Bitcoins?

[anonymous-user]

p1stonhead said:

dimots said:

Efbe said:

I really do have to disagree with the security side of things.

Whilst I do have various coins and have traded for a while with successes and losses, I am not blind to quite how dangerous "bitcoin" is.

1)The most unsecure part of the process is buying in. You hand over money in the trust that either a third party (i.e. bittylicious) or a seller will give you the bitcoin.
2)To convert your BTC to another Coin, you again need to trust that either an exchange will not run off with your money, be hacked, or the company you are buying the coin from is legit.
3)Transferring coins is blind, all you have is an address to send it to, no way of verifying you have pasted in the right one.
4)For small amounts of money, the fees for taking your money out of an exchange are way too high(cashing out even more so), so mean you end up leaving it in there.
5) To secure your bitcoin requires A LOT of knowledge. You can't trust any website you read as so many are trying to scam you, and most of the secure options are too expensive for most people.

Whilst I love the idea of bitcoin, It has big issues that will prevent it becoming really mainstream.

I left some odds and sods amounting to roughly £200 in an exchange back in 2008ish. The exchange owner walked off with all of it. My fault for not moving to my own wallets, but split across 4/5 coins the fees would have been too high so I left it in.

1) You can mine it yourself if you don't want to buy it. Buying is not particularly risky at all. You can use cash at an ATM or do it online. Third party transactions for anything of value carry 'some' risk. Try buying gold online...same thing.

2) Currency exchange online carries some risk if you do it through a third party...what does this have to do with bitcoin security?

3) It is not blind, you have a totally unique address to send it to.

4) What does this have to do with bitcoin security?

5) Securing your bitcoins takes a little bit of effort to understand, but I refer to my previous point - if you had to try and secure £10,000,000 of gold or cash under your own steam you would find it a lot more difficult and more expensive than securing £10,000,000 of bitcoin.

1) I thought mining was effectively dead now unless you have 10,000 gpus running?
2) What percentage of Bitcoin transactions do not go through an exchange of some sort? I assumed a majority did?
3) True.
4) Its just a negative that will hinder it being take up mainstream.
5) How about pocket money amounts or a few grand which is what most people will be using if this is to take off? Will people really be willing to spend the time taking them offline etc if they then have to get it all back online tomorrow to buy their tesco shop? Again just another hinderance which may stop it taking off.

Note - by taking off, I mean it being used as an actual currency rather than a store of wealth.

Just listen to yourselves... 99.9% of the population would read that and not have a clue what you're on about. I know, I know in 40 years all us stupid old people will die off and be replaced by tech savvy kids who will all just know how to run their own nodes and navigate all the scams to keep their vast wealth safe from the clutches of governments... or b) very few people care about payment systems or encryption and most of those who do probably aren't as smart as the scammers...

[anonymous-user]

I wonder what % of current btc users really understand how it all works and how to eliminate the vulnerabilities of transacting in the real world, particularly between btc and 'real' currency. I know enough to know that I don't know enough to do it safely. Given the number of scams and losses I assume many btc users don't have a clue either?

[jammy-git]

p1stonhead said:

Trolleys Thank You said:

p1stonhead said:

This is my exact point - an offline bitcoin store (correct me if I am wrong) literally contains your money hence people sifting through the tip to find old hard drives containing millions of quid.

Strictly speaking, no. A wallet never contains any coins. A wallet simply holds your cryptographic private key so you are able to spend your coins which are on the blockchain. The further away you keep those keys from the internet or other people, the more secure they are.

Ok, so sort of the same, if you lose the password you still lose the money?

Techincally different but realistically no difference.

Not quite. No one who has lost their pin or debit card has ever lost ALL access to their money. Lose your wallet private key or your offline store and that's exactly what happens.

[Trolleys Thank You]

fblm said:

Just listen to yourselves... 99.9% of the population would read that and not have a clue what you're on about. I know, I know in 40 years all us stupid old people will die off and be replaced by tech savvy kids who will all just know how to run their own nodes and navigate all the scams to keep their vast wealth safe from the clutches of governments... or b) very few people care about payment systems or encryption and most of those who do probably aren't as smart as the scammers...

99% of the population haven't got a clue about the technicalities of paying for something online with Pound Sterling but that doesn't stop millions of them doing it every day.

"very few people care about payment systems or encryption", considering e-commerce already relies heavily on encryption so your money or details aren't stolen, people certainly would care if one day it wasn't there.

