton of research.
bitcoin is cool and all and quite possibly an NSA deepstate intelligence program. but the reality is bitcoin is between a rock and hard place for a long long time.
1) if things remain bad because the fed refuses to blow out the debt markets thereby pursuing DECADES of stagflationary poilicy than ------bitcoin is always going to be limited deeply by the fear of sovereign confiscation so long as the market believes the fed has corneered itself into perpetually low interest rates. AND BY SOVEREIGN CONFISCATION I MEAN, THE FED WILL RESCIND THE LICENSES. because blackmarkets for ALL currencies become ever more pervasive in the u.s. and capital/money controls hit the u.s. like europe and all other failing monetary regimes.
2) if things get REALLY FUCKING BAD FOR THE FED TO PURSUE DEFLATION ON PURPOSE BY RAISING INTEREST RATES TO CRUSH THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD , which is a much lower possibility, than eveyr last fucker who has any savings of any sort will rush to the dollar like a mommies tit. and in that scenario bitcoin gets mother FUCKING crushed. it is HIGHLY SPECULATIVE just like the stock of paypal will be when ebay spins it off. here's another reason it will get fucked. international stuff in general goes down rapidly. if chinese demand for bitcoin is tied to american demand for chinese products (balance of trade to china) thne if the fed suddlenly jacks interest rates, goodbye to the chinese trade surplus, and hello hell hole for china. no one in china doens't sell their bitcoins. in that scenario. and bitcoin will get ditched by goldman and others. fuck----goldman might even go bankrupt like it should have in 08. but this scenario is unlikely . and actually, despite the pummeling the price of bitcoin might take, bringing its market cap down from 3 billion now closer to 500 million within a short time ( from 230 bucks to under 40 bucks) i would actually say that might be the more BULLISH scenario .
bitcoin is always going to be this wierd form of money that is grocked by the governments around the world, unless it can benefit them , which is why the NSA conspiracy story actually does make any sense of the anonymously created bitcoin story.
and finally
the big fucking big one
3) in a major world war bitcoin will go virtually to zero . unique crypto currency trust networks can be totally discontinuous and if they hit ZERO in value, or close to , the competition from startup currencies with better functionality and near zero 'monetary' cost already built into the ownership structure of the network of coins already mined -----makes IMMENSE pressure on previously succesful networks to be abandoned.
just because alt-coins are all fucking bullshit doesn't mean the notion of progress cannot turn bitcoin into bullshit one day under teh write traumatic circumstances.
between all 3 above scenarios where is the fancy ass science fiction libertarian future chance of bitcoin becoming some global bullshit that takes over the world while military industrial new world order types sit by and watch it fuck them over?
they won't. either they use this complex tool to theri advantage or they crush it whenever it becomes a threat to them.
oh yea
RULE NUMBER ONE; WITHOUT INTERNET , THERE'S NO BITCOIN. AND THEY CAN ALWAYS SHUT DOWN THE INTERNET. YES THEY CAN. AND THERE ARE PLASN TO SHUT IT DOWN IF NEED BE FOR EMERGENCIES!.
Because everybody posting to zerohedge really, really cares what the Fed is going to do.
Because the internet may one day go away we should, going forward, ignore the benefits it provides while it is functional just as we have ignored those benefits the past 20 years. For the love of god don't create contingency plans or factor in the chance of internet blackouts into our risk assessments for a whole slew investment choices (not just bitcoin related). As far as contingency plans go, in addition to the internet Bitcoin can be broadcast over Bluetooth, NFC, short-wave radio, etc. The blockchain is broadcast in the television spectrum in Europe, dedicated Bitcoin satellites are being sent into orbit...
Bitcoin , Btchezzzzzzzz..........
OK, riddle me this:
1. Bitcoin relies on "miners", to keep the network going. To date miners have earned 99.5% of their revenue from the block reward, getting handed new Bitcoins as they are created, 0.5% of their revenues have come from transaction fees. Um let's see, so 66% of all Bitcoins that will ever exist have already been mined, and when that gets to 100%...um...revenues from transaction fees will have to rise to...$50/transaction? $100? LOL
2. Bitcoin on a good day can do 4 transactions per second. Visa, on a bad day, can do 10,000. The only way to scale bitcoin to do more than that which is being seriously discussed is to make the blocks bigger. That will take them to 200 per second, woo-hoo. It will also concentrate mining even further, right now it's already concentrated to a few guys with supercomputers in caves in Iceland and anonymous Chinese server farms, nice.
3. Bitcoin "blocks" take 10 minutes to confirm. Um, yeah, I'm gonna wait 10 minutes for a guy in a cave in Iceland to process that latte purchase I just made. Mm-hmm.
