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Post by illram on Feb 11, 2018 1:47:42 GMT -5
Cuz I bought some. Ripple, Buttcoin, Litecoin, Ether for now. Want to buy some Stellar, Augur, IOTA, and maybe Watson and Cardano. Although I am not totally sure what exactly Cardano is going to do so that's a real longshot for me to actually buy.
I'm buying an holding and hoping one of these comes up big. Like a more fun, higher odds lotto ticket. None of this day trading bullshit for me, I'm sticking it all on a Ledger Nano S wallet and parking it in my sock drawer.
Any of you dabbling in this craziness?
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qupie
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Post by qupie on Feb 12, 2018 10:37:50 GMT -5
Oeh some crypto love in here. I have been in this for a year now, and it has been a wilde ride. This is my oppinion, don't take it as investing advice even though it might sound like that lol. Use it as you will. Do your own research!
Please sell your XRP. You didn't buy ripple, you bought XRP. Ripple as a business provides useful in between solutions between actual blockchains and the "old" banking system. XRP is actually something completely different. A public chain by the creators of ripple, the creators still own an absolute shitload of them, like really really much of them (at one point in December in time the creator was one of the wealthiest persons on earth in theory). There is absolutely no incentive for the banks to use the "public ripple chain" i.e. XRP. Additionally, it is not decentralized, the verification of transactions are all being done by the same party. Without decentralisation, there is no value in crypto. Centralized chains will always be inferior to old school databases.
Cardano is by far too expensive to be a long shot. It is vastly overvalued imho. Always look at market caps, not the price of the individual coins. I like their idea (peer reviewed blockchain protocol with Proof of Stake) but they are so far away from an actual product, it has a huge opportunity cost imo. They market cap is way to high for what they actually have at this point in time. They only have a white paper basically. Long shots are low market cap coins, which you believe will blossom in the future. They need to have a low cap so you get a good % return. This way you can bet on multiple moon shots and have 1 winning and the rest loosing and still make profit. Cardano is imho, the worst of both worlds, already a huge cap and still a solid chance to fail. Really like the project, but not for this price.
Walton is a decent investment AFAIK from 2nd hand knowledge, but I have not read up on supply chains personally. Not invested either.
IOTA is super cool in theory, but there still is not a working copy. If they succeed, it will be big. But that is still a pretty big if. Also no timestamping means a limited scope of smart contracts.
Stellar is a pretty decent coin afaik. Don't hold it though. Not convinced in these "ethereum killers".
Augur is not a bad buy for the current price I guess. Cool project. I don't own any.
Bitcoin has to go imho, I am not a fan. Too bulky and useless. Additionally I personally feel that Proof of Work should be outlawed within ~10 years, unless it can be done completely by solar energy or something. Litecoin is like testnet for bitcoin, it has a really weird place in the market imho. It banks on BTC being to slow to be usefull, and staying cheap itself so it can be usefull, but at the same time, it is a fork of bitcoin, so most of the code is the same. Either bitcoin will stay huge, and litcoin doesn't really add anything, or bitcoin will fail and litecoin has the same code, which will very likely make it fail too. I am not convinced by their fundamentals at all. Bitcoin and litecoin take too much time to have too little progress. And they take some stuff as religious, like the block limit. Rediculous imho. Bitcoin could have been king in crypto, but at the moment is loosing value because of the complete imcompetence of the developers (of which a huge part switched to ETH), the civil war is even more silly. BUT, that doesn't meant it won't soar in price. This market is crazy. Worthless stuff like XRP and TRX have made crazy gains. Bitcoin and litecoin do have pretty decent network effect. But personally I invest in fundamentals, not in the phycological/social part of investing. I don't feel I have the knowledge to invest in hype etc. Therefore I don't own either.
Ether is by far my biggest investment, I am very bullish on it. There is a reason it has the biggest group of developers BY FAR.