[p1stonhead]

jammy-git said:

p1stonhead said:

Trolleys Thank You said:

p1stonhead said:

This is my exact point - an offline bitcoin store (correct me if I am wrong) literally contains your money hence people sifting through the tip to find old hard drives containing millions of quid.

Strictly speaking, no. A wallet never contains any coins. A wallet simply holds your cryptographic private key so you are able to spend your coins which are on the blockchain. The further away you keep those keys from the internet or other people, the more secure they are.

Ok, so sort of the same, if you lose the password you still lose the money?

Techincally different but realistically no difference.

Not quite. No one who has lost their pin or debit card has ever lost ALL access to their money. Lose your wallet private key or your offline store and that's exactly what happens.

Obviously my English is second rate because that is exactly the point I was making.

My point was that the key to opening the account currently (a debit card) is currently easily replaced. The key to opening a bitcoin account (paper password etc) can be lost and lose your money forever.

It is a HUGE negative which 99% of normal people will never want to deal with.

[anonymous-user]

Harris_I said:

So then let's ask the hypothetical question: if all the world used a finitely bound decentralised currency operating outside a fractional reserve banking system, how does this impact on economic cycles?

My view is such an economic model strongly reins in the tendency to boom and bust. And if that's the case, then the ability to manipulate currency is no longer vital.

Sorry missed this and deserves an answer. Ignoring the political unlikelyhood... I'd assert such a system is so far beyond an optimal currency area it would make German Greek economic divergence look like a marriage made in heaven and condemn most of the world to endless depression. The EZ is held together by massive opaque fiscal transfers to the pigs. USA the same... tax payers don't mind internal transfers too much (London Liverpool), England Scotland less so but meh, UK EU, not so much, Foreign aid, v unpopular. So you're looking at a currency area with almost zero fiscal transfer, vast differences in productivity and wealth and you imagine this will cause less boom and bust!?!? Sure, if permanent bust counts...

[anonymous-user]

Trolleys Thank You said:

99% of the population haven't got a clue about the technicalities of paying for something online with Pound Sterling but that doesn't stop millions of them doing it every day.

"very few people care about payment systems or encryption", considering e-commerce already relies heavily on encryption so your money or details aren't stolen, people certainly would care if one day it wasn't there.

Why would encryption not be there? What are you talking about? Any idiot can use ecommerce very safely with little interest or understanding of the underlying tech. The same is certainly not true for cc's.

[Efbe]

dimots said:

Efbe said:

I really do have to disagree with the security side of things.

Whilst I do have various coins and have traded for a while with successes and losses, I am not blind to quite how dangerous "bitcoin" is.

1)The most unsecure part of the process is buying in. You hand over money in the trust that either a third party (i.e. bittylicious) or a seller will give you the bitcoin.
2)To convert your BTC to another Coin, you again need to trust that either an exchange will not run off with your money, be hacked, or the company you are buying the coin from is legit.
3)Transferring coins is blind, all you have is an address to send it to, no way of verifying you have pasted in the right one.
4)For small amounts of money, the fees for taking your money out of an exchange are way too high(cashing out even more so), so mean you end up leaving it in there.
5) To secure your bitcoin requires A LOT of knowledge. You can't trust any website you read as so many are trying to scam you, and most of the secure options are too expensive for most people.

Whilst I love the idea of bitcoin, It has big issues that will prevent it becoming really mainstream.

I left some odds and sods amounting to roughly £200 in an exchange back in 2008ish. The exchange owner walked off with all of it. My fault for not moving to my own wallets, but split across 4/5 coins the fees would have been too high so I left it in.

1) You can mine it yourself if you don't want to buy it. Buying is not particularly risky at all. You can use cash at an ATM or do it online. Third party transactions for anything of value carry 'some' risk. Try buying gold online...same thing.

2) Currency exchange online carries some risk if you do it through a third party...what does this have to do with bitcoin security?

3) It is not blind, you have a totally unique address to send it to.

4) What does this have to do with bitcoin security?

5) Securing your bitcoins takes a little bit of effort to understand, but I refer to my previous point - if you had to try and secure £10,000,000 of gold or cash under your own steam you would find it a lot more difficult and more expensive than securing £10,000,000 of bitcoin.

Dimots, there is absolutely no point in referring to £10,000,000, or purchasing gold. These are extreme cases that do not apply to 99.9% of people.

by blind, I mean what if you put in the wrong address? Yes you can check and double check it, but a 30 digit long random stream of letters/numbers is a damn lot harder to check than a sortcode and account number, for which you are also prompted as a security check for which bank it is being sent to.

Any issue with bitcoin for you or me, will be a massively huge one for someone new to the scene.

