Newbie questions crypto thread

(12-03-2017 08:40 AM)Roosh Wrote:  First question: I'm using Electrum for Bitcoin. What's the best way to set the transaction fee to aim for low cost while ensuring the transaction eventually goes through? I'm in no rush.

There's this page that suggests anything above 0.0001 mBTC/byte (10 satoshis/byte) will go through:

https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

Is therefore setting a fee of 0.0001 mBTC/byte safe?

That should go through eventually, although it may take up to a week or possibly even longer if the bitcoin network was under heavy load.

A better website for estimating the fee to use is: https://estimatefee.com/

If you want to look at a cool graph to visualize all past transactions and the fee paid check this out:

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#30d

The purple color represents transactions from 10 - 20 satoshis/byte, as you can see in the past 30 days there was one period from 9 November to 19 November where hardly any transactions in that price range were confirmed.

In regards to if it is safe, you are not really risking anything as the bitcoins would eventually be returned to the sending wallet if the transaction is not confirmed. This would happen after about 2 weeks.

There are a couple of ways you can speed up a transaction sent with low fees.

One is to use a tool run by one of the big mining pools, you can give them your transaction ID and they will include it in the next block that they mine.

https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/

A lot of the time you will receive an error message, this means that they already have hit the maximum amount of transactions they can confirm in one block, once they have mined a block you should be able to use it again.

Another way is for the address that receives the bitcoins to send them in a new transaction, this time paying a higher fee. Some exchanges will do this with deposits to speed the process up. Some wallets will not allow you to send bitcoins that have not yet confirmed, so this is not always easy to do. (Of course you can import your private key into any other wallet software if you wanted to.)

(12-03-2017 08:53 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  a) Is it reasonable to run all your trading through a smartphone.
b) Have the markets become buy/sell intensive to make money or can you still drop some cash in something like bitcoin, forget about it and see good returns in 6 months to a year.

a) It is possible and it should be okay if you are just trading occasionally, if you are day trading you are going to want a proper screen to view charts and you don't really want to be messing around on a touch screen when entering trades that need to be executed quickly.

b) In my opinion most people new to cryptocurrency would actually be a lot better off just buying and forgetting about it rather than trying to predict the market and buying/selling. Even better would be Dollar cost averaging to buy in rather than buying all at once, this protects you from losing a huge percentage of your investment if you happen to buy in at a high price right before a crash.

(12-03-2017 10:55 AM)Roosh Wrote:  What does "sweep private key" mean in the contact of a wallet app like Electrum?

(12-03-2017 11:24 AM)Roosh Wrote:  Without incurring any transaction fees, correct?

Without the private key remain the same? I'm guessing not since you have to create a new wallet on Electrum to use the sweep option.

Each private key contains multiple addresses, sweeping a private key will send all BTC balance from all of these addresses to a new address controlled by a new private key. It will require transaction fees.

(12-04-2017 02:02 PM)Roosh Wrote:  What determines the byte size of a Bitcoin transaction. Is it just the amount of Bitcoin you're trying to send?

It's not related to the amount of bitcoin being sent. It depends on the amount of inputs and outputs in your transaction.

For example you could send 1 BTC to someone, but you don't have it all in one address, you need to send from 5 different addresses each containing 0.2 BTC. This can all be sent as one transaction , but means that the person recieving the BTC will recieve 5 inputs, one from each address. To spend this 1 BTC the reciever will have to send a larger transaction than if they had just recieved 1 BTC from one address, which would only be one input.

Outputs are the different addresses that you are sending to, it would typically be at least 2 outputs as you will be sending to someone elses address and the change to another address of your own. For example if you have 1 BTC in an address and send 0.8 BTC to someone else you will actually send a 1 BTC transaction, 0.8 to the other persons address and the 0.2 left over to another address controlled by you. (This is typically handled automatically by the wallet software.)

(12-03-2017 04:08 PM)Royalist and Legitimist Wrote:  What is your preferred online exchange for bitcoin trading?