@mouse, while I don't completely disagree, isn't the stock market a ponzi too? But the market is very immature and (decent!) regulation is very needed. I am not completely convinced the crypto currencies we have now will be worth anything in 10 years, but I am very convinced the technology on its own, blockchains, will change the world.
p.s. good job buying a ledger! Don't forget there is a limited amount of wallets that fit on there! Also, don't forget to back up your 24 words!
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Post by illram on Feb 13, 2018 2:52:30 GMT -5
So, the thing I like about XRP is the service it could offer banks who use non-XRP Ripple (i.e., xCurrent) can easily adopt XRP and xRapid which, they claim anyway, will make transfers even easier and cheaper than using xCurrent alone. Ripple the company gets the banks looped into their system and then, their salespitch goes, it almost becomes a no brainer to eventually use XRP down the line. In my researching all of these coins it is one of the few coins out there, to me at least, that has a definite use case right now and could actually be a major "thing" relatively soon-ish (like 5-10 years). I get that it is sort of the antithesis of this whole decentralized revolution since it is basically a company selling its product but in a way that is more of a sure thing than 90% of the projects out there who seem to just want to pump their ICO'd token and hope market speculation and vague updates on their goals makes them multi-millionaires or paper billionaires. As for the huge amount of coins, the way I understand it they are held in an escrow and doled out over time and Ripple seems to be holding the vast majority to eventually leverage its adoption with banks, i.e. release sums to banks at discounts to increase their supplies so they can use pools of their own XRP rather than buy and sell on the exchange to facilitate transfers. Since banks want a stable market, the higher each coin costs the less volatility there is, so once banks have them they would be further incentivized to drive up their value since not only do they have them in their pools, there would also be this exchange market of them in the wild, and it would supplement their balance sheets. And as it meant to essentially work in tandem with currency (rather than replace it or supplement it) market cap, as I understand it, is not really as much of a barrier to its final price as it could be, or at least its potential market cap does not seem totally comprehensible given what it potentially can do and/or is capable of. (Replace multi-trillion dollar per year financial transfer market of SWIFT). Or at least, that is what I tell myself!
All of the above applies to Stellar as well, just minus the centralization stuff. It's potential seems basically limited only to the extent it and XRP cannot both really cover the same territory.
For the other stuff I pretty much agree with everything you said. I too think LTC is strange insofar as I don't see a purpose for it with all the alternatives. I am basically now an owner of it because it was available on coinbase and it went down so low during the tumble recently I couldn't pass it up, on the off chance it gets back up to where it was and goes past. I think it will, hopefully within the next year, at which point I will sell it. Purely joining in the speculative feeding frenzy on that one.
I did a little spreadsheet with some back of the napkin math and assuming there is anything to market caps with this new economy, the coins with huuuuge market caps and outlandish supply can't really be the "moonshots" even if we assume astronomical growth in the near future, i.e. a $10 trillion total market cap in 7 years or something wild. (With the exception of XRP and XLM....) So exactly as you said I am now looking for coins with limited total supplies and market caps indicating they have room to grow a ton per coin/token AND use tech or have ideas that I think are cool. Also taking a longer look at expensive coins or tokens that have the potential to possibly for high value or that are looking to be the new platform. I added to my "research more list" Neo, EOS, Dash, Monero, ICX, Decred, and REP. Already discarded TRON & Nano. I am a little low on IOTA after some more days of research given it seems very complicated to work with. It's tough though, there is so much BS out there on this stuff.
On the other hand though, part of me wonders how much "market cap" really matters. Everyone focuses on it. It seems a little too "status quo" for the possible financial revolution these coins and smart contracts and DAO's and dApps and all the rest are capable of.
