Bitcoin hits 3-year peak, nears record high on U.S. ETF approval

Re:Bitcoin hits 3-year peak, nears record high on U.S. ETF a... by mrb on Thursday February 23, 2017 @02:04PM (#13716697)

"So maybe that drives a lot of this trading"

No data supports this. For some reason articles occasionally still make this claim, but no sources support this.

In fact I am aware of a study that reports the opposite: that Bitcoin commerce is no longer driven by "sin" activities but instead by legitimate enterprises: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers2.cfm?abstract_id=2808762

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Re:Bitcoin hits 3-year peak, nears record high on U.S. ETF a... by mathattack on Thursday February 23, 2017 @02:32PM (#13716942)

I've seen anecdotally a lot of use for cross-border payments. (Try wiring $500 to grandma, and see how many middlemen take a share)

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Re:Bitcoin hits 3-year peak, nears record high on U.S. ETF a... by Someone1234 on Thursday February 23, 2017 @03:09PM (#13717279)

I just use TransferWise. Works great.

I used to use Xoom but every six months when I'd go to do a transfer they'd need more security verification and it got tiresome. Although that was a few years ago, maybe it is better now.

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Re:Bitcoin hits 3-year peak, nears record high on U.S. ETF a... by digitalronin on Thursday February 23, 2017 @06:36PM (#13719009)

Services like TransferWise and Xoom are great, provided both parties have access to good banking services. But, a lot of the remittances market is people working in a foreign country sending money back home to people who may well be unbanked. Some of the startups targeting that market, using bitcoin as the transfer layer, are pretty interesting.

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Re:Bitcoin hits 3-year peak, nears record high on U.S. ETF a... by awa on Thursday February 23, 2017 @02:40PM (#13717025)

well, there are bunch of services which make it easy (e.g. xoom.com) and allow tracking of transactions and verification of transfers etc.

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Re:Bitcoin hits 3-year peak, nears record high on U.S. ETF a... by alanfalcon on Friday February 24, 2017 @12:38AM (#13721312)

Unrelated: I remember when xoom.com was an e-mail service provider with free web space back in 1999. Feels weird to see URLs recycled like this.

http://web.archive.org/web/19990508170650/http://www.xoom.co...

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Re:Bitcoin hits 3-year peak, nears record high on U.S. ETF a... by arturmakly on Thursday February 23, 2017 @03:04PM (#13717234)

xoom rocks this

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