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Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency
- selectodude 8y agoWall Street will trade anything they can make money on. Better to make money on transactions than trying to win the ponzi scheme.
- ethbro 8y agoAnd if it's an unregulated market, then they'll trade even more money.
- twblalock 8y agoIt won't remain unregulated for long if the banks get in on it, or if a large percentage of the public starts using it. After one or two bad examples on the TV news of banks screwing people with crypto or a major exchange hack that affects average Americans, you can be sure regulation will be coming soon.
- bcheung 8y agoThe U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission ruled that cryptocurrency is a commodity (not a currency). As such, all laws regarding commodities apply. So it isn't unregulated. The grey area will be where in the use cases where it IS used as a currency. Since it is technically not a currency, is it not subject to currency laws?
- bsenftner 8y agoWall Street will trade anything people will speculate. Regardless of its merit or value, it's the transaction that generates their revenues. They care not what is being traded.
- conanbatt 8y ago"And I think the people who are professional traders that go into trading cryptocurrencies, it’s just disgusting. It’s like somebody else is trading turds and you decide, ‘I can’t be left out.'” - Charlie Munger
- r32a_ 8y agoHow are people surprised by this? If Cryptocurrencies become huge, these banks will just buy up crypto companies and also point their resources at building cryptocurrency applications. They are in the business of making money. If they can make money in crypto then they will do it.
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- lrl939ndj 8y agoDollars aren’t virtual? They only hold value cause we believe they do. We make up however many we need. More “name on a piece of paper means I win!” nonsense Humans are bizarre
- hudon 8y agoThis seems like good news for speculators (disclosure: I still hold Bitcoin and worked at a Bitcoin exchange). Having said that, "Wall Street" should be wary of enabling the use of a system that is using more electricity than the country of Switzerland [0] without any productive output. The energy consumption is rapidly rising too. Furthermore, Bitcoin's transaction throughput is dismally low compared to existing payment systems (Visa, PayPal, etc.) and "smart contract" systems like Ethereum seems to still not show any productive output aside from scams and severe bugs in wallets and contracts that lose millions of dollars. I'm all for "wait and see", but have we ever done that with a technology that is literally using more electricity than a medium sized nation? When are we going to ask crypto-fans to be accountable for the burned energy? We're asking Google and Facebook to treat our data fairly, can we ask proof-of-work miners to treat our planet fairly? At least wait until the blockchain can solve a real world problem before burning through the mines? [0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
- hndamien 8y agoYou are focusing on the wrong thing. Energy production is the issue, not energy use. There is an equilibrium to be found in the free market based on the value of BTC that is provided and the economic expenditure to mine it with the cost of electricity used to get there. Oh wait! I found the link in the causal economic chain! We don't put a price on carbon! Put your energy into yelling there and not at yelling at Bitcoin. Maybe Bitcoin will help shed a light on this overtly obvious problem.
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- almostApatriot1 8y agoChinese miners and other state subsidized miners will mine bitcoin at a loss to push out the competition and gain marketshare. An obvious problem, sure, but no easy solution.
- hudon 8y agoNations and corporations already compete at finding means of cheap or sustainable energy production. How does Bitcoin provide an efficiency here? Furthermore, if we can't find a stable use case for the blockchain and there are no more greater fools investing--the bubble collapses and all the ASICs end up in landfills--does society suddenly stop innovating in energy production? Can you point me to any good literature on this? I don't understand the point.
- jorblumesea 8y agoTranslation: we see a sucker born every minute, and we have decided Bitcoin has enough to justify our involvement.
- Proven 8y agoWhy not - it’s regulated, so it can be manipulated. And the sheeple is already in the casino waiting to be sheered.
- thisisit 8y agoI wonder how does the cryptocurrency community react to such news? Because lot of people holding cryptocurrencies tend to talk about how these coins are going to destroy big banks and Wall Street.
- kalms 8y agoI think the community is fine with it, if not outright wishing for it. Institutional money can add a big boost to crypto, although it in turn provides amble opportunity to control the market. Which they're probably already doing to some extent. We'll see how it plays out, but I'm pinning my hopes on tokens and networks provided by Ethereum, EOS or similar.
- tobiaswk 8y agoIn all fairness the Bitcoin, BTC, is currently close to unusable and scales very bad. It quickly gets oversaturated with transaction and transaction fees rise quick. I think the conspiracy has come full circle. Those who slowly "threw sand in its engine" has done a great job. Why are transaction fees low today? Because no one, or a lot less, is using BTC. I know some will label me as a conspiracist. I've been following this project since early 2011 and it has derailed badly. The community is a toxic mess. On both sides to some extent. I'm interested in how they will do this trading. Off-chain or on-chain. Bitcoin Cash, BCH, though is very interesting. It conforms to the original idea (whitepaper) much better in my opnion. No second layer nonsense "solutions". A simple block size limit increase (again) and enablement of Op-Codes (again). All coming 15th of May. The very reason to why Ethereum was created by Vitalik was because Op-Codes usage was too limited on BTC. This changes with BCH; Op-Codes will be back and open for smart contracts. Lots of merchants and people are beginning to use BCH. Because it is fast (0-conf works again) and has close to zero transaction fees. It's the project I began following early 2011.