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qupie
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Post by qupie on Feb 13, 2018 8:21:34 GMT -5
Hmm at least you seem to know why you picked XRP. Still though, you are investing in a blockchain project. The benefits of blockchain products is the trustless environment. And then you are trusting a company, with a ceo who owns 5.2B XRP (!!) to spend that money on adoption, instead of lambos? I don't know, it seems extremely counterintuiative for me personally. And even if they sell at a discount to banks, what does that do for the value of the coins you are holding? That can't be good... You buy a coin in the hope the price goes up, but accept it will be sold in huge amounts at a discount in the foreseeable future? I have also heard in multiple places they can freeze any xrp accounts they feel like, which is also a big no no in a decentralized world. In general, I simply don't think any of the parties has a real incentive to buy the coin the general public is hodling. Creating a side chain has no drawback (compared to a sidechain of ETH/stellar for example, which will probably be used by companies, but would have a big drawback, loosing the miner support and therefore a big part of the safety/decentralisation of the main chain). Why is there an incentive to move to the XRP chain? "Seems almost like a no brainer" said by the guy owning 5% of the coins is not something that gives me the biggest confidence in my investment personally. Comparing XRP to ICO is no good comparison imho, because XRP already has a HUGE market cap. It should be compared to other top 10 coins, and there it looses big time imho. XRP has all the drawbacks of crypto (tx speed) with none of the positives. The transfer market you quote is probably talking volume, not cap right? I mean, eth/btc moves a gosh darn golly gee whiz lot of money already. Also, why can't any of the real decentralised products not do what XRP is trying to do? Like you probably know by now, not a fan of XRP. I hate how they seem to take advantage of new crypto fans with buzzwords. Many people I know have lost quite of lot of money (and some made a stupid amount lol) without realizing they were getting into. Everybody likes the idea of a crypto used by banks, but the truth is, banks and crypto are somewhat opposites of eachother. Combining the two makes little sense in the long run, and while the between bank transfers seem like a great idea on the shorter term, almost nobody knows banks are not actually using XRP. Additionally, I am not really convinced there is enough incentive to do so in the future, but please convince me otherwise . Nor do I see any incentive for ripple (the company) to spend their money (in XRP) on adoption, when they could just simply keep that money to themselves. Stellar is a fork of xrp right? I believe it is a DPoS system, less secure and decentralised compared to complete PoS. While some bitcoin maximalists seem to hate on DPoS for their lack of true decentralisation, I still like it like for some cases, to coexist as a less secure option next to something like ethereum. Not every DaPP needs to be 100% secure. My personal bet is on LiSK over stellar though (they are going huge on marketing next month, one of the most important things for a "semi decentralised smart contract platform" I like to call them. Most of the coins you name in your research list are advertising with "no transaction fees" or "xx transactions per second" but remember, a lot of these coins are still not tested, or only tested in a test environment. Most of these advertised tx speeds are not achievable in a real network. Additionally, and this is the big one imho, in all current projects, there is a trade-off between decentralization, security and tx-speed/cost. No single blockchain can have them all (currently), whatever they are saying. If they don't acknowledge this tradeoff, that is a huge red flag for me personally. For example, DPoS has a huge advantage on speed and costs, BUT reduces the security and decentralization. Some projects acknowledge this and embrace it, focussing on another part of the market. Others (like EOS AFAIK) don't. They call themselves ETH killers but have a vastly different setup and are not even close to guaranteeing the same level of security and decentralization. This is a great read on the subject: steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@chosunone/why-blockchains-will-always-have-feesI agree market cap is not the ideal way to compare projects, but there is no better alternative at the moment. It is however a better tool than comparing the price of single coins. p.s. Thank you for discarding TRX lulz.
