So with Breadwallet I will be holding my own private keys, which means if my phone dies then my Bitcoin is gone. But if I hold my own keys, then I get free coins if there's a fork in the blockchain? How does that work?
And with Blockchain, I do not hold my own keys, which means if my computer dies I do not lose my coins, but I do not get free coins if there's a fork. If I'm only holding a few hundred dollars at a time, is not getting free coins going to be a serious amount of money?
Is this stuff really as complicated as it seems?
And with Blockchain, I do not hold my own keys, which means if my computer dies I do not lose my coins, but I do not get free coins if there's a fork. If I'm only holding a few hundred dollars at a time, is not getting free coins going to be a serious amount of money?
Is this stuff really as complicated as it seems?
Yes, with Electrum or Breadwallet you will have full control over your own private key(s). Is really easy and practical once you have done it once. Also it is considered good practice to backup those private key(s) (for example to KeePass) or you can backup the encrypted wallet(with a strong password of course) to your dropbox/cloud.
Blockchain is also a single point of failure, if their server gets hacked you are fucked.
When forks occur you will get 1:1 amount. So if you have 1 BTC you will also get 1 of the new forked coin.
But don't worry too much, the Segwit2X fork is deemed to fail, even if rouge miners decide to fork it.
So what's stopping a person from buying bitcoin on coinbase and then selling them for nearly double on Paxful???
The price is not regulated, so it can be set as high as the seller wants. But really, I don't think that many people are willingly to pay double of market price, unless the their funds came from shady business.
Wait, so everyone doubles their bitcoins every time there's a fork? How often are there forks?
Yea, that was my thought, was that anyone willing to pay nearly double must be laundering money.
Won't double BTC, because the new forked coin isn't valuated the same as BTC.
There have been quite a few bitcoin forks, but only Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold have been successful so far. The latest fork that was supposed to happen was SegWit2X, but it failed yesterday because of buggy codes and lack of community support.
There may be upcoming forks in the future, but no one knows, since we haven't heard anything from developers.