coryl

I doubt that blockchain was invented by a fresh out of school computer science graduate. The breadth and depth of technical complexity (even if just the white paper) that blockchain covers requires time and experience to accumulate.

Technically they can try, by selling users coin in a fractional reserve model. This is probably already being done by some exchanges.

But that's a problem regarding legal regulation.

The author seems to expect that the changes created by cryptocurrency should be visible immediately. It is a lack of patience, and lack of understanding that changing deeply rooted systems and behaviors takes time.

People have never managed software where if you lost your "password", your money was gone forever. They never had to keep a 12-24 word recovery phrase. They've never sent money to addresses that look like hash strings. Their money value was never this volatile (in some countries anyway) and never this complicated to use (understanding and waiting for block confirmations, looking up transactions in the blockchain explorer).

That's why Coinbase exists, to obfuscate these complexities, to sell security as a service. The cryptography behind cryptocurrencies allows you to basically be your own bank vault; this is not intuitive to people.

The fundamentals for Satoshi's vision have been laid out, the rest of the implementation details will come in time.

Buy and hold doesn't have any recurring fees. If you look at the opportunity cost between crypto and any other financial security in the market, its an easy decision.

Exactly, which is why the safer bet is going long on high market cap coins, not small volume coins where pump and dumps can cause liquidation events.

If you are short term day trading you're likely to be a victim of pump and dump groups and manipulation.

Going long on high market cap coins with a longer timeline is a relatively safer bet.

I suspect the investment banks that say they're going to stay away will quickly get FOMO and jump in sooner rather than later.

Crypto is always in the headlines and will constantly occupy the headspace of trader's colleagues and peers, so it's just human nature that they will not be able to resist having a taste.

By peer to peer exchange, you mean an exchange built on blockchain?

One exists that I know of (bitshares). I'm sure others are being developed.

Turning fiat into crypto is a separate problem of its own. The problems there are legal and political, not so much technical.

It probably is a bubble.

The problem is when it bursts, we don't know if we'll be in better positions having entered now, or having entered after.

You don't use it in individual transactions.

It's for wholesale drug operations. Usually drugs go at one time, money comes back another time. Only now instead of cash you could just use a crypto, but figuring out how to liquidate enough of it would be difficult.

You can use a test node called testrpc (now called ganache-cli ???) and connect to that.

I've also just begun to play with smart contract programming.

One problem I'm having is with event listening.

It seems that MetaMask doesn't yet support subscriptions, nor does my localhost testRPC instance pass it in the web3 object.

Some have suggested I need to run my own node just to listen for contract events. Has anyone figured out an easier solution?

Why does he need to call you back? Stock market crashes are nothing new. Bitcoins are basically the same thing as stocks in terms of the way they're traded.

No one is saying a price crash isn't possible. But it won't be caused by some liquidity issue, it'll just be people selling off.

Ok, so the problem is in the legal arena; the government bans banks from allowing cryptocurrency transactions.

This doesn't seem like a fundamental problem due to the structure of Bitcoin or exchanges.