...

Is there any evidence elsewhere of blockchain being meaningfully useful to people?

Yes. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/bqhfzg/venezuela_update_1_btc_is_47000000_bs_last_week/

https://btcdirect.eu/en-gb/banking-the-unbanked
...

A reserve currency in the places with a poor banking infrastructure but an adequate internet infrastructure could be a mainstay of cryptocurrency - but it's still a niche.

Why would it be preferable over using the US dollar as hard currency in the vast majority of these places?

A record of how much cryptocurrency was being used for actual trade rather than as a speculative holding would be a great resource - does anyone keep a record like this?

I knew nothing about money before I discovered bitcoin. What I have learned is that Fiat currency is a farce robbing us blind and it made me passionate about bitcoin. Predominately bitcoin is a wonder, it appeases my adversity towards our current monetary system that is currently draining capital from us. Less obvious for us, more obvious for many others.

I haven't researched how much bitcoin is being traded for speculative holdings vs trading as a currency in Venezuela, you'll have to use your own brain and imagination with what is possibly going on over there, given these people don't have a pot to piss in anymore and volume is so astronomically high.

especially as EvilPie pointed out all the complete idiots have now been bitten, all that's left now are the purists, how is there going to buy any huge buying volume again?

Unless the secret billionaires club is manipulating again, there must be an influx of eskimos and taxi drivers (again).

No one I know has really bought it for any practical purpose other than pure speculation. That's a dangerous and unsustainable position if that's all its used for.

For practical reasons of course not. You live in good ol' blighty and in 2019 nobody is going to be using bitcoin here practically.

Is there any evidence elsewhere of blockchain being meaningfully useful to people?

Yes. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/bqhfzg/venezuela_update_1_btc_is_47000000_bs_last_week/

https://btcdirect.eu/en-gb/banking-the-unbanked

Bitcoin doesn't work as a 'currency' for many reasons... Its more likened to gold.

How can anything with a finite supply be expected to be a currency? A capped supply is a disincentive people from using it as a currency, and is also so contrary to how fiat currencies work. Imagine if every year your employer gave you a cost of living pay cut. Your debts get bigger in real terms every year even though the balance stayed the same.

Slight inflation is an incentive to spend 'money', which drives GDP growth.... Bitcoin does not do this.

People who are accepting Bitcoin for their goods / services SHOULD be doing it purely from a speculative point of view and making sure they're in a financial position to do so.... If this isn't the reason / they aren't in a financial position to speculate with the amounts of Bitcoin they're receiving then they need to educate themselves more. 

There is a fantastic book called the Bitcon standard. Despite the name, bitcoin is only discussed in the last two chapters. Bitcoin is currently mined at a faster rate than Gold, but by 2025 it will be overtaken as it gets closer to its hard cap. The purpose of money is to be sound and if it can be artificially inflated then it becomes quickly unsound. Why would we want to spend bitcoin if we live in a such a consumer hungry world that is promoted by the ever devaulaing scale of our unsound fiat currencies?

The thing most people on earth consider as money is the stuff that is issued by the banks. The concept of money has changed many times over the past thousands of years, with fiat currencies being a blip on that scale. Whenever money has proven itself to no longer be sound due to ease of artificial inflation, we have seen the same story. Almost every single money in history has suffered the same fate, it is foolish to think that fiat currencies will one day not cease to exist in their current form. They break rule number 1: Money has to be sound. The only form of money that has failed to break any of the rules is Gold. Unfortunately, it is not practical in this digital age and even FIAT currencies are a better form of money.

On one hand people say bitcoin is dead, yet at the same time say it cannot work as a currency because of the hard cap- price is expected to continue to rise if it is considered a safe storage of value. It is cognitive dissonance at its finest.

this could literally read.. blah blah blah buy bitcoin.  You're acting as a shill not a visionary

It could. I don't care what people think, I have never lived following the rhetoric that most people in society listen to. What do I benefit from shilling bitcoin? My holdings in bitcoin are fairly minimal because I'm a bit skint right now, not that that's important. I just care about facts and I find the way society zombies it way through life rather fascinating. If you care for a visionary then that is only something or someone that appeases to you.