- lrvick 8y agoBitcoin fees were cut in half on a technical level by those that chose to adopt segwit which made transactions roughly half as big. Schnoor signatures can further compress transactions to get even more in a block. If in spite of these innovations blocks end up full, a block size increase is still a tool kept in reserve. In reality BCH did not make any hard won technical innovations and simply reached for the bigger blocks knob. If BCH did become the globally adopted winner its blocks would fill and create a fee market eventually too driving it to seek the same sorts of transaction size optimizations bitcoin has made. These roads might well converge in a similar place eventually. I strongly suspect Layer 2 solutions are going to be needed regardless of the knobs fiddled on an expensive but immutable Layer 1 so we might as well all buckle up for that. Plus, atomic swaps in Lightning pave the way for decentralized exchanges which means even better anonymization and censorship resistance. Everyone wins with a stable Layer 2 most major coins are compatible with.
- tobiaswk 8y agoThat's my point. BCH did not include some technical innovations like you stated. It simply increased hardcoded block size limit. Simple as that. Even Satoshi himself mentions this in his whitepaper. Other stuff has also changed. The difficulty adjustment (DAA) algorithm has changed to allow are more stable difficulty for miners. Segwit just changed what parts of a transaction counted as size in a block. In reality we're talking about 200KB or thereabouts extra space in blocks. Lightning network is based on a mesh-network. Furthermore it completely changes the bitcoins fundamental clockwork. Suddenly you can't receive payments if you don't hold any coins yourself. Even more detrimental; you can't receive payments if you are not online on the lightning network. It has several other flaws that are very hard to fix; https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800 https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-.... I suggest you see this presentation on 1GB blocks (tested on test-net) by Peter Rizun; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2ep3X_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2ep3X_M And his talk at "Satoshi's Vision" (here he talks about what is called "weak blocks" and how it can improve scaling and wasted PoW; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXFuNkaYcPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXFuNkaYcPQ It's totally feasible and does not require super computers albeit a Raspberry Pi won't do no more. Scaling to VISA level of transactions is possible. I don't think it's really going to change too much in computing power with bigger blocks. The size of the merkle root won't change just because blocks are larger which means the block header size won't change. Why do you suspect a second-layer is needed?
- blackrock 8y agoHow do you guys buy your Bitcoin? What exchange do you use? Do you use Coinbase? Or do you have an offline wallet?
- sparkie 8y agoYou should always have your own local wallet, and if you use an exchange, you should immediately transfer your funds to your local wallet once you buy them. In terms of exchanges, there are many alternatives to Coinbase which you should look into. Coinbase has some sketchy history like insider trading, blocking Wikileaks without giving reasonable explanation, several times they've turned off their markets when conditions aren't favorable to them (sudden price drops). They're also not able to keep up with the technology as they've lagged way behind many of the other exchanges when it comes to implementing technical updates like segwit, bech32 addresses, transaction batching. God only knows how long it will take them (if ever) to be ready for the Lightning Network.
- udfalkso 8y agoThis is not necessarily good advice. If someone only wants to buy, say, $100 worth of bitcoin just to get their foot in the door and they don't put in the time to research how to keep their local wallet secure and make sure their computer/phone has not been hacked, they're very likely better off keeping that small amount of bitcoin with a service like Coinbase (and set up 2fa!) Of course if you play with bigger amounts, and you take the time to educate yourself further about taking custody of your own funds, then I completely agree with what you've said.
- blackrock 8y agoAny recommendations other than Coinbase?
- sparkie 8y agoDepends where you are. I use Coinfloor (UK). I've heard good (and nothing bad) about Gemini for US. I also used Kraken in the past but now I actively avoid any exchange which deals in Tether, as they've repeatedly failed to produce an audit to show that the money actually exists.
- Havoc 8y agoThey'd trade pet rocks if they thought there was enough of a market in it. Market makers win in the same way as the house always win. Call me again when they have actual direct exposure to BTC fluctuations.
- AKifer 8y agoFunny to see that despite all the negative voices against bitcoin, these people still advance theirs pawns and play the game. I seriously think that there's a perverse move behind the walls to instill fear to the commoners towards the cryptocurrencies though the media; until all the pie is eaten. Then in a matter of days they will flip all these negative opinions and show bitcoin as the new messiah on earth.