LebGeeks

Link-

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

@reppinhighz, a warning is generally the outcome of: an opinion or some form of analysis. Either way, throwing a warning about a hot topic will most likely be prone for debate. No one is getting on your case. But you stated an opinion and you must be ready to defend it. Or at least, that's the general expectation from contributing to a forum. The point of this debate is not making a point, instead, a showcasing of evidence, case studies and trustworthy information could lead to the formulation of more informed opinions for those who are reading (or contributing to the discussion).

Bitcoin is not for the masses. Not yet at least. Whoever wants to invest/experiment/play around with it, should already be aware of the associated risks. Hell, the entire story behind bitcoin is shady. That does not mean however, that it is not good medium for making profit or investments.

How is this different from people trusting their savings to a brokerage firm? Or how different is it from someone going into the trading field, alone, misinformed and wasting his funds on bad stock?

Prices are dropping due to the media frenzy associated with each theft attempt or the closure of a bitcoin based business.

Coinbase, for example, is insured against: "breach of our physical security, cyber security, or as a result of employee theft." Insurance

Last edited by Link- (March 20 2015)

ironman

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

Guys check this article

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/darknet … ds-stolen/

People who " lost " their bitcoins were using those "coins" to buy drugs and prohibited material, check the link i posted its interesting.

thank you Link for posting that issue.

samer

Admin

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

I am really not interested in discussing the pros and cons of Bitcoin at this point with anyone but i am here throwin a friendly warning that you might face MORE issues with Bitcoin that any other means of buying and selling

The point of this thread is to go into these sorts of discussions. We appreciate the friendly warning, but it is vacuous until you start presenting detailed arguments and supporting them. You could be the most renowned financial expert in the world, spreading the good word to help us protect our money, but your authority is meaningless without compelling arguments.

I fail to see how the article you linked strengthens your warning against Bitcoin. It is like warning people against putting their money in banks because banks can be robbed. I agree that bitcoin enables new kinds of scams, but scams will exist regardless of bitcoin, and discounting the value of bitcoin based on this would be a net loss.

Bank robberies do happen everyday but there is insurance on deposits so you cant really compare the two.

When deposited in a bank, money is no longer your legal property. Governments can seize your assets to not to default on their debts (e.g., Cyprus) or if they believe you are engaged in illegal activities (whether that is actually the case or not). The point is, you are relinquishing control over your own property.

With Bitcoin, you actually own your currency. You physically and undeniably own it. Just like gold, you can bury it in your back yard (print or etch the private keys). Unlike gold, you can transfer it in minutes, without the need of armored trucks. As long as you choose not to give centralized entities control over it, and take the appropriate operational security measures (use hot and cold wallets) you are more in control of your money.

Bitcoin is still in an experimental stage. We are still figuring out how to make it user-friendly, and how to help users secure their assets. By all means, don't put all your savings in it if you are not willing to lose them. The fluctuations can be stabilized to a certain extent, but it will be a bumpy road before mainstream adoption.

Exciting times are ahead for cryptocurrencies, but most importantly, for blockchain and decentralized technology.
Here are links for some further reading and projects I am excited about:

• Foundations of a Programmable Society
• http://openbazaar.org/
• http://ethereum.org/
• http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/ … tofthings/

reppinhighz

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

Interesting replies from Samer and Link. Thank you both.

Again we are all relatively clueless as to whats ahead of bitcoin in the future.

My warning comes from that fact that no government is truly endorsing it, its not regulated and there is no clear indication of demand and supply for it effectively making it extremely shady and mysterious. Its growing in popularity but not in efficiency or transparency.

Going into stocks or any exchange based markets, your money is insured in case the broker goes under and the only risk you have is if the exchange going offline or shutting down which is not a money risk but a problem in being able to enter or exit positions. Although everything can still be run offline (in case of an EMP attack lol). As for companies going under well thats an existing risk and can usually be filtered through studies and analysis. Although even as a worst case, you might get some money back but nonetheless you enter the market understanding those risks.