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qupie
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Post by qupie on Feb 13, 2018 9:25:13 GMT -5
There are quite a few crypto coins that are going to return a real world profit too. Like Ethereum. Or other coins that give dividends, like Ethorse or ICONOMI. Additionally, the value of crypto depends on how that crypto is going to make money with real world products too... The difference is that you buy a part of the network instead of part of a company. There is little difference honestly, especially if you consider some traditional stocks don't even pay dividends anymore. You seem to have little knowledge of the actual usecases of crypto in general to be honest (which is fine). Crypto is vastly more valuable than "what people are willing to pay for the coin". Partially this is true, but that part is just as much true for normal stocks. For example, if you buy an ETHER, you buy a part of the gas used on the ethereum network. When ethers are going to be staked in the near future, there will only be a small amount in circulation, and everybody who wants to use the ethereum network, will need to buy a little part of ethereum. that is a real world use case. And therefore, owning (and staking) ethers will give real world profits. Yes crypto are impossible to valuate, and yes, most are probably overvalued at the moment. But people are banking on one of them becoming "the new internet", which is not unrealistic imho. While the market can be seen as a ponzi scheme in some way for some people, the first use cases are being rolled out (like BAT/Brave which is very cool and solves a real world problem, look it up!) which very clearly add real world value. Anything that you hope to sell to the next guy for more money is some kind of a ponzi I guess, and that includes both stocks and crypto. The difference is that stocks are (most of the time) companies already selling real products or services. Crypto (at least right now) is buying a part of the network that you bet on will be huge in the future. Very different but both try to sell higher to the next guy. These networks and coins are very real though, and already used to send money across borders by many. b. Not arguing here. That doesn't make one or the other a ponzi though. The potential to scam people doesn't mean all coins are scams. I can't completely agree with your last sentence though. People investing in crypto are investing in potential. Compared to stocks where you most often invest in real world products (although, some of the biggest companies like Facebook didn't make a profit at all, what are you investing then? potential too. Pretty similar right?). Investing is not what is used to be. Investing in something that can be crazy valuable in 10 years (facebook? Youtube? Ethereum?) is just as viable as investing in a company that makes profit right now. Regulations are needed, but that doesn't mean the whole market is a ponzi. Just look at the entethalliance.org/members/ and see which companies have dedicated to contributing to ethereums code and adoption. Al those companies are heavily invested in ethereum. So investing in microsoft, is in a way, indirectly also investing in ethereum. This is not merely a ponzi. Is it more risk than normal stocks? Yes. Do you have a higher chance of huge returns? Yes. You are gambling on a product to be vastly adopted in the future.
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Post by illram on Feb 13, 2018 12:46:48 GMT -5
What tokens/coins do you like qupie? Other than ETH?
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Post by illram on Feb 13, 2018 17:19:57 GMT -5
Just sunk hours into some more research. Hopefully I will be over this obsession soon and on to something else. But in the meantime: BAT looks pretty cool, insofar as it has a functional product (the Brave browser) that you can download and use right now. I like that Brave out of the box supports most of the privacy functions that you can install as extensions on Chrome/FF. (Personally I only use adblock but can see the use of the others and like how easy the browser makes it.) Their ICO seemed a little shady though, but all ICO's are inherently unfair and shady I guess, at this point.
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Post by blackbarney on Feb 13, 2018 17:45:16 GMT -5
Hey guys, i work in investments and have a CFA charter so I just want to put out some blanket statements cuz I like you guys. These aren't currencies, you can't buy anything with them. They are speculative investments. Think of them like that. Illram is good to think of this as a different kind of lotto ticket. But lotto ticket have established odds, these don't. The vast majority of ICOs are total scams. Pure scams.
So just be careful. You're not buying currencies. you're buying speculative investments. Think of it like that. Good luck and I hope nobody loses their shirt.
Bitcoins value curve is almost identical to a traditional asset bubble.
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Post by illram on Feb 13, 2018 19:45:13 GMT -5
My one rule is I am capping my total "investment" or lotto ticket purchase price at a total amount that I and my wife are 100% OK with losing, financially. (I mean we would prefer not to but it won't matter if we do).
I totally get this is sort of crazy, speculation driven hot air, I'm basically getting in to see if I get lucky betting on a few horses. And, in the process I am learning alot about financial markets, online security, and some pretty exciting potential new technology.
