Bitcoin...surprised there isn’t more uk discussion/press coverage?

[Dancinggertrude]

Bitcoin has had an interesting few months, steadily rising.
Twitter feeds are full of American discussion about it, US press coverage etc.
Yet here it is still not v mainstream..
Aibu to be surprised ?
I’m neither a convert to bitcoin or an investor btw, I like to dabble and watching the charts /world press coverage really interests me.
Most (Uk)people I mention it to aren’t even aware you can purchase fractional bitcoin.

I’m really glad I started this thread
Lots of v knowledgeable folk coming out of the woodwork

Although I dont see how you can have blockchain without bitcoin, as bitcoin is the incentive for people to secure the network. WIthout bitcoin there is no reason for people to keep the ledger.

BitCoin is Proof of Work, not Proof of Stake. There are different ways to instantiate a blockchain, and currency "mining" is a tiny subset of the potential.

Properly done, no one "owns" a blockchain, and transactions advanced by the blockchain are immutable.

One idea might be to store personal details on a blockchain, that can only be rendered to a specific trusted party (for a limited time). I have met some Australian lawyers who are looking to make their Land Registry a blockchain.

There was a lot of coverage about it last year when it became evident that it was being used as a pyramid scheme although this was pretty obvious from the beginning - afterall, it has not actually value and can’t be used for anything except money laundering. I suppose everyone has lost interest now. What is more interesting is Libra - I am interested to see how that pans out.

@BogglesGoggles world interest suggests otherwise , it absolutely isn’t the case that people have lost interest. Recent events in Iran, in Turkey, even this week in Germany and then in the States mean renewed interest in bitcoin has gone through the roof.

Yeah, but PoS and its variations can only be done if you have a centralised authority which pre-mines the currency. Eth moving to PoS will be a real test of decentralisation.

Land registration is an obvious use case for blockchain, lots of interesting experiments being done in Africa at the moment with this.

@cailleachisn that is interesting.
Can you post a link re the experiments?

Land registration is an obvious use case for blockchain

Or public records in general. Births, deaths and marriages for a start.

I was at IBM a few years ago, and they were trying (badly) to implement a system for vehicle registration for a German pilot scheme. There's also freight and cargo tracking. Being a bit of a history nerd, I was intrigued by a scheme for the provenance of diamonds and antiquities.

The main problem in uptake of blockchain in the UK is the inability of Capita and ATOS to work out how to monetise it, which is holding back various initiatives. I'm sure when they can smell the pork, it'll be the Next Big Thing.

It's very popular for online drug transactions.

As I said, a lot of people don't understand it. Since most criminals are generally a bit thick, that means more of them. They appear to have read somewhere (or someone read it to them) that BTC and cryptocurrencies are somehow magically anonymous. Which they aren't.

I'd suggest you don't underestimate criminals. There are some very clever people on the dark web (to my rather superficial understanding of all this). The law enforcement agencies struggle monumentally. "Tumblers" are used to effectively anonymise illegal transactions. In theory the blockchain can be analysed to trace the money, but it would require disproportionately enormous amounts of effort.

Some links...

Ghana (using IBM private permissioned blockchain)
bitcoinafrica.io/2018/07/19/ghana-partners-with-ibm-blockchain-based-land-administration/

Kenya
www.the-star.co.ke/business/kenya/2019-03-22-state-to-digitise-land-registry-services/

If you are interested in real estate/land on the blockchain,you might also want to take a look at Propy (propy.com/)

I'm not sure if it's due to America being so much larger (so their voices drown British ones out) or a major cultural difference, but I have noticed that American media (both formal like news and newspaper and informal like youtube and blogs) are far more likely to focus and discuss money and finances than British.

I mean, I know a couple British frugal sites and voices, Martin Lewis is obviously a huge name, but on things like Bitcoins or financial independence or similar, there does seem to be a lack or maybe I'm just missing them. It is a bit annoying as I try researching things like investing for pensions and diversifying and similar and mostly get American stuff which has basics that are helpful, but a lot that isn't.

Sorry! Am blatantly place marking so I can re-read the thread later and understand and learn. Thanks all!

I'd suggest you don't underestimate criminals. There are some very clever people on the dark web (to my rather superficial understanding of all this). The law enforcement agencies struggle monumentally. "Tumblers" are used to effectively anonymise illegal transactions. In theory the blockchain can be analysed to trace the money, but it would require disproportionately enormous amounts of effort.

