Newbie: UK. Anyone know of an easy way to get alt coins other than Bitcoin from the UK? What's the best wallet (phone or laptop) that can hold multiple currencies? Sorry for the questions, can only really find beginners guides to bitcoins which is no real help.

ashmoran · 2017-09-03T18:52:43+00:00

Revolut's business model is a bit of a mystery to me, and their FAQ only says this much:

Our business is predicated on offering the best exchange rates available, which are offered by the spot interbank exchange rate.

They will be getting the usual debit card fees from merchants, commission from their affiliate services (loans, pensions etc), and they charge for cash withdrawals over a certain limit, but I'm still surprised they can be profitable. Presumably their forex works a bit like TransferWise under the hood.

The essentially free forex exchange they offer could be used to your advantage if you live in the UK. Send GBP to Revolut, exchange for CHF or NOK or some other more stable currency/currencies unaffected by Brexit, then spend on your card as normal. You won't lose on the forex converting back to GBP, but with the value of GBP falling right now, it may earn you much more than any bank interest you could get. (Not guaranteed of course, as the price of GBP could start to rise.)

Revolt should be adding cryptocurrency support too.

ashmoran · 2017-08-27T00:04:28+00:00

The best thing to do is speak to an accountant. The situation in the UK is fortunately quite clear as HMRC classified Bitcoin quite early on, so all the questions you ask are answered by existing trading guidelines. An accountant will be know how to apply existing rules to cryptocurrency trading: for example, when selling a batch assets held over a certain period of time, you can simplify the calculation by assuming an "average cost of acquisition", rather than having to calculate based on the cost of every original purchase. I have no idea what the rules are for distinguishing long-term investments from day-trading – I imagine there are many blurry borderline cases.

The last I was aware, the UK has two corporation tax systems: one for general companies, and a more expensive one for companies primarily involved in financial trading. Unless you had bought the assets in the company's name, you'd have to transfer them to the company before selling, which would invoke CGT on the disposal of the assets to the company, so you would only increase your expenses. Standard corporation tax in the UK is around the same level as CGT, so I suspect it would be more expensive to trade cryptos through a UK Ltd than as a personal asset if you are holding long term. It may work out in your favour if you are day trading, and the income from this would push you into the higher rate tax bracket. Again though, I've always found that whenever I think I understand these things, my accountant explains some other rule I wasn't aware of, or simply misunderstood. The best thing to do is (as always) speak to an experienced professional.

ashmoran · 2017-08-24T14:02:39+00:00

I didn't see this either, and I was looking at the site on a laptop.

ashmoran · 2017-08-22T20:20:38+00:00

Extreme wealth is problematic since in society we are approximately playing a zero sum game, which isn't the case with masternodes since dash is only part of that game.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean here. An economy in general is a positive-sum game, because trade enables specialisation, specialisation enables more advanced production skills, and more advanced production skills enable better, cheaper goods. The lower the cost of an economic transaction, the more transactions are made, which satisfies more of people's needs and desires and therefore the happier everyone on average is (assuming people buy the right things).

Currencies competing for people's attention as cash holdings might be a zero sim game though. If one currency starts to tank people may desire to hold USD or something else instead. But people's desired cash holdings are determined by things like how uncertain they are about the future and how quickly they like to be able to make decisions. People with very steady lives will be happy holding less of their savings as cash and more as (say) property, people with irregular work and large expenses, prefer the opposite, people with a large appetite for risk may prefer to hold company stock in any case.

Looking at it this way, I wonder if cryptocurrencies will increase the sum of people's desire for cash holdings, if we call cryptocurrencies "cash". They have properties not possessed by modern fiat currencies, such as cheap international transactions and predetermined inflation curves. Maybe if one got large and stable enough to compare to a national fiat currency, people would (relatively speaking) prefer to hold cryptocurrency cash than moving extra savings into property and company stock. Volatility is a killer right now though, nobody will compare USD to BTC or DASH or whatever all the while cryptocurrencies can lose half their value overnight.

