Coinbase monitors who you send your BTC to, and if they don't like them, they block you permanently from using their system.

So they're not tainting coins, they're tainting customers. Nice.

(etiquette: no requirement to use /sarc off when it's completely obvious)

Oh, look, you can buy credit card numbers on the internet, scan them into ApplePay, and go on a spending spree with your phone. Whee!

Just another walled garden. A huge, successful, powerful walled garden...just like AOL was. Just another extra middleman workaround. Next battle is Alibaba versus Amazon, gee who do I think can give better prices, the middleman or the guy who actually manufactured the thing? It's about the end points.

AliPay is non-repudiable. They got refused a banking license in China however, a big political deal. China Mobile is putting RMB on a SIM card with global roaming. This stuff it gettin' real

The gold price is not a result of a free market changing price in response to supply and demand of the shiny metal. Instead, it is controlled, and very easily at that, by leveraged speculation and by paper and illegal tricks to trade "gold" far in excess of physical demand. One example is the LBMA, where 100:1 leverage is readily available. Another is the futures market, where it is common to see trades for 25,000 contracts placed at the slowest possible time on Sunday night where trades of that size will inordinately move the price. The people making those trades can only lose money, which means they are profiting elsewhere, usually the options market, which is another place highly leveraged trades take place. Another place trades take place that move the gold price is in gold ETFs, which are supposed to be pass-through vehicles that actually hold the underlying metal, but unless you have > $10M, when you sell your ETF shares you must settle the trade for cash (dollars etc) and not in bars of gold.
Bitcoin has a similar problem, but to a lesser extent. Small investments are required to move the Bitcoin price at 50X leverage (Bitfinex etc). Now there are swaps dealers who will take the other side of large Bitcoin trades, and they are not even required to hold Bitcoins (you're relying on the credit of the swap counterparty, not on the fact that he holds any Bitcoins whatsoever).
Bitcoin has a few other problems besides leveraged speculation. One is that it is "automatic money" in other words regardless of demand a certain amount are created constantly. Another macroeconomic problem is that mining is a "natural monopoly" in other words it will always make economic sense for two miners to join forces, reduce their costs, and thereby increase their profits.

Step 1. Stick some servers under your desk;
Step 2. Wait for the black helicopters to descend

It's depressing to see people in this thread talk about "mild inflation" as though it's accepted to be something good. It's like saying "mild theft of your bank account is OK". As central banker Paul Volcker said "a 2% inflation target means that a worker loses 70% of his savings during a 30-year working life".

Deflation is also otherwise known as "productivity". Humanity becomes more productive in things like agriculture, IT, manufacturing and the cost of goods is supposed to go down. Guess what, under that system the standard of living also goes UP.

But oh no, banks want to sell more debt and protect existing debtholders (even if insolvent) so they hire politicians and academics to spout absolute rubbish about how "oh oh inflation is good, really, no, no, really". Lower prices keeps people from buying things, oh, oh wouldn't want them to actually SAVE any money now would we? OK genius riddle me this: if LOWER prices mean people buy LESS, then why do companies like Amazon and Walmart do everything they can to make their prices CHEAPER? This reasoning would say oh no just raise prices and people will want to buy more.

Let's see, it's better for me if A. I go to the store and receive the same quantity of goods as last time I was there, or B. I go to the store and receive LESS goods for my money than last time. Select ONE scenario that makes you WEALTHIER. This is not rocket science

I think people are missing a central point with Ripple.

It's sold as a way to transfer USD or JPY or BTC or any store of value. It's not.

It is a way to trade IOU's, that rely on your trust in the entity that issued them. Those IOUs could be called RippleUSD or RippleJPY...but they are not real USDs or JPYs. Those real-world currencies are fungible: "freely exchangeable in whole or in part for another of like nature". One gateway's USD IOU will be better quality than another's; they are not interchangeable. They are not fungible.

Could be useful for internal purposes for banks, corps etc, where of course both ends of the transaction already trust each other.

I would love to update my Trezor firmware but I paid 1 BTC for a Trezor exactly one year ago and have not received it.

Thanks Alan for responding, OK I get your points. But if I had Admin privileges and could turn on/off or limit user functions based on login it would be even more useful. Certainly someone compromising the machine as Admin is still a threat (HSM etc would help that as you say).
Here's my scenario: I want a User to be able to create, import, sign, and broadcast multi-sig txns, but not be able to import new public addresses, and not be able to spend single sig from his wallet, or at least only be able to spend to whitelist addresses maintained by Admin. Only Admin can import new public addresses, change whitelist etc. Even better would be daily spending or txn number limits.
Am I missing something? Will pay BTC to someone who wants to consult and figure this out, thx

What is it about FRENCH GUYS and Bitcoin?

Karpeles, those Dealco guys out of HK, now these scammers

French Bitcoiner = AVOID

FEATURE DISCUSSION

91.99.2 has some very good features, but it makes one key assumption that reduces its usefulness in enterprise situations. Once installed, a user can do anything he/she likes. It assumes that there will only ever be one all-powerful central user, and that user can do everything, create addresses, import wallets, create transactions, and spend coins.

A better assumption for enterprise users would be a hierarchy of login permissioning. Admin-level login that can do everything; maybe even password protected or 2FA controlled (so multiple sign-ins are required for any admin-level changes). Then, the ability to set up users with different permissions (spend Yes/No, create address Yes/No, modify whitelist spend addresses Yes/No, etc).

Even the first-level login control would be a big step, Armory is difficult to use in a risk-managed enterprise fashion without it.

Any Armory experts who want to create such a feature set (or can construct workarounds) please get in touch

The goal of ethereum is to replace the Internet (DNS, email, facebook, ...). It's not even remotely comparable to the goals of Bitcoin. I very much doubt that Bitcoin can move in this direction, for many reasons. I mean, for example the accounting system is a mess and is going to be removed. If not even something which is in the core can be fixed, how could one take one such large goals? The last 16 bips of 39 bips are in draft mode. The last feature update of Bitcoin is now 20 months ago.

Anyone taking this seriously? Seems to me that innovation in the protocol is stalled. Anyone asking why? Is it the protocol architecture? Is it the core dev team (size, resources, politics)? I would think some of the venture money coming in would be paying attention (Andreesen, R. Branson). Oh, look, Branson just put money into TransferWise...

This is the critical question I'm still confused about. If 1 sidechain BTC always = 1 mainnet BTC, then how will sidechains be useful for assets? They'll be fine for things like fast BTC transactions etc.
Example: my sidechain asset (gold or whatever) that I paid for with 1 sidechainBTC is now worth 2 sidechainBTC. Do I redeem it for 2 sidechainBTC, then re-peg back to mainnet BTC?