It depends on what you want to do, if buying or selling bitcoins and wanting to deposit from or withdraw to your bank account it will depend what country you are in. http://www.bitstamp.net is one of the less dodgy ones.

(12-04-2017 10:39 PM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  Are there any good wallet options for linux users that don't involve running windows emulators?

I run basic zorin but I haven't gotten into any of the command prompt stuff.

Electrum runs on linux if you want a wallet just for bitcoin.

Quote

What is a 'snapshot?'

Quote

(12-05-2017 07:54 AM)glugger Wrote:  What is a 'snapshot?'

In what context?

Quote

newbie question: I put some play money into VEN and it's now worth well over 2x what I put in. At what point do you just go "fuck it" and pull out with your profit?

Quote

2x is good for something like VEN.

Don't turn a wonderful gain into a loss.

Quote

Another newbie question:

This is a little bit of a weird question, but I often see guys arguing over the merit of the tech involved in the creation and use of the coin and I think that's an important metric, but how does one know when the tech will carry a coin through or when pure hype will carry a coin through. I've seen a bunch of coins that people wrote off as shitcoins that skyrocketed randomly just because of hype and buzzwords, and I've also seen coins that seemed technologically-sound just floundering at .20 cents.

What principles do you guys use when selecting coins?

Quote

(12-06-2017 01:03 AM)Fortis Wrote:  Another newbie question:

This is a little bit of a weird question, but I often see guys arguing over the merit of the tech involved in the creation and use of the coin and I think that's an important metric, but how does one know when the tech will carry a coin through or when pure hype will carry a coin through. I've seen a bunch of coins that people wrote off as shitcoins that skyrocketed randomly just because of hype and buzzwords, and I've also seen coins that seemed technologically-sound just floundering at .20 cents.

What principles do you guys use when selecting coins?

This is a common issue that investors find out. What matters more than anything for these altcoins and ICOs is not the fundamentals or tech, but the hype. That's how a nonexistent (Confido) or scammy (Bitconect) coins can suddenly balloon up in value. Meanwhile projects with solid fundamentals/tech (i.e. Chainlink) bleed slowly due to lack of hype.

Note: Market cap matters too, a hyped project with $30m ICO cap has less upward potential than say, a similar project with $2m or $3m ICO cap.

Quote

(12-05-2017 07:56 AM)Savage Wrote:  

(12-05-2017 07:54 AM)glugger Wrote:  What is a 'snapshot?'

In what context?

As in, a snapshot of the blockchain for an airdrop.

Here's an example of the context:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ByteBall/commen...lockchain/

Quote

(12-06-2017 05:50 AM)Olav Wrote:  

(12-06-2017 01:03 AM)Fortis Wrote:  Another newbie question:

This is a little bit of a weird question, but I often see guys arguing over the merit of the tech involved in the creation and use of the coin and I think that's an important metric, but how does one know when the tech will carry a coin through or when pure hype will carry a coin through. I've seen a bunch of coins that people wrote off as shitcoins that skyrocketed randomly just because of hype and buzzwords, and I've also seen coins that seemed technologically-sound just floundering at .20 cents.

What principles do you guys use when selecting coins?

This is a common issue that investors find out. What matters more than anything for these altcoins and ICOs is not the fundamentals or tech, but the hype. That's how a nonexistent (Confido) or scammy (Bitconect) coins can suddenly balloon up in value. Meanwhile projects with solid fundamentals/tech (i.e. Chainlink) bleed slowly due to lack of hype.

Note: Market cap matters too, a hyped project with $30m ICO cap has less upward potential than say, a similar project with $2m or $3m ICO cap.

Yeah, this sounds about right. I'm in a reasonably large cryptocurrency group on a social media platform and many of the guys are actually targetting coins to flip based purely on hype as opposed to fundamentals--and it's working pretty well. I'm not totally sold on taht approach since gauging hype can be hard, but I can't say it hasn't been effective.

