26
I am not a lawyer, but...
The Coinage Act of 1965, Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," states: "United States coins and currency... are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues."
In the USA all monetary debts can be paid in US dollars.
Second, while bitcoin is legally a payment method in the US, it does not have legal ...
22
There are several major differences. Bitcoin is a currency with a built in payment system for its currency. The XRP Ledger is a payment system for arbitrary currencies with support for cross-currency transactions.
One big difference is that currencies (other than XRP) are represented as debts (IOUs) on the ledger. This is much the way currencies are ...
19
I made a payment to a company for a product more than a year ago in
bitcoin. The amount that I paid then was equivalent to $75. Now the
company has failed to provide the product and they and I both agree
that I'm owed a refund. However, we disagree on the means.
The company wants to refund me - in bitcoin if I wish it - to the
value of $75 of ...
18
This is answered in the official wiki:
Like Bitcoin:
ripple is a distributed peer-to-peer payment network
ripple transactions are irreversible, sent over the Internet, and counterfeit proof
ripple uses the same underlying cryptography as Bitcoin
ripple has multi-signature support
ripple has low to no transaction fees
ripple servers can ...
15
The primary advantages are:
Speed and price. You can transfer money anywhere in the world within minutes with negligible fees.
No central authority. Bitcoin is not dependent on any company or government to maintain its value.
You can start accepting bitcoins instantaneously, without setting up merchant accounts, buying credit card processing hardware, etc.
...
15
The normal rule is (two letter country code) + (letter), although that's arguably already been broken by the Euro having EUR instead of EUE.
BT is the country code of Bhutan, whose currency has the code BTN. If anyone will object to BTC for Bitcoin, it'll be them.
According to wikipedia, which is never wrong, multi-national currencies use the X prefix. XBC ...
15
TL;DR Bitcoin already is a currency because it's a generally accepted medium of exchange among certain communities. As those communities grow and usage spreads to other communities, its strength as a currency solidifies.
This requires a little bit of history. I am not a numismatist, but I have studied this a little even before the advent of Bitcoin.
...
14
The closest predecessor to Bitcoin is generally agreed to be Wei Dei's b-money proposal.
The proposal had a lot of holes. For example, it assumed that money could be created simply by solving hard computational problems. But it contained no mechanism to control currency inflation, so currency would inflate as computing power increased.
He actually offered ...
14
The exchange rate at any one point in time is determined by supply and demand at the markets.
The value of all bitcoins at the current market price is $80 million because the current market price is the point where the demand for bitcoins at a certain price meets the supply. You are describing introducing an artificial demand that would indeed cause ...
14
While in the US last year, I sent money to myself in Europe that way once, because it was significantly cheaper than using the legacy banking system.
I think it mostly comes down to whether you have easy access to a Bitcoin exchange from your bank account in the US and what amounts you are trying to transfer. It also depends on how urgently you need the ...
14
A refund should be issued using the same payment method that was used at the time of purchase.
This also serves an anti-fraud measure for the cases where a purchase was made on a stolen medium (eg a credit card) but the scammers request a refund in a different medium (eg cash) as soon as the payment goes through because all they want to do is take the money ...
13
It depends entirely how much those alternate block-chains get utilized. In the recent examples of ixcoin and i0coin, a small portion of btc miners and users switched over, sold their stash and went right back to bitcoin. It's essentially a case of network effect - whichever block-chain has the most users will be the most attractive to new users, and those ...
12
Today, it primarily serves as a store of value. It is inherently more useful as a medium of exchange, its intended purpose. Perhaps a bit ironically, its expected future usefulness as a medium of exchange is what is driving its present usefulness as a store of value. The thinking is that if you get them now when they're cheap, in the future when they're used ...
12
Bitcoins are a purely electronic currency. If you want to sell them in exchange for dollars or euros, you can do that. But as Bitcoins, they exist purely electronically. There are physical Bitcoins but basically, they're just the key to an electronic account printed in some form.
I think you're missing the concept that Bitcoins act like a currency or ...
