yet another bitcoin thread - DANG, the price dropped
- Thread starter sennin436
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The blockchain has been unfathomably useful to the FBI in prosecuting Ross Ulbricht. That's why the price is plummeting. Everyone is realising the shit ain't anonymous by nature, further proving the main use of bitcoin is illegal transactions.
Who really wants their entire transaction history publicly visible? Imagine if the government suddenly said all transactions in USD are going to be publicly visible to anyone in the world... lol.
"Ironically, it would have been much easier to conceal these assets in the traditional financial system. Conventional money laundering is still an enormous headache for prosecutors, and subpoenaing the transaction records for an offshore bank is much harder than simply checking the blockchain."
The blockchain has been unfathomably useful to the FBI in prosecuting Ross Ulbricht. That's why the price is plummeting. Everyone is realising the shit ain't anonymous by nature, further proving the main use of bitcoin is illegal transactions.
Who really wants their entire transaction history publicly visible? Imagine if the government suddenly said all transactions in USD are going to be publicly visible to anyone in the world... lol.
"Ironically, it would have been much easier to conceal these assets in the traditional financial system. Conventional money laundering is still an enormous headache for prosecutors, and subpoenaing the transaction records for an offshore bank is much harder than simply checking the blockchain."
That may just be a reason to believe it will be adopted.
Pretty crazy how fast they're dropping. Still questioning weather to invest if they get any lower or not. Seems like every time a major site gets hack bitcoins plummet.
Yes and no.
The blockchain's incredible transparency has been an extreme selling point to the state and people who aren't anarchists and drug users for years now. Huge, industry-wide papers from HSBC, Chase, the IMF, and other top outlets in fact said that this feature was the best thing about bitcoin and they're frankly jealous of this feature in an electronic cash. All kinds of bankers around the world talk about this daily, both in awe and fear. Some buy under the table, some are deadset against buying because they know what it can do to their job.
Think of these stiffs as group #1.
Group #2 would be your underground market buyers. Drug users, illegal arms buyers, and other no-no-buyers that shop on the silk road. Bitcoin certainly owes them some gratitude for their early adoption, and I've personally got nothing against any of them, excepting only the kiddie pr0n producers. These guys are certainly the most effected by the news you are talking about.
However, group #3, the traders who are actually moving the market, do not correlate directly to either of the two groups above. They are closest to forex daytraders in demographics. Sure, they'll latch onto any bad news to see if that can grease the wheels a bit, but they don't give a shit if bitcoin has a transparent blockchain... They're just playing technicals and jumping on news that could be seen as negative.
You might not believe how many state-loving sheeple are arguing right now for the right of their governments to have easier access to their financial details. The Stockholm syndrome these days is incredible... Just look at how many people want Snowden dead or imprisoned.
That particular event has always been the trader's absolute favorite sell signal. It's ludicrous though, because news like BitStamp's hack should clearly be taken as a positive, not a negative... Bitstamp didn't lose a satoshi of its' customers' funds and is continuing operations normally a couple of days later. After losing that much money, you'd think it would obliterate them, but they covered everyone and said "nah, we're good; game on!"
That's a hugely bullish sign to me. I don't think bitcoin traders are particularly bright.
That's a reason to believe the regulators are going to allow it to be legal for the short to mid-term. It has nothing to do with adoption otherwise, and can't be seen as an incentive to adoption.
THESE are the incentives to adoption, and they are fucking legion:
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nOfHpOFhN8"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nOfHpOFhN8[/ame]
Given your hardcore libertarian leanings, how can you support a currency that allows the government (or the public) to see your entire transaction history? It sounds like something out of a new world order. How can you reconcile these two opposites?
They aren't opposites at all. What you're not getting yet is that Bitcoin is both the most transparent currency and the most anonymity-capable currency at once. It's anonymity agnostic, really.
Think about the nature of cash. Cash is very anonymous normally, because no one is writing down the serial numbers of the bills in your wallet.
Unless you are already under watch or just robbed a bank, it is highly likely that right now you can spend the dollars in your wallet to a drug dealer and the serial number on those bills will have no way of implicating you afterwards. Even If cops raid that dealer, the number doesn't identify you at all.
But the serial number does exist, much like the blockchain exists. Cops can use it to track the movement of your funds but they cannot use it to identify you. If and only if they identify you first, is it useful to them... So just be careful not to identify yourself when using bitcoin, and you'll be fine.
The libertine war is still winnable with the blockchain; people who know what they are doing can be as anonymous as they need to be.
Isn't BTC a prosecutor's dream? Let's say the government nails a drug producer and several dealers who buy from that producer with BTC. Then they discover all parties BTC addresses through raids and whatnot. Can't the prosecutor piece together every single transaction made between all parties, even transactions that occurred months or years before the investigation? If that's true, then cash would be much better in this scenario.
Extremely difficult, and even more difficult to prove in court.
Time will tell over the coming years though, but as far as I'm aware, not once has the blockchain been used as evidence in a criminal trial. If they went strictly off the blockchain, do you have any idea how many false arrests and raids the police would have on their hands?
Cops: "We tracked the blockchain to your address, then you sent funds to Bitstamp.net, and pulled them out to your bank account."
Guy: "Fuck you guys, that money was sent to me from a dice gambling site where I won!"
The govt can't tell the difference. They only know when you pull it out via an exchange, and even knowing that is tricky, unless they've convinced various exchanges to hand over all addresses they generate / use.