4. But oh, "it's about the protocol". Bitcoin is not a protocol, never was. TCP/IP is a protocol. But you may have noticed that there was never a finite supply of packets that each cost money to buy. But oh, you can store all kinds of data in the blockchain! Um sure...if you wanted to run the most expensive data store in the world with no indexing, no data management features at all. May I suggest: a relational database, there's lots of good ones around.
5. These recent "investments" have all been in Bitcoin banks. You don't control the keys, they do. Why would I want to "bank" in an "asset" like Bitcoin?
1.
Not really how free markets work.
2.
Im sure the "internet will never handel tv quality video" is alive and healthy these days. We will just have to wait and see.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3INbCnEfZq4&feature=youtu.be
http://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper-DRAFT-0.5.pdf
3.
Not really the nature of how a bitcoin transaction processes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDOcLros-w0
4.
Bitcoin blockchain is not omnipotent, so what? However blockchain technology is.
https://vimeo.com/102119715
5.
"You don't control the keys, they do"
Not with multi-signature they don't. This dramatically mitigates the risk of theft.
3. 10 minutes is the time for a CLEARED payment. If you want to make it astronomically secure, wait 6 confirmations aka 60 minutes. In contrast, a credit card or check payment takes days to clear for the merchant, so he takes a risk and gives you your latte and does not let you wait several days on your latte order. I would say 60 minutes vs. several days is a disruptive advantage for bitcoin against traditional payment systems.
1. Bitcoin relies on 50% of the miners to be honest. Currently miners are financially incentived to stay honest by the large block reward. When the block reward decreases it is possible an increase in transactions and associated fees will pick up the slack. Otherwise, a portion of the miners will turn off their machines as they will no longer be profitable and the network continues on the same with the remaining miners. Bitcoin is an experiment. If it fails in the end, well, that's just fucking too bad. For now it works exactly as advertised and I prefer it to all other forms of electronic payment.
2. Bandwidth, harddrive storage and CPU cycles have all been getting cheaper for a long time. It is intended that the bitcoin network scale up as resources become cheaper, having no net change in costs for running a bitcoin node or miner.
3. Once you broadcast (instantly) your Transaction to the network there is no taking it back. There are situations where you could broadcast a second, doppleganger transaction using the same funds. It is for these situations that block confirmations are occaisionally required by the acquirer. Most merchants are willing to risk the rare (if ever) case where a customer double spends against them by accepting the broadcasted (instant) transaction.
4. Bitcoin is both a protocol and a commodity. It is a protocol because you can write a client for that protocol in any programming language and it will communicate with other clients on the network according to the rules of the protocol. In your TCP/IP analogy there is a limit on the number of IP addresses. If you think of Bitcoin Transactions as TCP/IP packets the protocol currently limits the transactions to a total of 1mb per block, but that limit is set to gradually increase at the protocol level (See above point 2.).
5. While Circle, Coinbase, and others do offer banking services (they provide security surrounding bitcoin private keys that your ordinary joe sixpack might not be competent to handle themselves) their business models are primarily foccused on the exchange of Bitcoin for other assets, typically fiat.
2. Mining is not done on supercomputers, but on ASICs. Concentration is not a problem as long as a single miner or a mining cartell gets not more than 50% of the computing power. The biggest mining pool has about 21% at the moment, but it just a pool not a cartell.
4. TCP/IP is a protocol on the transport/network layers. Bitcoin is a protocol on the application layer. The bitcoin nodes need somehow a protocoll in order to communicate with each other.
True - Bitcoin lives above a communication protocol - but can easily live on protocols other than TCP/IP ..... so The Internet (a set of protocols) .... is not the only network tech it could use.
It could easily run across a VTAM or Hyperchannel network with a little development... Oops - showing my age.
And there goes the whole reason why the founders wanted Bitcoin in the first place.
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I think I need Reggie Middleton to teach my uneducated ass about the pros of 'investing' in the permanance of transitory electron states.
Bitcoin Electron States ? Are they similar to the Electron States that exist inside Gold atoms , or different in some way ?
Squeezing blood out of turnips.
Should be fun to watch.
What ever.. long Black markets.
Most of the Silk Road replacements have either been scams or compromised from the start. I'd actually be short online black markets until someone un-fucks the Tor network, which is probably never.
Local black markets, now that's a place to be long. Barter networks, too.
seek .... you still have I2P and Freenet as alternatives (sort of) to Tor ... and when OpenBazzar is out of it's early development state, then the 'run away with your money scam' is dead for the darkmarket operators.
The decentralized market system still has the problem of shady merchants (and customers) ... but some of the issues ae being addressed by technology.
