Tarsnap Support for Bitcoin Ending April First

That is interesting - I guess by using scrypt for passwords you're encouraging crackers not to bother brute forcing (it isn't worth your time), wheras in a cryptocurrency you're actively encouraging that behaviour? Well spotted.

I can't exactly take credit for litecoin (and others) using scrypt, given that they did it without my knowledge, endorsement, or advice. (If they had talked to me I would have pointed out that limiting scrypt to using 1 MB of RAM eliminated the entire point of scrypt.)

That makes no sense, businesses that have been accepting Bitcoin generally charge the USD price at the current exchange rate and convert that back to USD not long after the transaction, for fear that Bitcoin would turn into funny money. We're talking business here, not investment.

Looks like the US cutting off Wikileaks from the credit card system in late 2010, forcing them to set-up bitcoin very early, and Wikileaks keeping the coin because of fear of bank account seizure, might have netted it $25 million or so[1]. This is really a classic case to point to for the problems(or strengths, if one is in control) of the current banking/fiat system that was part of the claimed reason why Satoshi created Bitcoin.

[1]https://www.thedailybeast.com/where-did-wikileaks-dollar25-m...

It is up to him, but most people/companies immediately convert to USD, because they just want money for their service not to gamble.

Yes, you could have made a lot of money with bitcoin, same of you would put all your money on 7 black in roulette. Hindsight is always 20/20.

Precisely $0.00. I have never held bitcoins or any other cryptocoins -- Stripe abstracted that away for me.

> It seems amazing that one could have made a little fortune by just deciding to accept Bitcoin as an experiment few years back.

In terms of what you might have made, there is no difference between 1) accepting Bitcoin as an experimental payment method in an existing business; and 2) accepting cash as usual and using that to buy some Bitcoin as an experiment.

What would have been much easier is 3) buying some Bitcoin as an experiment outside of the operation of a business. Because you wouldn't have had to worry about how to handle it in your business accounts, or set up an automated payment flow for it, and so forth.

You might as well be asking "I wonder how much people made from the Bitcoin rise".

Communities for coins are important.

E.g small coins like sucr or madcoin target specific populations (here south america and maroco). Monero is used by the darknet community. Ripple by the gafas and big financial entities. Ethereum is loved by start ups and geeks. Lightcoin is nice for traders to transfert funds between exhanges cheaper and faster than with btc. Etc.

If you just want to make money however, you target stuff that have a strong chance of going back up in the next month, but is currently very low. Philscurrency is an example of that, with the masternode going from 2.7k to 13k and back to 3k. Having a good rythm and patience is key. But phils has no specific advantages over other coins. It just looks a lot like alqo, and may follow the same path, being now at 23k for one mn. But why does it move that way ? The community on bitcointalk or discord is a big factor.

There are now more than 1300 altcoins, 10% of that only really have something technically unique (having masternodes or dark send is very common nowaday) or a good project (zencash, wagerr, stellar, kryll, etc. are exceptions, not the norm). But because we are in a bubble, most of them are economically very active anyway. So betting on the community is a better metric.

Of course it takes time to get in touch with each of them.

One fundamental problem at this point is that coin sponsors and the enthusiastic coin owner-boosters want massive price growth so they can strike it rich. But as a medium of exchange price stability is a very nice property.

In terms of price stable crypto-currencies there's tether, which is looking very much like a scam, and some kind of complicated ethereum contract token the name of which slips my mind at the moment.

The stellar network is supposed to be able to be used to make payments without necessarily involving stellars (except to fund the transaction). But the anchors and trust web needed to do that don't exist (yet?)

Looks like all the chains will have their own money, also known as gift cards or store credit.

Too bad they're not creating their own coin, starbucks would be a pretty catchy name.

Announce? Yes. Stop? Not really.

April 1st is the first day of the second quarter for businesses whose fiscal year is the calendar year.

It generally makes sense for changes that affect accounting to start on the first day of a quarter.