Story - Bitcoin vs Dash
https://www.coinigy.com/main/markets/BITF/BTC/USD
Today Bitcoin’s price pulled all the way back to $14,000 on Bitfinex before return to over $15,000.
Meanwhile the pool of unconfirmed transactions has grown larger.
In yesterday’s episode, at time of recording we had over 140,000 transactions waiting to confirm and a total size of 140 MB.
Today the numbers are…
I got some pushback in the comments yesterday when I highlighted claims by Paulo Santos about the tiny fraction of Bitcoin transactions that are commercial.
One person specifically took issue with me talking about Dash in the context of the Steam gaming platform removing Bitcoin as a payment method.
If you remember, I said I would not at all be surprised if the business development people over at Dash capitalised on this opportunity because they are very business like.
If they see a potential customer for their payment network, they are likely to make a move to serve them.
People were also suggesting LiteCoin but who within the LiteCoin community is going to invest the time and energy to contact the people at the Valve company and then help them integrate LiteCoin?
I don’t think there’s anyone who is actually paid to do that, which means it relies on some unpaid volunteer doing it. You can’t run a business on that basis.
The user in question who goes by the name ‘BlockChain’ on YouTube asked what percentage of Dash transactions are commercial?
Their argument was that if I’m going to cite research that suggests only a fraction of Bitcoin transactions are commercial, why didn’t I turn that test back on Dash?
There’s a simple answer to that, which is that I made no claims as to how many Dash transactions where commercial. My comments were about the Dash business development team going after the Steam gaming platform as a customer, in order to increase the number of commercial transactions.
But now you mention Dash’s commercial transactions all we need to do is refer to the Dash treasury to find a new list every month of commercial Dash transactions.
This is hard evidence that at least $4-$5m worth of Dash transactions each month are commercial. There’s no easy way to produce a publicly available list like this for Bitcoin.
And just by the way for anyone who didn’t tune in yesterday, I hold about a 3rd of my portfolio in Dash.
Story - UK To Step Up Crypto Trading Regs.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/04/bitcoin-uk-eu-plan-cryptocurrency-price-traders-anonymity
This is according to the Guardian so immediately you know you are going to have to filter out a load of BS.
The basic story is that as part of an EU wide plan, the UK government plans to force traders to identify themselves in an effort to prevent money laundering and financing of terrorism.
It says they are going to regulate Bitcoin wallet providers, however this can only apply to exchanges that offer wallet services, perhaps even web wallets at a stretch.
However, you can’t regulate software, so wallets like Exodus can still be used anonymously.
Even forcing UK based exchanges to force identity checks, which most already do, will do nothing but cause them to lose customers since there are dozens of other exchanges outside the UK that Brits can move to.
So the regulators can regulate the gateways from fiat currency into Bitcoin, but once you’ve got some Bitcoin, you can trade crypto to crypto anonymously all day long.
Now I’m pointing this out, not to be antagonistic to the government, I’m just attempting to identify a project that is about to expend a large amount of time, money and energy and achieve little to none of the desired outcomes.
The government really needs to spend more time understand how all this works before they start taking regulatory action.
If they don’t then they are going to waste huge sums of tax payers money which will only deepen the existing resentment against governments and push more people into using cryptocurrencies.
This is set to be yet another example of a government program that manifests the exact opposite of what it intended.
Story - Please Submit Lyrics For Remix
This idea sprung up in my private patrons chat group.
What I want to do is make my own remix of this track.
The plan is to crowd source all the best Bitcoin and cryptocurrency rhymes to form the song lyrics and then I’ll perform it listing all the contributors in the credits.
Then I’ll publish it on some blockchain based music platform.
So go nuts in the comments and submit your best rhymes and I’ll collect them all up and organise them.
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