Also, although it's true that most of the stuff out there are not "currencies," most of them don't actually aim to be. (For those that are trying to be currencies, you can buy some stuff with a few of them right now, although it is mostly useless stuff or stuff you are better of using real money for.)
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qupie
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Post by qupie on Feb 14, 2018 6:15:04 GMT -5
What tokens/coins do you like qupie? Other than ETH? At this moment I own Eth, OMG, FUN, ICN, ICX, HORSE, LINK, REQ, BAT, LISK, ENG, ZRX, Kyber, ENJ and SONM. Yes that list is too long. I am too deep in alts atm. Still 50% ETH but would like to move back some. This many projects is simply too deep to keep all in check. My end goal for most of these is increasing my ETH stack before 2019 staking. Short term I am very bullish on LISK (rebrand), ZRX + kyber (decentralised exchanges are going to be key), Horse (kind of a bet, but could be HUGE with main net release in 2 weeks), BAT (first youtubers are getting paid in 2 weeks or so, curious if there will be hype). Longer term I think ICX will be huge (korean company, but still no trading pair with korean fiat) but to be honest I wanted to sell on the news a couple of weeks ago, but missed it. My personal and profesional life is too busy to keep up with selling opportunities of 15 coins. Really, try to pick a few lol. Additionally, ICN is vastly undervalued at this moment imho, I bought in a little higher than it is now, but it shouldn't be long before it goes up big time. They are creating FIAT onramps as we speak. FUN is also something I really believe in, the team is amazing and very very professional (founder of PKR amongst others). OMG, LINK and ENG are very vital parts of the future ecosystem, and I think they will grow with the whole ecosystem. From all those coins, I am still not sure which I want to let go of. But this should give you a nice head start. Would like to drop ENJ, because I am simply not familiar with any of the games they want to be part of. Got shilled a bit there I guess FUN, ICN and OMG are pretty good research starting points at time imho (didn't do too well on the ETH ratio past months but have a clear use case, so "relatively" cheap).
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qupie
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Post by qupie on Feb 14, 2018 6:21:33 GMT -5
i didnt literally mean the entire concept of cryptocurrency is a full on ponzi scheme. but the vast majority of coins right now and the people investing in them care about the money you can get by buying and selling them. even eth, which arguably takes its practicality more seriously than any other, basically rises and falls in value with bitcoin in the long term. even then its very different from stocks because shares are intended to approximate the value of what they give ownership of. a company that doesnt produce anything doesnt magically have ridiculously expensive shares; stock in that company would itself be cheap. cryptos are tangibly either worth next to nothing or actually nothing yet are outrageously expensive simply because of their current profitability. if the actual tech and potential of a coin was even remotely important then bitcoin wouldnt even exist anymore. I agree with all of that, except for the bolt part. A distributed public ledger that anybody can see can be very valuable in a vast number of applications, like supply chains or land ownership for example, holding the units that others have to use to use the network, is therefore also valuable in my oppinion. A lot of other coins don't bring real value though, like bitcoin imho. "It is valuable because it is", and that is utterly stupid and very ponzi like, agreed. I also believe that a damn lot of these startups will completely fall to the ground because they vastly overestimated what scaling will ever be, and some of those don't even need a blockchain to begin with. The market at this moment is full on crazy and speculative. And most are indeed vastly overvalued atm
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qupie
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Post by qupie on Feb 14, 2018 7:14:23 GMT -5
Hey guys, i work in investments and have a CFA charter so I just want to put out some blanket statements cuz I like you guys. These aren't currencies, you can't buy anything with them. They are speculative investments. Think of them like that. Illram is good to think of this as a different kind of lotto ticket. But lotto ticket have established odds, these don't. The vast majority of ICOs are total scams. Pure scams. So just be careful. You're not buying currencies. you're buying speculative investments. Think of it like that. Good luck and I hope nobody loses their shirt. Bitcoins value curve is almost identical to a traditional asset bubble. Heh the bubble curve can be plotted against bitcoin at at least 5 time points. I am not a believer in bitcoin at all, and I do believe we are in a bubble, but the question is, which part of the bubble? And what bubble will be the last crypto bubble? You are right to call most speculative investments though (but some are currencies, and you actually can buy stuff with them, even if they are not backed by a government). And like Illram said, I invested a sum of money I am 100% ok with loosing (although I am falling for the house money fallacy atm I guess, because loosing my current stack would be kind of heart breaking lol). Anyways thnx for chiming in
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Post by TheHawkNY on Feb 15, 2018 11:18:51 GMT -5
Can someone more knowledgeable please explain to me the path for these to have widespread usage to make purchases in brick & mortar stores? How do we go from where we are now to people actually using it for everyday purchases, and what does that look like? One dominant currency? A small handful?