You can even see it in some of the crypto threads on this forum. People are bashing IOTA for logical reasons but the hype around a currency with no blockchain is massively intriguing to the average joe blow who has a few thousand dollars to throw into cryptos.

Quote

(12-06-2017 09:46 AM)Fortis Wrote:  

(12-06-2017 05:50 AM)Olav Wrote:  

(12-06-2017 01:03 AM)Fortis Wrote:  Another newbie question:

This is a little bit of a weird question, but I often see guys arguing over the merit of the tech involved in the creation and use of the coin and I think that's an important metric, but how does one know when the tech will carry a coin through or when pure hype will carry a coin through. I've seen a bunch of coins that people wrote off as shitcoins that skyrocketed randomly just because of hype and buzzwords, and I've also seen coins that seemed technologically-sound just floundering at .20 cents.

What principles do you guys use when selecting coins?

This is a common issue that investors find out. What matters more than anything for these altcoins and ICOs is not the fundamentals or tech, but the hype. That's how a nonexistent (Confido) or scammy (Bitconect) coins can suddenly balloon up in value. Meanwhile projects with solid fundamentals/tech (i.e. Chainlink) bleed slowly due to lack of hype.

Note: Market cap matters too, a hyped project with $30m ICO cap has less upward potential than say, a similar project with $2m or $3m ICO cap.

Yeah, this sounds about right. I'm in a reasonably large cryptocurrency group on a social media platform and many of the guys are actually targetting coins to flip based purely on hype as opposed to fundamentals--and it's working pretty well. I'm not totally sold on taht approach since gauging hype can be hard, but I can't say it hasn't been effective.

You can even see it in some of the crypto threads on this forum. People are bashing IOTA for logical reasons but the hype around a currency with no blockchain is massively intriguing to the average joe blow who has a few thousand dollars to throw into cryptos.

Yeah I think the question is when the music will stop. It's definitely reminiscent of the dotcom boom and bust cycle. Almost anything can go up in price based solely on hype. I hope people aren't left stranded when a lot of it finally comes down. Though my estimate is that we've got at least another year of hype. Will need to re-evaluate end of 2018, but I wouldn't be surprised if we see an additional 2-3 years of hype. At least with Etheereum, there's a solid roadmap for the next two years.

Though even Ethereum will have to demonstrate at some point it can enable a large-scale real world applications for which blockchain technology makes sense.

I'd guess we might see a big crash around 2020-2021 maybe? At some point people will start asking where the real world applications and value are.

I'll see if I can find the article, but I read an analysis that was guessing there's only 40 million people with Bitcoin addresses. To put it in perspective, the internet/email had about 25 million users in 1994-95. We've definitely got a lot of growth ahead. Question really is - how fast will we get to a major bust. Technologies have reached mass adoption faster and faster:

http://marketrealist.com/2015/12/adoptio...g-heights/



So yeah 2-3 years...

Quote

What is the best exchange to buy bitcoins without ID?

Quote

two questions:

1) Bitcoin or Bitcoin cash? seems like the latter is cheaper to invest in but will it stay for the long haul? I'm thinking just a small amount over the next year.

2) Are britons fucked in terms of keeping digital currency? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/busin...90791.html

for any snoops, the second question should be taken as neither admission nor denial of british citizenship.

Quote

(12-06-2017 10:59 PM)gonzoman925 Wrote:  two questions:

1) Bitcoin or Bitcoin cash? seems like the latter is cheaper to invest in but will it stay for the long haul? I'm thinking just a small amount over the next year.

2) Are britons fucked in terms of keeping digital currency? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/busin...90791.html

for any snoops, the second question should be taken as neither admission nor denial of british citizenship.

1) nobody knows. I'd recommend learning the difference between the two and feel out which one you think has the best potential for growth

2) that article reminds me of when US congressmen wanted to "regulate" the internet, not understanding how the internet works and that you can't regulate/control the flow of information. Same applies here imo, I don't think any of these British MPs understand how Bitcoin and other blockchains work - you can't shut it down or control it in anyway. As for your money - there are ways to buy BTC and send it to other addresses without there being a traceable link.