If you ignore the darkmarket segment, try installing the current beta (.4) of OpenBazzar and see how badly eBay and PayPal are going to be affected.
OpenBazzar allows a merchant to run their own 'store' within the OpenBazzar system, without paying fees for doing so, without needing permission from eBay about what they sell. They accept irrevocable payments using Bitcoin, with trivial transaction costs - anywhere that the Internet exists - without needing permission from PayPal or a bank ...
If Goldie is investing in it then it will be the world's next Reserve Currency~
Bubble Up!
These TBTF MFers think they'll be able to grab a sizable position in bitcoin on the cheap right now, or own part of a company that does. And they can. But if bitcoin succeeds for several decades, those banks will have to act in the best interest of their customers and shareholders for once because bitcoin don't do bailouts. It also can't be taken from slave cattle to pay for the banks' personal regulators.
Click bait/
Anything GS gets its hands on is a thing to be avoided.
Absolutely! Once GS even talks about it, it's controlled. It's all over but the screamin' and yellin'.
So everything is controlled? :)
The stupidity here is very funny.
I bet you don't even know what bitcoin is and how it works.
And people think some mythical programmer came up with Bitcoin.
The Goldmanites run the dark internet. The CIA trades sex slaves, weapons, and drugs through it. Bitcoin was created by the CIA/Mossad to once again scam the suckers who would throw real money at the scam all the while tracking the whereabouts of thier competition in the 9 year old asian boy toy market.
Like Tor the blockchain stores who you are, he who has the key can see all that you do.
Hey , those rays of light you can see through the cracks are called sunlight. It is safe to come out of there you know.
duh blockchain only stores transfers between randomly generated keys. You can leak info about keys you've generated but that data is not stored in the blockchain. The paranoid throw dice to generate random keys as we don't believe the NSA has hacked physical dice yet. Punch your key onto a strip of steel and store it alongside your gold.
CIA/Mossad created Bitcoin - prove it.
Goldmanites run the dark internet - prove it.
If they like your new toy or weapon, they will first pooh pooh it, to give themselves time to take over.
They then take it away, sneakily if possible, and by force if need be.
Their dollars and derivatives didn't work out so well so they are following Q99X2's ideas. Makes sense to me.
Get in line bitchez.
Yo Q - I heard that Goldman bought fonestar ....
I hope they blow a nice big bubble on this one, it'd be nice to exchange my BTC to gold with BTC at a premium and gold at a discount.
Going to one day prove to be really "Zitcoin." As in, Zion's coin.
Liberty is a demand. Tyranny is submission.
I can stack and load my wealth.
really ?........
even the Devil wants his BTC - the blockchain to the underworld....
All you BTC haters, you know it makes sense... just come round to the dark side...
"She was right"
No she wasn't.
The rapists have a pathological condition, and when they play games with the currency, they'll eventually run out of host to rape.
Sorry, BTC'ers -- even if it was a good idea -- which it wasn't, because it pretends to circumvent the real issues.
Enter the rapacious.
Ironically, the banksters want the very same things that I want: My wealth. Gold. They also share my quest for power, as they desire to remove my "triggered" backed power, and replace it with their "trigger" backed power.
Liberty is a demand. Submission. is tyranny.
Thank the Almighty for the nosedive in the number of Bitcoin stories since last year.
Will they ever go away completely?
Educate yourself little peasant.
Bitcoin is here to stay. :)
Taking the logic of this article: Goldman invests in a real estate company, therefore real estate is bad. Ditto for PMs.
In fact any commodity that does not limit who can be its owner is suspected of being some sort of two-faced lying commodity.
Definitely don't agree with last statement. Was there anybody that believed that Bitcoin would make any difference and the elites would do nothing??? Of course they will try both to fight it with propaganda and legislation, and if unsuccessful, invest and try to be a part of it. But they can't control it the way the do with fiat, they can't create it out of thin air. Sure, they can manipulate prices a little bit, but if more people use it as a currency and understands that real bitcoin they can move and monitor on the blockchain is the way to go, not the paper equivalent, that will also be harder. Bitcoin is what you make of it. If following rules and legislations is your cup of tea, you can use it in that way. If not, there certainly other ways regardless of what jpm and Goldman Sachs et al think about it.
Double post...
:) So...."Don't listen to what they say - Look at what they do" seems to be the thing to do, as usual. It's very good that there a lot's people that don't believe in BTC still.
Bitcoin = freedom
ZH authors = fucking idiots.
Blythe and GS can't control the 21 millions cap and miners (they can't create out of fine air).
Not even the transaction ! They can't imped you from sending money to someone.
So their nocivity is limited it will take far more to put BTC on it's knee !
Decentralized systems are far more resistant to corruption than centralized ones.