Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

Re:Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month by buttershakes on Monday July 17, 2017 @04:05PM (#14791883)

Well i consider trading a very valid use case, as well as simple peer to peer payment for all goods and services. How much transactional volume is Bitpay doing? 800,0000 isn't a big number, and certainly it will only represent a small portion of the payment volume if Bitcoin went anywhere near main stream. It's also pretty evident that Bitcoin may be censorship resistant but it isn't anonymous or fully fungible, makes it a pretty terrible currency for dark market usage going forward.

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Re:Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month by hudon on Monday July 17, 2017 @04:43PM (#14792113)

If you can show me that bitpay processes around the same amount as dark markets, I will re-assess my position...

As for anonymity and fungibility: I believe tumbling services are good enough today, which is why buying on a dark market works. However, it is not perfect and this is why projects like Monero, ZCash, MimbleWimble, TumbleBit and Xim are important.

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Re:Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month by buttershakes on Monday July 17, 2017 @05:06PM (#14792276)

https://qz.com/931810/cheapair-and-bitpay-data-show-rising-b...

This isn't the most accurate thing, but looks to me like several millions USD worth of volume just in Bitpay. That doesn't account for all of the other payment processors, or the peer to peer payments, or the exchange trading, etc. I'm not saying dark markets aren't an early driver of Bitcoin, but it's not where the majority of the action is now at all.

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Re:Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month by hudon on Monday July 17, 2017 @05:20PM (#14792353)

"peer to peer" payments don't require a blockchain: see Venmo, Square Cash, Facebook Messenger, PayPal, TransferWise, Uber (paying the driver), etc.

Exchange trading is not really using bitcoin, it is buying/selling bitcoin. This is like saying buying a car is an application of cars...

Having said that, Bitpay is processing more than I thought. The data in that article would mean it's about $5M per day... I'd love to see a breakdown of this to figure out why people are spending bitcoin for everyday things if it'd be better for them to just use a credit card (to get rewards, to not have to hold a volatile currency, for consumer protection, for faster payments, etc.)

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Re:Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month by aianus on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @12:11AM (#14794216)

If you buy stuff via bitpay with your hugely appreciated bitcoin you probably have a good shot of successfully evading the taxman. I bet that's what a lot of that traffic is.

That and you can buy cash-like goods like gold bars which would be prohibitively expensive or impossible to purchase via credit card.

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Re:Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month by buttershakes on Monday July 17, 2017 @06:03PM (#14792642)

Well, that's a narrow definition of P2P. All of those are centrally cleared systems vs a decentralized one. Buying a car is an application of money. The killer app for Bitcoin is better money, that's the vision I subscribe to and the one I would like to see proliferate.

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Re:Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month by andirk on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @09:37PM (#14801509)

I agree; I am here to see something become similarly as powerful as the almighty dollar, and I have faith that Bitcoin or another altcoin will.

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Re:Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month by tkxxx7 on Monday July 17, 2017 @06:49PM (#14792922)

I'm sure a lot of those dark market coins are going through BitPay.

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