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https://support.coinbase.com/c...

Cash balances held in your Coinbase accounts belong to you - not Coinbase.

If you are a United States resident, your Coinbase USD Wallet is covered by FDIC insurance, up to a maximum of $250,000.

Even if Coinbase were to fail as a business, the funds held in the custodial bank accounts could not be claimed by Coinbase or its creditors. The funds held in those accounts would be returnable to Coinbase’s customers.

One of the many big problems with bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is that the bitcoin whales own so much of the available coins that it enables collusion between a very small number of people to result in massive changes in the price of bitcoin. This makes the bitcoin market ripe for "pump and dump" securities fraud.

Without a doubt, at least one of the bitcoin whales works for Hashflare, and was aware of the planned timing of the most recent "pump," which happened 3 days ago. Hashflare's customers bought and paid for 1 year contracts ahead of time. Hashflare used that up-front money to buy all the ASICs and GPUs to set up their mining data center. Now in theory, the contract is established obligating Hashflare to transfer all of the mined bitcoins to their contract holder's wallets for the next year. But now that the most recent pump was pretty successful... they would rather keep those coins for themselves and reap the profits that rightfully belong to the people who took the risk of buying their contracts up-front. Never-mind that they wouldn't have all that mining hardware if it wasn't for the investors that bought their contracts. This is blatant securities fraud, these guys should go to jail for it.

Anyone who knows anything about Bitcoin will tell you that such movement isn't even a fart in the wind.

https://www.coinbase.com/chart...

$9760.00
+0.05% Past hour
9.08% Since yesterday
6.12% Since last week
+40.08% Since last month
+695.05% Since last year

- 13% Since two weeks ago
- 55% since three months ago

But "anyone who knows anything about Bitcoin" doesn't much like publicizing those numbers.

And I don't know where in your ass you're pulling your numbers from, because they don't match the numbers on the chart you link to...

Currently $9,880
-1.39% past hour
-7.41% percent from yesterday.
-7% from last week
+43% from last month
+705% from last year

Anyone who knows anything about Bitcoin will tell you that such movement isn't even a fart in the wind.

https://www.coinbase.com/chart...

$9760.00
+0.05% Past hour
9.08% Since yesterday
6.12% Since last week
+40.08% Since last month
+695.05% Since last year

https://support.coinbase.com/c...
"If you are a United States resident, your Coinbase USD Wallet is covered by FDIC insurance, up to a maximum of $250,000"

Coinbase secures customer digital currency through a combination of secure, online servers and offline (“cold”) storage. Coinbase maintains 98% or more of customer digital currency in cold storage, with the remainder in secure online servers as necessary to serve the liquidity needs of our customers.

Coinbase maintains commercial criminal insurance in an aggregate amount that is greater than the value of digital currency we maintain in online storage. Our insurance policy is made available through a combination of third-party insurance underwriters and Coinbase, who is a co-insurer under the policy.

The policy insures against theft of digital currency that results from a security breach or hack, employee theft, or fraudulent transfer.

and

Cash balances, such as U.S. Dollars, British Pounds, Euros, customers store with Coinbase are held as a balance in your Coinbase or GDAX account(s). For U.S. customers, Coinbase combines your balance with the balances of other customers and holds those funds in custodial accounts at U.S. banks and/or invests those funds in liquid U.S. Treasuries in accordance with state money transmitter laws. For non-U.S. customers, funds are held as cash in dedicated custodial accounts. All custodial pooled amounts are held separate from Coinbase funds, and Coinbase will neither use these funds for its operating expenses or any other corporate purposes.

To the extent U.S. customer funds are held as cash, they are maintained in pooled custodial accounts at one or more banks insured by the FDIC. Our custodial accounts have been established in a manner to make available pass-through FDIC insurance up to the per-depositor coverage limit then in place (currently $250,000 per individual). FDIC pass-through insurance protects funds held on behalf of a Coinbase customer against the risk of loss should any FDIC-insured bank(s) where we maintain custodial accounts fail. FDIC insurance coverage is contingent upon Coinbase maintaining accurate records and on determinations of the FDIC as receiver at the time of a receivership of a bank holding a custodial account.

