[lambuhere1]

Originally Posted by ragh_bhushan

What currency or assets can be used to finance illegitimate activities?

A better way to put it is this: It stands to reason that covering up a crime is itself a crime, but should it be a crime to obscure activity that is not itself illegal or harmful, simply because doing so inconveniences law enforcement?

[sushantr5]

Just posting comparison of graph which was posted earlier in teambhp and current trend of bitcoin pricing. It looks so much similar somehow

[alpha1]

Oh, has it already tanked so much so suddenly?
What are the reasons?

Originally Posted by Rachit.K.Dogra

As most people, I did some reading around this topic as well. My colleague got very pumped up and started following this concept a lot and eventually I took interest as well.

However, there one thing which I am not able to understand. What complex problems are miners solving to mine a coin? What are these huge complex problems that need so much processing power? Who comes up with these problems? Are these problems of any significance to common man? Like maybe feather forecasting calculations?

Rachit

Hahahaha.
The problems that are being solved are abstract mathematical problems.
Something similar: what are all the prime factors of

82357643598745673465876459723847140988628736576148 81097793567823658745763457982734870812923886235768 92745877136348782759872484589183498209057984757689 34798627562737587245878457845798347589634876283756 78665635487704850998996457789244573568987976982745 79639756783743058093860735986787348598776716485708 35686787346576876773856776124875687398657983768768 76457677369898137465816685687437689347632645651263 57553641734618723376125755713476

[ragh_bhushan]

Quoting reddit here:

Bitcoin has spectacularly 'died' several times

📉 - 94% June-November 2011 from $32 to $2 because of MtGox hack

📉 - 36% June 2012 from $7 to $4 Linod hack

📉 - 79% April 2013 from $266 to $54. MTGox stopped trading

📉 - 87% from $1166 to $170 November 2013 to January 2015

📉 - 49% Feb 2014 MTGox tanks

📉 - 40% September 2017 from $5000 to $2972 China ban

📉 - 55% January 2018 Bitcoin ban FUD. from $19000 to 8500

I've held through all the crashes. Who's laughing now? Not the panic sellers.

Market is all about moving money from impatient to the patient. You see crash, I see opportunity.

You - OMG Bitcoin is crashing, I gotta sell!

Me - OMG Bitcoin is criminally undervalued, I gotta buy!

N.B. Word to the wise for new investors. What I've learned over 7 years is that whenever it crashes spectacularly, the bounce is twice as impactful and record-setting. I can't predict the bottom but I can assure you that it WILL hit 19k and go further beyond, as hard as it may be for a lot of folks to believe right at this moment if you haven't been through it before.

When Bitcoin was at ATH little over a month ago, people were saying, 'it's too pricey now, I can't buy'.

Well, here's your chance at almost 60% discount!

With growing main net adoption of LN, Bitcoin underlying value is greater than it was when it was valued 19k.

Bitcoin is trading at $9,052 at the time of writing this after having plummeted to $7,600 4 hours ago. (More than 60% from the high)

[joe1980]

Originally Posted by Rachit.K.Dogra

However, there one thing which I am not able to understand. What complex problems are miners solving to mine a coin? What are these huge complex problems that need so much processing power? Who comes up with these problems? Are these problems of any significance to common man? Like maybe feather forecasting calculations?

Rachit

When I tried to understand the machinery behind Blockchain, I wanted to try that by myself. So here is a short documentation in a very simplistic way that explains the problem the miners are trying to solve:

https://github.com/joesan/blockchain...ster/README.md

[SmartCat]

Originally Posted by ragh_bhushan

Quoting reddit here: Bitcoin has spectacularly 'died' several times. Bitcoin is trading at $9,052 at the time of writing this after having plummeted to $7,600 4 hours ago. (More than 60% from the high)

A couple of key differences this time:

1) Previously, price discovery was based on buy/sell actions of only a small bunch of enthusiasts. But now, Institutional traders and get-rich-quick crowd are involved. Enthusiasts don't have that much control over the price.

2) Futures trading has been allowed. This gives speculators an opportunity to go short and make money. That is, if a particular group of traders have a short position, it's in their interest to somehow (price manipulation) ensure that prices trend downwards.

[SmartCat]

Originally Posted by ragh_bhushan

I agree with you that gold can be used as currency if required. So what is Bitcoin really? Digital gold perhaps?

Bitcoin supporters might find this 75 minute documentary on cryptocurrencies very interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF362xxcfdk

The host owns a gold & silver sales business.

[Samurai]

Jordan Belfort, on whom the movie Wolf of Wallstreet was made, says botcoin will crash soon. I guess we can all agree he knows a thing or two about trading and manipulation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks-4gRZmcRE

I was curious who was this woman he referred to as the creator of notorious Credit Default Swaps. Turns out it is Blythe Masters, just noticed she is one day younger than me.

Now she is bullish on blockchain.

[V.Narayan]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Jordan Belfort, on whom the movie Wolf of Wallstreet was made, says botcoin will crash soon. I guess we can all agree he knows a thing or two about trading and manipulation.

Thanks for this one. I am sending it to the young ones in my family who really need to know this. The best thing he said is that bitcoin was meant to be a currency and has actually become a horde of wealth and is almost not being used as a currency at all. In my view (no economics here) it ends up being neither. The second was that the day it goes bust the price will go straight from a 5 figure price to a 3 figure one to a 1 figure price.

[ragh_bhushan]

Interesting analysis / comparison between Bitcoin and Dotcom bubble.