It should rightfully scare the shit out of governments. I was reading The Sovereign Individual recently - a pretty good book, written before 2000 - and it predicted this - the invention of cybermoney, how governments would try to control but ultimately fail (not that governments won't become more draconian in how they treat their citizens as they get more desperate for tax money).

Crypto could potentially be a killer blow to governments because it makes money collection infinitely harder. Good luck trying wage garnishment on crypto or freezing your crypto assets the way they can freeze your bank accounts.

Right now for most of us, we have to go through Coinbase, which requires an ID, to buy cryptocurrencies. But it won't be that long before other less intrusive ways exist and you can buy crypto without any trace to your identity. You already can through localbitcoins.com, but I imagine soon we'll have more robust ways of doing it. Governments are gonna be shitting their pants.

Quote

1) Bitcoin or Bitcoin cash? seems like the latter is cheaper to invest in but will it stay for the long haul? I'm thinking just a small amount over the next year.

Bitcoin Cash does well when people are scared about Bitcoin. People aren't scared about Bitcoin right now.

2.) No, read the article more carefully.

Quote

Guys, I have two newbie questions!

I have some bitcoin on my phone in the Jaxx app. I bought them 2 years ago and haven't touched them since. I want to sell now.

1. What's the easiest and most secure way to sell? I want cash in my bank account or on Paypal.

2. How do the forks affect me? I figured out, that I bought before the forks happening. Can I now sell my bitcoins on various forks and cash in multiple times?

Quote

(12-08-2017 05:14 AM)MrRemi Wrote:  Guys, I have two newbie questions!

I have some bitcoin on my phone in the Jaxx app. I bought them 2 years ago and haven't touched them since. I want to sell now.

1. What's the easiest and most secure way to sell? I want cash in my bank account or on Paypal.

2. How do the forks affect me? I figured out, that I bought before the forks happening. Can I now sell my bitcoins on various forks and cash in multiple times?

1. Coinbase if you're a USA citizen.

2. With each fork, you possess the same amount of the new currency that you had in Bitcoin at the time of the fork. You have to claim the new currency with a wallet dedicated for that new coin (it could get technical since you may have to empty your existing Bitcoin wallet, copy the private key, and then insert that key in the forked coin wallet). If you want to sell the forked coin, exchange it back to Bitcoin and sell on a place like Coinbase.

Quote

(12-04-2017 03:17 PM)pants Wrote:  they are stored cryptated, only to be unlocked with a PIN.
The passphrase 30 word will generate a set of addresses.
There is no central storage.
Lose your trezor, you are safe with your backup.

Lose both, and you lost your coins

Thanks pants. I think I understand how things work now, but I need to learn more about the blockchain itself until I'm truly confident.

Here's another question. I'm not sure if this qualifies as "Newbie" but it deals with interpreting order books:

What is the best way to look at a "bid" order book to get the most real-time price of a coin? I can think of three possible answers here. One way would be to retrieve the maximum bid price for all of the bids in the order book. The other way would be to look at the most recent bid entry into the order book. Finally, we could look at the average price of all bids within the order book.

Looking for the highest bid makes sense because sellers are going to want to pair with the highest bid, which will help set the price. However, the downside here is that a single inflated bid can be misleading if all bids before and after it are lower and still getting matched with sellers.

Looking for the most recent bid makes sense because the most recent bid should reflect what the public thinks the price is right now. However, the downside here is that these bids might come below the current max and never get matched if latter bids come in around the current max as well. Thus, the price attributed here means nothing if bids aren't being matched.

Taking the average price seems to solve these issues of single bids throwing things off, but gives us a less accurate answer.

Quote

well, you cant look at the most recent offer.

If i put in a bid for 0.01USD / btc on an exchange. that has nothing to do with what the price is.

Unless you are planning to do major selloffs in short amounts of, time highest / lowst / bid / ask, are the only numbers that are relevant..

Quote

(12-08-2017 05:14 AM)MrRemi Wrote:  Guys, I have two newbie questions!

