bitreality

It's illegal if it's provably done for personal use. But when you have money, you can create a legitimate company with a legitimate reason to have a yacht. Perhaps the yacht is essential to your meetings with other high net worth individuals, to discuss important business. When your friends all have $10-100M, the lines between business and personal events are constantly blurred.

Take a real life example. Look at Bill Perkins. He live streams poker from his boat. The boat is essential for setting the atmosphere for the live stream. Look at Tai Lopez. He purchases / rents luxury vehicles and residences to portray himself as successful, which is important to his brand. So where do you draw the line?

That's exactly what it means. And if corporations can earn investment / passive income untaxed, then everyone would just keep their portfolios inside a corporation and draw salary for exactly what they need and nothing more.

The problem would then become people using their corporations to make all of their purchases. Their corporations would own their yachts, their houses, their cars, etc.

So as a person, any time you can utilize a corporation's resources without drawing income, you are cheating the system. This definitely already happens, but in your case it would go to another level.

The system is designed for humans to behave like this. Big corporations allow blame to be diluted across an entire organization, meaning you face very little individual risk as an employee of the company. Furthermore, the employee's job and compensation depend on making the company money.

You do not make money by avoiding a catastrophe that could cost a company money. If you avoid a potential future lawsuit by removing the asbestos, how does that look on a company balance sheet? Looks like you spent money removing the asbestos, but there is no gain from avoiding the lawsuit.

So unless the employee feels the lawsuit is inevitable and imminent, why bother? It's just going to hurt the bottom line and provide no increase in revenue. Even worse, if the public catches on to you fixing the problem, then that could expose the problem existed in the first place.

Where is the author pulling their mining costs from? I'd love to see their source. Mining costs are mostly concentrated in purchasing the equipment and setting up a factory. Once that's done, your day to day expenses are electricity and labor.

Many of the biggest Bitcoin mining operations are in places like China, near hydro-electric dams, where the electricity cost is extremely low. Labor is also cheap. Since they've already paid the setup costs, they are not going to be shutting down even at $1000 BTC.

There have already been hash rate wars. BCH has tried sending BTC into a death spiral before, by luring over miners to their blockchain. It worked, for a bit. Eventually, transaction fees went up on BTC, and miners were incentivized to return to BTC.

The average block time is 10 minutes for Bitcoin. Hash rate adjusts every 2016 blocks. That's 14 days on average. If the hash rate dropped 50%, it's 28 days.

There is a major difference between Airbnb and Uber/Taxi. One has a relatively fixed supply (real estate), the other has a virtually unlimited supply (cars). Airbnb introduces a new layer of demand to apartments and houses, which traditionally were only demanded by long-term residents, it has completely shaken up the market. This is especially true in cities with a busy tourism industry.

So while the supply is mostly the same, the demand has measurably increased, the price will clearly be impacted. To argue otherwise is akin to denying the fundamentals of economics.

I understand the view where you say, let people use their property the way they want. However, at the same time, if we acknowledge that rents are increasing due to a new market for short term rentals, then we must also acknowledge that this increase in pricing pushes a certain percentage of locals out of real estate that they would otherwise be able to afford.

In a city like Des Moines, Iowa, the effect of the short term rental market is going to be minimal. Plenty of space, very little tourism, rents already quite low. But when you go somewhere like NYC, SF, Paris, Barcelona, etc. then the impact of short term tourism rentals has a major impact. Millions of people visit these cities every year, and suddenly they are in direct competition with locals for real estate.

Now why is it a problem if locals are priced out? That's much more a matter of opinion. But the clear reasons are that locals create deeper bonds with the area and people around them. Locals have more reason to respect the area. Locals are interested in building a community around them. Tourists are basically just ticking off a bucket list of typical activities and are on their way.

Nobody here knows how these cases truly work. There's some precedent where you can find gag orders, which make people think that Cook would simply go the "No Comment" route, but to assume those are a blanket procedure for everything is incredibly narrow-minded.

When it comes to National Security, combined with the most valuable company in the US, all assumptions should be off the table. Apple has many reasons to publicly dismiss the claims: their business in China, their marketing as a security-conscious company, etc. They also operate under immense secrecy. Apple has unmarked buildings, top secret projects, a culture of secrecy within the company. They are the type of company that would have innovative approaches when dealing with national security matters.

It would be odd for Tim Cook to knowingly lie about this situation. If definitive proof came out that the chips were bugged and he had knowledge of it, then he could be punished. But, at the same time, if he were able to prove that he lied in the name of National Security, it could be instantly excusable.

"Digital Nomadism" is a pretty vague term, most people stop the "nomadic" part of it within a year or two. The need for stability is a realization that everyone must discover themselves. Then the label turns from "Digital Nomad" to "Location Independent".

