Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[jaffer]

This has been done before https://www.casascius.com the government did crack down on the business accusing him of money laundering.

Denarium sells physical coins:

https://denarium.com/

There does not seem to be any legal problems in Finland.

 

[molecular]

@AdrianX
At the same time casascius coins were popular. At first I thought it was because people tend to like physical transfer for in person transactions, but casascius coins were not used much for in person transactions, instead they were mostly used for long term storage. So its not entirely clear to me why they were popular.

They were never really used as money. Maybe by some for storage.

Mainly people love(d) them because they look so damn cool. Collectors items. I used them as conversation starters first to spread the word about bitcoin, giving them away as presents (had 30, now down to 2). Making bitcoin touchable, so to say. You should've seen the faces... "so this is a bitcoin wallet". "whuuuuut?!" . Later I traded them, sending them all over the world (side-story: since postal service only allows to insure letters for the value of the goods at the time of SENDING, you'd have to actually buy a bunch of bitcoin put options (it can take up to 3 months until postal service admits the letter is lost and you can claim insurance) or something. This bit me in the ass when a letter to the states with 3 1 BTC coins got lost. It was sent when BTC was at ~$15 and declared lost by postal service when BTC was at around $180. So I got ~$45 from the insurer and had to cough up 3.x BTC to make the customer whole. Ate pretty much all my profit at that point. Now I know: being an online retailer has its problems).

Oh, this reminds me... this beauty was assembled for kickoff of an auction site (dutch style) that never happened. So this is "left over" from those times. Just so you guys know this exists, so if anyone has use for something really special to do something cool with at some point in the future, get in touch:

zoom in to read which coin types are in there (sorry for the mediocre photo quality, plan was to make good ones). Comes complete with scans of the fronts and backs of the coins, the hashes of which have been inserted into the blockchain in 2013 as a proof of existence.

 

[awemany]

I had similar thoughts yesterday. Ended up thinking we should just hardfork and then we'd see.

Just a random idea here: Maybe nodes could collect persistent but summarized stats for each link to each peer and count the number of incoming/outgoing invs? And then have a way to query these statistics remotely? This would allow to somewhat, statistically distinguish nodes that are actively relaying transactions from those that are just sitting in the network.

There might be a privacy angle here, and it might be a bad idea due to that, on the other hand I am talking about summaries and not tracebacks for individual transactions.

 

[yrral86]

I felt so stupid when bitcoin hit $1000. I also thought these coins would be a collectable but I realized the price I paid will always be double the face value. If bitcoin hit $10,000 I would have paid $20,000 for a coin that would most likely be worth $12,000 even then in fiat that's a 10,000% return but I paid in bitcoin not fiat so it represents a loss to me.

I realised the better investment would be to just hold the bitcoin as it's going to be more valuable than the collection value of the coin.

If they are series 1, I wouldn't worry too much about that. The last one I sold went for 3 BTC.

 

[Norway]

The EU-Parliament's Public Hearing on Virtual (lol) Currencies, starting in 36 minutes:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ep-live/en/committees/video?event=20160125-1500-COMMITTEE-ECON

 

[Melbustus]

I felt so stupid when bitcoin hit $1000. I also thought these coins would be a collectable but I realized the price I paid will always be double the face value. If bitcoin hit $10,000 I would have paid $20,000 for a coin that would most likely be worth $12,000 even then in fiat that's a 10,000% return but I paid in bitcoin not fiat so it represents a loss to me.

I realised the better investment would be to just hold the bitcoin as it's going to be more valuable than the collection value of the coin.

I'm of two minds about Casascius coins. It's probably true that the more common ones will not have a huge btc-denominated premium. But I'm not so sure about the rare ones. Coin collecting is about the combination of history & rarity more than anything, and the rare Casascius coins embody bitcoin extremely well. From their beginnings as a proof-of-concept and intended use as a "conversation-starter" to get the word out about Bitcoin, to Mike getting shutdown due to ridiculous US Federal gov overreach, they track Bitcoin's early years well. A story like that - especially when the pieces themselves are beautiful and rare - is the stuff highly-sought-after numismatic pieces are made of.

