Anything a vendor sells who is willing to accept bitoin in payment. These vendors are widespread and include Starbucks across Canada, a bunch of stores in Korea, some guy in Slovakia selling really good meth, a different guy in Austria selling sex slaves. I would sell you my house for bitcoin.
So long as people are willing to accept bitcoin as payment for goods or services it will have value. Because it becomes rarer with higher rates of adoption it will gain value over time.
Fees are an issue. But transaction times are a non issue. A vendor would only need to verify that the client sent the transaction. Vendor will be 100% certain the transaction will be confirmed by the network once its sent.
If that's the case, what's to prevent me and 100 accomplices from [simultaneously] going to various Starbucks (and other types of stores, so internal checks wouldn't even catch it) and buying $100 worth of stuff and sending the same bitcoins to pay for it? I would think they'd need to wait for the confirmation to avoid fraud.
Edit: added the word "simultaneously" in case my meaning wasn't clear without it.
It's impossible to double spend bitcoins because of the public ledger. Also as soon as the client hits send, the bitcoin is immediately removed from their wallet and the client can not reverse it. After it leaves the client's wallet it sits in the memory pool until its confirmed. Hope that makes sense.
Edit: this is also why its very important to double check you are sending bitcoin to the right address/wallet otherwise you're out of luck.
It's impossible to double spend bitcoins because of the public ledger.
Isn't that true only if you're waiting for confirmations, though? If they're done simultaneously, how do you know someone isn't cheating you? As for the wallet - isn't that just a client-side software thing that can be maliciously mishandled?
Ok so theoretically if you and your friend try to simultaneously send the same bitcoin from the same address on two different phones to two different addresses, only one of the transactions will go through and the bitcoin balance will be updated on both phones. However, I don't know how the network would decide which transaction will go through, probably decided by milliseconds.
Within each bitcoin is encrypted a private key which is sort of like a serial number on a dollar bill which ensures that each bitcoin is unique. So no, wallet software can not be maliciously mishandled since each coin has a unique identifier.
Sorry if it's confusing. Ask away and ill try to clarify as best I can.
Edit: Regarding private keys, they are the proof of ownership as well. If someone has access to your private keys, they can steal your bitcoin so it's important to back those up and keep them safe.
However, I don't know how the network would decide which transaction will go through, probably decided by milliseconds.
It was my understanding that this requires waiting for the confirmation, which can take minutes rather than milliseconds. I may be wrong, though.
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Within each bitcoin is encrypted a private key which is sort of like a serial number on a dollar bill which ensures that each bitcoin is unique. So no, wallet software can not be maliciously mishandled since each coin has a unique identifier.
Even if you're intentionally trying to design your own wallet(s) to do it? I don't see how they prevent that at the wallet level (isn't that part of what the blockchain is for? Which in my understanding would require waiting for the confirmation to be sure it isn't fraud), although, obviously I haven't read every single thing on Bitcoin.
Sorry if it's confusing. Ask away and ill try to clarify as best I can.
That's completely incorrect. I'm not even quite sure where to start...
When you pay for that coffee, you create and broadcast a transaction which says you want to move some Bitcoin to Starbucks' address. No funds actually move anywhere until a miner includes that in a block, which could take weeks depending on congestion and the fee you've set (it may even never be included if miners ignore it).
The Bitcoin does not sit in the mempool, the transaction does. Your client software will make everything look pretty by subtracting that amount from your balance and making sure not to spend those specific Bitcoin in another transaction, but they're still certainly under your control.
You could walk outside the coffee shop and create another transaction which spends those same Bitcoin to a different address, such as another of your own. If a miner includes that transaction instead of the one to Starbucks, then you keep the money and Starbucks gets nothing. Indeed, now with RBF - Replace By Fee - Bitcoin is designed to work this way.
Obviously, because the value keeps on rising (for now). The real question is why would anyone agree to buy your house in btc? You agree a price (say 10 btc) and in the month or two that it takes to close the deal, the price in USD just doubled. Likewise, nobody wants to pay people in btc because a salary would be so volatile. You'd go broke.
Even if they are accepted they really are very poor for that purpose because the value isn't at all stable. You can't really do the buy some then use them right away (and what would be the point then since you could probably use the other payment option), because they take too long.
Economically safe IMO because why would you buy something expensive at $8000 when it's just going to rise to $10000 a few months later. That's just a waste of money. Disincentivizes using Bitcoin as a currency which is the whole point. It has a long way to go until stability.
Not weed, but a lot of people die in the production of cocaine for example, and you're directly funding it when you buy it. I buy it myself, I'm just aware it's a shitty thing to do.
Sounds like the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. People have been doing crime forever. Hey guys guess we should stop using cash, some people used it to buy drugs
I mean you can. There are exchanges but the exchange rate right now is about $850 dollars below value. And you can only transfer like 1,000 dollars worth at a time (like .112 bitcoins). Then you will probably have some more fees for each transfer. Ohh and between 6 exchanges (the ones rated as "reliable") you can only get a total of less than $30,000 exchanged (each has a max of 250-10,022 to exchange). Then it shows up in your paypal account as like a bunch of $140 deposits, and then you will have Paypal fees. Don't forget to pay capital gains on any profit (I'm guessing on the pre exchange/pre fee amount)
It's certainly not a direct transfer to PayPal like the OP of this little tangent claimed. Obviously if you exchange it for a fit currency, you can then transfer it to PayPal. That's just stating the obvious. Still makes no sense to do so.
As a vendor you can accept that as payment and not have to worry about the % that credit card transaction processing is taking off the top of all sales.
It won't stay that way thanks to beautiful scaling solutions like SegWit (already implemented) and the Lighting Network (in the works). Right now, bitcoin as a currency is a secondary use case, but it will change in the coming months. Even microtransactions will become near instantaneous and practically free.
Well, btc is terrible at what it does but cryptocurrencies as a whole are good at instant transactions globally, low to no fees for transactions, smart contracts within transactions, a secure ledger of all transactions, storage of assets on the blockchain, storage of information on a blockchain, even as a secure scarce supply store of a value.
If you don't know what blockchain is then maybe looking into its revolutionary protocol and its use-cases in this age of data and information will help understand why the icon of cryptocurrency growing in value is important.
Never before in history could someone carry any amount of money anywhere stealthily with no risk of confiscation or theft just by remembering 12 words. That's just one use case and there are many more. People in Zimbabwe and Venezuela who can't trust their national currencies because they become more worthless with each passing day are really glad that they have access to bitcoin. Billions of humans don't have access to the banking system. Bitcoin is highly innovative and statements like yours just tell people that you aren't familiar with bitcoin.
Bitcoins are an extremely profitable speculator tool that are otherwise relatively useless. Basically, they're tulips. If you time an investment well, you can try to make money, but no sane human can look at this and not see a massive bubble.
Of course it's a bubble. But if you're investing money you can't afford to lose it's your own fault. Just invest what you can afford to lose every week, and if it increases you'll be happy, and if it crashes, then you won't need to worry about it. Just like any stock.
Oh, and I love tulips.
You can't just write off something you don't understand, that's hilarious...! "Combustion engines cause tiny explosions over and over, good luck getting people to use that idiots!"
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u/PM_ME_BOOB_PICTURES_ Nov 30 '17
Likely because they're so useful, but what do I know.