As for money in the bank example, what happened in Cyprus is not only an extreme situation but one that is technically illegal with the idea questioned up till today by important officials and lawmakers. Obviously it might be out of the control of all of us but its still an extreme and very dangerous case that brought the country to its knees due to the lack of regulations and risk management.

As for prices dropping, its simply the lack of demand and its not about the media. The professionals in the financial world trade against the masses. In other words if they see it as a good investment, they will buy it, trust me and they know better than all of us. The naturally occurring downtrend that has been going on for a while is a clear indication of no professional demand. The volatility spikes are interesting though and they have destroyed plenty of people who i saw trading Bitcoin on a daily basis. But that's another story.

Its also extremely unstable in terms of pricing, making it not a very attractive mean of exchanging money. People already have a hard time dealing with an extremely strong Dollar nowadays and were only talking peanuts against what Bitcoin can swing.

Again, id like to remind that i may be an expert, but i would never claim that i know everything and while my reasons are clear, they could be dealt with, making Bitcoin an important aspect of our future. Lets hope so. I like it and i have nothing against it i just have my concerns. Also my defensiveness comes from the fact that some people on the forum are too one-sided regardless of whether there are obvious reasons or not to an argument. Meshklet l lebnene and his arrogance.

Last edited by reppinhighz (March 20 2015)

DaveAchkar

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

Do your research.

My warning comes from that fact that no government is truly endorsing it, its not regulated and there is no clear indication of demand and supply for it effectively making it extremely shady and mysterious.

NYDFS is releasing the "bit-license" a license specifically for new and growing Bitcoin businesses in New York. [1]
UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is expected to announce the government's digital currency plans following the new budget. [2]
The German Finance Ministry announced that bitcoin is a "unit of account" and can be used for the purpose of tax and trading in the country. Bitcoin is recognized as private money. [3]

As for money in the bank example, what happened in Cyprus is not only an extreme situation but one that is technically illegal with the idea questioned up till today by important officials and lawmakers.

That's a neat after the fact justification. Would you also qualify the crash of 2008 as an extreme situation that shouldn't happen? Read up on the Black Swan, these events define the systems we live in, rather than being the exception.

As for prices dropping, its simply the lack of demand and its not about the media.

You sound incredibly certain of your statements. Do you claim you completely understand the cause of price fluctuations?
Have you considered that every ten minutes 25 new bitcoins are created, the supply, therefore, continuously increasing?
Have you considered that growing merchant adoption can lead to downward price pressure, because merchants that receive payments in Bitcoin sell them directly to cover their cost?

Its also extremely unstable in terms of pricing, making it not a very attractive mean of exchanging money.

This was solved a long time ago.
https://coinapult.com/locks/info
https://bitreserve.org/en/how-it-works

Again, id like to remind that i may be an expert, but i would never claim that i know everything and while my reasons are clear, they could be dealt with, making Bitcoin an important aspect of our future. Lets hope so.

Repeating 3 times that you're an expert doesn't make you an expert. Providing sound and researched arguments will get you there.

Meshklet l lebnene and his arrogance.

Yes, people that make no effort to research their claims nor provide any facts should not be entitled to an opinion.

Hybrid

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

As for prices dropping, its simply the lack of demand and its not about the media.

That statement is the most inaccurate statement in this entire thread. Not sure where you're getting those statistics from, but I can show you hundreds of articles with new merchants adopting bitcoin and other cryptocoins everyday.

Link-

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

As for prices dropping, its simply the lack of demand and its not about the media.

That statement is the most inaccurate statement in this entire thread. Not sure where you're getting those statistics from, but I can show you hundreds of articles with new merchants adopting bitcoin and other cryptocoins everyday.

Again, all this discussion is based on speculation. So, let's do the empirical analysis exercise and get the answer, who's up for a data analysis challenge?