I have some bitcoin on my phone in the Jaxx app. I bought them 2 years ago and haven't touched them since. I want to sell now.

1. What's the easiest and most secure way to sell? I want cash in my bank account or on Paypal.

2. How do the forks affect me? I figured out, that I bought before the forks happening. Can I now sell my bitcoins on various forks and cash in multiple times?

Thanks Roosh for your answer.

Short follow-up:

1. I sold to a guy that I found on localbitcoins.com. He paid cash at a fair rate, easy.

2. I claimed my Bitcoin Cash BCH in my Jaxx Wallet. Didn't bother with Bitcoin Gold.

Quote

(12-06-2017 11:15 PM)Genghis Khan Wrote:  It should rightfully scare the shit out of governments. I was reading The Sovereign Individual recently - a pretty good book, written before 2000 - and it predicted this - the invention of cybermoney, how governments would try to control but ultimately fail (not that governments won't become more draconian in how they treat their citizens as they get more desperate for tax money).

Crypto could potentially be a killer blow to governments because it makes money collection infinitely harder. Good luck trying wage garnishment on crypto or freezing your crypto assets the way they can freeze your bank accounts.

But why would governments fold? Like you said, cryptocurrencies are a very real threat to their power. Why wouldn't they simply outlaw it at some point? They can't outlaw the internet as it is just a generic technology. This is not true for crypto, as it meant to be a substitute for fiat money. So they can find all kinds of reasons to outlaw it and explain it to the public (money laundering etc etc).

I mean you could argue that people would just carry on using and trading cryptos even if outlawed. But realistically, how many people would really want to deal with it once you could potentially face 5-10 years in prison?

Quote

(12-11-2017 12:58 PM)kurti Wrote:  

(12-06-2017 11:15 PM)Genghis Khan Wrote:  It should rightfully scare the shit out of governments. I was reading The Sovereign Individual recently - a pretty good book, written before 2000 - and it predicted this - the invention of cybermoney, how governments would try to control but ultimately fail (not that governments won't become more draconian in how they treat their citizens as they get more desperate for tax money).

Crypto could potentially be a killer blow to governments because it makes money collection infinitely harder. Good luck trying wage garnishment on crypto or freezing your crypto assets the way they can freeze your bank accounts.

But why would governments fold? Like you said, cryptocurrencies are a very real threat to their power. Why wouldn't they simply outlaw it at some point? They can't outlaw the internet as it is just a generic technology. This is not true for crypto, as it meant to be a substitute for fiat money. So they can find all kinds of reasons to outlaw it and explain it to the public (money laundering etc etc).

I mean you could argue that people would just carry on using and trading cryptos even if outlawed. But realistically, how many people would really want to deal with it once you could potentially face 5-10 years in prison?

There are huge applications for blockchain technology outside of currency, it's untenable to just outlaw it. The most they could do is strict KYC for every fiat<>crypto transaction.

But even then we may eventually have an economy where a significant amount of people are being paid directly in cryptocurrency, which would be very difficult to audit if they were to choose being paid in Monero or a similar privacy coin.

Quote

(12-11-2017 01:39 PM)Valentine Wrote:  But even then we may eventually have an economy where a significant amount of people are being paid directly in cryptocurrency, which would be very difficult to audit if they were to choose being paid in Monero or a similar privacy coin.

My point is that governments will not allow such a economy to develop.

Quote

(12-11-2017 12:58 PM)kurti Wrote:  

(12-06-2017 11:15 PM)Genghis Khan Wrote:  It should rightfully scare the shit out of governments. I was reading The Sovereign Individual recently - a pretty good book, written before 2000 - and it predicted this - the invention of cybermoney, how governments would try to control but ultimately fail (not that governments won't become more draconian in how they treat their citizens as they get more desperate for tax money).

Crypto could potentially be a killer blow to governments because it makes money collection infinitely harder. Good luck trying wage garnishment on crypto or freezing your crypto assets the way they can freeze your bank accounts.

