Its cool when a 14 year old learns about bitcoin

Not everyone wants to sign up for an exchange. ATMs have a role to play. And being expensive/high fee is not stealing. If they told you a price and then charged you more than that price, that would be stealing, having a high markup isn't, its charging for convenience.

The problems they encountered in the video are partly the misunderstanding of what a Bitcoin ATM is (not an ATM) and a lack of understanding of some of the features of bitcoin required for it to be useful (Not understanding the miners fee)

A bitcoin vending machine in concept is not a scam. The barriers come from the friction between vending a digital, frictionless asset out into a physical, regulated world.

If BTC goes under $100, I'm going all in

Confusing. I'm guessing that they mean you are not allowed to buy bitcoin with fiat?

I add on news, not price. I think bitlicence will be crucial

I think bitcoin is more practical because most trade will be < a whole bitcoin. Also its virtual so 'coin' is a misnomer, its more like a commodity.

0.142 bitcoin

Less divisibility than a satoshi doesn't exist in the protocol so if someone says millibit they must mean 0.001 BTC, regardless of if people are using bits as nomenclature for uBTC. This is why the argument that there will be confusion between the two makes no sense.

I don't think it's ideal that to someone unfamiliar with how BTC works, looking at the display it looks as though the minimum spend is ~$480. A little display underneath with $1 = 2085 uBTC/bits would be good, just to clarify that you can put 20 bucks in if you want

I know the client says you are supposed to keep it open during name registration (for ~3 hours), is there likely to be a way around this in the future? It seems less than ideal that everyone has to leave their client open for hours waiting for confirmation.

Also what happens if the client is closed after the name_new but before the name_update? Does it cancel/void the registration process?

If you artificially peg a crypto to USD (with reputation or expectation to back) and then create more coins aren't basically printing USD? Do people think they aren't going to get guys in suits knocking on their door if they try this? Isn't this liberty dollars all over again?

More people are using 1 bit = 1 uBTC than 1 bit = 1 BTC. Have a look at r/Bitcoin. It makes more sense if we make the assumption that bitcoin gets popular in the future and practically no one will have a whole bitcoin.

It's a good solution to quite a few problems.

This also works really well where in financial software where bitcoin is represented as XBT anyway and the price has to be denominated in uBTC/bits + 2 decimal places (satoshis).

There is no way in hell you are going to get the whole network to simultaneously re-define a bitcoin. Dumbest idea I've heard in a while.

Your proposal wouldn't have anything to do with wanting to scam people into buying 'zibs' would it? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=522958.20

1BTC = 1 000 000 bits. Nice try but no one wants zibs

A bitcoin is arbitrary, but it is still more practical to price something as 1BTC than 100000000 Satoshi

No it will be fine. Humans are far better with big whole numbers like 10,000 than small decimals like 0.0001. Italian lira and Chinese Yen are a couple of examples, I'm sure they have their fair share of 'dumb' people in these countries

I've posted this before but ill post it here.

Ponzi scheme - A central actor (person or 'company') receives money with a promise of quick and significant returns. All people that buy into the scheme interact directly with the central actor who pays out money he has received from 'investors' as returns in order to drum up more investment in a fictitious investment opportunity. It is by design centralized, non-transparent and has a hierarchy of 2 levels - CEO of ponzi and everyone else. The investors do not realize they are being payed out with their own and others principle investments.

    O      O       O
     \      |      /
O - (CEO of ponzi) - O
    /       |      \
 O         O        O


Pyramid scheme - A central actor encourages a number of other actors to invest in something in return for something of little to no real world value in a fixed hierarchy on a promise of a) high profit margins on a cheap product and b) getting more new actors into the hierarchy directly underneath you feeding your personal revenue stream (and by design, those directly above you). This structure allows large profits to flow up the streams towards the tip of the hierarchy. A pyramid scheme by design is centralized and non-transparent in nature. People lower down are often not allowed to know exactly how far down they are in the pyramid, only seeing those they directly interact with.


        (CEO of MLM)
          /      |       \
       O       O       O
      / | \   / | \     / | \
   O  O  OO O O O  O O


Bitcoin - Every bitcoin is worth the same so every actor benefits proportionally with the growth of the network. Note that with a pyramid scheme the goods you purchase either have little utility like a poor quality 'how to' guide or a good whose market value is vastly lower than what you just paid to purchase it ($600 for 24 energy drinks). With bitcoin wealth is being traded 1:1. If you buy a bitcoin at a market price of $600, that is what it is worth at that moment and neither party can be said to have 'lost any wealth'. There is nothing stopping you from turning around and selling it right back to the market for market price, just like gold or an antique vase. Bitcoin has a flat hierarchy with no central authority and is transparent.


   O - O       O
    \    \       /
 O-O   O - O
     \   /      \
      O         O - O  

The scam Bitcoin is closest to in nature is a pump and dump, but what separates it from a penny stock P&D is transparency. Because the bitcoin landscape is transparent (open source software, the blockchain etc), it's utility is transparent. The pump of a penny stock is dependent on misinformation and opacity.

What confuses people is the exponential growth and the religious zeal of some bitcoiners giving the impression it is a get rich quick scheme.

This argument always gets derailed by people who, ironically, don't understand that it has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with human psychology and spending habits.

I don't see how Neo was an 'obvious scam'. If i was going to cut and run I wouldn't waste a load of money on office space, employees and newspaper and TV advertising after the IPO was closed. A flawed business plan possibly but a scam from the start, I don't see it.