I bought 20 in early March for around $500 (it's $1300 today) and I'm going to continue to buy 1 or 2 every cheque.

Bitcoin has some major infighting about scaling right now so the longer they take to figure it out, the more they will fall behind. Once that happens, the money will start to flow through other crypto projects like ETH.

Yeah this was summer '14. I remember now, I didn't forget my password but when I reset my phone - which I was using for two-factor - I lost the code generator. Blockchain wouldn't let me remove the two-factor so I've been stuck in limbo ever since.

https://blockchain.info/wallet/reset-two-factor

You can tip me later in bitcoin.

Sorry, totally noob question. Where do you guys buy ethereum and any good site you recommend to learn more about it?

Sign up for kraken. you can use credit card, paypal or bank deposits. They support a big selection of cryptocurrency.

For news I like to use ethersummary.info for the condensed quick glances to keep up to date.

Bitcoin News, Blockchain News, Prices, Charts & Analysis - CoinDesk for more indepth articles on Blockchain in general, however, they are a bit biased on Bitcoin over Ethereum.

For technical discussions I like to use http://reddit.com/r/ethereum

For the actual specifications from the founders, you should do a deep dive on the whitepaper -- https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper

However, unless you enjoy it, I'd recommend looking at it at a 50,000 foot level because the technical stuff is way too dry.


To buy, use Kraken or Quadrigacx.com

Anyone mine Ethereum right now?

I am. I have a shitty gtx 1050 ti and it's pulling in 0.4 ETH a month lol

LTC exploded the past week, jesus

Thinking of dumping my stocks and doing a crypto #YOLO

LTC was pumped because of them activating a feature called SegWit, which essentially enables scaling by having more transactions per block..

This is stupid because nobody is really using LTC for anything right now anyway. LTC is basically Bitcoin Jr. and is only around for speculation.

Don't follow the money, follow the tech -- Ethereum is the most promising blockchain out there right now although there's a couple others coming that are definitely interesting. Blockchain is the future, you just need to understand and pick the right team.. which can be difficult.

What do you think about XRP?

Entry point is so low right now and it seems to be getting adopted by banks. I'm tempted to just throw down a thousand and see where it goes in a year or two.

Same thing with ETH, although I'm waiting for a slightly better entry point. Quadrigacx hasn't approved me yet.

XRP isn't really a blockchain in the conventional sense. 20% of the supply was distributed to the founders and the total supply is close to 40 billion. In my opinion, it's crap with no real world uses aside from being a settlement layer for a few banks.

The only two real Blockchains at the moment are Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin has value because it's the first Blockchain and the most well known. Ethereum has value because it has active 3rd party developers on it making cool shit.

However, If you're looking to jump into something from the ground floor and hoping to strike gold -- basically just gambling -- I recommend looking into Tezos. It's a new blockchain with a crowdfund coming May 22nd and it's backed by billionaire Tim Draper. I'm still researching Tezos myself but I will most likely be participating in the crowdsale. https://www.tezos.com/

Haven't read much into Tezos, but someone on reddit commented that 1 BTC = 6000 Tezos during the ICO. That makes 1 Tezos equivalent to 0.3 USD. Price-wise, seems high, no?

EDIT: Nevermind, seems like other cryptos started higher. ETH at around 0.50 USD, BTC at around 0.05 USD.

Yep, 1 BTC for 5000 XTZ plus the early bonus.

From what I read so far, the tech sounds promising. It's basically Ethereum with the ability to copy any other new Blockchain tech that comes out through network consensus.

Sounds cool on paper but will need to research more. If the development sticks around long enough for it to be listed on any exchange, you'll make money. It took QuadrigaCX two years to add Ethereum to their exchange so expect to sit on your worthless XTZ for a while if you participate.

I'm in a couple of them. Did pretty well with STEEM, invested at .50 and sold when it hit 1.20 the other day.

I've got XRP and XLM among others.
It was hilarious to watch XLM on Sunday on Polo for those that were following :troll::joy:

Digital Tulips?

You're so clever.

It's a 9 year old technology that has unimaginable potential in changing many industries around the world. Major banks, corporations, and countries around the world are all dedicating a lot of resources into understanding the implications and advantages they can yield from this blossoming technology.

And then there's people like you who can't rub two IQ points together and can only contribute with posts like "Digital Tulips?" to be edgy.

Your declaring that for taxes right? :alone:

It's funny because as you can see in this thread, I have been a proponent of bitcoin from the start. I still use it all the time.

The keyword is: I use it. I don't trade it or speculate on it, I just use it because it's useful.

So when I see all these altcoins pop up and die away, I can't help but think of all the people who said this about bitcoin. They thought it would be like tulips, but it wasn't. Because it's useful.

So how useful are these altcoins? Aside from buying and selling them and the fact that "it's not bitcoin"?

I find it funny how I laughed at the people who called bitcoin a pyramid scheme, and I'm sure others did too. And now you have Tezos which really actually looks like one, and some bitcoin people are buying into it...