You can find many many examples of bullion coins (which btc physical coins approximate) where the coin trades at a fiat-denominated price that's many multiples of its bullion value (even well into 6 figures (with a few into 7)) - and they do so because they're both sufficiently rare, and have some special story behind them. If bitcoin is a longterm success, the best Casascius issues may enjoy similar status.

 

[Norway]

No Chinese nodes has upgraded to Satoshi:0.12.0.
https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/?q=/Satoshi:0.12.0/

 

[cypherdoc]

@Norway

we're still just on the release version

 

[Norway]

Hmm, that's true. RC2...

 

[cypherdoc]

so good:

 

[VeritasSapere]

Not for me lol. Yeah its good. Hope the price gets bumped up again so I can keep my mining operation going. Have been hearing rumors about Bitfury selling their chips to the public, if they start doing that I will probably buy into the next generation then.

I have already ROI'd btw, but you know like a good miner I am motivated by my greed for the good of the network.

 

[cypherdoc]

@VeritasSapere

yeah, if BF goes back to selling miners to the public, that will help in pulling mkt share away from China and help further decentralize the p2p network. that's a good thing.

 

[cypherdoc]

 

[Roger_Murdock]

I guess this should have been obvious, but I was just thinking about how things play out if the small-blockers really try to play hardball and maintain their 1-MB / MicroBitcoin chain as a viable alt / spinoff in the event of a successful hard fork to raise the block size limit. Now again, I'm sort of skeptical that the losing chain will even remain viable long enough to get to the point where there's a market for it on the exchanges. But let's assume it does. There are a number of old-timers with very strong hands who collectively hold millions of Bitcoins. I'm assuming that most of these guys, in order to have adopted as early as they did, and to have held on as long as they have, really grok Bitcoin. And I'm guessing that their confidence in minority hash-power MicroBitcoin might not be quite as high as their confidence in the real thing. The dumping could be truly epic. Heck, maybe we'll see Satoshi's stash move as he heads for the exits on the MicroBitcoin side. (After all, his writings make it pretty clear where he comes down on the scaling question.) Unlikely of course, but kind of fun to imagine.

The only thing bothering me about this scenario is my Casascius coin. Will it be worth it to redeem it for the purposes of dumping those MicroBitcoins?

 

[tynwald]

Surely there would be minuscule amount of hashing available for the new BlockstreamCoin, compared to Bitcoin. Plus no place to buy or sell new coins.

All the existing ASIC capacity would move to Classic or BU or XT, rather than lose 100% of invested money. All exchanges would support largest hash rate, as would payment processors, wallets and merchants.

I hope Maxwell & Co do try the nuclear option, it would be the absolute end of Core and Blockstream IMO.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

@tynwald

Oh, I agree completely. But they might be able to keep something shambling along for a little bit with a PoW change and sheer force of will. It would just have all of the economic relevance of 42Coin.

 

[cypherdoc]

@theZerg

didn't we @rocks have a discussion during the summer where you said that it wasn't possible to tell how long it would take to validate a block ahead of time? IOW, a full node would have to go thru all the sigops, etc to only find out after the fact that it takes a long time?

 

[rocks]

@tynwald

Oh, I agree completely. But they might be able to keep something shambling along for a little bit with a PoW change and sheer force of will. It would just have all of the economic relevance of 42Coin.

For a long time alt coins were my biggest fear regarding the project, and in late 2013 it looked as if some might be gaining traction.

We all believed in and trusted that network effects would allow only one cryptocurrency to have value and keep any altcoin from gaining traction. And in the end network effects worked and no altcoin has come close to Bitcoin's value or reach.

It will be the same with the fork. Network effects will move one branch to take over and the other to be valued no more than altcoins are. It is a binary outcome, we will not see two branches maintain value, only one will. Sure core can change the 1MB chain to keep it running for years, but no one will care or use it.

 

[Erdogan]

No Chinese nodes has upgraded to Satoshi:0.12.0.
https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/?q=/Satoshi:0.12.0/

Shit, that was many nodes.

 

[yrral86]

@theZerg

didn't we @rocks have a discussion during the summer where you said that it wasn't possible to tell how long it would take to validate a block ahead of time? IOW, a full node would have to go thru all the sigops, etc to only find out after the fact that it takes a long time?

You can guess and you can try it and abort if it takes too long. But you are correct that you can't determine runtime ahead of time for all but very simple scripts.