They took a risk;  it appeared most probable at that time that a BTC would eventually be worth $0.   It is not a fundamental law that Bitcoin is deflationary.

In fact... right now;  it is inflationary  in the sense that new Bitcoins are still being added to the system.

Just because the supply is limited does not mean it will be deflationary, however.
This depends on the amount of economic activity, with regards to BTC changing hands,  which affects the supply and demand of BTCs.


I would like to point out  ---  that  not even 10 million  actual BTCs necessarily have to exist to support an annual GDP   of  10 billion BTC,   as long as  only consumers are using them and  merchants are not holding the BTCs;   the BTCs get sold right back to the exchanges,  and effectively, the exchanges eventually start working like central banks...

I have yet to see or hear of a merchant that doesn't require a minimum of at least 1 confirmation.    In theory,  it might not be needed,  at least if there is a sufficient transaction fee  to prioritize it.

However,  I believe  the merchants/processors are all practicing CYA / "better safe than sorry,"  and  requiring a minimum of   1 confirm,  for even the smallest transaction,  and  larger transactions/operaations generally requiring 4 or more confirms.

Perhaps in the future,  buyers will acquire some sort of  insurance card or  "performance bond"  requiring a small deposit with a trusted third party  reputation service  to demonstrate to the merchant    who will   publish the buyer's  "Wallet Address"  in a merchant-accessible database of bonded addresses.

And the merchant will treat payments from listed addresses as immediately confirmed, based on their reputation.

However if the buyer double spends in less than 48 hours,  and the merchant   can later demonstrate that   they were given a signed transaction  which not get confirmed, by submitting a copy;   the buyer will be alerted  and given a short time to settle up.

E.g.  5 days  to replace the double spent transaction  before their reputation status is suspended, deposit is taken to pay the merchant,  and they get a bill in the mail  in the amount of an agreed upon "penalty".

Customer #: 13760
Entry #   41

And this little igppy went hshaing
err, sorry, typo

And this little piyggy went hai shing
oops, try again

And this little pig gy went gnashing
sigh

And this little piggy went cashing
getting closer

And this little piggy went hashing!
Yay!

Itsa hard to type with big hooves, using little keys on the keyboard, you know.

My thought.....  perhaps you should be finding an insurance policy that will pay "replacement cost" for a new unit plus coverage for business income losses (due to miner not being in operation),  not  the nebulous "market value".

If you go the insurance route;  there is a problem that the market value of the unit may very well drop to $0  after the loss occured, but before the months it takes for insurance claim process to finish  and pay you out.
Plus you will have lost all that mining revenue.


My first thought....  how to prevent theft......
(1) Get a big   19" cabinet,  that has a door with a high-security lock.

(2)  Mount the miners in the cabinet.

(3)  Rig an inexpensive alarm panel with a siren  20db or higher;  some magnetic reed  switches in the cabinet;   run some wires out of the cabinet,  for perhaps an extra motion sensor in the room.

(4) Get some extra heavy-duty chains, and run them around the cabinet;   secure with a padlock.
If necessary;  drill some holes in the cabinet to mount loops for the chains to go through,  or weld them to the cabinet.

(5) Highly visible cameras  mounted in high places outdoors

(6) Consider defensive/deterrent systems which emit a Pepper Spray Aerosol when triggered, e.g.   https://burglarbomb.com/AB-2000.aspx
http://burglarblaster.com/

My answer personally....  is  I feel really good with the price stagnating for a long time.

First of all....  less volatility means less discouragement for people to adopt.

Second of all.....  it means more opportunities and time to find capital for buying in more BTC  and thinking about possible Bitcoin-related business(es) to experiment,  or play with,    before it becomes more mainstream, and regulators invade to break up the party.

I think one of the problems is;  there's no guarantee about which order the miner tries the nonce values in, and it might fail or decide not to try some subset of nonces of the winning one is one of... without being a "cheating" or withholding miner.

The other thing is sending miners some fake work units:  results in hashing power being wasted,  so great care must be taken for the "fix"  to  not have greater  expected total losses on average,  than the block withholding attacks that are likely.

At some point you could consider making it economically viable for miners to "spot check"  work units conducted by other miners,   and  if  another miner finds enough blocks the other mining operator apparently missed in the past,  then miner deemed to have originally witheld that solution.

Perhaps pools publishing detailed statistical datasets for every miner operating on their pool; including the listing of complete work units  they claimed to have exhausted.   And every time the pool solves a block, set aside 0.02BTC of the generation  (or some other fraction) towards a heavily secured "security/bounty fund".

Partially as a reward for reporting or correcting nefarious activity, in order to "crowdsource" audit work,  and partially as an 'insurance fund'.