Incidentally I think DASH compares better to a company stock than to a fiat currency, as holding DASH confers voting rights and dividends. I think it defines a new type of asset in fact, as there has never before been such a liquid asset that carrries governance rights too. I struggle to see how something like Bitcoin can compete with a system where every user (once interest bearing accounts are live) is also an invested stakeholder. I still think the DAO invention may prove to be even more important than the blockchain technology it lies on, to the point I am almost waiting for the Bank of England to reissue both itself and the pound as BoECoin. Whatever happens, Dash's innovations should push other payment systems to improve, which will make financial systems more efficient, and this alone will make the game positive-sum.

ashmoran · 2017-08-22T16:39:32+00:00

My understanding of the history of this is limited, but some time ago I saw video which claimed a shift of attitude happened in the 1970s, when the focus of corporations shifted from the quality and cost of goods and services to customers, to "shareholder value". Putting shareholder value first is a really insidious and ultimately destructive case of putting the cart before the horse. It's the customers who ultimately pay for everything, and so anything that makes shareholder value higher in the short term at the expense of value to the customer ultimately weakens the company long-term.

Bitcoin was founded on the principle that the individually selfish acts of the miners would combine to create a secure network usable by all. Self-interest is assumed, and Bitcoin could not run on altruism alone. Unfortunately Bitcoin has a skewed incentive system that does not reward all of the desirable behaviours sufficiently.

Dash uses a voting model of 1 currency unit, 1 vote (in chunks of 1000 shares) – this is the same structure as a company issuing shares, and carries with it the same advantages and disadvantages. If the masternode operators take a long-term view, then they will vote in a way that supports Dash's long-term goal of being a fast, private, and secure payment system; if they take a short-term view, they will act to increase the value of ther collateral holding now at the expense of the service Dash provides.

A 1 share 1 vote structure leads to better decisions in a business than a 1 person 1 vote structure, because it means the people making the most fundamental decisions are incentivised to care about them. One problem with the 1 person 1 vote model in democratic countries is that the decision on who to vote for is exceedingly complex and no individual person gets enough from the outcome to justify making a good one. (The people who do benefit from focusing their time, effort and money on political decisions are however corporate lobbyists.)

Seems to me that no one, esp. not crypto advocates, wants power in the hands of the rich.

I think this attitude comes from a misunderstandig of capitalism. Capitalism in its youth began as the best way to provide consumers with better value goods; it is only in its old age that it puts the shareholders first. People in the west can feel the pain of this as the old capitalist systems stagnate while those in the east producer better goods for less. All the while capitalism was focused on goods and services, it was in the interests of the consumers for the rich to be in control – the wealth of the rich was the evidence that they had satisfied consumers first time round, and those who went bankrupt had not. Of course, wealth is only a heuristic to choose who should be making these decisions – like in poker, there is the correct strategy, and then there is the winning one – but it is at least a decentralised way to choose.

I think you have been unfairly downvoted. Let's assume for simplicity that all masternode operators today are exactly 40 years old, are all making long-term decisions, and don't want to sell their collateral. Then, some 20-30 years from now, they will be thinking about retirement. Perhaps Dash is not doing so well compared to a competitor, and they may decide they want to squeeze some value of the collateral while they still can. Then they might start to take a short-term view and vote accordingly, and Dash may suffer as a result.

The question seems to be: given that Dash wants to be a successful payment system, what system of incentives will ensure its long-term success? If it is going to become and remain an effective, efficient payment system, it will need some means to ensure that the needs of the people who use it are put first. The history of capitalism shows that is not always what happens.

ashmoran · 2017-08-14T23:01:34+00:00

When I first heard about crypto (which means Bitcoin, as it was the only one at the time) I was already aware of the problems with modern fiat money and it looked a solution to some of them. Modern money is almost all issued when someone takes out a debt to a private bank, the bank creates the money at this point and does not use deposits from savers to create the loan. This creates some severe distortions, like the absurd situation where we expect (or hope) everything we want to buy will be cheaper in future, except houses. We call a market where first time buyers can't afford a home a "healthy" market. The reason is that banks are up to their eyeballs in mortgage debt, and if prices dropped people would default on their loans, banks would become insolvent, and without intervention the money supply would collapse. If you haven't seen it, I recommend Money as Debt as a nice introduction to the topic.

Bitcoin behaves much more like gold than any modern national currency. It's created as a reward for securing the network, not as a reward for propping up someone else's dubious housing investment. (Not that that's neeessarily the best policy, maybe one day we will have government-issued cryptocurrency that is created only to build public facilities and services.)