I looked around searched the kraken website and could find no similar statements about how/if funds are insured.

Ever consider the BTC may be stored in a US based exchange like coinbase who store over 98% of the assets "for their customers security"?

If the exchange is in the US, they'd no doubt have to turn over the BTC (or its cash equivalent) or face federal money laundering charges.

Has anyone actually tried to get $10k for a BTC? I'd really like to see someone post they actually cashed out BTC into US Dollars.

I can send some to Coinbase, have them convert it, and have money in my bank account in a few days. If I'm in a hurry and don't care about getting a suboptimal exchange rate, I can drive downtown and use the Bitcoin ATM at the D. There are probably other methods as well, but those are the ones I've used.

(Hell, it turns out there are more Bitcoin ATMs around here than I thought. The one at the D was the first in town IIRC.)

The title is technically true but take a look at the chart and see if this is quite the devastating crash they're talking about
https://www.coinbase.com/chart...

Coinbase is FDIC insured.
https://support.coinbase.com/c...

Just finding someone willing to give you $4000 for one bitcoin is not all that easy.

Umm...Coinbase, perhaps? They probably don't even have the absolute-best pricing; they're just easier to deal with than many.

In the past the value of bitcoin was inherently tied to the production costs of bitcoin where there is a very narrow margin of profit above the minting costs from production.

What makes you think this has changed? The price has roughly doubled with a reward halving upcoming.

Today the cost of bitcoin production dropped from ~1.6 million per day to around 820k a day USD and the price remained the same.

Look at a historical chart. It ramped up in anticipation, speculation. It doesn't just double on the day. People have been expecting the doubling, so miners stay around, and have been buying as a result.

https://www.coinbase.com/chart...

No, bitcoin could switch from a proof of work system to a proof of ownership system. The problem with the later is the initial distribution of coins, but that is a problem for a new coin not an established coin that is already widely distributed.

There are many more problems with proof of stake than you imply. Take a look at the security concerns the Ethereum community has with a bad actor controlling a significant stake and their upcoming wishes to switch to proof of stake as an example.

You are merely re-stating the problem I described earlier, and bitcoin is widely distributed and beyond such concerns. This issue we both refer to is a big problem for coins that are born proof of stake, not those who switch to proof of state once mature.

One thing the article left out is how Zug will convert BC to SF. I would guess they want to do that immediately since they would not want to expose themselves to BC's volatility but rather ensure the expected revenues are matched by actual ones. Since it is a small trial the volatility wouldn't be enough to make much of a difference but large scale adoption of BC for payments would require them to address the volatility and conversion to SF issues.

Good question.
I would imagine they'll simply resort to a payment processor? And thus defer to them the gory details of handling the BTC-CHF conversion ?

- They use payment processors for handling credit cards anyway (Six Payment is wide speard in most physical shops in Switzerland, Datatrans is popular for on-line payments)

- There are a few payment processor that both can handle CHF *and* BTC (Random example among the bitcoin-oriented payment processors, Coinbase is available in Switzerland) (Another more classical example: Sum Up is a start-up for classical credit card payments, focussing on using Apps on smartphones/tablets a.k.a. mPOS - thus perfect for small businesses on the move like food-trucks - which is partnering in Switzerland with UBS - one of the three biggest swiss banks, that's some cred - and apparently they've started featuring bitcoin, using Bitpay behind the scene for the BTC processing)

- Nearly any shop that I know which handles BTC (random example: Humble Bundle) uses a payment processor and defers to them the handling of BTC, the shop it self only receives its local currentcy on the bank account, like with credit card processors.
The only exceptions are shops ultra specialised in bitcoin technology (e.g.: butterlfy labs, they price all their mining hardware directly in BTC)

It will be interesting to see if other cantons / cities get on the train as it leaves the station or merely get pulled along into it by Zug...

I see what you did here... :-D

While Bitcoin had a great year in most metrics of 2015( https://blog.coinbase.com/2015... ), expect even more rapid growth in 2016 when years of development and investment compound with another disinflationary bubble driving media and user interest. Several more bitcoin "killer-apps" (I.E.. https://openbazaar.org/ ) will come online while banks continue to poor money into block chain development to play catch-up. Crypto-currency developers will be the biggest winners as more fintech VC money pours into innovative startups and "blockchain" consultants.