Use a 90 or 180 day delayed payout mechanism to give some funds as reward to miners solving a block,  in order  to discourage small miners from witholding, since they will actually immediately lose $$$ in doing so.     And to distribute  the rest of the bounty fund (excluding a reserve of at least 100BTC)  as  payouts similar in concept to  "claimed insurance" to  reduce miners'  losses due to block witholding.

If any software developer designs an effective scheme of lower cost to operate that provides reliable automatic detection which is not easily defeated or provides permanent immunity against block witholding,  then the developer would be awarded 10 or 20 BTC,  from every pool to have such a fund,  and the size of the  security bounty / block "insurance"  premium  could then be reduced.

On the other hand...  if anyone who reviews a pool's public datasets and is convinced that a certain miner is conducting block witholding,  they can pay a   3 BTC fee  and specify  which  2016 block difficulty adjustment period,  or  6 BTC and specify their two sequential 2016 block periods, etc, in order to lay their  accusation.

In case the pool operator finds the proof of the accusation to meet the statistical requirements,  then the first to have reported the miner block witholding for each 2016 block period is paid from the bounty fund  the lesser of 20BTC from the bounty fund per 2016 period and half the pool's loss from that miner (Not to exceed  40BTC total to all accusers for accusations related to a specific accused miner or during a specific 30 days).

In either case, the pool operator keeps the 3BTC fee taken from the first accuser to lay the accusation,  in order to help compensate for investigation,  but may: at their discretion, refund some portion, if it was shown to be wrong but non-frivolous.

Seriously....  you should at least see to it that your marriage is officially recognized by at least one jurisdiction   that  your government and locals will see as somehow valid and official.  Or see a lawyer about other options.

The concern is about various situations where not having an officially recognized marriage can be extremely inconvenient or troublesome.

If you can prove marriage; you have additional legal rights in some situations, such as with kids -- guaranteed right of both parents to act as guardians, pick up kids from school, shared property rights, etc,  or if spouse is temporarily incapacitated or in hospital: without proof of marriage/family relationship, or  legal documents,  there is no authority to direct their care.

The blockchain marriage is a cool idea and all,  but I would advise you to not take unnecessary risks in giving up legal privileges couples with the legally recognized state documentation ordinarily have.

The thought occurs to change mining -- to require an additional digital signature, so that knowledge of the secret key is required of the recipient address(es)  that newly generated coins are to be output to,  before a candidate block can be tested against the hash target, to see if it is a proper solution.

This makes it difficult to pool resources, since it ensures the 'solver'  of the block has enough information to spend all the coins generated in the block that they solved.

Or talk to the neighbor about it. And if they refuse... start recording it, and initiate a legal action to request injunctions against their noisy activity, sue for damages or to seek a noise abatement order against the neighbor.

In most states, the neighbor could be liable from $50 to $100 a day. Much more, if it causes medical/psychological issues, or if it affects the value of your property or interferes with  your ability to rent or sell..

You'll need to be able to prove  using recordings, police reports, and your witness testimony that
* The noise is excessive and disturbing, and
* The neighbor is creating the noise (or e.g. is the landlord and therefore, responsible), and,
* Your enjoyment of your space is affected, and
* You verifiably asked the neighbor to stop the noise on multiple occasions, and they had refused or continued to make the noise.

That  OUGHT to be good enough;  the main consideration is that your bank allows you to transfer out the funds required...  once you have the BTC...  divide it up and stick it in offline wallets right away.  Once funds are in an offline wallet; they should be reasonably secure against any 'shenanigans'.

Do any trading to fiat  virtually on different exchanges  that are not linked to a bank account and that you didn't wire funds to;  expect to convert back to BTC before withdrawing.

Wait 1 year, until you are 18, before attempting to cash out any BTC back to real dollars.

If your mining operation is a block eruptor.... you have nothing to lose.
A "lower amount of payouts" from nearly zero, is hardly distinguishable from nearly zero.    Many of the pools have a mechanism such as pay per share, so the withholder doesn't lose any payouts  even if the pool is strangely 'unlucky'.

They're paid just by "proving" they are working on the solution.

Without an extra kickback for providing the solution when they find it, however... the pool operator, and the majority of the miners need the solution to be found early a LOT  more than the individual miner does.

Hello.   Anyone can write a "warning"  with a headline that "such and such" is a scam;   such warnings have been made about Bitcoin itself, and there are many 'suspicious' actors or 'businesses' that might or might not be schemes to cheat people out of their bitcoins or money.

Do you think you could provide an explanation of what you are basing this on?

What is XCFD.COM doing, in what way are they cheating or being dishonest, and.... how do you know  for a fact they are perpetrating a "scam" ?

The pools really ought to give some small reward to the miner who found the block, such as an extra 0.1BTC  for being the lucky finder of the block.