Source

[vamsi.kona]

Dogecoin, a Cryptocurrency joke that turned real

A really interesting read on how majority people in the Crypto currency space are behaving, conflating the technology with the product itself. A few excerpts that make a lot of sense

This is the story of Dogecoin a Crypto currency made for fun but turned too serious.
This is how it started

At the peak of the meme's popularity near the tail end of 2013, Palmer, an Australian marketer for one of the world's largest tech companies, made a joke combining two of the internet's most talked-about topics: cryptocurrency and Doge. It was a joke taking aim at the bizarre world of crypto and bitcoin's multiple derivatives.

"Investing in Dogecoin," Palmer tweeted, "pretty sure it's the next big thing."

The tweet got a lot of attention.

For laughs, Palmer decided to keep the joke going. He bought the Dogecoin.com domain and uploaded a photoshopped Shibe on a coin.

Markus was an IBM engineer obsessed with gaming and he created a Crypto currency 'Bell' for fun. And importantly he created a Crypto currency just over a weekend.

He decided to take a weekend and do something weird. He tried to create his own cryptocurrency for "sillies," as he put it.

Bells wasn't meant to be serious, it was a digital currency based on a video game about animals who live in a village and go fishing together.

The cryptocurrency community didn't really get the joke.

"People were just trashing it," laughs Markus, who quickly discovered there was very little crossover between crypto-obsessives and gamers.

"I was like alright, I retire," says Markus. "I don't need to do this anymore."

And then Markus saw Palmers funny tweet about Dogecoin and decided to join the fun.

"Dogecoin," says Markus, "from 'that seems like it's funny' to actually doing it, took about three hours. It's almost trivial to create a new cryptocurrency."

It was a find-and-replace job.

Ctrl+F 'Bitcoin,' replace with 'Dogecoin.'

Markus freely admits to finding large chunks of bitcoin's source code completely incomprehensible, but knew enough to change a few core elements for Dogecoin. For example, Markus created 100 billion dogecoins (as opposed to bitcoin's 21 million) and made them easier to mine. (Dogecoin is already close to being mined out, while bitcoin's final coin will be mined in 2140.)

He changed the font (to comic sans of course) and changed every mention of the word 'mine' to 'dig' (because dogs don't mine, they dig...).

And then, during his lunch break, Markus set Dogecoin live.

But Markus and Palmer didn't premine any Dogecoin. Because they weren't serious about launching a cryptocurrency.

"We thought it was this big joke that would die off," laughs Palmer.

And according to Markus, Palmer wasn't even sure how to mine a cryptocurrency.

And then the frenzy starts

Reddit was almost certainly the main driver in Dogecoin's rapid rise to crypto stardom. The Dogecoin subreddit exploded almost immediately, and with that explosion came the infrastructure any cryptocurrency needs if it is to become successful: mining pools, services.

"It was moving at light speed," explains Markus. "Within minutes we were like, 'Wow, this is way out of our control."

But it was the Reddit "tipping bot" that drove Dogecoin into the stratosphere.

If a user posted something to the effect of, "hey 'dogebot' tip this person five dogecoin," that Reddit user would automatically receive five Dogecoin.

Both Palmer and Markus still used the popularity of Dogecoin for charity purposes and donated all their coins for different charities in Kenya etc. But that spirit was losing ground

"We wanted to create something that was a force for good," explains Palmer.

But as the community grew, the initial spirit in which Dogecoin was launched was difficult to preserve. People started to care about the price of Dogecoin. They were literally and figuratively invested in it.

And that terrified Markus.

"I don't mind if someone spends ten bucks and gets some Dogecoin," says Markus. "It's like buying a movie ticket or something, that's fun.

"But when someone puts $20,000 in? That makes me really, really uncomfortable."

Markus began clashing with members of the community. For him, Dogecoin was still crypto "for sillies," but here it was ballooning into a currency people were trading for real money. In his view Dogecoin was a silly thing that should remain silly. Many in the community disagreed.

At one point Dogecoin's market cap reached $2 Billion and right now it is around $770 Mln. $770 Million market cap for a Crypto currency created in 3 hours by some one for fun . The most important bit is the quote by Markus "It's almost trivial to create a new cryptocurrency."

[lambuhere1]

Be careful. Two Indian Exchanges Closing.

Govt websites mining Crypto. If possible, transfer all your coins to hardware wallets ASAP

Source :

https://cointelegraph.com/news/india...ernment-stance

Crypto exchanges BTCXIndia and ETHEXIndia have informed their customers via email that they are stopping trading activities, citing the “stress” on their business caused by governmental actions discouraging crypto, local Indian news outlet the Economic Times reported yesterday, Feb. 28

https://ambcrypto.com/monero-xmr-new...mining-monero/


On Friday a Twitter user, Shadma Shaikh tweeted claiming the official website of the Union Minister for Law and Justice, Ravi Shankar Prasad’s official website was mining Cryptocurrency using Coinhive which is based on javascript.

[SmartCat]

The guy behind this ICO fires straight. He managed to collect around $210,000
https://uetoken.com/

[Samurai]

Finally, John Oliver weighs in:

That Bitconnect investor was either an evangelist or an Amway diamond member before he got into crypto.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg

[shifu]

Originally Posted by Samurai

I was curious who was this woman he referred to as the creator of notorious Credit Default Swaps. Turns out it is Blythe Masters, just noticed she is one day younger than me.

Now she is bullish on blockchain.

She is now the CEO of Digital Assets Holdings (DAH). Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) has tied up with DAH to replace its clearing and settlement technology with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT = blockchain).

Link

This is kind of revolutionary, unlike BitCoin and other cryptocurrency.