Data Sources

• Here's all bitcoin related data available in JSON,CSV formats (Quandl)

• We need a list of all bitcoin related articles with specific date/time of release

Analysis

We will compare the following:
1. Aggregating articles that have a high probability of having an impact on the BTC exchange rate (up or down)
2. Find spikes or substantial fluctuations in the transactions of bitcoin post an adoption event by a large entity (pattern matching with #1)
3. Find patterns of influence between BTC exchange rate with news of theft, closure of a bitcoin business and all other cases not covered in #2 (whether up or down)
4. Come up with new insights that are not listed above based on the results of your data crunching attempt

I will start the work on this using iPython, numpy and the rest of the gear. I will publish the on-going work to a github repo so that anyone can contribute. If anyone wants to do the exercise using other tools, feel free, in fact, it's best if we have 2 or 3 different analysis to compare at the end and eliminate bias and errors.

This is not as easy as it looks.
Enjoy

Last edited by Link- (March 21 2015)

reppinhighz

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

Do your research.

My warning comes from that fact that no government is truly endorsing it, its not regulated and there is no clear indication of demand and supply for it effectively making it extremely shady and mysterious.

NYDFS is releasing the "bit-license" a license specifically for new and growing Bitcoin businesses in New York. [1]
UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is expected to announce the government's digital currency plans following the new budget. [2]
The German Finance Ministry announced that bitcoin is a "unit of account" and can be used for the purpose of tax and trading in the country. Bitcoin is recognized as private money. [3]

As for money in the bank example, what happened in Cyprus is not only an extreme situation but one that is technically illegal with the idea questioned up till today by important officials and lawmakers.

That's a neat after the fact justification. Would you also qualify the crash of 2008 as an extreme situation that shouldn't happen? Read up on the Black Swan, these events define the systems we live in, rather than being the exception.

As for prices dropping, its simply the lack of demand and its not about the media.

You sound incredibly certain of your statements. Do you claim you completely understand the cause of price fluctuations?
Have you considered that every ten minutes 25 new bitcoins are created, the supply, therefore, continuously increasing?
Have you considered that growing merchant adoption can lead to downward price pressure, because merchants that receive payments in Bitcoin sell them directly to cover their cost?

Its also extremely unstable in terms of pricing, making it not a very attractive mean of exchanging money.

This was solved a long time ago.
https://coinapult.com/locks/info
https://bitreserve.org/en/how-it-works

Again, id like to remind that i may be an expert, but i would never claim that i know everything and while my reasons are clear, they could be dealt with, making Bitcoin an important aspect of our future. Lets hope so.

Repeating 3 times that you're an expert doesn't make you an expert. Providing sound and researched arguments will get you there.

Meshklet l lebnene and his arrogance.

Yes, people that make no effort to research their claims nor provide any facts should not be entitled to an opinion.

well i appreciate all the info you provided although it could have been an amazing reply had you not turned it a bit personal ;)

i dont get it, you guys sound like you are angry or for some odd reason dying for this to take off. Chill.

Governments are taxing it which is good although its not considered legal tender.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasha … urrencies/

crash of 2008 is not an extreme situation and worse could happen what i meant was the Cyprus situation was handled in a very dangerous and illegal way. Dont need to read up on anything bro, i do this for a living. Read up on Greece and how the current party ruling the government is doing the right things and setting their foot down against the European central bank and German governments. Those two basically destroyed Greece and put so many rules and limits that the country will never accomplish whats needed for them to return to the international markets.

and yes, i completely understand the cause of price fluctuations. i have access to all banking platforms whether involving stocks, options, futures, currencies, you name it i can see its flow. I see when pros are buying or selling, i know when they are accumulating, i know when they dump. Sometimes i can even tell as soon as they just start. No fortune teller but when you are in the biz you can see all of this. its no hidden secret and even attempting to take advantage of it is extremely difficult but at least its there and i know it. They are humans (robots too) theyr just faster thats all. So when i tell you its the lack of demand its because all signs and flow point to that. Not an assumption. Although this is not something you can find articles about. Its something you learn from other pros in the field and spend thousands of hours seeing it in the order books.

About volatility, well whatever the case is, i see its prices on a daily basis and it swings like crazy. So its volatile and theres not much to say here beyond this.

