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French Tobacco Shops Will Sell Bitcoin and Ethereum Starting January 2019 (venturebeat.com)
Tobacco shops are a staple of daily life across France, selling cigarettes, newspapers, magazines, and lottery tickets. Come January, these most traditional of merchants will take a plunge into the future by adding cryptocurrencies to their wares. From a report: The French Federation of Tobacco Vendors (French Confederation Nationale des Buralistes), which represents the 27,000 tobacco shops in France, announced that it has approved plans for its members to sell Bitcoin and Ethereum to customers. The program is expected to start in 3,000 locations in January, eventually rolling out to all tobacco shops across the country. Of course, the timing is somewhat less than ideal, as prices of cryptocurrencies have been in free fall most of this year. Just this week, Bitcoin hit a new low for 2018. While the effort is seen as a new potential revenue source for these merchants, it remains far from clear how interested the general public is in owning cryptocurrencies.
Wasn't the original point of crypto to act as a replacement for cash in order to purchase goods and services? Not the other way around? Shouldn't the tobacco shops be accepting crypto as a form of payment for goods and services?
I will not buy this bitcoin, it is trashed.
While I am enamored by the cleverness of the entire proof of work system it seems like there's an inescapable problem with the proof of work concept.
To boil bitcoin down to it's most elemental irreducible aspect there is one and only one thing that all cryptocurrencies have to do. This is prevent double spending the same token without using a central authority to regulate when a coin is transferred and can't be spent again. There's other nifty bells and whistles but that is the one thing they must do.
The bitcoin solution to this is to make it prohibitively expensive not impossible. It works by making it so that in order to spend twice you have to be able to hash the ledger at least twice as fast as the rest of the system's combined effort. If you can do that then you can spend a coin, let the transaction close, then go back to the old ledger without the coin being spent, and hash it two more times quickly. Now you have the longest blockchain and it by fiat is the one that will be accepted. In practice you might actually need to be more than 2x.
So when would it be worth it to acquire so much computing power? When the double spend value to you exceeds the compute cost.
Therefore to make it prohibitive the compute cost has to be pegged to be near (or half) the most you could steal in one transaction.
That is the irreducible cost. It's not that the computation is expensive, it's that it HAS to be expensive ot the whole process fails.
Therefore the larger the transactions on bit coin and the more outstanding coinage there is to steal, the higher the transaction costs needs to be.
Thus bit coin baked in the seeds of it's own destruction. It can't expand past a certain capitalization without becoming too expensive to hash. that part of it cannot be removed.
So it's trash
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
B) are you really trying to say that currencies are never are treated as investments? Really?
No, but really:
a) All currencies trend downwards in the long term, due to inflation.
b) To make money, you're relying on the difference between two currencies becoming larger over time.
c) You're relying mostly on one currency going down, not the other one going up (ie. the other one won't be worth more in the country where it's used).
Right now:
i) All cryptocurrencies are going down so the advice of any sensible person would be to switch to $, not the other way around.
ii) It's a negative feedback loop, less people using Bitcoin as a currency means it won't "recover", it will be worth less and less as time passes.
No sig today...