You have to think Bitcoin as a prototype which failed for various reason.
Whoever created bitcoin probably didn't intended this prototype to be used in a production environment but rather as an experiment.
You can conclude that bitcoin tech has a lot of fundamental flaws, such as the 7 transaction limit per second, the transaction verification time the impact of mining pool and the 51% factor, the fact that it's possible to trace back a transaction to it's original ip (10 to 60% success rate), the fact that adoption is close to 0 as companies like microsoft / dell / overstock and so on are not accepting bitcoin but usd through bitpay or other systems.
Also the actual number of bitcoin user is marginal after 7 years of service.
"The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007"
Compare those numbers with the adoption of bitcoin.
All of this show that the network is very prone to a large scale attack by government or else. If a government was willing to put a lot of efforts into disrupting bitcoin it would be possible.
The block chain concept is interesting but i think it's too late for mainstream user to be convinced as image of bitcoin is extremely negative in the media and seen as a speculative toy by most of people (try to do a survey around non tech savy people around you...). Bitcoin has failed 7 times already in 6 years but every failure add up in the eyes of a mainstream user more negativity.
In a perfect world bitcoin is a wonderful solution, unfortunately as the world is not perfect and mining and bitcoin in itself became a business / speculative toy for many, things didn't turn out the way the creator of bitcoin probably envisioned it.
Whoever created bitcoin probably didn't intended this prototype to be used in a production environment but rather as an experiment.
You can conclude that bitcoin tech has a lot of fundamental flaws, such as the 7 transaction limit per second, the transaction verification time the impact of mining pool and the 51% factor, the fact that it's possible to trace back a transaction to it's original ip (10 to 60% success rate), the fact that adoption is close to 0 as companies like microsoft / dell / overstock and so on are not accepting bitcoin but usd through bitpay or other systems.
Also the actual number of bitcoin user is marginal after 7 years of service.
"The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007"
Compare those numbers with the adoption of bitcoin.
All of this show that the network is very prone to a large scale attack by government or else. If a government was willing to put a lot of efforts into disrupting bitcoin it would be possible.
The block chain concept is interesting but i think it's too late for mainstream user to be convinced as image of bitcoin is extremely negative in the media and seen as a speculative toy by most of people (try to do a survey around non tech savy people around you...). Bitcoin has failed 7 times already in 6 years but every failure add up in the eyes of a mainstream user more negativity.
In a perfect world bitcoin is a wonderful solution, unfortunately as the world is not perfect and mining and bitcoin in itself became a business / speculative toy for many, things didn't turn out the way the creator of bitcoin probably envisioned it.
You made a very good point, it's theoretically possible to find the ip address from where is originating a bitcoin payment :
Researchers Trace Bitcoin Users' IP Addresses By Looking At Transactions
That's a huge difference though. Once I spend my dollars, the record of that transaction is gone forever. I don't have to worry about something coming out 5 years or 20 years down the road that will tie me to that transaction. No matter how secure you might think Bitcoin is now, you have to have confidence that it will never ever be breached, and that new technology won't appear that uncovers those transactions. With technological capabilities constantly increasing exponentially, that would be a foolish thing to assume.
I don't mean to shit on anybody's parade here, but illicit digital transactions will always have a way of coming back to bite you in the ass. So it's no surprise that the government is pushing us towards a cashless society.
It's a crock of shit. Don't listen to it. Reminds me of how US police raided some poor innocent guy in the past, because of the IP address blockchain.info showed. Again, crock of shit, and don't worry about it.
...If you have the IQ of potato.
Fortunately for you, your post is not important enough to be added to this list:
Bitcoin Obituaries: Following Bitcoin While It Dies & Goes Up in Price
I'd love to know, how exactly has it failed? After years, bitcoin is still humming along just fine, with thousands of transactions constantly being processed. Definitely some bumps in the road, but how exactly does that constitute a failure?
Want my prediction? Hard fork will happen sometime in the next 12 months, which will cause the price to plummet to about $30. After that, scalability will be in place, and over the next 24 months you'll see it truly take hold, and become an actual payment network.
The core devs aren't bumbling fools, and they know what the issues are. They also know the responsibility they have though. If you're starting up "MyKickAss" coin which has a market cap of $50, then yeah, making changes on your every whim is no big deal. Bitcoin is currently a global payment network that processes millions every day though, so making changes is more difficult than fixing a bug in some Wordpress plugin, for example. It's quite a bit more complex than that.
There's no way crypto currency is disappearing, and there's no way bitcoin is getting replaced. Do you think companies like Dell, Microsoft, Expedia, Newegg and others will even look at a new crypto currency until if & when bitcoin proves itself? Of course not. They're already taking a risk by accepting bitcoin, so there's no way we're going to start seeing press releases from them saying, "we now accept 'MyKickAss' coin".
If Gavin Anderson gets his wish of a hard fork, that's probably exactly what will happen. It's like pushing reset on the entire eco-system.
Thing is, I think adoption is widespread enough to actually pull it off. I know we'd be on board, and would immediately make the necessary changes to conform to the new protocol, so we could continue humming along accepting BTC. And I'm sure the same goes for a good chunk of bitcoin based companies.
And I wouldn't be surprised if a hard fork happens sometime in the future, because well, we don't really have a choice. Either we stay with the current technical limitations, or do a hard fork, and get better scalability in place. I'm assuming the latter is going to happen.