I'm a fucking retard. I mean, I'm a retard, but I'm smart enough to know that anything that seems like magic has something at work behind the curtain.
How does anyone in the middle of the country make money off this? Like, real money to use in real life. Even more basic, how in God's name would it benefit my life in any way whatsoever over the existing system both now and going forward?
I have no clue how it all works. I'm interested but clueless. Can someone help me with this? Please? Guide me to the fundamentals? The basics? Anything at all?
How will this help me currently and, if it won't at all, how is this going to benefit me in the future and why would it be important for me to understand and be on the ground floor in learning and understanding and following the development?
I'm too young to have missed the dawn of the internet, but I'm too old to not realize just how much I missed out on.
If any of that makes sense to you, any help is appreciated.
there is insane demand for more fiat-cryptocurrency options with lower fees. figure out how to set that up, show everyone that you arent a scammer, and you will be rich
Brody Diaz
Are you asking about bitcoin or blockchain here?
Jose Sullivan
start a local offline exchange sell sealed paper wallets for cash (there will be buyers) establish a trust relation with your customers first buyers will be just curious about you there won't be much money turned around but later on they will know your wallets are good and some serious buyers might come by.
you make money off the difference between your buy and sell prices compared to spot.
world needs services like that. sadly most around here are too expensive (ie keep to big spread) because of the low traffic i imagine.
Colton Morgan
Aye, there's the rub. I'm not even sure which I'm asking about here.
>there is insane demand for more fiat-cryptocurrency options with lower fees. figure out how to set that up, show everyone that you arent a scammer, and you will be rich But what is the endgame here? For everyone to have their own currency? Backed by what? Their own labor?
>start a local offline exchange sell sealed paper wallets for cash (there will be buyers) establish a trust relation with your customers first buyers will be just curious about you there won't be much money turned around but later on they will know your wallets are good and some serious buyers might come by. So start your own bank, essentially?
Eli Hill
The issue with buying bitcoin like that is that OP will have been able to see the private key of each wallet.
Lincoln Torres
>So start your own bank, essentially? no banks basically hold your money you are more like a currency exchange service altho legally bitcoin is not a currency it's a commodity and that means regulations should be more favorable to you.
Jose Baker
yes even he sets up a system where he can't there is no way for the clients to verify this.
that is why it needs trust. and as the guy opens the seal and scans the wallet pk he will immediately send it to one of his main wallet addresses and if the transaction does not confirm he will come back to your shop with a lynch mob.
Aaron Williams
i imagines some very untrustful souls would even wait the transaction to complete right in the shop the first few times. so he might also set up a little coffee corner. nothing fancy just lease a couple of vending machines of better quality and a few tables and couches.
Blake Smith
But by exchanging this non-currency/commodity that has zero relation to real life actual money, how does anyone continue to operate? Or is the "fee" charged in actual real life money?
Or is the answer just let venture capital prop it up until someone figures out a viable model? (I don't mean that snarky, btw)
Zachary Murphy
Just watch some bitcoin videos on youtube and at least get a basic grasp of what its all about,maybe read satoshi nakamotos white paper.
Bitcoin is basicaly the biggest thing since the internet,understanding the potential of bitcoin will help you to realise why its worth investing in.
Julian Rivera
>But what is the endgame here? For everyone to have their own currency? Backed by what?
no the endgame is that people who are in shitty countries will no longer be enslaved by economic manipulation of their local currency. They can team up and use a global currency without ANYONE ELSES approval. heres a great explanation
you can either charge an exchange fee in money, or you do it as a percentage depending on which direction you exchange. you will want bitcoins too if you are a seller of bitcoin.
Benjamin Watson
(without watching the video, yet, I will watch it) I understand and appreciate the elimination of money manipulation but, even in this very thread have people talking about starting your own currency? As far as I understand, "bitcoin" or all the other coins I've heard about are not all one currency, correct? So how are the currencies themselves not subject to the same manipulation? Just by their big blocks of users this time rather than a central governing authority?
Nicholas Barnes
>people talking about starting your own currency? that's not for you user, it's the usual ponzi scheme of pimpled russian teenagers with high iq and much programming aptitude.
Sebastian Long
But is that not the fundamental flaw of bitcoin, then? And, to extend it further and to use a really strange synonym in my head, like financial communism? As in, sure the system (i.e. bitcoin and blockchain) works, "in theory," but it can't survive as a global system free of manipulation?
Matthew Ward
you should not see bitcoin as money you should see bitcoin as digital gold. the difference between physical gold and digital gold is when you want to get it in or out a country one can be confiscated the other can't be found.
bitcoin in itself as of now it not money. it could be used as money but it's not there yet and it shows big weaknesses that are yet to be fixed it doesn't scale well and the developer community is locked in a power struggle disguised as ideological debate for many years now and simply nothing gets done.
this makes bitcoin "inflexible senile and utterly impractical" but also the "good old trustworthy" of cryptos. like i said it's basically gold. only better in some regards or more like with a very different risk set.
Angel Turner
Okay. So who's making money? Or was I correct that everyone is propped up by VC's until someone figures it out or this so-called "power struggle" breaks?
Landon Smith
>So who's making money? well the money is made by exchanges solely. miners mine bitcoin, holders hold bitcoin, buyers buy bitcoin and sellers sell bitcoin. none of them make money. the exchange does as it charges real money for it's services.
now of course if you buy bitcoin at a lower price and sell it at a higher price you make money and if you mine bitcoin efficiently you also make money on your investment. but the only one guaranteed to make any money is the exchange.
Jaxson Foster
>now of course if you buy bitcoin at a lower price and sell it at a higher price you make money
So you're saying there is currently a trusted place that exists that I can give money to buy bitcoin and when I sell it I make get real money back to buy goods and services? Okay.
And bitcoin is like gold but it's not gold because it doesn't exist and it's just math problems being data mined?
Nathaniel Smith
kinda, but the exchanges that exist are inconvenient for a lot of people. for one while bitcoin was designed to be anonymous the block-chain is open to see for everyone and all the big exchanges require you to identify yourself when you buy or cash out.
so an anonymous trustworthy exchange with decent rates would do great good for bitcoin.
bitcoin is basically a number in a global ledger that corresponds to a key pair where only you know the private key to authorize a transaction.
transaction not on the ledger for a sufficient time are "unofficial" but exist nevertheless. that is the biggest problem with bitcoin, you can create these transactions immediately but it takes time for them to be reasonably fixed the ledger. in this time-frame the seller of the bitcoin or the person that is buying goods with it can screw you over.
which is why you need trust for it to work in the real world or interact with the real world even tho it was designed to be trust-less.
Easton Morales
Bitcoin is "like gold" because it can't be mass produced out of thin air like cash (it requires 'work' to 'mine'). So it generally appeals to people who distrust the government/central banks monetary policy
Jaxson Anderson
it's not really a problem. no one is going to do a 51% attack to screw you out of the cost of a cup of coffee, and if you're buying a house or something you can afford to wait an hour for confirmations.
a bigger problem is that the network can't support enough transaction throughput
Ryan Torres
>no one is going to do a 51% attack to screw you out of the cost of a cup of coffee oh boy a 10yo can screw you over with a double spend i have done it myself once because i had a transaction that never confirmed so i simply spent the same coins twice.