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Post by blackbarney on Feb 15, 2018 11:21:21 GMT -5
because every transaction is tracked with blockchain so that you buy the entire history of where that bitcoin has been, I don't think it's realistic to think that it can be used as an actual currency. The power utlisation for each transaction is insane.
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Will
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Post by Will on Feb 16, 2018 21:32:02 GMT -5
The potential uses for blockchains go leaps and bounds beyond currency encryption. I'd invest more into the companies heavily researching those uses rather than gambling on the currencies themselves (but said gambling can be pretty fun too). As a libertarian, the concept of a private currency has me frothing at the mouth, but crypto is still fiat.
Etherium and Iota are my favourites right now.
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qupie
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Post by qupie on Feb 21, 2018 7:59:35 GMT -5
Can someone more knowledgeable please explain to me the path for these to have widespread usage to make purchases in brick & mortar stores? How do we go from where we are now to people actually using it for everyday purchases, and what does that look like? One dominant currency? A small handful? One huge problem that nobody has solved yet is scaling. We are talking in hundreds of tx per minute for the faster chains. There are other projects that use semi-decentralized consensus that could get faster theoretically, but still have to show it actually working in a real environment. Honestly, there is a pretty good chance scaling will be solved in the future, but it will probably take at least 2-3 years still. If scaling solves tx-speed and tx-costs. There is little reason to use anything else than crypto honestly. That is an IF though, it is a real possibility scaling will not be resolved at all. If it doesn't, the actual use market for crypto will be quite small.
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Post by illram on Feb 22, 2018 3:39:00 GMT -5
Can someone more knowledgeable please explain to me the path for these to have widespread usage to make purchases in brick & mortar stores? How do we go from where we are now to people actually using it for everyday purchases, and what does that look like? One dominant currency? A small handful? Fully replacing fiat is I think unrealistic. There are a few possibilities for them to coexist with fiat, or offer an alternative, none of which are necessarily mutually exclusive and each could happen (or not) before or after any other, and none of these possibilities rely on any particular coin or blockchain: 1. Phone apps converting crypto to USD/CAD/GBP/EUR (i.e. fiat currency) for payments. This is being worked on now and is already available on some coins, albeit with very limited availability of any merchants. This is crypto currency agnostic, i.e. they could theoretically use any coin and multiple coins. 2. Credit cards linked to MasterCard or Visa network that have a crypto balance, but can be used like normal credit cards. This is currently available, e.g. Uphold offers these, and there are tons of companies (including blockchain developers) working on their own products. This is also crypto currency agnostic. 3. Blockchain apps working in the background solely to deal with exchange of your cash to wherever it needs to go. The blockchain (or "distributed ledger") can securely deal with the information needed for the electronic distribution of money much, much quicker and more efficiently and cheaper than the current payment gateway providers. Huge billion dollar companies you have never heard of such as SWIFT network & Worldpay would basically be obsolete. These are the "middlemen" which basically form the backbone of all electronic financial transfers in the world, so there is a possible financial incentive to replace them with just a blockchain protocol (which could be a token or coin, or some privately created blockchain just the banks all decide to use). This would be basically completely obscured to me and you, life would go on as normal really, we would still use fiat but blockchains would become the new backbone of all financial transactions. For fans of bitcoin and its ideals this is potentially sort of a "worst case scenario" because it could mean teh evil bankz wun. 4. Magical fairy unicorn land i.e. the banks cease to exist and we all use bitcoin or monero some other coin, which also magically stops being crazily volatile and stable enough to become a currency. Personally I think it is going to be all 3 together, with fiat still being king for a long time until there is a stable crypto currency that can be relied upon as an actual currency, and even then I think we need some sort of major shift in economics and social policy to replace government issued and regulated currencies. (Robots taking over, so we have nothing to do but look at our belly buttons all day and we need to radically rethink the concept of currency based transactions??! That kind of sh it. This is why nerds like me love this stuff.) If you put bitcoin on a credit card you would be foolish to use it to buy stuff as one hour later your $100 of bitcoin could easily be $150 (or the merchant would be foolish to accept it, as it could be $50.)