Banking alts will begin to roll out in late 2016 with some eventually becoming massive failures and some private blockchains winning out providing slight benefits from removing some interbank inefficiencies. Both bank alts/tokens and bitcoin will coexist and serve different purposes as the key benefits to bitcoin will never be replicated by the banks: immutability, privacy and security with no KYC, sovereignty, open source and decentralized allowing limitless innovation and ability to onramp billions of unbanked and underbanked.

careful, your bias is showing.

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Bitcoin is currently dropping in price. Incredibly fast since the fight/fork was announced.

Can you provide some evidence of that? I don't know much about Bitcoin, but a quick google got me to this graph which shows a Bitcoin's value to be fairly stable since the beginning of the year.

That chart shows a halving in the BTC exchange rate over the last year. I suppose that you can argue that a persistent downward trend is "stable".

Bitcoin is currently dropping in price. Incredibly fast since the fight/fork was announced.

Can you provide some evidence of that? I don't know much about Bitcoin, but a quick google got me to this graph which shows a Bitcoin's value to be fairly stable since the beginning of the year.

Yes, perhaps you should read the "About" page at https://www.coinbase.com/about where they describe themselves as "a bitcoin wallet and platform where merchants and consumers can transact with the new digital currency bitcoin". So they've blurred the lines between a pure 'merchant service' and a bitcoin wallet, just as I described.

Being "professional" does not mean a company is legal or ethical, anymore than being rich does. Silk Road and MyCoin were "professoinal", and quite well known, and now are facing various well earned criminal prosecutions. Being bitcoin based did not make them criminal, but the bitcoin sub-economy doesn't have the historical regulations and protections real currency has, so the abuse is very real and not surprising at all.

Perhaps you should look at the link I provide and note its a professional operation being used by various large corporations.

https://www.coinbase.com/merch...

You are confusing people trading and using online wallets at exchanges with merchant services at an exchange. They are two very different things.

To get familiar with the sort of thing I am discussing see https://www.coinbase.com/clien...

> Who knows about the bitcoin mining because that's all nonsense anyway.

Nobody in their right mind uses GPUs to mine bitcoin any more. They use custom mining chips (ASICs) which are about 100 times more efficient, because the calculations are done entirely in hardware, and being fairly simple, can be parallelized much more than graphics cores.

As far as bitcoin being nonsense, the New York Stock Exchange and a large bank just invested in a bitcoin company: http://blog.coinbase.com/post/..., and Microsoft accepts bitcoins: https://commerce.microsoft.com... . Evidently they don't think it is nonsense.

> But I'll bet their little programs that they run using $1 of electricity to get 50 cents in bitcoins

I did mine at a loss sometimes back in the day, but it was in the background, for a graphics card I was already using in this PC. So I only had to pay for the incremental electricity of the card running full bore instead lower levels. The $60 of extra electricity is worth $680 in bitcoins today. I stopped mining in mid-2013 when the custom chips started going into volume production. Not all of us are idiots.

Coinbase has 1.7 million user wallets ( https://coinbase.com/about ). I buy my bitcoins from them because I can pay via ACH transfer from my bank account. It's very convenient. My understanding is BitPay recycles their coins through exchanges.

> Why not just pay with regular money?

Most merchants who take bitcoin are online (76,000 total merchants, 5000 physical locations). Even in the US not everyone has access to a bank card, and outside developed countries the majority don't. Bitcoin doesn't arbitrarily seize or close your account because they don't like your business. If you need to send money right away (bank wires) or internationally at any speed, the fees are really high. Some merchants offer a discount for bitcoin purchases, because they get to avoid bank fees for debit/credit purchases, chargebacks, and fraud. Even cash has significant overhead - you have to monitor employees and customers, count it, take it to the bank, etc.

If all you do is buy stuff with your debit card at local stores, there isn't much reason to use bitcoin, but not everyone is in the same situation.

Bitcoin is falling in value so rapidly that it doesn't work.