There really aren't any clever criminals out there - but that's a semantic and philosophical debate for another time and place. The "dark web" as reported is more a fairy story designed to scare people into giving the state(s) around the world even more excuses to stick their nose into whatever they feel like today. Especially (as a recent Private Eye showed) quite what people mean - or think they mean about "the dark web" isn't clear.

BTC is a tad too volatile for serious criminality.

Also, not quite sure why you'd go to the time and effort of messing around with attention-attracting activities on "the dark web" when Facebook et al seem just as good a place :

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31050051

Ethnographical data shows a high degree of drug-dealing activity on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook Messenger. Buyers and sellers also use encrypted platforms, such as darknet forums and the Wickr app on their smartphones. The medium used varies across the countries, as well as motivations for usage in connection with risk perceptions.

Also reports like that miss a whole swathe of communication protocols, which is the danger of thinking "apps" are pretty cool.

(You could actually use a blockchain itself to communicate secretly. With the added bonus you have no idea who the recipient of a message was ....)

Also, not quite sure why you'd go to the time and effort of messing around with attention-attracting activities on "the dark web" when Facebook et al seem just as good a place

Interesting!

My understanding is that TOR (the tool used to access the darkweb) makes it effectively impossible for the IP addresses to be used to trace the other end of a transaction. This is usually coupled with strong encryption (PGP) and the use of "tumbled" crypto currency.

I would assume that Facebook would be much easier for law enforcement agencies to penetrate.

@Cailleachian
I’m really interested in blockchain and it’s use in industries that require verified provenance for individual constituent items that make up a particular product.
Are you aware of any industries that use blockchain in this way?

@aquafaba

There's quite a lot going on in the supply chain aspect of blockchain. VEChain, WaltonCoin and Ambrosus are all working in this area. VEChain has "MyStory" that is currently being used to track wine and car components.

www.cryptonewsz.com/with-vechain-my-story-launches-wine-bottle-verification-system/8604/

You might also want to take a look at Provinence (www.provenance.org/) where businesses can sign up to have their supply chain verified.

Wow

I’d be happy to invest small amounts and see what happens. I prefer the long game to lottery tickets, for example I’ve been investing tiny amounts in the new set of online bants. Where would I go to put in between £20 - 100 say?

@RJnomore1

Coinbase is quite a good place to start. They have an app and make buying cryptocurrency very easy.

Just make sure you’ve done your own research before. There are a lot of great forums out there but it can be a bit like the Wild West as it’s all so new still.

@RJnomore1

Best place to go for a beginner is Coinbase. There are lots of disadvantages to it, that cryptoheads will tell you about ad nauseum, but for a newbie with small amounts its the best place to start.

They offer a range of cryptocurrencies there (and you can even get some free by watching a couple of videos), but focus on bitcoin until you know what you are doing.

Ignore the price, it can swing wildly. Dont panic and sell when it goes to tuppence and dont get over-excited and buy more then its a squillion quid. You should be aiming to gather at least 0.003btc - any more is a bonus.

I ran a crypto coin minining business in 2013, even listed it in LTC Global, a now shut down crypto stocks exchange. I should have stuck to my day job, running my beautiful little business Memset, who yes is forever getting their name confused with Mumsnet.

Bitcoin and other crypto coins are now becoming seriously important. They are currency independent of central control. The underlying technology component called blockchain (a ledger in layman's terms, it just happens to be cleverly distributed in a way to prevent tampering without having to trust the "nodes", a term for a computer, that the copies of the ledgers are stored on) can be used to store information, manage contracts, full record forgettability, host and run applications, and more. Oh, and a world full of cheap, efficient mobile devices tied together in a 5G grid would be idea I reckon. Probably quite green too. Did I mention I was doing a PhD on industrialised computing and climate change? Probably should have established credibility with that. 🤦🏼‍♀️

Oh, and since people are generally curious, I think crypto currencies probably are a good long term investment, but if you are going to, be prepared to lose the lot, at least 10% chance - think like that; balanced against the alternatives does it make sense - and buy and forget, Do Not attempt to trade; it is part of your permantpent savings portfolio to be tapped when you need not when you think you have a hot tip. You will fail trading crypto eventually even if excellent elsewhere. It is an unregulated market with low liquidity, so easily manipulated by someone with only a few tens of millions of dollars to play with.