Otherwise....  all the small time miners  are better off witholding and discarding the block that they solved,  instead of sharing with the network; in case they do find the solution..   so although the pool as a whole will be slightly less profitable...  lower network difficulty, that way

A CALL for that amount expiring today would have approximately 100 * (650-500) = $15,000 in intrinsic value.    Add 205 days of time value premium, where historically the underlier has ranged from $400 to $1000 over a similar period of time, a standard deviation of ~50% of log returns.
 
And we can estimate that today this Call option is worth a total of approximately $60,000,   but  any writer in their correct mind,  would  need to add on a charge of 5 to 10%,  in order to expect a profit.

They would probably replace "free mining" with a requirement that a completed block also be submitted to the fed for approval/validation and then digitally signed by the Fed, before being awarded,  and a portion of the block reward has to be going back to the fed as the fed's fee,  so the fed decides which bank (or that the fed itself) is going to successfully mine the next block.

The fed could then be enabled to specify FedCoin reward for mining, difficulty parameters, and "fed's fee" parameters centrally, for each individual block, instead of letting a distributed algorithm decide the mining parameters.

The fed's ability to reduce difficulty, increase reward  ("liquidity infusion"),  or increase fed's fee for the block taken from the reward ("liquidity removal"),   then lets the fed influence money supply.

Also, at any point in time, the fed can decide that the next block and the next 10% of the blocks will be won by the specified bank -- .e.g.  the fed,  regardless of hashing power,  and have a specially magnified award.

IF you have that amount, you can write a check; your payee deposts to the account with their bank,  as long as they are in the same country. Sure you can move money.

It's if you want to move money internationally, or _fast_   (e.g. Wire transfer) or by getting a special cashier's check, etc,  that you incur a fee,  or if you want the cash or spend the funds, that you incur extra delays.

E.g. after transferring a large sum of money, the funds are likely to be 'held' on the receiving account and unavailable for spending, for a waiting period:  attempts to spend  without sufficient unheld funds = overdraft = overdraft fees.

The last time the price was below $400 per B⃦,  was also a time when crypto currency was younger  and more unknown and there was even more risk and uncertainty than there is today.

Some of those who 'bought in lower'  lost it to Gox;  or lost the value in some other way.   So anyways, buying in today is somewhat lower risk, so less reward.

I don't expect massive growth in value of a BTC vs Fiat Units in the short term, and the current price probably reflects a bit of speculation.

It's entirely possible that almost everyone who is going to adopt cryptocurrency for a while has  ("the early adopters").

Historically speaking -- it is not unusual for a new idea or technology to quickly saturate the market of innovators, and  then growth stalls,  and sometimes dies there,   because mainstream audiences are fundamentally different than the early adopters,  the mainstream is less likely to pick up new ideas -- old traditions are strong, and new ideas are adopted at a lower rate with reluctance and risk aversity.

There are lots of theories about 1 B⃦  becoming worth a large amount of fiat.
But it's not really going to happen,  unless and until crypto currency  begins to be adopted by the average person  who is risk averse and hesitant to jump onto just any cool new idea that comes along,  and if you are waiting for to happen --- it is probably 6 or 7 years,  if it will happen at all.

For now, most chance to growth of BTC will be more early adopters coming onboard; your best bet is new startups,  banks/bankers, hedge funds/wall st. traders,  small retailers,   retailers that themselves are trying to get into the market  as a new competitor ---  in other words  they are so small, even the "innovator" / "early adopter"   markets are valuable to them --- and by offering to do business in BTC  they have an edge,  that may  get their business some new customers.

So to be safe... when spending... always create a transaction that spends any unused part to one or more of your other Bitcoin addresses  (or new addresses) that have never spent anything.

And when receiving funds from someone, always receive them at a newly generated address, if possible.

Using these rules would achieve greater degrees of security and privacy than if you did allow yourself to reuse addresses.

I don't necessarily expect that fiat currencies will ever become non-volatile with respect to Bitcoin.     In the event that the supply and demand of Bitcoin grows;  the supply and demand of the fiat currencies will shrink over time.

You may see price volatility still,  when you are comparing Bitcoins to fiat at that point,  due to the  instability of the value of the fiat currencies as a whole,  and the relative stability of the value of currencies such as Bitcoin that have a physically fixed or mathematically predictable supply -----  and then, demand only fluctuates with the economy and the health of the network.

Yes.   The bitcoin protocol may need some major changes, however, to ever conduct a tx volume approaching Visa or Paypal's; there are surely problems and pain points involved with scaling that will need to eventually be encountered and then addressed by future work in the development of bitcoin protocols and software.

So a positive but manageable rate of growth is key.

More users and more merchants accepting BTC for goods and services coming on board are a fundamental requirement,  before Bitcoin begins to become more mature and more valuable.