I can literally find dozens of articles on why this would fail. Its not a matter of seeing people adopting it or government agencies discussing it. Its about a whole monetary system that cannot handle such technological advances in terms of money and thus cannot implement this no matter how many people adopt it. IF this was to be adopted, it could potentially change the entire global system and trust me, a lot of powerful people bank on the current system set in place. Its beyond all of us.

Id love to see otherwise. Again i have nothing against Bitcoin (for a second you guys made me feel like im against it, im not :) ) I hope this does take off.

I am glad you guys are doing your research, just like Dave told me to do mine, im thanking him for doing his and enlightening all of us. I truly had no idea about a lot of the info you guys posted.

Link, regarding the study, heres an example that might save you some work.

You are trading and you bought 1 bitcoin at say 200. Your stop is at 190 meaning you are willing to lose 10. A news event comes out, the pros drive the price down by selling at market big sizes, forcing the prices lower and as soon as you start selling at 190 or your stop loss is hit, those same pros are buying (taking the other side) driving prices higher again and profiting both ways. They need the liquidity the little guys provide to make their money.

All traded markets are driven by supply and demand coming in from large and professional investors, funds and corporations. No matter how much you think the media affects it, it has nothing to do with it.

Its never the media. They want you to think it is so they can always make money off of you and get a better deal, thus making their money. You always believe its bad news but really they are already aware of this way before it comes out, they are already in control.
And no im not joking this is really how things work in the world of trading. Believe it or not ;)

Link-

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

@reppinhighz

I wrote a big fat response, but my LegGeeks session expired and what I wrote is gone. The gist of it all is the following:

1. We're not on the same wave length, not because it's personal, but because we're people who value 'data', 'research', 'evidence' above and beyond words of merit.

2. We've done our research about this disruptive technology and formulated conjectures after analyzing its different facets and not only its financial side. I personally believe it is quite resilient and has proven this characteristic numerous times. Best evidence is that it withstood 2 bubble bursts, a ton of startup failures, MtGox scandal, Silk road [etc...] and still running uninterrupted since 2009.

3. I'm personally quite familiar with the impact of Bitcoin whales on moving the market. And more so familiar with the consequences of 'fear' and 'greed'. Which are not mutually exclusive. But you see, the transparency of the technology (i.e. blockchain) is quite interesting: Top 100 Richest Addresses and Transactions volume excluding popular addresses

4. The purpose of the exercise I proposed is to establish correlation and not causality (which is always the goal but never attained in statistics and data analysis). Meaning:

Given the following sequence of events: Silk road shutdown > News event broke > Bitcoin price drop.

A link between the news event and price drop can be determined which could mean a shitload of things, including but not limited to:
1. The news of the Silk road shutdown led to fear and lack of trust in the currency > price drop
2. The idea that the silk road funds will fall into the hands of a single entity led to fear of market manipulation > price drop
3. The idea that things like silk road exist led to ethical questioning about the purpose of this currency > price drop
4. Fear that the end of bitcoin is near, massive dump > price drop
5. etc...

All scenarios have one common denominator, correlation with the price drop. That's what I'm after, a high level index to analyze lower level details.
(and the entire process will definitely be fun).

To conclude, this phenomenon deserves our relentless support (in any means possible, instead of warning against it even if it's financially risky) irrespective of whether it will succeed in global domination or whether it will perish. The value of this technology is far beyond today's  financial aspect.

Last edited by Link- (March 23 2015)

DaveAchkar

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

@link- this has saved my life countless times: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta … fgno?hl=en

Link-

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

So, for those interested in the data challenge, here's a quick update on what we have so far. It's not much, at all, but this can be the building block on top of which the analysis can be done. This cleans up the data, does the alignment, and puts it all into nice DataFrames to play with.

Here's the nvbiewer link: NBViewer

And here's the Github repo: Repo

Last edited by Link- (March 29 2015)

ironman

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

Guys, user "DaveAchkar" stopped selling Bitcoins, any alternative?

Edit: went across this site

https://www.coinmama.com/#buy_btc

i wanted to buy bitcoins via WesternUnion, and guess the address of the owner? Israel, Lol, watch out guys, i am looking for other alternatives.