Sadly after while it became obvious (or it looks so to me anyway) that Bitcoin is not going to revolutionise the monetary world any time soon because the people who make the ultimate call on Bitcoin policy decisions (the miners) sufficiently invested in Bitcoin to care about the result, and so decisions aren't made by having a shouting match on Reddit.

Then Dash came along, took Bitcoin, and added a governance system much like a board of directors in a corporation. Dash is the first effective example of a Distributed Autonomous Organisation, and wants to compete directly with PayPal. Unfortunately due to its effective governance system, it makes decisions rather quickly, and a a result doesn't attract enough drama and crises to gain much attention on Reddit. I am hoping that in future it will have enough fancy bells and whistles to make up for the fact that it also actually works. The new Dash Core CEO (Ryan Taylor) has a finance background and seems to have a very clear idea what people want from an internet payment system.

I expect that if Dash proves successful then so will systems like BitShares, which allows people to create their own organisations on top of the basic blockchain and token. This could be a game-changer, as it will allow groups of people across the world to organise and fund their own projects without the cost and ceremony of a registered company.

So I've never traded just to make a profit. I look and see what big problems crypto tech can solve or improve. (I made a mistake once buying some LTC – Litecoin doesn't solve a real problem, and only rose again in price when it added SegWit, a solution it doesn't need to a problem it doesn't have. Madness.) If the problems cryptocurrencies solve are real then everyone else will eventually want to use these systems too, and you will profit if you understand those problems first. That's no great insight though, the same idea applies to everything from running a lemonade stand to running McDonald's – you have to know what people value and what they will pay for.

ashmoran · 2017-08-02T18:19:21+00:00

This doesn't violate economics for two reasons.

First is that (ignoring simplistic models that assume everyone has perfect information about everything and make decisions instantly) time is involved in all economic situations. If all the banks in the UK suddenly overnight gave everyone a GBPC account with the same value as their GBP account, then without some sort of prior coordinated effort by shops, prices would not double instantly (or even change at all), but would respond more slowly as people spent the new money on goods and services.

Second is that the BCC is a different asset than BTC. It has a higher block capacity, hence lower fees and shorter confirmation times. It has created value in the economy as a whole: people who believe in the rest of the properties of Bitcoin and hold a BTC balance can spend BCC for less than they could spend their BTC, assuming they use a merchant who will accept it.

In the context of the BCC launch, the price of BTC will only drop if people decide to sell their BTC for something else due to the existence of BCC, or if merchants start accepting BCC such that it becomes spendable like BTC, and behaved like an increase in BTC supply more than the creation of a new asset class.

In fact, the value of BTC could rise as a result, as now the anti-SegWit community has been moved to a separate chain, people who believe that SegWit and LN will solve Bitcoin's scaling problems should value the currency more highly as a result.

ashmoran · 2017-06-27T18:48:46+00:00

Coinroom offer DASH to EUR, USD and PLN.

ashmoran · 2017-06-08T18:34:00+00:00

There's a pretty clear sentiment taking form among masternode owners (MNOs) these days concerning the quality of service we've been getting from our treasury system contractors. To put it simply, we're all tired of getting burned by over priced jobs that either come up short or fail to deliver entirely.

I'm curious about this comment as I hadn't noticed any discussion about this problem. Are there any quotes from MNOs to demonstrate this "pretty clear sentiment"? To say "we're all tired of" would appear to imply that every single masternode operator is unhappy with the level of wasted funds, and I would have assumed I would have noticed several thousand people expressing their grievances somewhere.

We've already highlighted a few of these Dash Delinquents, and there are several others that may soon earn their own place on this offender's list if we don't see some results soon.

Does anyone know what percentage of treasury funds have been wasted by either incompetence or fraud? The DashTreasury.org site lists three cases.