But why would governments fold? Like you said, cryptocurrencies are a very real threat to their power. Why wouldn't they simply outlaw it at some point? They can't outlaw the internet as it is just a generic technology. This is not true for crypto, as it meant to be a substitute for fiat money. So they can find all kinds of reasons to outlaw it and explain it to the public (money laundering etc etc).

I have no doubt they'll strongly consider outlawing crypto. They may even end up doing it.

The problem is with economic incentives. It gets a whole lot harder to continue to outlaw blockchain technology when that technology is causing domestic corporations and jobs to lose out.

Governments across the world won't act in unity. If the US and China ban Bitcoin, ETH and the rest, other countries will gladly open their countries to blockchain technology in order to gain the economic benefits of blockchain technology.

Russia already is looking into Ethereum for quite a few projects:

https://futurism.com/ethereums-founder-s...um-russia/

Cat's already out of the bag.

Quote:I mean you could argue that people would just carry on using and trading cryptos even if outlawed. But realistically, how many people would really want to deal with it once you could potentially face 5-10 years in prison?

The reality is that we're looking at a future where Western governments are getting more and more oppressive anyways. You can already a bunch of people fleeing abroad and denouncing their citizenship. Expect to see more of this - as governments become more taxing, fewer and fewer people will care much about supporting their nation.

This has precedent in the 15th century - Europeans were fed up with the excesses of the Church (the 15th century equivalent of the nation-state). The Church lost its power in record time, though it did fight hard to keep it.

(12-11-2017 04:12 PM)kurti Wrote:  

(12-11-2017 01:39 PM)Valentine Wrote:  But even then we may eventually have an economy where a significant amount of people are being paid directly in cryptocurrency, which would be very difficult to audit if they were to choose being paid in Monero or a similar privacy coin.

My point is that governments will not allow such a economy to develop.

Which governments? I think you'll find there's quite a few (like the Russian one), which are very open to blockchain technology, the cryptocurrencies it creates and the economy that'll follow.

I agree that the US probably won't be OK with crypto, and many European countries will feel the same way. Regardless, I'll bet countries in South America, and the East will be far more open to it. And assuming that blockchain does fulfill its promise of being easier and more convenient to use, it'll be very hard for the US/Western Europe to stop it.

FYI it's not just about the cryptocurrency part - the idea of smart contracts can potentially revolutionize a lot of industries, and streamline their logistics (amongst many applications). It'll be very hard to block the applications of blockchain from getting a hold.

Governments are really fucking bad at stopping technology from spreading. The Church was really fucking bad at stopping the spread of information once the printing press was invented.

Quote

When I buy the big 3 on coinbase using USD, is there a way to check beforehand how long it'll take for me to have the coins?

I just bought ethereum for the first time and it says it'll take 8 days. I wish I'd have known beforehand it'd take that long.

Quote

(12-11-2017 10:48 PM)KMK Wrote:  When I buy the big 3 on coinbase using USD, is there a way to check beforehand how long it'll take for me to have the coins?

I just bought ethereum for the first time and it says it'll take 8 days. I wish I'd have known beforehand it'd take that long.

Coinbase Buy/Sell FAQ

Quote:US Customers

Purchases made using a credit or debit card or the USD wallet are made available instantly.

When using bank transfers, the ACH bank transfer system is used for payments with your bank account. The ACH bank transfer system typically takes 3-5 business days* (which may be as many as 7-10 calendar days, depending on the timing of weekends and other bank holidays) to complete after initiating a purchase.
You may see the funds immediately debited from your bank account when you initiate the transfer, but the funds will not be transferred to your wallet until your payment has finished moving between the banks and clears in our bank account.
After the banks have processed the transfer, the funds enter our system and you will see the money in your account sometime before the end of the estimated delivery day. This date is shown on the confirmation window when placing your order and can be located in the order confirmation email you received from us. End of the day would be considered 11:59 PM PST, as we are based in San Francisco.

Some customers may be eligible for instant bank purchases for their account.

Quote