It's great to be able to choose where you live, what your routine will be, and who you surround yourself with. As a remote worker, you are in charge of all these things which would normally be decided by your company. You'd live near the office, your routine would be determined by your work hours, and you'd be surrounded by your colleagues at the office. All pre-determined.

However, sometimes when we have so much choice, and we must make these choices ourselves, we can get a bit lost. Without concrete requirements, it's easy to get yourself into the wrong routines and forget to properly plan out what you want to do each day, where you want to go, and who you want to see. It's easy to spend a few days in a row without even leaving your house or apartment. You can end up ordering all your food from delivery apps and doing your shopping online.

So it takes a conscious effort to remain happy. It's really a day to day endeavor. You cannot just put in a bunch of effort for a few days in a row and then just veg out for the rest of the week. The brain needs to be constantly stimulated by changing environments and real face to face social engagement.

This isn't some guy with a few thousand followers. He's literally a celebrity. He would need to delete all his publicly accessible social media, stop reading emails, and have the will-power not to go down the rabbit hole of reading the online discussion about him.

You act as if just disappearing as a celebrity is some easy job. Especially one in this area (Twitch), where the audience is more pervasive. There's plenty of celebrities out there who try to filter out criticism online but can't help themselves but get consumed by it. Kevin Durant is a great example. The guy has no reason to care about what some kids say about him on social media, but he still gets sucked into conversations about him online.

If you haven't been in the situation before, I think it's pretty unfair to just say "ignore it".

Sure it would. But these things don't happen in a vacuum. If someone like Ninja just quit streaming one day, there would be a ton of pressure on him. His followers would constantly be asking him why he did it, when he's coming back. They'd speak rumors about him, comment publicly on his health (mental and physical).

I'm sure your answer is to just ignore it all. No problem, if you're a robot. Then there's the pressure that comes along with quitting a super-high income job. There's a voice in the back of your head saying "You are incredibly lucky to be here. Quitting is crazy. You'll never get a chance like this again."

This isn't a job that comes with a lot of security. If someone like Ninja left the scene for 1-2 years, there's no guarantees he'd ever be able to come back and have the same impact again. The odds are he couldn't.

Par for the course for any business operating outside of traditional industries. Payment processors are continuously dropping merchants who they consider "high risk". Unfortunately for the merchants, they are not given any explanation on why they are "high risk", nor are they ever offered any chance to appeal the decision.

The result is a huge amount of businesses which are operating legally, filing taxes, and doing their best to abide by the payment processor's TOS being dropped without explanation. Furthermore, considering how incredibly monopolistic the online payment processing industry is, there's few alternatives once a merchant has been dropped.

Outside of PayPal and Stripe, you'll be hard pressed to find a payment processor suitable to handle worldwide online payments. The next step down from those 2 options are incredibly limited in comparison. An account closure on either of those two platforms is essentially a death sentence for any online store.

Imagine, these payment processors have the ability to terminate your operations at any time, for any reason they wish, and they do not even need to provide you with an explanation. Your business is at their mercy, and you never know when or if they will pull the plug.

Just another example of how the modern landscape is hostile to small businesses. These trends will continue, and you'll see plenty of innovative startups and small businesses get cut off from payment processing simply for being different. It's as if the payment processors are saying "Go open a traditional business! Sell toilet paper! Sell toys for kids!" But the reality is, nobody buys typical physical products from small businesses online anymore. They almost exclusively use Amazon and Walmart, or other major retailers.

It's really depressing out there.

It's very easy to get around those questions. Facebook is great at it. There is usually a customer-friendly reason, which is the one they answer with publicly. For example, "we collect your information to serve you content that you like". But the real reason is, "We collect your information, because your information can be sold in many ways, indirectly and directly, to make us money".

Both are arguably true. But for a publicly traded company, the "Why" must always come back to the bottom line. The ultimate goal is to build value for shareholders. Any answer that doesn't include some reference to the bottom line is utter BS.

For young people especially, the investment opportunities are an absolute bore. It makes a lot more sense to take big risks when you are young, and by implementing the 'qualified investor' requirements, many young people will never have a chance to invest in the exact companies which interest them the most.

A 25 year old who loses a $10K investment in Myspace, or Digg can easily bounce back. It's well worth the chance of investing early in a company like Snapchat or Facebook which could give them a shot at a 10-100X return.

There's a reason so many people poured money into Bitcoin and crypto. Most of the projects are pointless, but young people have very little interest in earning 5-10% in stocks, since they don't have a ton of capital to invest.

Who says they necessarily need to be picking stocks? Retail investors could still utilize the same vehicles they're using on large blue chip stocks if they had access to newer, higher growth-potential companies.