I only replied to some posts with some simple questions or comments, your post offers absolutely no substance other than comedic value.

especially as EvilPie pointed out all the complete idiots have now been bitten, all that's left now are the purists, how is there going to buy any huge buying volume again?

Unless the secret billionaires club is manipulating again, there must be an influx of eskimos and taxi drivers (again).

No one I know has really bought it for any practical purpose other than pure speculation. That's a dangerous and unsustainable position if that's all its used for.

For practical reasons of course not. You live in good ol' blighty and in 2019 nobody is going to be using bitcoin here practically.

Is there any evidence elsewhere of blockchain being meaningfully useful to people?

Yes. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/bqhfzg/venezuela_update_1_btc_is_47000000_bs_last_week/

https://btcdirect.eu/en-gb/banking-the-unbanked

Bitcoin doesn't work as a 'currency' for many reasons... Its more likened to gold.

How can anything with a finite supply be expected to be a currency? A capped supply is a disincentive people from using it as a currency, and is also so contrary to how fiat currencies work. Imagine if every year your employer gave you a cost of living pay cut. Your debts get bigger in real terms every year even though the balance stayed the same.

Slight inflation is an incentive to spend 'money', which drives GDP growth.... Bitcoin does not do this.

People who are accepting Bitcoin for their goods / services SHOULD be doing it purely from a speculative point of view and making sure they're in a financial position to do so.... If this isn't the reason / they aren't in a financial position to speculate with the amounts of Bitcoin they're receiving then they need to educate themselves more. 

There is a fantastic book called the Bitcon standard. Despite the name, bitcoin is only discussed in the last two chapters. Bitcoin is currently mined at a faster rate than Gold, but by 2025 it will be overtaken as it gets closer to its hard cap. The purpose of money is to be sound and if it can be artificially inflated then it becomes quickly unsound. Why would we want to spend bitcoin if we live in a such a consumer hungry world that is promoted by the ever devaulaing scale of our unsound fiat currencies?

The thing most people on earth consider as money is the stuff that is issued by the banks. The concept of money has changed many times over the past thousands of years, with fiat currencies being a blip on that scale. Whenever money has proven itself to no longer be sound due to ease of artificial inflation, we have seen the same story. Almost every single money in history has suffered the same fate, it is foolish to think that fiat currencies will one day not cease to exist in their current form. They break rule number 1: Money has to be sound. The only form of money that has failed to break any of the rules is Gold. Unfortunately, it is not practical in this digital age and even FIAT currencies are a better form of money.

On one hand people say bitcoin is dead, yet at the same time say it cannot work as a currency because of the hard cap- price is expected to continue to rise if it is considered a safe storage of value. It is cognitive dissonance at its finest.

Blockchain technology alone is worthless. About as useful as useful as saying spreadsheet technology or something. Using blockchain tech with cryptography, proof of work on a peer to peer network is what Bitcoin is all about. Eventually a few other cryptocurrencies will find a niche but I struggle to see where the breakthrough in technology there is in any other cryptocurrencies. Not saying other cryptocurrencies are worthless (although many are) as they will be valuable somehow.

The best example of a valuable cryptocurrency are the tokens that exchanges have created made in order to use their platform. They are valuable but there is no breakthrough there, meaning that it might be completely unnecessary and something better will come along.

The four technologies of Bitcoin is what was needed to create a full-proof decentralised network. The intentions of creating some kind of internet money is something that has been tried many times in the past but failed ultimately because nobody could figure out how to decentralise it. It's was figured out over 10 years ago and that network is ticking along very nicely, with many nay-sayers (including many smart people) boldly claiming it is a scam of somesort, or that it is worthless. Well, I haven't seen an argument that has much merit against the network. There is a gigantic honeypot for the taking if anyone is able to compromise the network.

