I am sure everyone would be interested in the ledger itself. But how is the security of transaction validation being managed? One could mandate mining function for all notaries, of course. Take a leap from there... is it safe to say these approaches will have to be closed or permissioned?

I am relatively new to the Bitcoin ecosystem. I have tried to understand how the tech works, and have a basic handle of the concepts.

At this stage I am struggling to understanding the hype around "blockchain minus bitcoin" and the excitement shown by mainstream industry for such a platform. Basically I am unable to really understand how incumbents financial institutions are planning to adopt blockchain technology while shunning bitcoin itself. From my understanding of the technology tokens (like bitcoin) are a necessity to maintain the security of the blockchain. And even at the scale of bitcoin's adoption mining centralisation is a reality and we are essentially at the mercy of our comrades in China. What hope do smaller scale tokens available to invited audience have?

Can someone explain what a blockchain based on a limited membership really achieves, and why is it such a revolutionary thing for banking? Aren't what they are talking about just a distributed database with universal read access? I am just unable to wrap my head around this. What am I missing? If this is discussed or written about elsewhere, I would appreciate some pointers.

Thanks for confirming this, Glen

I agree about the indexing effort being unaffected, and that blocks are not terribly compressible. But fetching blocks in chunks of 500 blocks is quite a bit of network overhead which could be positively impacted by this scheme.

Of course if someone had some data on how much of total wall clock time is for different tasks that would help...

 I recently download Bitcoin Core, and been waiting for it to sync up... it is a highly frustrating experience to wait for so long. It made me wonder ...

If the genesis block could be baked into the code, why can't the next 300,000 blocks be made available in 50K chunks? It's not like they are going to change or anything...

Trust is not an issue as the blocks will still be validated and accepted as today. It will cut out the network handshakes and improve startup times. People can even tshare the blockchain on thumb drives in local meets.

Yes, it is not a 'pure' and 'elegant' bitcoin experience.. but do you think it will make a significant impact on initial sync times?

This problem continues to exist, and this is not really an error. See this Issue: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/5794

Terrific, received. That's my first bitcoin transaction. Mission accomplished

Thanks buddy

Super. Here you go: 1Mm83DJnWza2CsAmNmTjJu2DR2YFQRGBDv

Your tax guy should tell you how to value an asset that was gifted to you

From the research paper by Nishith Desai there is some basis for considering Bitcoin profits as capital gains. That much is the easy part.  When you obtained the asset (earned / bought / mined / begged / borrowed / stole) there is a "cost of acquisition" in INR. When you sell there is a "Sale Price". The difference is your profit (Capital Gains) and taxed. That's the simplest principle. By 'Transaction History' I mean list down all the Bitcoin you sold in the last financial year. Then tell list down how you obtained those bitcoin, along with acquisition costs. Then you find the difference.

If you have mining "income" things get far more interesting, and you just need to apply some common sense in terms of what you can justify to the IT department if you are called for audit. For mining, cost of server and electricity may be considered as cost of acquisition - but god knows what the IT department will think of it... That is beyond the scope of this discussion as there are no precedents or authoritative rules on this. Safe to say this is a gray area and you are really on your own.

Disclaimer: I am not a qualified tax consultant.

Tell your tax guy you traded in an asset called Bitcoin, and that you need to show your profits as Capital Gains. Then give him your transaction history, including all Sells you did in the last financial year. If he still does not get it, tell him to think of it as a new stock scrip called BTCX and to use your txn history for comptutation. If he still does not get it, run from that guy.

If you have used only Coinsecure, you can use my tool CoinsecureCG (http://coinsecurecg.appspot.com) to compute your Capital Gains. You can print out the CG computation page and give it to your tax guy.

Have you filed any IT Returns ever? Which form has a place to write random notes like that?

Why so?



What is their business model?

Are there any India-based companies/ groups / hackers working on Bitcoin / Blockchain tech other than exchanges / merchant payment type stuff? In general what're the coolest things Indians have done with Bitcoin tech so far?

[ Just a few days old with the source as well as this forum itself. Would appreciate any quality resources for beginning Bitcoin devs. ]

Two questions about the Bitcoin Unit Test framework:

1. Why are they organized in a way that makes 'make check' look like only 3 tests are being run?

2. Why do the test cases in bctest.py live separately from the rest of the Boost-specific test cases?

:+1:

That will not be correct. To correctly calculate your CG, your sells need to be matched in FIFO order. If you ignore some transactions in either buy or sell, your setoffs will not be true. You will get some number out the tool, but it will not be in keeping with accounting principles. Ideally this should include *all* your bitcoin transactions - because your computing CG for *you* not for your activity on one exchange. It is for this reason that many stock trading / portfolio apps allow you to manually add "transactions" to your portfolio in the view (distinct from the transactions that happened on the exchange)


Try a different date range. There are transactions from 2014-01-01 to 2015-06-30

That will show some data, but it will be incorrect as your true Capital Gains, defeating the purpose of the tool.

BTW - the app supports a 'test' apikey (i.e. type test into the apikey form field) to see how it works. It is explained in the FAQ, but so far no one has noticed

We may be debating a minor point here, but it is important to get the terminology right.

A 'Transaction on an Exchange' is where the exchange squares off a pending Buy Order against a pending Sell Order. Technically this is two transactions - a Buy for the Buyer and a Sell for the Seller.

When a user "deposits bitcoins" -> they are bringing the asset from another wallet or source into your trading account so their balance increases. There is no role of the Exchange in this at all. To take the Stock Market analogy, There are three entities: (a) The Exchange such as BSE/NSE, (b) a demat account - that holds shares owned by users and (c) a trading account that allows a user to meet other owners of assets and exchange for consideration.  The "Market" is only the Exchange in this. I can purchase shares directly from my friend and deposit those shares into my demat account. When I do this the Exchange does not come into the picture.

I guess in your case Coinsecure is all three, which is the confusion.

Anyway, this may all be too pedantic ...

Thanks for the quick response on getting this fixed.