Thanks.

Last edited by ironman (May 5 2015)

DaveAchkar

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

Yes, we had to put our voucher product on hold in Leb - some regulatory lack of clarity...

You should be able to use our Egypt based voucher product: http://eventtus.com/event/554088800e706e002c8b45ca with a credit card.

ironman

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

@DaveAchkar Thanks man

nas

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

Anyone has at hand a mining rig GPU only without asics. Want to buy one for experimental purpose.

Hybrid

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

Anyone has at hand a mining rig GPU only without asics. Want to buy one for experimental purpose.

You can use the graphic card at home if you want?

Just don't expect anything in return without ASICs

nas

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

I know. But just wondering. As I m looking to buy a new system. so might be as well one already designed for mining.
I know about the performance of GPU V/S ASIC, but my thing is more experimental.

nas

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

Or alternatively. Does anyone have a used system with a powerful GPU?

amkahal

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

Guys, I'm a CS master student, and i'm preparing a presentation about Bitcoin. I already understand the basics of Bitcoin, but i have some questions to ask, anyone with solid understanding of bitcoin are welcome to answer my questions.

1- I really don't understand how we can get free bitcoins by mining process, even the rewarded amount is very small, as i know there is no free money in our world, every currency has reserve (ex: gold or a least some services), i fix your laptop, then you give me some BTC, and you fix my laptop then i re-pay the BTCs for you, it makes sense, but free bitcoins for nothing ??!! someone explain to me please.

2- as we know, the huge blockchain size is a big problem for Bitcoin concept (many gigabytes) , so one of the solutions is to be hosted online, again this is not a Decentralized solution. So anyone read about feasible and Decentralized solution for the big size of blockchain.

samer

Admin

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

1- I really don't understand how we can get free bitcoins by mining process, even the rewarded amount is very small

When miners are forming blocks, they add a generation transaction, which is a special transaction whose inputs section is empty (it has no parent transaction outputs) and 25 BTC as an output transaction to an address that the miner controls. See for example the first transaction in this block: https://blockchain.info/block/000000000 … 327758f557

The reward is not small, 25 BTC amounts to >9000 USD today.

as i know there is no free money in our world, every currency has reserve (ex: gold or a least some services), i fix your laptop, then you give me some BTC, and you fix my laptop then i re-pay the BTCs for you, it makes sense, but free bitcoins for nothing ??!! someone explain to me please.

When the fed issues new dollar bills, they also do it out of thin air.

I highly recommend reading Mastering Bitcoin to better understand how Bitcoin works. It's available to read online for free.

MrClass

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

https://www.bitcoinmining.com/

amkahal

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

Thanks you for you reply guys, Reading your suggested book Samer is on my list.

MrClass

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

I both love and hate bitcoin. It is a very nice way to transfer funds quick. There are no country restrictions.

But the value is so volatile and transactions are irreversible. Someone hacked my btce account and transfered all the bitcoin to some address. nothing can be done; i just had to live with the loss.

Silentcontrol

Member

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

Yes i agree you need to be that much more careful

samer

Admin

Re: Bitcoin in Lebanon

I both love and hate bitcoin. It is a very nice way to transfer funds quick. There are no country restrictions.

But the value is so volatile and transactions are irreversible. Someone hacked my btce account and transfered all the bitcoin to some address. nothing can be done; i just had to live with the loss.

I think both of these are a result of the ecosystem being young. Bitcoin hasn't been around for too long, and the ecosystem started maturing last year when VCs started taking it more seriously.

Volatility has gotten better and will get better with greater adoption. See https://btcvol.info/ for some numbers.

Transaction irreversibility is a feature not a bug. Someone could implement reversible transactions on top of Bitcoin and use that to offer the consumer protection features we have come to expect (this could be implemented using sidechains). However, you can't build irreversible transactions on top of a platform that guarantees reversibility. In other words, you could choose to act like your own bank, but you don't have to.

Regarding the funds you lost on BTC-e. I'm sorry to hear that. For future reference, never leave money on an exchange. Move them to a wallet where you control the private keys.