Try finding out yourself how to secure your bitcoin and other currencies on google, or even how to get them in the first place. Think of it from a newcomers perspective, it's incredibly complex, easy to go wrong and never clear which way is the best to do something.

[Trolleys Thank You]

fblm said:

Trolleys Thank You said:

99% of the population haven't got a clue about the technicalities of paying for something online with Pound Sterling but that doesn't stop millions of them doing it every day.

"very few people care about payment systems or encryption", considering e-commerce already relies heavily on encryption so your money or details aren't stolen, people certainly would care if one day it wasn't there.

Why would encryption not be there? What are you talking about? Any idiot can use ecommerce very safely with little interest or understanding of the underlying tech. The same is certainly not true for cc's.

I was responding to your bizarre assertion that people don't care about encryption. They may not have an interest in how it works but it is absolutely essential to so many things on the internet.

You're talking about usability of a very young technology. Before DNS for example, you had to access websites through their IP address instead of using a nice and easy website name. Before modern Windows/Mac operating systems, the only way to use a computer was through a command line. Can imagine you saying back then "Rubbish tech, no one will ever want to use this". The fact is, CCs will become a lot easier to use. Bitcoin is a base layer of a protocol like TCP/IP is for the internet There will be many applications built on top of it for everyday usage.

Edited by Trolleys Thank You on Tuesday 23 January 16:30

[Some Gump]

Boydie88 said:

So they hacked an exchange? Nothing to do with Bitcoin's security.

Well, not really tbh. "They" have done many, many hacks. Apparently, 14% of all crypto has been stolen at one point. http://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/the-15b-bit...

This includes the biggest exchange https://www.wired.com/2014/03/bitcoin-exchange/
And the biggest miner. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42275523
It's also hard for people not fully tech savvy to be secure...
http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/hacking/r...

Oh, and "they" may in fact be North Korea. http://fortune.com/2017/12/22/north-korea-bitcoin-...

But yeah, it's fully secure. Unless you get hacked.
Best keep it in a nice safe offline wallet.
https://www.coindesk.com/man-stole-1-8-million-eth...

All of a sudden, using Barclays looks a bit less dodgy, doesn't it?

[Trolleys Thank You]

Some Gump said:

Well, not really tbh. "They" have done many, many hacks. Apparently, 14% of all crypto has been stolen at one point. http://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/the-15b-bit...

This includes the biggest exchange https://www.wired.com/2014/03/bitcoin-exchange/
And the biggest miner. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42275523
It's also hard for people not fully tech savvy to be secure...
http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/hacking/r...

Oh, and "they" may in fact be North Korea. http://fortune.com/2017/12/22/north-korea-bitcoin-...

But yeah, it's fully secure. Unless you get hacked.
Best keep it in a nice safe offline wallet.
https://www.coindesk.com/man-stole-1-8-million-eth...

All of a sudden, using Barclays looks a bit less dodgy, doesn't it?

Yea...... Good old Barclays.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/nov/04/barc...

[dimots]

Some Gump said:

Well, not really tbh. "They" have done many, many hacks. Apparently, 14% of all crypto has been stolen at one point. http://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/the-15b-bit...

This includes the biggest exchange https://www.wired.com/2014/03/bitcoin-exchange/
And the biggest miner. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42275523
It's also hard for people not fully tech savvy to be secure...
http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/hacking/r...

Oh, and "they" may in fact be North Korea. http://fortune.com/2017/12/22/north-korea-bitcoin-...

But yeah, it's fully secure. Unless you get hacked.
Best keep it in a nice safe offline wallet.
https://www.coindesk.com/man-stole-1-8-million-eth...

All of a sudden, using Barclays looks a bit less dodgy, doesn't it?

These issues are not unique to bitcoin. What’s your point? None of these make Barclays look any better or bitcoin any worse. Leave your coins on a third party exchange and you take a chance on that exchange maintaining your funds securely. Send private keys through an unsecured network and anyone can see them. If you don’t understand these basics...step away until the technology is manageable for you. If you’re greedy and want to hoard bitcoins now...do so at your own risk or learn how to use them. You’re not making any salient points at all...

[stongle]

The use case for distributed ledger tech is parachoial at best. It's value largely is driven through opportunity cost savings Vs. Traditional financial or data exchange or frictional slippage. YES, there is massive value to be released; but to the man on the street less so. All research I've seen indicates a 1 - 10tr benefit to the global economy in time savings - at maturity. The use of encryption and secrecy is going to be a weakness that the establishment will always exploit against the use of crypto currencies. It's not the banks you'd be fighting but the entire established G20 way of thinking 're money flow. If you strip post crisis financial reform back to basics you'd notice that BASLE3 etc entrench the role of banks in economics BUT also reinforce the requirement for private sector support of public debt burden - the EC and ECB are obvious examples of this. Enabling a decentralised CCY to operate outside the control of central banks ain't going to happen.