Sorry in advance for this longer rant (I will be simplifying A LOT so ask if you want more detail).
I have been in the space now for a few years and it has changed my life. I should explain that I retired very early due to investing in other scarce assets so I have more or less studied this every day).
Through studying the Austrian School of Economics, in which Bitcoin fits so perfectly - in that Mengerian sense, I have come to change my time preference completely. It has made me realise that the current system of debt, credit creation and quantitive easing is as unsustainable as it is futile (I urge anyone to study the Cantillon Effect), and only geared for parting with your money in order to further fuel the Ponzi that is Neo-libral Keynesian economics. The negative rates and further QE (FED, BoE, ECB, BoJ) will only exacerbate the problems further. In fact despite being a life-long Labour supporter I now realise party affiliation means nothing anymore. They all want to further increase supply. Labour in order to re-nationalise utilities etc, Tories in order to fund tax breaks etc. In BOTH cases it severely impacts purchasing power, which mainly affects those the least well off. We desperately need to switch to a hard money system, like the one we had before we severed with gold standard. So while I have made insane gains through investing in Bitcoin it is the global social change that Bitcoin will facilitate that has made me stay in the space.

But in pure investment terms why BTC?
As the current financial system deteriorates by way of every government debasing their own currencies in order to prolong the inevitable, hedge funds, family offices, pension funds, rich individuals will go into BTC. They may not believe in it yet like I do, but they will at the very least want to leverage their wealth in the ways they can. Bitcoin has outperformed every other asset since its inception 10 1/2 years ago by a factor of a lot. These entities will need an escape pod for their money and that will partly be gold and increasingly it will be Bitcoin.
BTC has a FIXED supply of 21mill coins of which 17.8mill are already in circulation. The more money flows into the economy the more the value of each satoshi (bitcoin's cent), each bitcoin, will grow in value.
This scarcity and the set in stone monetary policy (as well as it's decentralised, distributed nature - meaning it is immutable, anti-fragile and censorship resistant) is what makes it special - NO OTHER "crypto" has this, hence why they are not to be touched (I could talk about pre-mines, the fallibilities of PoS systems etc but just trust me on this).

Oh there are so many things I want to mention that seem absolute crucial. In terms of price prediction I am very confident that we will see a $100k bitcoin in the next two years and a $1mill in the next five. This is based on mathematical models base don Stock to Flow with an extremely high R2 value (accuracy of 95%). I would say it is inevitable that Bitcoin will become the new global reserve currency and eventually a global UoA.

I would advice this: 1) Take a position in Bitcoin and hold it for min 2years. 2) Never touch any shitcoin. Stick to bitcoin ONLY. 3) We are in the infancy of this - we are trying to establish it as a Store of Value before it can become a medium of exchange, let alone a unit of account. Because of this it will continue to be volatile (hence a lower time pref is needed) 4) Download a wallet and buy a little bit for now, then educate yourself as you're pulled further in.

Educate yourself!!! Read The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous and venture down the rabbit hole from there.

I have included some incredible resources incl podcasts. Get involved!

Good luck and I'm always open to questions and discussion :)

Articles:
medium.com/@vijayboyapati/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoin-6ecc8bdecc1
medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-with-scarcity-91fa0fc03e25
nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/
www.unchained-capital.com/blog/enders-game/
For more top level reading: nakamotoinstitute.org/literature/

Podcasts:
anchor.fm/s/7d083a4/podcast/rss
anchor.fm/s/7d083a4/podcast/rss
anchor.fm/s/7d083a4/podcast/rss
anchor.fm/s/7d083a4/podcast/rss
feeds.megaphone.fm/offthechain
feeds.megaphone.fm/offthechain
anchor.fm/s/558f520/podcast/rss
anchor.fm/s/558f520/podcast/rss

When I was in Canada last week the convenience store by our apartment had a Bitcoin ATM.

I have to admit I haven't followed it much - I don't understand it and didn't find a very simple explanation.

I realise it's a crypto currency but....I just feel confused by it.

How is it linked to blockchain? And what is blockchain?

Why is it so terrible for the environment?

Who monitors how much it is worth?

How do you buy it?

What is XRP?

Some great investor said to never invest in something you don't understand....I definitely don't understand it

• disappeared down the bitcoin rabbit hole a while ago. Thinking that its an investment is just the first stage, once you actually realise the full power of cryptocurrency, its mindblowing....smart contracts, governance, privacy, identity are alll being redrawn and barely anyone is paying attention.

Bitcoin is a gateway to a whole new economic and political consciousness.*

See....I read these words and I feel like I'm no clearer.

I'm intelligent, I work in financial services but it's like you're talking a different language.

Where is the best place to get a very simple explanation?

Thank you thank you

There have been huge increases in cryptocurrency scams in the UK. This is one area that should definitely be treated with caution.

Read The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous and listen to all the podcast epodes of Stephan Livera for starters ;)