Crypto currency mining

[moltuae]

Originally Posted by Regulus

Have you read about the spoofer in bitcoin?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-0...-bitcoin-price

I have not taken the plunge into crypto currency yet.
As this thread shows, it's so complicated on many levels. And to add to that, I am worried that the government will place stops in the system to make sure they can tax me. Or even make it illegal.
I have no plans to start mining. But I would like to buy bitcoin. But through buying or selling bitcoin with fiat currency, my transactions will not be anonymous, right?

The ZeroHedge article, while recently published, is largely focusing on the events of 3 or 4 years ago, in particular events immediately before and after the collapse of Mt. Gox, at a time when the BTC daily trading volume was just a few million Dollars. While some amount of price manipulation undoubtedly still occurs, with the daily BTC trading volume now approaching 2 billion Dollars, you'd need to have very deep pockets indeed to make a significant impact on the price.

Bitcoin's price still gets pushed around a lot though by both negative and positive news, misinformation and FUD, which all contribute to price volatility. Such volatility should reduce over time however as greater adoption adds more inertia. Scarcity, exponential growth and adoption are what will ultimately dictate the price. About 16.5 million Bitcoins have been mined so far. By the time we reach the 21 million limit (in a little over 120 years time), I would guess that the amount of Bitcoin actually in circulation would be less than half that value, mainly due to 'lost' coins. If adoption continues on its exponential curve, that's not a lot of coins to share between several billion people. If you do the maths, you can see why there are a lot of bullish predictions, suggesting that widespread adoption as a worldwide currency could see a single Bitcoin worth hundreds of thousands (or possibly even millions) of Dollars within the next 5-10 years, especially when you consider the irreparable state of the global 'fiat' economy.

Trading fiat currency for cryptocurrency is not anonymous because the banks, exchanges and any financial institutions that deal in fiat currencies have to adhere to KYC and AML laws. Bitcoin itself is pseudo-anonymous: All transactions on the blockchain are publically viewable/verifiable but it's not possible to know who those transactions belong to without a lot of detective work and some initial 'clue' or path to follow, such as obtaining private fiat trading information from an exchange. Bitcoin is that way by design. Some cryptocurrencies are designed to provide complete anonymity.

Originally Posted by Regulus

Besides. I am not wholly convinced this is not a ploy to get us all to fully accept digital currencies, and drop cash altogether

A ploy by who? Bitcoin is built on open source software (that can be examined by anyone) and is a distributed, decentralised network that requires a high degree of consensus for any changes to be made. Unlike fiat currency, nobody is running the show.

If anything, Bitcoin is the people's own replacement for cash. It allows person-to-person trading just like cash, to or from anyone in the world, even if those people are some of the unfortunate unbanked billions. Recent events such as the Indian banknote demonetisation, an attempt by the Indian government to forcibly remove some of the country's cash from circulation, caused a lot of the Indian population to flock to Bitcoin. Then there's countries like Venezuela, where people are using Bitcoin as a cash replacement to escape the economic crisis of their own currency.

As for making Bitcoin illegal: You can outlaw it but you can't stop it (short of turning off the national/global internet). The knee-jerk reaction of some governments was to ban it, but most have reversed their decisions or attempted to regulate it instead. What I think most governments eventually come to realise is that banning cryptocurrencies does nothing to help 'fiat flight' but instead excludes the country from a growing global economy. In some countries, like Japan, the government have decided to embrace it and recognise it as a legal currency to put them ahead of the game.