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Slick
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Post by Slick on Feb 23, 2018 19:12:55 GMT -5
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Post by illram on Feb 23, 2018 19:33:31 GMT -5
There is definitely a natural path to blockchain currencies in video games, since we basically have fake (worthless) video game money now. If we are stuck with these stupid fake video game currencies, perhaps they would suck less if they were worth actual dollars and tradeable outside the videogame itself. E.g. you could go trade them on an exchange or buy a video game on your Xbox or a buy dildo on Amazon or whatever.
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Slick
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Post by Slick on Feb 24, 2018 1:46:07 GMT -5
There certainly can be a time and place for it though. Most games prohibit this activity already, but currency merchants will always be in demand. I've made some rainy day funds from doing it on games where it's not against the tos to do so. Not really sure how blockchain will be implemented into this space though unless UbiSoft decides to pimp out their or a coin they have a stake in.
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Post by illram on Feb 24, 2018 3:38:39 GMT -5
literally the whole point of videogame funcoins is to not be redeemable for cash Think outside the mousecage!
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Post by Disgruntled Jigglypuff on Feb 24, 2018 12:35:57 GMT -5
But what happens if/when the power grid goes down?
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Post by Broadband on Feb 25, 2018 19:42:29 GMT -5
I missed a window to invest in Bitcoin back in 2013. I kick myself in the balls every time I think about it.
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qupie
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Post by qupie on Feb 26, 2018 6:30:12 GMT -5
But what happens if/when the power grid goes down? Like every single computer on earth? There is probably a bigger chance for a blockchain to survive than the current banking system (in blockchain everybody can download a copy of the complete ledger). But lets be real, we will be fucked either way if something on that scale happens, whole cities dying from hunger and lack of water etc etc.
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Post by illram on Feb 26, 2018 23:25:09 GMT -5
I missed a window to invest in Bitcoin back in 2013. I kick myself in the balls every time I think about it. Me too. To make it worse there were about 2 or 3 other windows between 2015 and now when you could have turned a few grand into millions of dollars in about 1 year. I think Ethereum debuted at 30 cents in 2015 (currently pushing $900) and NEO (an Ethereum variant) started out at 12 cents in 2016 (now pushing $150.) There are a bunch of others in that magical 2-3 year window where with some luck and balls you could have radically changed your life. 99% of society, me very much included, was laughing at silly people spending real money on fake digital money which, to be fair, was and still remains a perfectly rational position to take. Basically pick any date before September 2016 here and compare to now for max depression levels.
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Post by blackbarney on Feb 27, 2018 9:57:10 GMT -5
but you can say that about any speculative investment that has gone up.
the power grid going down isn't a big deal since the blockchain stuff is all stored. I think a big solar flare is probably a greater risk.