12
Most Bitcoin lookalikes are not really worth looking at. The two that are more or less accepted are Litecoin and Namecoin, of which the latter is not intended as a currency. Another more or less popular cryptocurrency that is not based on Bitcoin is Ripple.
I know that there are many more Bitcoin-based currencies. Most of them are not adopted and are thus ...
12
Yes!
Bitsquare.io is:
Decentralized – there is no single point of failure.
Safe – Bitsquare never holds your funds.
Instantly accessible – no need for approval from a central
authority.
Private -no one except trading partners exchange personally
identifying data.
Open – every aspect of the project is transparent.
Easy – we take usability seriously.
Many ...
11
Intersango trades BTC/PLN and offers free domestic withdrawal as PLN.
https://intersango.com/fees.php
https://intersango.com/orderbook.php?currency_pair_id=4
11
XBT is used because the ISO 4217 (the standard for currency codes) alphabetic code XBC is already in use. It stands for the European Unit of Account.
Here's the Official table of ISO 4217 codes
The X indicates it's not a national currency, but rather a supranational currency (like the East Caribbean Dollar, XCD) or something else that isn't quite a ...
10
Ecash, created by David Chaum, and introduced in 1993, was a cryptographic bearer certificate, though the underlying instrument was national currency (e.g. dollars). It required a central party to keep track of spends to avoid double spends, unlike Bitcoin's distributed peer to peer ledger. It existed until the bankruptcy of its issuer, Digicash, in 1998.
...
10
Namecoin is a distribuited DNS system where information held about a web address (MX, A, etc) are held within the coin itself. Advantages of this are no other company holds the address, unique ownership will always be had due to the way the bitcoin works. (no man in the middle attacks, CA will no longer be needed)
Specific DNS servers are required to browse ...
10
I'd actually like to see a reference to someone saying that it's illegal.
...because it's legal.
FinCEN guidance establishes who must register with government and when one must pay taxes (sell bitcoin for USD, pay taxes on gains).
10
Given that bitcoin has increased in value, one of us has to profit from this.
If you hold the bitcoins while the value goes up, you are the one entitled to profit from it, because you also risk holding while the value drops, and then you're the one stuck with the loss.
Imagine the 10,000 BTC pizza transaction were refunded now: would the purchaser be ...
10
Acquiring Data
You have two options here:
Check out one of the data providers online. Quandl offers (mostly) free historical data for a variety of pairs and exchanges. Alternatively, if you have bucks to spare, Coinigy offers high-quality data sets on a per-month pricing model.
Roll your own data crawler, using a programming language of your choice and the ...
9
Until a careful analysis is performed, I think most crypto currencies are very similar in all properties except one - adoption.
Bitcoin has the largest hash rate, participating nodes, accepting sites, and people going over the code and protocol.
While alternative currencies can gain more hash rate, especially if effective forms of merged mining are ...
9
There is a game that uses Bitcoin as its currency called Dragon's Tale, not to mention numerous online casinos. In general, using Bitcoins in games is quite feasible, just requires a willing developer.
In many cases it can even be preferable, as one could imagine making a simple micropayment in an instant provided they need to purchase something in a game, ...
8
It is likely that blockchain-based currencies like Bitcoin are a natural monopoly. It is most beneficial for users to own and accept in trade the most popular currency, as they will have the greatest number of opportunities to do business with it. This is referred to as a network effect.
There are also additional costs and risks associated with owning and ...
8
BTC-E currently offers trading pairs of BTC/USD, BTC/RUB, SC/BTC, SC/USD, GG/BTC, TBX/BTC, FBX/BTC, LTC/BTC, LTC/USD, RUC/BTC, RUC/USD, RUC/RUB, NMC/BTC and RUB/USD
8
The process of attempting to buy all of the currency would drive the price up arbitrarily high.
For example, I have some bitcoins and plan to sell 10% of what I have left every time the price doubles. I will never run out of bitcoins to sell, no matter how high the price, so it is impossible for anybody to buy them all.
The US government could try to ...
8
This site allows you to compare the mining profitability of the various coins:
http://dustcoin.com/mining
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