There are ETF's for everything today. If more small companies were available on public equities markets, then they would be included in a variety of different ETF's. The problem is that today you need to be an "accredited investor" to buy any of the high-growth potential private companies' equity, and even then, the best companies are usually raising capital from a small number of people and organizations.

This means the majority of the high growth in equities markets is captured by high-wealth individuals, and private organizations owned and operated by high-wealth individuals. Without strong connections, it's difficult to gain access to any solid high-growth private companies.

The applications which are most interesting are the first implementations of smart contracts. Most notably, truly "stable" tokens which track the price of something like the USD. One example of this being https://makerdao.com/

This is made possible through increased liquidity in crypto markets. Specifically, the movement towards decentralized exchanges for crypto to crypto transactions. As this continues to progress, interesting financial innovations like MakerDAO will be become more and more sustainable. One of the primary caveats of doing business in crypto-currency is the fluctuating value.

Imagine holding a real decentralized crypto-currency that is pegged to the USD. That will open many doors for commerce, and decrease transaction costs. The ability to swap this token back and forth using atomic swaps will allow people to remain in crypto longer, without exposure to crypto price swings.

Once this happens, people will be able to keep a portion of their net worth within crypto currency indefinitely. A stable coin is what the market needs to move forward, and it will happen within the next few years.

I can't tell you what every person uses it for. But I can say for certain that it is already being used to transfer money cross-border. And I can say for sure that people use it in nations like Venezuela, where the banking system has failed.

How do I know this? I run a business which buys and sells digital items for online games. Every single seller from Venezuela is looking for BTC. Most sellers from Kosovo as well. And tons of people are asking for BTC in general. The majority of $500+ transactions in the industry (often B2B) are done in crypto.

Bitcoin can be used however people want. People are certainly using it. Over 162,000 transactions have been sent today, basically all of them with a fee (meaning people actually were willing to pay to use the service).

Even on a slow day, hundreds of millions in USD are transacted through Bitcoin alone. And plenty more through Ethereum. There are tons of use cases for crypto-currency as a transfer of value.

Eventually, there will be more stable coins, there will be instant (or virtually instant) transactions, and the cost to send a transaction will be virtually 0. That's the future of crypto-currency, and you'd be insane to think that once these basic milestones are achieved, that it won't serve any purpose.

It's a work in progress, but there are definitely people using the service as is right now for considerable amounts of money.

Your argument is so short-sighted. Yes, right now the Lightning Network is not ready for mainstream use. It may turn out that the Lightning Network and Bitcoin itself are obsolete in 5-10 years. But are you seriously betting against crypto-currency long term?

Crypto-currency technology received billions of dollars in funding in 2017. Yes, plenty of that went to bullshit projects which have no chance at success, and probably have no intention to develop anything substantial. However, plenty of it also went towards hiring talented developers and creating projects focused on the next generation of crypto-currency.

Up until 2017, the actual investment into blockchain projects was minimal. And yet, even when the market was chopping around between 2014 and 2016, and barely any money was invested, very important milestones were reached. Most notably, Ethereum was launched, and has set the foundation for putting applications on the blockchain.

I don't think anyone argues that having full scale, working applications on the blockchain is a bad idea. They simply argue that the current applications are limited, and aren't working very well. As if the current state of crypto currency is static and will not improve in the next 10-20 years.

The reality is that crypto-currency and blockchain never got any serious attention until 2013-14. And even then it was short-lived. Today every single person in tech knows about blockchain and crypto-currency. They all have their own opinion on it, but compared to just 5 years ago, it has come an incredibly long way.

The technology will improve. It will improve at a much faster rate now, thanks to the bubble in 2017. These projects don't need to post quarterly earnings improvements. The developers don't need to follow a corporate timeline. You can't kill these projects. They will always improve incrementally, until at some point the technology is truly unrecognizable from what it is today.

Go back and check a computer from 1950. I'm sure plenty of people back then were laughing at how ridiculous the concept was of owning a PC. Technology moves in a straight line, forward. And unless a competitor outpaces the improvement, then every day crypto currency gains on other forms of currency.

The USD/USDT price has no impact on if Tethers are issued. A USD/USDT trade occurs on only a few markets, one of which is Kraken, and it requires one party to already have USDT, which they are then selling for "real" USD.

I think they'd just prefer no one speculating on Tether at all. If Tether had a bunch of people actively trading the USD-Tether pair, it would be much more expensive to keep the price fixed.

By keeping the price volatility extremely low, they discourage speculators from trading, since they don't stand to make a profit without price movement.

I think the underlying point of the article is that Tether's price movement is not possibly natural. It should often trade at a premium or discount. The fact that it trades so tightly with the USD is likely a huge sign of foul play. The obvious answer is that Bitfinex AKA Tether is using wash trading and other tactics to keep Tether trading at $1.00.