Wrong.
https://coinbase.com/charts

Dell is using a payment processor, Coinbase, ( https://coinbase.com/ ) who accepts bitcoins on their behalf. Coinbase deposits dollars to Dell's bank account, and resells the coins to individuals, and on exchanges. So Dell never handles bitcoins themselves, just dollars like usual.

The value of the Bitcoin Network (as distinct from the currency token) is in the ability to move money quickly, with low fees. To illustrate, when I buy bitcoins at https://coinbase.com/ it takes 4 days for the ACH transfer from my bank to clear, but 1 hour for the transfer of bitcoins from Coinbase to my PC wallet to clear. Coinbase paid 11.2 cents in transaction fees to send me my coins. PayPal would charge $4.52 for the same value transaction.

Since the only way to use the Bitcoin Network is to get some of the tokens, demand to move money drives demand to buy the tokens. The price of the tokens is set by daily supply and demand, because there are only a finite number of them (12.4 million now, 21 million eventually). They can be subdivided to the 10 nano-bitcoin level ( called a "Satoshi"), but the total number is limited.

On top of the intended use to transfer money, people do speculate on future demand, and hence future price. But that's like speculating on wheat in the commodities market. The primary use for wheat is to make baked goods, day trading is just froth on top of the actual useful purpose of wheat.

https://coinbase.com/

Like almost all online merchants who accept Bitcoin, they set their price in euros or dollars and the price in BTC is calculated at the moment of sale. Mobile Vikings uses BitPay as a payment processor who offers this service, another one is Coinbase.

If you are in the US, you can sign up with https://coinbase.com/ They just got $25 million of venture funding: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-12/bitcoin-startup-gets-25-million-in-andreessen-led-funding-round.html so they are not a fly by night outfit.

You have a choice to keep your bitcoins on their system, which is OK for small amounts, or transfer it to a personal "wallet" on your own computer. All bitcoin balances actually live on a distributed database called the "block chain", which every full copy of the client software audits independently. A wallet contains the private cryptographic keys that allow you to *move* a balance from your address to another one in the database. Thus wallet files are pretty lightweight, and can be backed up onto pretty much anything, including paper. Bitcoin wallets should be treated like house keys - have backup copies, but don't lose them, because then someone else can steal your stuff/bitcoins.

The distributed database is why bitcoin transactions are so cheap. A transaction is basically a message that says "Move X bitcoins from address A to address B", which is signed by your private key. The block chain database includes every past transaction, so everyone can audit your current balance simply by adding up all the past transactions for that address. If your balance is too low to cover the new transaction, it gets rejected. If it meets all the audit tests, it gets passed along to everyone else on the network. Since everyone now knows you spent your balance, you can't spend it again.

Bitcoin balances are tracked to 8 decimal places, so you don't have to deal in whole bitcoins. These days people are transitioning to reporting in millibitcoins (mBTC) since those are closer to dollars and other fiat currencies than a full bitcoin is these days.

They were at $90 five months ago. (Not sure why you're modded as "informative" when you're inaccurate.) https://coinbase.com/charts

Branson immediately converts the ticket sale to local currency (dollars or pounds, whichever they use). That way they can provide a refund if the buyer decides they don't really want to go into space. I don't know if Virgin Galactic is using a payment processor like BitPay or Coinbase, but those companies accept bitcoin on behalf of merchants, convert to local currency, and deposit that to your bank account daily. The exchange rate gets updated in real time, like you can see on this site:

https://coinbase.com/merchants

You really, really didn't look very hard. Your next stop should be Coinbase, where you can transfer your coins to a wallet with them and cash them out to a bank account.

I've heard a lot of complaints about Coinbase, but don't have any personal experience with them. Just off the top of my head, though, it seems at odds to use them for a currency exchange with one of its primary selling points being anonymous payments and usage model like cash. At Coinbase you agree they can do whatever they want to verify your identity, and the only transactions they deal with first require a connection to your US bank account.

You really, really didn't look very hard. Your next stop should be Coinbase, where you can transfer your coins to a wallet with them and cash them out to a bank account.

There's nothing stopping you from conducting a Bitcoin transaction in person, aside from the other party needing to hold and/or be able to receive BTC as well. For the holding part, new solutions providers such as Coinbase are starting to focus on merchant gateway style solutions. Progress is being made.