Canadian Cryptocurrency owner "dies" ( or disappears) holding the only password to his clients $140M !

[frequent]

Who knows, maybe the Russians found him and made him "accidentally" die.

All these cryptocurrencies are beloved of the Mafia, blackmailers, kidnappers, drug-dealers and high-class prostitutes so frankly anything is possible

[cdnmatt]

Exactly what I said. $140m of anonymous and untraceable money is probably pretty attractive to folks like the Russian magia, or who knows, maybe some Saudis like good ole MBS.

[frequent]

Exactly what I said. $140m of anonymous and untraceable money is probably pretty attractive to folks like the Russian magia, or who knows, maybe some Saudis like good ole MBS.

How is your Bitcoin treasure trove these days Matt? Still promoting the cryptocurrencies scam?

[cdnmatt]

Hoe many more years does it have to keep going for before you decide it's legit form of money transfer?

It's only been 10 years now, and it's still going strong, so maybe you need another 5 years or so?

[frequent]

Hoe many more years does it have to keep going for before you decide it's legit form of money transfer?It's only been 10 years now, and it's still going strong, so maybe you need another 5 years or so?

A money transfer is converting from (say) Canadian dollars to Thai baht. I don't need some sort of intermediary store of fluctuating value to do that; Transferwise does it instantaneously. There's no need to go and buy Bitcoin with my dollars and then sell Bitcoin so as to buy baht

[cdnmatt]

Problem. TransferWise doesn't work for Laos Kip.

[frequent]

Problem. TransferWise doesn't work for Laos Kip.

What's your solution Matt? Buy Bitcoin with your Canadian dollars and then sell your Bitcoin to someone who will give you Lao kip for it? Only the True Believer would see that as a least-friction solution

Here's the Transferwise link about the Lao kip - https://transferwise.com/au/currency...ak-laotian-kip

Perhaps you could enlighten us with the total transaction costs for such an act of lunacy

[bkkguy]

You can't just crack a password / key that long.

and if he is already dead then the classic xkcd solution is no longer an option!

Hoe many more years does it have to keep going for before you decide it's legit form of money transfer?

It's only been 10 years now, and it's still going strong, so maybe you need another 5 years or so?

really? last I read after the last fall the market valuation of a Bitcoin is now lower than the cost of mining one for most people (it depends on your electricity price) and without major changes to the underlying software there is no way it can scale to handle the volume of transactions that even minor payment systems cope with effortlessly - yes I know there are groups currently working to address these and other issues but the solutions will not be incorporated back into Bitcoin

and it seems even blockchain no longer has the flavour of the month status it once enjoyed

[cdnmatt]

Unless someone else has the key, and they're not telling, those funds are gone. I guess with the advent of quantum computing you may be able to get the funds back, but that's still very unlikely. If that key is gone, not even the NSA has the resources to get those funds back.

I can't remember how many times I've heard, "that's it, bitcoin is dead, pack your bags boys", and bitcoin is still humming along just fine. Worst case scenario, miners collectively decide to hike their fees, and we end up paying say $2.00 to send funds instead of $0.10. It will piss off all the people flooding the network with $0.15 transactions, but hardly the end of the world.

Network capacity is decent at ~7 TPS, but I guess could use some improvement. Please note, bitcoin was never designed for a bunch of $2 purchases. It's kind of morphed into that due to user demand, but that was never the intended purpose / design.

And I have no idea why the blockchain concept ever got so much attention, and glad that's over. For a good while there you had loads of people and companies saying this is the future, and the blockchain "technology" is going to change all aspects of society. We're going to begin putting property titles, car leases, wills, airline bookings, and everything else on the blockchain. Anyone who spouted that nonsense simply doesn't know what the hell they're talking about, because that's simply not how it works.

Bitcoin is a transactional network with a very specific format, and you can't just start shoving large documents into the blockchain. The protocol was modified years ago, and I think you're now allowed to add 60 bytes of arbitrary data to a transaction, but that's it. That's enough for a small CRC32, MD5 or SHA1 hash, and I guess you could use that to match up with records in the provider's database, but that's about it. And there's so many potential problems and issues with that scenario, that's why you've never seen concepts like that really gain any momentum.

[frequent]

Please note, bitcoin was never designed for a bunch of $2 purchases. It's kind of morphed into that due to user demand, but that was never the intended purpose / design.

Oh dear. How should I send 17,130 Kip then?