Bitcoin is accepted in a lot of places that aren't illegal.
https://99bitcoins.com/who-accepts-b...take-bitcoins/
Anyway, I thought the electricity issue was more about mining than transferring sale data.
Bitcoin is accepted in a lot of places that aren't illegal.
https://99bitcoins.com/who-accepts-b...take-bitcoins/
Anyway, I thought the electricity issue was more about mining than transferring sale data.
Just because lots of places take it doesn't mean that there's any added utility over normal currencies. Given the current volatility, I would argue that there's less utility.
The mining is indeed what uses the extreme amount of electricity, but you can't entirely separate that from the transactions.
I was taking with a friend about it's viability in a market crash, it *could* be a safe hiding place for money in the right scenario, like 2008.
But I doubt it. Because when shit hits the fan, you want stability. A made up currency, which they all are, without any real standard or support, is useless.
There are some safeguard to a bitcoin crash, I think. From what I understand, you can't just "cash out" everything. There are limits (I think $50k/day, or some other time period).
I thought about getting into, in order to play online poker a while after it was outlawed in the US. I just didn't understand it enough, and didn't want to fall down some dark well or something.
Valve's reason for getting rid of it are kinda funny. Apparently transaction fee's and time are too big. And with it so volatile, when someone purchased something using bitcoin, by the time the transaction went through, the value was significantly different.
I think high-end car dealers and realators are taking bitcoin these days.
There was a Big Bang Theory episode last week about it all. They mentioned the price at $5,000. It doubled by the time the episode aired. Then doubled agains since!
As far as I'm aware, the two are intrinsically related.
Rocks. Invest in rocks.
A friend of mine posited that you could buy up a heap of BTC, wait 'til it triples, then sell it and buy gold. When the market eventually crashes, all the smart people will flee and go back to gold like they always do when market crashes happen and drive its price up. Win-win.
Yeah, the thing I read said that BTC transaction fees are up to $20 per transaction, they were about $0.20 when they started using it. It's wildly uneconomical for cheap items like games, plus its value would change like crazy while a transaction was taking place, leading to funding shortfalls during both sales and refunds.
I agree, I'm just saying it's not just for illegal activities.
In a way this reminds me of when the internet first came out and I had (mostly older) people talk to me about it as I ran a website company and they were afraid it was a lot of illegal activity going on. I think much of this is that it's a very complicated thing to understand, and not something we've really dealt with before.
Ripple is one to watch. It's having a bit of a spike right now.
It's interesting to me because some banks are experimenting with it.
So today would be a bit interesting to a lot of newbies who have just dived in.