re: At $9600 per, Bitcoin is expected to hit the $10,000 mark today.

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There has to be a way around this problem that people smarter than me can come up with. I would say having a third party crypto wallet holder would be an answe

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That’s what the Pillar Project (PLR) is rolling out 1Q.

Beta testing right now. You will have full control of your identity and accounts. Your armor in the crypto-world.

You can google them for more details.

Les,

You store your bitcoin on a hard wallet. It’s a flash drive. You are the only person with the key to open that flash drive. If the drive gets stolen or ruined, there is a recovery process in place. If you lose your money by leaving it in an online wallet, that would be no different than joe blow having money in an online sports book that gets shut down.

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You store your bitcoin on a hard wallet. It’s a flash drive. You are the only person with the key to open that flash drive. If the drive gets stolen or ruined, there is a recovery process in place. If you lose your money by leaving it in an online wallet, that would be no different than joe blow having money in an online sports book that gets shut down.

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I get what you’re saying here. But the consequence of this is that you have to have all of your money on that flash drive in case that online wallet storage fails.

What do you mean you are they only person that can open that flash drive? Do you mean a password protected drive?

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cant you store it on an offline wallet?

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What happens if it fails?

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Heckler & Koch?

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When I signed up, a google search suggested that Bauer used H&K a lot throughout the series. I suck at picking user names lol.

Everyone fails to point at what I think is Bitcoin's giant elephant in the middle of the room: electricity consumption.

The bitcoin network currently uses about 29 TWh/yr of electricity, which is about 0.13% of the world's output. That's more electricity than about 160 or so individual nations consume. It uses all of this power to process the mind-numbingly low total of about 300,000 transactions a day. Visa alone processes 150,000,000 transactions a day. So, Visa ALONE processes transactions at 500 times the rate the bitcoin network currently does.

Since the bitcoin network is designed to require, on average, a certain number of calculations to verify and process a transaction, it is reasonable to assume that the number of calculations required scales proportionally to the number of transactions processed. So, if it currently uses 0.13% of the world's power to process 300,000 transactions a day, it would require 65% of the world's power to handle the transactions that ONLY Visa processes, and that's if there is enough physical hardware attached to the network to even accomplish that.

That doesn't even address the fact that in order to provide the security and trust in its transaction processing, the protocol responds to an increase of power connected to the network by increasing the difficulty of processing a transaction. So, as more power becomes available to process transactions, the amount of power required to process a single transaction increases.

I'm genuinely curious how this pans out. I believe that the blockchain technology is revolutionary, but the Bitcoin implementation's Achilles' Heel is how astronomical its energy usage necessarily becomes as the network grows in size. In theory, it's a brilliant piece of math and logic. In practice, I think the Bitcoin implementation is limited in the scale it's feasible over and it ultimately will crash as it becomes apparent that it's not going to replace other forms of currency or wealth transfer or it is replaced by more agile and energy efficient implementations of blockchain tech that can realistically perform as required.

If I've misunderstood something technically that will prevent the energy use from skyrocketing or that will make the processing of transactions more efficient, please let me know. I understand the numbers in the calculations and analyses might not be exact and the inputs put into the assumptions may vary. It gets the point across though that the protocol's security is ensured by, in a very real sense, turning a staggering amount of electricity into the trust that a single transaction is secure.

Links to a couple of articles highlighting the problem.
Vice
Business Insider
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Proof of stake is intended to solve the energy consumption for ethereum. Each node can stake an amount of ether and only certain nodes will be required to verify a transaction. If that node attempts to do something nefarious, they can lose their staked ethereum. They are then paid a % of ether to process the transactions. This disincentivizes malicious activity while incentivizing running nodes to protect the integrity of ethereum while reducing the energy consumption of the current proof of work system.

This is my basic understanding of the intended solution. You can google for much better explanations.

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cant you store it on an offline wallet?

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What happens if it fails?

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lolwut? As in the flash drive fails?

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cant you store it on an offline wallet?




What happens if it fails?

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They offer wallets with insurance

NASDAQ plans to allow trading in Bitcoin futures in 2018. So you'll be able to make or lose money on it without actually owning it