Longer term decentralised or public block chains are probably doomed (rightly or wrongly). The CCYs will only gain populist support not govt (already the US has bipartisan support to condemn Venezualas oils packed crypto). Private blockchain is being sewn up by the banks (JPM being one of the biggest supporters of Ethererum backed code despite Dimon), and the patent antics of Goldman's etc. New CCY is an existential threat to our politic masters. Even Corbyn and Co couldn't get behind it as too easy for capital flight.

That saying I do have a punt on crypto, monetise the sentiment. When the revolution comes hopefully I be in my bunker!

[Some Gump]

Trolleys Thank You said:

Yea...... Good old Barclays.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/nov/04/barc...

The thing is, you're undermining your own argument there.

Not only is 6k very different to 14% of the entire circulation of Sterling, but the key factor is here:

linked article said:

Pitcher is the latest Barclays customer to contact Guardian Money after being fobbed off following a fraud. The Financial Conduct Authority has made it clear that a bank must refund to customers any “unauthorised” transactions that appear on their account.

Barclays might be acting like s, but the FCA will stop them and correct this. If they go bust, the FSCS will protect you. One of the key sales points of crypto seems to be that it's nowt to do with governments, and therefore there are no safety nets. I might be a scaredy cat, but I quite like safety nets, all told.

[Some Gump]

dimots said:

These issues are not unique to bitcoin. What’s your point? None of these make Barclays look any better or bitcoin any worse. Leave your coins on a third party exchange and you take a chance on that exchange maintaining your funds securely. Send private keys through an unsecured network and anyone can see them. If you don’t understand these basics...step away until the technology is manageable for you. If you’re greedy and want to hoard bitcoins now...do so at your own risk or learn how to use them. You’re not making any salient points at all...

Haha! Thanks for the "you're not clever enough to use them". See snake oil salesman analogy that someone else already used.

Who should be at the forefront of understanding it? The exchanges? The biggest miners? They can't secure it either. If the key movers and shakers in the industry can't keep their BTC secure, how can the pair of you trot out the "most secure currency ever" lie ad infinitum? You made the claim, so please explain (in simple terms so I can understand them) how BTC is the most secure currency ever?

[anonymous-user]

Trolleys Thank You said:

I was responding to your bizarre assertion that people don't care about encryption...

I'm not sure why you're being so obtuse. No I seriously doubt many people, even those who use ecommerce, give much of a fvck about encryption or related tech. If ou think that's a bizarre assertion you need to get out from your server room more! I'll also wager most people who use cryptos now are interested in the tech and everyone who use cryptos safely have decent technical knowledge, I think the latter are in a small minority. Of course the tech will get easier to use, cheaper, more convenient, safer etc... not much of a selling point to start using it now though, any more than I want to go back to using Altavista. With popularity, imo, will also come regulatory crack down; when you all have to register your wallets with HMRC I wonder how popular it will be?

[jammy-git]

dimots said:

These issues are not unique to bitcoin. What’s your point? None of these make Barclays look any better or bitcoin any worse. Leave your coins on a third party exchange and you take a chance on that exchange maintaining your funds securely. Send private keys through an unsecured network and anyone can see them. If you don’t understand these basics...step away until the technology is manageable for you. If you’re greedy and want to hoard bitcoins now...do so at your own risk or learn how to use them. You’re not making any salient points at all...

Errr, those points were made after some people were saying that Bitcoin was the future and we should be using it instead of cash and other digital currency.

[Gecko1978]

fblm said:

. With popularity, imo, will also come regulatory crack down; when you all have to register your wallets with HMRC I wonder how popular it will be?

I can see HMRC wanting to do this I just am struggling to see how.

[anonymous-user]

Gecko1978 said:

fblm said:

. With popularity, imo, will also come regulatory crack down; when you all have to register your wallets with HMRC I wonder how popular it will be?

I can see HMRC wanting to do this I just am struggling to see how.

Along the lines of US FBAR reporting to start with I would imagine.

[gumshoe]

dimots said:

You can get a bitcoin debit card if you want one.

You can give the piece of paper containing your bitcoins to a bank to look after if you want to.

No, you cannot get a bitcoin debit card.