There is just not enough liquidity on Tether for it to follow the USD so closely. It has been very difficult to sell Tether for USD to Bitfinex AKA Tether over the past year. For awhile, any normal user had no option to withdraw USD from the platform at all. Their banks were completely shut off from the system.

You can argue there were people who were on the inside with Tether / Bitfinex and were able to sell Tether to them. I think there may have been some individuals / organizations that had the ability to send and receive fiat to Bitfinex, but I highly doubt they do enough volume to fully stabilize Tether 1:1 to the USD.

Look at Bitcoin over the past 1-2 years. It is completely common for it to trade at a 3-5% spread between USD exchanges. Don't get me started on exchanges in other fiat currencies. The spreads have been known to reach 10%+. These spreads can also be arbitraged by anybody, but they still appear. So I strongly doubt that Tether is a special case.

If Tether was trading on a real market, it would certainly not follow the price of USD 1:1.

1 Billion "market cap" and they don't even have a working blockchain (product) yet!

I'm not even sure you would need to exchange it to another coin. You would never be exchanging it to USD because USD withdrawals will require you to identify yourself and a corresponding bank account. To withdraw crypto you just need an address.

So you can exchange it to BTC or ETH and withdraw. Or you can just deposit it and withdraw it after. Most exchanges just mix customer funds together, so as long as the exchange has enough BTG balance minus the double spent deposit, they will send you real BTG.

Mr. Bachman, with all due respect, I would argue that the majority of people proclaiming they don't care about the price are bluffing. Perhaps even bluffing themselves. Bitcoin's price increase has far outpaced its adoption or disruption of the financial system.

Crypto-currency is different in the sense that it is decentralized. Paypal and other payment systems can and do freeze people's balances at will. Many countries have features disabled. Some countries are flat out discluded.

At the end of the day, there is no button that can be pressed to remove your access to the system.

Definitely one issue with crypto-currencies today is that they have volatile pricing which makes them difficult to use in commerce. There are several projects working to use smart contracts in order to peg the value of the coin to currencies like USD, EUR, etc. As liquidity increases in decentralized exchange formats, such as atomic swaps and DEX applications, there will be enough volume to properly manage these smart contracts to peg coins to fiat currencies.

A unit of account from my understanding simply means that other people are willing to price their goods/services in your currency. This is a by-product of people participating and using the token, and it being stable enough. So once there is a "stablecoin" that gains traction, this will surely follow.

The incentive to create new currencies has really only taken major effect over the past year. Up until then, the term "ICO" hardly even existed. Since that time we've seen a goldrush to launch separate blockchains and sell ICO's.

But that's just a natural by-product of crypto currency's evolution. The amounts being raised in ICO's has been steadily decreasing. In summer 2017, you could raise $100M on a half decent project. Today, you're lucky to raise $10M. Investors are also demanding more transparency and deliverables from the projects.

This trend will continue as the market matures. Fundraising will continuously become more difficult once investors get burned a few times. This is all very new, people have no idea what they're doing. Eventually the fools will go broke and the smart money will remain.

The reality is that with so many scams / useless projects being launched every day, investors need to do more and more research to get positive ROI.

Blockchain as it exists today is a proof of concept. It shows that people can use code to create a monetary system. The system does not need to be backed by any government or physical good guaranteeing its value.

This proof of concept can now manifest itself in a variety of formats. Many of which we cannot fathom today, because they haven't yet been invented. There are many intelligent people now working on this problem and improving the way a blockchain works, or even pulling from that proof of concept and rethinking the solution without traditional blockchain.

People are too heavily focused on what the technology is capable of right now. That is irrelevant. The industry is in its infancy. Up until 5 years ago, the only blockchains that still exist today in any meaningful format are Bitcoin and Litecoin. Litecoin is just a Bitcoin clone.

Just wait and see how this space will develop over the next 10, 20, 30 years. The proof of concept is that people will assign value to digital assets without any authority backing them. That's the most important development.

Well, ultimately a decentralized blockchain tackles the issue in a much different way. In the 1800s, if you were a money issuer, you could print any amount you wanted. In a truly decentralized blockchain, there are defined rules for how new currency enters the system. You cannot just print new money. The amount that exists is fully visible by anyone.

Transparency is everything. This also explains why a currency like XRP is not a real blockchain. Beware these pseudo-blockchain projects, because they are much more similar to your example from the 1800s.

Definitely, but this is a feature that a centralized authority like the fed would prefer to do without. Whatever technology is behind any sort of "FedCoin" would certainly not be blockchain. They will not relinquish control of their currency, doing so would make themselves obsolete.