When I first heard about Bitcoin, it didn't make sense at all. Why would I, or anyone else, use some internet money that has no value when there is Paypal etc out there?

Then I heard about it again. And again. When I finally looked into it deeper in early 2013, the usefulness and potential it has hit me like a ton of bricks. In the age of the internet, where information is free flowing, why is something as important as money still so restrictive for cross-border transactions? Why does it cost so much to send something that's basically digital from myself to a merchant and why do I have to pay a middleman to facilitate that purchase on eBay?

This was also around the same time as occupy wallstreet, the 2012 market crash, the arab spring, so the world was in disarray from a authoritarian standpoint. Bitcoin held the promise of a more unified future for the citizens of the world. It was the libertarian hero that we hoped for.

Anyway, I don't want to ramble on too much about my history with Bitcoin, but to cut to the point, Bitcoin was an important discovery and it's still useful today for that same purpose -- it's nonrestrictive, relatively cheap, and fast to transact around the world to purchase services and goods.

However, Bitcoin has become stagnant in innovation and it's been that way for years. My original vision, aside from using Bitcoin as a worldwide currency, was for it to be the "internet of money." What that means is I thought it would become programmable money, where we could actually use it to remove friction between merchants, corporations and consumers. Uber and AirBNB is only useful because they are the middleman who vet trust and facilitate transactions between a peer-to-peer relationship. I thought Bitcoin would eventually evolve into something that could replace them as both a vetting service and automated transaction service through third party apps.

That didn't happen because Bitcoin's protocol is too limited and too difficult to work with. Furthermore, the politics deep within the development groups have caused scaling issues and you can check https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions to see that it has roughly ~150k of backlogged transactions daily. This has been going on for years.

Sorry for the long-winded response but I need to be clear about the history so that I can lay out why I feel you're being short-sighted in dismissing Tezos as a ponzi-scheme.

I only started looking deeper in Ethereum around February of this year after giving up on Bitcoin and the belief that they would eventually sort their shit out. I heard about Ethereum from their crowdsale back in 2014 but back then, I dismissed all Alt-Coins because they were all basically derivatives of Bitcoin with their own niche enhancements. So that flowed onto Ethereum as I truly believed whatever other Alt-coins could come up with, Bitcoin would be able to adapt their protocols into itself.

So after giving up on Bitcoin and reading up on Ethereum, that eureka moment I had in 2013 with Bitcoin sparked once again with Ethereum. Ethereum was similar to Bitcoin in that it's also a Blockchain, however, it's radically different in its approach and vision. With Ethereum, they've built a programming language into the protocol itself so that any developer can now build applications and use the Ethereum blockchain as the backbone for facilitating trust.

What does this mean? It's kind of like when Apple came out with the iPhone. It wasn't the first smartphone, but it was revolutionary in the fact that it had an AppStore and it invited developers to come develop whatever they wanted. The initial apps were all shit but it opened up the world to what's possible with a phone.

Ethereum is the same way. There are now dozens of apps being developed. I'll give you one example. There's a big project called Golem that's being developed (https://golem.network/). Golem will allow you to rent out your idle CPU/GPU processing time to people who require large processing power like machine learning, graphics processing etc. Remember SETI? It's like that but now you can get paid.

Ethereum is useful in that it's ushering in these new apps that can now utilize monetary incentives and trustlessness to cut out middlemen (Uber, AirBNB) and bring in new ideas. It's giving birth to something called CryptoEconomics.

And to bring all of this back to your concern about Tezos, Tezos builds on Ethereum's idea but it also has some differences that's worth exploring. Of course it could be a scam but from what I've read so far, it's doesn't seem like it. It's more likely that it will fail or become a nichey product for certain industries. I think the future will have multiple Blockchains providing different services.

Seems all nice and dandy but how do u keep reviews real and legit? Who is going to vet the code for whatever block chain transaction is going to occur?

anyone test out the local atm's for cash or No?....i saw a handfull of atm's around downtown...11% seems abit much

https://cex.io/limits-commissions#/direction/withdrawal

Cex can do credit withdrawls in usd. Visa is 3.80usd per transaction. Mastercard is 1.2% + 3.80usd. If you verify your account they remove the limit which is 500usd daily and 2000usd monthly. Best to apply for usd credit card so you dont get raped on conversion as well. However you would most likely have to declare taxes on the withdrawls. Now does 11% seem much when you dont have to declare taxes? Thats up to you.

I'm not sure I understand your question. Are you asking how do you a know if a transaction is legit?

That's the whole breakthrough behind the blockchain technology. You can trust that a transaction which appears in the blockchain is legit because it has go through the "proof-of-work" vetting service before it can be added to the blockchain.

So when I send you $10, this $10 gets broadcasted to the network and sits in an "unconfirmed transactions" bucket. From this bucket, all the participating computers in the world use their computing power to try to be the first ones to confirm that this transaction is legit. The first one to do it, gets a 25 Bitcoin reward for their service, and this $10 is now added to the "confirmed transactions" bucket where you can now be sure that you won't get "charged-back" from this transaction.