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Slick
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Post by Slick on Feb 27, 2018 17:44:08 GMT -5
The big three (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin) have now escaped the bear trend, watch for them to slowly rise. Buyer sentiment isn't very strong still.
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Post by TheHawkNY on Mar 1, 2018 13:41:21 GMT -5
Can someone more knowledgeable please explain to me the path for these to have widespread usage to make purchases in brick & mortar stores? How do we go from where we are now to people actually using it for everyday purchases, and what does that look like? One dominant currency? A small handful? Fully replacing fiat is I think unrealistic. There are a few possibilities for them to coexist with fiat, or offer an alternative, none of which are necessarily mutually exclusive and each could happen (or not) before or after any other, and none of these possibilities rely on any particular coin or blockchain: 1. Phone apps converting crypto to USD/CAD/GBP/EUR (i.e. fiat currency) for payments. This is being worked on now and is already available on some coins, albeit with very limited availability of any merchants. This is crypto currency agnostic, i.e. they could theoretically use any coin and multiple coins. 2. Credit cards linked to MasterCard or Visa network that have a crypto balance, but can be used like normal credit cards. This is currently available, e.g. Uphold offers these, and there are tons of companies (including blockchain developers) working on their own products. This is also crypto currency agnostic. 3. Blockchain apps working in the background solely to deal with exchange of your cash to wherever it needs to go. The blockchain (or "distributed ledger") can securely deal with the information needed for the electronic distribution of money much, much quicker and more efficiently and cheaper than the current payment gateway providers. Huge billion dollar companies you have never heard of such as SWIFT network & Worldpay would basically be obsolete. These are the "middlemen" which basically form the backbone of all electronic financial transfers in the world, so there is a possible financial incentive to replace them with just a blockchain protocol (which could be a token or coin, or some privately created blockchain just the banks all decide to use). This would be basically completely obscured to me and you, life would go on as normal really, we would still use fiat but blockchains would become the new backbone of all financial transactions. For fans of bitcoin and its ideals this is potentially sort of a "worst case scenario" because it could mean teh evil bankz wun. 4. Magical fairy unicorn land i.e. the banks cease to exist and we all use bitcoin or monero some other coin, which also magically stops being crazily volatile and stable enough to become a currency. Personally I think it is going to be all 3 together, with fiat still being king for a long time until there is a stable crypto currency that can be relied upon as an actual currency, and even then I think we need some sort of major shift in economics and social policy to replace government issued and regulated currencies. (Robots taking over, so we have nothing to do but look at our belly buttons all day and we need to radically rethink the concept of currency based transactions??! That kind of sh it. This is why nerds like me love this stuff.) If you put bitcoin on a credit card you would be foolish to use it to buy stuff as one hour later your $100 of bitcoin could easily be $150 (or the merchant would be foolish to accept it, as it could be $50.) I still don't really understand how any of those benefit either the consumer or the vendor. What is going to make the average consumer prefer making their transactions using cryptocurrency?
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qupie
True Bro
Posts: 12,400
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Post by qupie on Mar 2, 2018 7:20:42 GMT -5
"I still don't really understand how any of those benefit either the consumer or the vendor. What is going to make the average consumer prefer making their transactions using cryptocurrency?"
Not much, the use cases for simple crypto money transfers is kind of thin. Smart contracts is where it is at imo.
I would like to add another point to your list though.
5. giving people without acces to banking systems a way to transfer money digitally and safe.
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Slick
True Bro
Taking the piss
Posts: 1,015
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Post by Slick on Mar 2, 2018 13:20:54 GMT -5
What I like is aside from ICO's, which you should stay away from anyway, there's no better space to play with hot money for smaller investors. It's very volatile, which is great for daytrading and swingtrading. The increasing regulatory pressure will be a big boon for projects that survive as it will make investors more comfortable and steer billions of ill-allocated capital to coins that we want to succeed. This current market cap is peanuts.
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