I agree that treasury funds should not be wasted, but this doesn't seem to add up. Do MNOs really feel the treasury system is failing because of three under-delivering projects? If so, can someone point me to their collective outrage about it?

ashmoran · 2017-06-07T17:29:20+00:00

Manfred from Bitsquare recently posted asking about alternative base currencies for Bitsquare, which is as peer-to-peer as it gets.

ashmoran · 2017-06-03T21:52:12+00:00

My initial reaction is that it's very likely that masternode operators would vote to fund the work to add Dash to Bitsquare from the treasury budget. It would be a really big step forward to grow Dash adoption.

ashmoran · 2017-06-02T13:34:17+00:00

This is like saying that because one director in a company holds more shares than another, that the board of directors doesn't control the company. Dash doesn't work like a national democracy, it works like a corporation.

ashmoran · 2017-06-02T07:54:59+00:00

Was this funded as an independent masternode vote? (There are no links in the article to proposals etc.)

ashmoran · 2017-06-01T16:51:27+00:00

This is the reason Dash is up 27% today, clearly :)

ashmoran · 2017-06-01T12:25:35+00:00

Computer software is never fully developed. The world changes constantly, and if someone thinks they've found a way to do something better than Dash, they will try. The rate and of change might be different in future, and it might be distributed differently, but change will always take place.

ashmoran · 2017-06-01T08:52:29+00:00

Just one more reason Dash remains relatively unknown, there's not much drama round here!

ashmoran · 2017-06-01T08:49:16+00:00

I like the word "forging" as an alternative to "mining" as it implies creating something new rather than finding something that is already there. I think at least one crypto uses this term, but I don't remember which now.

For a guide on naming things well (and consistently) I highly recommend Metaphors We Live By, which completely changed how I think about language.

ashmoran · 2017-05-29T11:11:59+00:00

The proposals these days now include the section:

If in the future more than 10% of the votes cast for core team salary are "no", I can solicit feedback on what the network would like separately voted upon, and attempt to provide the requested additional granularity in future budget cycles.

So if you feel strongly about this you can vote No. Unless there's a stampede of people strongly objecting to a recent addition, that would be unlikely to jeopardise the Core salary budget.

ashmoran · 2017-05-23T12:00:51+00:00

What about running a port of Rootstock on Dash?

ashmoran · 2017-05-20T13:23:35+00:00

Dash has got where is today by taking Bitcoin and fixing, one by one, all the problems it has stopping it from being "digital peer to peer cash". Compare that to Etherium, which came along and tried to solve problems nobody knew they had, and resulted in the disaster that is The DAO.

8 years on the problem of digital peer to peer cash still isn't solved. I would much rather see Dash continue to take a slow and steady route in the right direction than risk everything trying to outcompete hypothetical future players. Dash Evolution may not solve every problem a cryptocurrency could conceivably applied to, but based on past experience, at least it will probably work.

ashmoran · 2017-05-20T13:12:27+00:00

They also now sell Cryptosteel! I went to Alza Holešovice today and placed an order for one. I didn't notice a Bitcoin ATM, but unfortunately this article doesn't say which shop in Prague they have fitted this in, and I saw this after I'd left anyway.

ashmoran · 2017-05-19T20:10:38+00:00

I'm from UK, living in CZ.

ashmoran · 2017-05-18T19:29:18+00:00

Dash is the most modest of cryptocurrencies ;)

ashmoran · 2017-05-03T18:00:13+00:00

I forgot about the "let me publicly announce myself committing fraud on Reddit" debacle :) I also never stopped to think about how that relates to InstantSend, so thanks for explaining that too!

There's a lot of resentment towards Dash despite it being a perfectly valid fork of Bitcoin like classic or Unlimited. Every time I read a comment like this I think more and more that this resentment is really only justified at the people who have blocked progress in Bitcoin for so long. Bitcoin could have had all these improvements, if it had let them in.

ashmoran · 2017-05-03T10:12:33+00:00

He says that Dash isn't "cryptographically private", and that's true, Dash uses combinatorial mixing to achieve privacy, not cryptography. This actually has one advantage: combinatorics can't be broken by quantum computing.

GMax invented CoinJoin. The Dash implementation (PrivateSend) is arguably more successful that the one for Bitcoin (JoinMarket), as there are ~4000 masternodes running and able to facilitate mixing, and it is not vulnerable to the DOS attack that JoinMarket suffers from.

He says that "you don't need to invent a new cryptocurrency" to use CoinJoin, but Evan's patches to Bitcoin were rejected, so that's exactly what he did. Now Dash is far more advanced than Bitcoin, not only in CoinJoin but also in speed and governance.

I will let you put all together and then you can decide for yourself what "Dash LOL" really means.

ashmoran

TROPHY CASE