Ok fess up, who's buying? I thought all the cab drivers and eskimos had bought bitcoin now, so which suckers are BUYING?

Love reading your posts Dave, it is the only reason some people log into Blonde for these days.

The best thing you can do for your golf game is joining a decent golf club. Go for one of the cheaper ones as the members will less likely be a bunch of pretentious arseholes. Once you get a handicap and start playing some comps you will be utterly hooked!

Trying to offer advice to beginners for improving golf is a bit of a lost cause, if you enjoy the game and find excuses to play more regularly then you're already on the right track. I started when I was 13 and had my first lesson when I was 17. My next lot of lessons were when I turned 29 and from there I have been very focused on better technique. Remarkably I got down to a 6 hcap with a really bad technique after just a couple of years but the problem with this was that when I didn't practice for a while I was really bad. I used to grip with a strong baseball grip (some people call it the wankers grip), swing with the arms only and see what happens. I got a free lesson and the coach said to me if I wanted to still play golf when I was older I had to change my technique! Glad I did as I got my handicap right down last year through some arduous work on the swing.

Bitcoin still isn't dead yet? If this thread of conflicting information was anything to go by Bitcoin would have gone to zero now since all the taxi drivers have given out their advice. What gives?

After that there was just the written equivalent of white noise. Maybe i’m just not bright enough to understand.

TLDR New technology means we can make a form of payment without 3rd party. Not at mercy of centalised authority, can be sure that fraudulent activity hasn't occurred on the network and that every transaction is entirely immutable.

There are people that don't think that this is a big deal which is fine- the banks and financial systems in Europe have been very reliable for them for a couple of generations. Quite a few of us have been able spend and store our money without much difficulty and without money losing value at a speed that is negligible over short periods of time.

There are also a lot of people that disagree with the fact that bitcoin is the most trust worthy financial network in the world and has the potential to grow exponentially, that's also fine, but those people aren't asking questions either.

Awful journalism.

Could you explain what the bolded part means in really simple language for me.

Of course! Sorry for not replying, I have been so incredibly busy. It's actually my job to research every in and out of this amazing tech and then write about it, so it's my pleasure. Trying to navigate through a new technology and then having to try to explain something you recently didn't grasp can be tricky however!


A blockchain is a growing list of records with each block containing information. The concept of a blockchain is not new and for a long time wasn't seen to be very useful since until recently people could not reliably trust the information that was in each previous block. Until 2008, the reason a blockchain couldn't be trusted is because it could be easily forged, impossible to verify and was very vulnerable to attacks. With each signing of a block to prove the last block was legitimate required a third party to verify, rendering the whole blockchain worthless since its properties lacked immutability. What is the point of creating something trustworthy if it is easily corruptible?

Almost 10 years ago to this day a solution was found. A protocol was created where multiple parties would have to participate. To lead you towards your question, miners and nodes play a massive role in the maintenance of the Bitcoin network.

Miners Search and assemble of a new block for the blockchain. If successful are rewarded with 12.5btc (halves every 4 years, used to be 50btc). Miners use an extremely large amount of computing power and therefore electricity in order to find a new block (expensive). Finding a new block is done by using maximum computing power which was once done with graphics cards. The action is completed on average every 10 minutes. A new block found is actually just their computing power calculating a unique 'nonce' which is a thoroughly difficult cryptographic puzzle.

Since the puzzle is worth a lot of money these days, people will fight tooth and nail to find it. If you don't use the most powerful computing possible, you are going to be at a loss my friend. Since we know due to game theory that maximum computing power is used at all times, we know that the network cannot be attacked or forged by a higher power as there is not one. The reward for attacking the network and forging blocks is equally useless. It would cost an unfathomable amount of money (if it were even possible) and the reward would be zero, since the trust in the blockchain would be lost. It's like gold at the end of a rainbow.

