Do you own bitcoin?

The price seems so high now .. but when you read about the demand, and the fact that there is no new supply, the price has to keep going up ..
I'm so tempted to buy ...
any advice from someone who knows or follows the trades ?
 
fruitfrog said:
The price seems so high now .. but when you read about the demand, and the fact that there is no new supply, the price has to keep going up ..
I'm so tempted to buy ...
any advice from someone who knows or follows the trades ?
Click to expand...

Nope, there is new supply, but it is controlled. Read up on the Bitcoin Lottery that runs every 10 minutes.
 
Swa said:
Don't worry mate I'm still trying to figure out what an Ethereum Wallet is. Meanwhile everyone is telling me things about it acting like I should know. It's like telling someone to select anti-aliasing when they don't even have a clue what a game is.
Click to expand...

As far as I can tell it is more or less something like this:

Account: A password generated hash for a specific currency. Your accumulated coins is 'stored' or 'related' to the account. Various utilities can generate accounts of which wallets is one type (Geth for example can also generate an account but does not qualify as a wallet). You can't directly transfer coins directly from on currency's account to a different currency's account (an exchange does this). You specify your account to receive coins or as direct target for mining (eg. ethminer will directly send coins to your eth account), most pooled miners generate coins to a temporary account and then you need to withdraw coins to your account.

Wallet: Holds one or more accounts, mostly wallets will only hold accounts of a specified currency, eg. ethermeum wallet only holds eth accounts. You can easily send and receive coins using the wallet. There are however other utilities that do not qualify as wallets to send coins. Some wallets have integrated mining.
 
jacosmit said:
Nope, there is new supply, but it is controlled. Read up on the Bitcoin Lottery that runs every 10 minutes.
Click to expand...

Yes, but baked in to Bitcoin is that the rate of supply halves at pre-determined intervals until it stops at an absolute limit.
 
fruitfrog said:
The price seems so high now .. but when you read about the demand, and the fact that there is no new supply, the price has to keep going up ..
I'm so tempted to buy ...
any advice from someone who knows or follows the trades ?
Click to expand...

There is new supply, that's what miners do whenever they process transactions is bring new bitcoins into circulation, until the cap is reached. There are around 15.2 million bitcoins currently in circulation of a capped total of 21 million.

The price is based on supply and demand so the more people that buy the higher the price goes. Should bitcoin use go mainstream the price will reach hights that make the current price look very low. That's a very big if though, and that's the risk you take into account when deciding how much to invest.

I was confident that the future of bitcoin looks very good, especially after Japan gave bitcoin legitimacy, but after reading the essay by Mike Hearn that I linked to in my post above, I'm not so sure it will ever truly become a real currency that can replace current money systems. It's going to take longer and longer to process bitcoin transactions, and nobody is going to go into a store and wait even half an hour for a transaction to be confirmed before being allowed to take their stuff so I suspect bitcoin may remain a fringe online currency forever.
 
I think the ethereum platform addresses many of the issues relating to Bitcoin. The platform is also not limited to ether (ETH) coins, new currencies can also operate on the ethereum platform.
 
etienne_marais said:
As far as I can tell it is more or less something like this:

Account: A password generated hash for a specific currency. Your accumulated coins is 'stored' or 'related' to the account. Various utilities can generate accounts of which wallets is one type (Geth for example can also generate an account but does not qualify as a wallet). You can't directly transfer coins directly from on currency's account to a different currency's account (an exchange does this). You specify your account to receive coins or as direct target for mining (eg. ethminer will directly send coins to your eth account), most pooled miners generate coins to a temporary account and then you need to withdraw coins to your account.

Wallet: Holds one or more accounts, mostly wallets will only hold accounts of a specified currency, eg. ethermeum wallet only holds eth accounts. You can easily send and receive coins using the wallet. There are however other utilities that do not qualify as wallets to send coins. Some wallets have integrated mining.
Click to expand...
Ah thanks that makes sense. So a wallet is locally stored where an account is based on a hash and password and stored on the network?
 
Swa said:
Ah thanks that makes sense. So a wallet is locally stored where an account is based on a hash and password and stored on the network?
Click to expand...

I think the account 'hash' is something rather more like a public key in cryptography terms to be technical though. Not sure myself.

I don't think the account is stored on the network either, it can exist on only one computer before transactions are made to it (and if deleted lost forever). I think the blockchain then remembers all transactions where the account was relevant and the blockchain is itself distributed, so in that sense it exists on the network but not centralized as you may have been thinking. I don't think there is a centralized 'authority' over accounts if that makes sense. Also note that account and address are sometimes used interchangeably.

A wallet is more centralized though and facilitates buying/selling/deposits
 
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etienne_marais said:
I think the account 'hash' is something rather more like a public key in cryptography terms to be technical though. Not sure myself.

I don't think the account is stored on the network either, it can exist on only one computer before transactions are made to it (and if deleted lost forever). I think the blockchain then remembers all transactions where the account was relevant and the blockchain is itself distributed, so in that sense it exists on the network but not centralized as you may have been thinking. I don't think there is a centralized 'authority' over accounts if that makes sense. Also note that account and address are sometimes used interchangeably.

A wallet is more centralized though.
Click to expand...
Yeah right, I forgot about that aspect. An account should be able to exist on just one pc due to the nature of the network. But I think in practicality it will end up being incorporated into the chain. I didn't mean centrally though but in a more distributed way.
 
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