Miners do more than just search for new unique puzzles to create an empty block. They are responsible for listening to the network at all times that have been verified by nodes as well as listening to new blocks broadcasted by other miners. Their final job is to fish for new transactions and add them to the next potential block. Before the transactions are added to a block they are kept in a memory pool (usually for up to 10-20 minutes, but in extreme cases when the network has been overwhelmed can be longer). The memory pool is located on each node and the miners will pick transactions, starting with the ones with the biggest fee.

Nodes- Effectively network maintenance. All miners are also nodes, but anyone can run a node to help maintain the network. They authorise transactions to see if they are unique and legitimate (this is trustworthy- I don't grasp this well enough to explain it in confidence).

Nodes that don't follow the consensus rules of the network get booted and there are a lot of them around the world.

Once a block is created and added to the chain, the hunt has already begun for the next one. This whole process takes 10 minutes because the difficulty of each puzzle is tinkered with every 2 weeks. Computing power is always increasing so the difficulty is often slightly increased each time.



I do hope that this can at least explain why the concept of cryptocurrency and blockchain work together so well. You hear a lot of muttering saying that blockchain tech is useful but the currency side of it is useless or overvalued, don't listen to that. The technology of blockchain and currency are a huge breakthrough and the proof of work on display gives the data huge amounts of value. If you're curious then fire questions away, if I find time I'll happily answer them.

Hey DC, long time no speak, you good? I live overseas myself now too (South of France running a watersports holiday company, teaching wakeboarding and waterskiing and a few other things).

What's your views on XRP? Personally, I think it's the most likely crypto to go big in the next 3 months. I'm gambling on it being somewhere between $2 and $3 (though higher would be nice) by the year end. I think %-wise, it'll be the most successful crypto by quite a long way between now and year end. It does kinda break the rules of cryptos - way too centralised, way too much control and ownership of XRP by Ripple itself, designed for big business/banks rather than individuals etc., but it has a great use case (for them anyway!), and if they do continue to get on board I think it could go massive.

Hey Matt. Long time indeed. Yes life is treating me well. I was only talking about you yesterday with the missus!

I know very little about ripple. For about 15-20 years many people were trying to solve the riddle to how you could create a digital currency without the need of a third party to deem the transaction being legitimate one or not*. The brightest computer scientists and cryptographers pulling their teeth at trying to solve the puzzle. So when nearly 10 years ago (31st Oct 2008) some person posts a solution to the problem, we have a breakthrough. What completely baffles me is that the one very thing that makes the entire idea of a cryptocurrency being so valuable in society is then spun around and used in the same methods of more traditional FIAT currencies. WTF? I don't understand, and therefore, I just completely avoid ripple. It spells disaster for me. I think people losing money now have learned some hard lessons through scam ico's and investing in just poor projects (I've been there). Ripple is pretty freaking massive and I don't see it failing any time soon since it has such a huge following. I may sound like acegooner here, but a lot of people are going to get hurt and frustrated when something like ripple falls on its arse. People don't learn from history. One thing people will never learn from is being greedy, but for me ripple goes much further with the public. With ripple, a lot of people will be burned because they are ignorant. Almost every fiat currency ends up failing for the same bloody reasons, ripple is just another one of these centralised currencies that will suffer at the hands of centralised attacks and people at the top being too greedy.

*To continue with where this was going without making this more confusing than it already is, the reasons why digital currencies failed before bitcoin is because they all had a central point of attack. Governments and banks just need to fart and they will collapse like a house of cards.

Gold is a legitimate medium of exchange, it’s functionality/practicality in a modern day society is questionable but so is bitcoins. If we were ever to return to the dark ages due to war or natural catastrophe then gold would again be the standard.

I don't think saying you can't buy your staples with bitcoin makes it impractical or nonfunctional. It is a completely new technology that people can't grasp yet.

Why are we talking about dark ages? If the whole world loses power for a year then bitcoin will still exist. As long as someone has a copy of the blockchain and starts processing blocks again, it will be a race to who can create computing power to solve the cryptographic puzzles to mine new coins and process new blocks in the blockchain. It would be a painful process for a few months, but people would just switch to using bitcoin again.

Bitcoin can’t function properly as a currency because there is a finite number of units and that to a degree stokes it’s volatitlty

Bitcoin is volatile because it is a little fish in a big pond. This fish is like a roach though, it won't die and you won't get rid of the fucking thing. The fact that there are a finite amount of units doesn't make sense, there are 1,730,660,000,000,000 units in circulation. That's 1.7 quadrillion units.

Central banks can increase or decrease money supply to influence the value of a particular currency and/or a particular asset class as we have seen since the financial crisis.

Central banks and decreasing money supply? I will sign up to that one! I will restrain on elaborating into what is wrong with this because I will end up frothing at the mouth and probably induce a stroke or something

My hunch is crypto currencies have a long way to go before the bear market ends, a lot of coins as was the case with tech stocks in the 90s will simply disappear.

Who knows! I think most cryptocurrencies will die and that is just fine. We are in unknown territory as its only been a few years since a lot of this has been discovered. The market will decide what will succeed. Nobody can be sure what will succeed in terms of which coins have the highest market cap, but I feel strongly that a lot of cryptocurrencies will have a function in day to day lives. I can't fathom a world without bitcoin to be honest.

Gold is tangible and there is a finite amount of it, crypto currency has neither of these properties.

This is just not true and a misconception that really needs clearing up.

Gold is tangible because it's physical. Its properties are that it is hard to forge, it is scarce/finite and is extremely difficult to damage or destroy to its atomic structure.

Bitcoin (not cryptocurrencies) is finite. For this to change there would need to be a huge change to the protocol (by huge, the change is so absurd you may as well just choose a different coin) and for that you need consensus (not happening). I think it is about time people should understand that an asset doesn't have to be in a physical form. Every 10 minutes Bitcoin's blockchain gets one block longer, to do so requires an incredible amount of computing power. Each block in size it increases is a proof of a successful and trustless protocol that can make a transmission of value without a single person deciding if its "good" or not.

What do you mean that institutions rule the roost?

Yes sub $100 eth is more likely than $10k. I would take that bet too (who said that, can't find it).

Bitcoin has indeed done very well each time it has been tested at the 6k level, it goes without saying the more often it is tested and holds the more it says about what people think it is worth. I can offer some input regarding this. I actually now work for a bitcoin broker in the Netherlands and last month was the biggest drop in seller % and largest increase in buyers. That trend means a lot given that the hype has gone away. The hype will return just like it has done in 6 or 7 cycles previously. I feel very very bullish for BTC in the next few months and am very excited to see what happens. Maybe someone wants to take a friendly bet that BTC will break 10k before Dec 31st with me? We probably keep testing support but I feel pretty good about the worst case scenario being hovering around 6-7k for a while.

I do agree with the state of a lot of coins not reaching their ATH's for a long time, I would also disagree and say that a lot of them will never reach their ATH again, this is of course easy feel this way during such a bear market. The future is very unknown and I have never felt confident about the value of a lot of alts in terms of their dollar value, however, I don't believe that makes their value redundant.

I mean the price of Bitcoin is being manipulated by the institutions in the futures markets. It’s in their interests for the price to go much lower than it is today, so they can buy bitcoin at some stage in the future from panicked sellers.

Bitcoin is being compared to Gold in regards to the proposed ETFs, but in my opinion a large part of the upswing in the gold price was to do with it being a safe haven asset during the financial crisis. Bitcoin is anything but a safe haven asset.

A little contradictory no? Wasn't gold supposed to have been manipulated over the years? I don't deny in the belief that has happened with bitcoin too, I just don't know enough about this sort of behaviour.

What makes gold such a safe haven asset? (I already know the answers, I just want to hear it from you)

What makes Bitcoin anything but a safe haven asset?