Bitcoin Will Cost $500,000 By 2030 – Snapchat Investor Liew

bitcoin at $500,000 by 2030 is the latest sky-high prediction to come from high-flying personalities, this time Snapchat’s first investor.

Smith, Liew: Developing Markets Will Drive bitcoin’s Moontrip

In a joint presentation with Blockchain CEO Peter Smith, Jeremy Liew, whose stake in Snapchat is now worth $2 billion, said that external factors driving interest in bitcoin would propel it to unseen heights in the coming decade.

Remittance increases, mobile penetration and political uncertainty top the list.

Business Insider quoted Liew and Smith as saying:

We believe bitcoin awareness, high liquidity, ease of transport and continued market outperformance as geopolitical risks mount, will make bitcoin a strong contender for investment at a consumer and investor level.

Developing countries represent a significant market for bitcoin, with countries such as Kenya already conducting financial activities via mobile, having skipped banking in what was previously a highly cash-driven economy.

With such mobile monopolies come easier remittances. In Kenya, dedicated startup BitPesa is already cornering both markets with bitcoin.

Enough users, according to Smith and Liew, and the virtual currency’s value will take care of itself.

“Put another way, we need a population of bitcoin users around a quarter of the Chinese population (or 5% of the global population) in 2030 to see bitcoin at $500k,” they said.

bitcoin Slow And Steady In 2017 – $1000 A Piece

Current hurdles facing bitcoin propagation, specifically network capacity and the wary approach taken to related financial instruments by regulators, do not faze Smith in particular.

“The SEC’s ruling wasn’t a surprise to us,” he said about the Winklevoss twins’ rejected Bitcoin ETF.

“We know that getting this sort of approval is going to take (a potentially long) time. In the meantime, bitcoin is already simple to buy and hold and, as the asset continues to mature, we’ll continue to see an increase in the development and deployment of surrounding products.”

Nonetheless, in keeping with the current sentiment, both agree on a 2017 bitcoin price of $1000 – slightly less than today’s spot rate.

bitcoin’s Reliability Unrivalled Despite Problems

Other recent price estimates to come from well-known sources include several from Vinny Lingham, who in December forecast $3000 this year.

His optimism came with a hint of caution, however, the entrepreneur adding that too rapid a price increase would be detrimental to the industry and reintroduce volatility and associated lack of trust.

Smith concluded:

…bitcoin is incredibly resilient and stable…In fact, the bitcoin Blockchain has operated for 7+ years with no downtime, a feat no other back-end system operating at this scale can claim.

What do you think about Jeremy Liew and Peter Smith’s forecast? Let us know in the comments below!

Images courtesy of Coinbase, Blockchain, Shutterstock

The post Bitcoin Will Cost $500,000 By 2030 – Snapchat Investor Liew appeared first on Bitcoinist.com.

July 24, 2017

This New Tool Can Help Bitcoin Users Deal With Stuck Transactions

Samourai Wallet is becoming increasingly popular as a wallet that focuses on privacy and security for its users above all else, but a recent tool released by this wallet’s team of developers has a focus on user experience. The new app, called Bitcoin Afterburner, allows users of many different bitcoin wallets to boost transactions that have become stuck due to low fees.

The app works for transactions that have been sent or received, and it is compatible with all BIP 39 and BIP 44 wallets. Examples of compatible wallets include Mycelium, Blockchain.info, Airbitz and Electrum.

To get more details about bitcoin Afterburner and the concept of fee bumping in general, bitcoin Magazine reached out to the anonymous CEO of Samourai Wallet.

“Afterburner is one more example of how we are experimenting and developing ways of monetizing our business without resorting to accepting fiat or exposing our users to harmful KYC/AML collection,” said the CEO.

Samourai Wallet monetizes the bitcoin Afterburner app by adding a $5.99 fee for helping users with their stuck transactions. This fee is added to the child-pays-for-parent (CPFP) transaction that is used to bump the user’s bitcoin transaction fee. CPFP is a process by which the recipient of a transaction can spend the inputs of an unconfirmed transaction by using them in a new transaction that has a higher fee (and incentivizes miners to mine both transactions at once).

The full question and answer session with the CEO of Samourai Wallet can be read below.

bitcoin Magazine: Will fee bumping eventually become the norm on bitcoin?

Samourai Wallet: We believe that over time as legitimate transactions start to fill block space, and a fee market begins to mature, wallets that have implemented sophisticated fee management mechanisms such as fee bumping will provide their users with the most competitive transaction fees and confirmation times. The tech is there today, the challenge — and it isn’t a small challenge — is entirely UX. We’re working on this today while others are playing catch-up.

BM: Could you compare and contrast this app with the transaction accelerators offered by ViaBTC and BTC.com?

SW: The difference between the miner operated TX Accelerators is that Afterburner is not an off-chain 1-to-1 with a specific miner. Instead, Afterburner broadcasts a bitcoin transaction to all miners using the standard bitcoin p2p network. All the miners on the network compete for the new transaction with the higher fee, meaning it often works much quicker than the miner operated TX Accelerators. Afterburner was very much a defensive response to the miners who have been blocking SegWit activation and broadcasting empty blocks, some of those same miners are the ones who run the TX Accelerators.

BM: Is bitcoin Afterburner getting much use so far?

SW: Afterburner has a good number of installs, but not many paid ‘Boosts.’ A few days after we released Afterburner the transaction backlog that was driving up fees and confirmation times completely dried up. The fees required for next block confirmation dropped from 300 sat/b to 25 sat/b. Once the mempool gets saturated again, we will have a much better idea of the potential utility of the app.

BM: Why do you think more wallet providers don’t offer this sort of service?

SW: Many wallet providers — inexplicably the most well-funded ones are the most guilty — haven’t invested any time into proper fee estimation and management until very recently. A misguided industry-driven quest to make the bitcoin wallet for “grandma” resulted in an unusable bitcoin wallet for actual users. Samourai has focused from inception on actual bitcoin users first.

BM: Do you think this sort of fee bumping will eventually be free? Does Samourai Wallet offer fee bumping like this natively or do they need to use this separate app?

SW: Samourai Wallet provides the exact same functionality as Afterburner natively. Afterburner was designed to allow users of any other BIP 44 HD wallet to boost their stuck transaction using CPFP (Child-Pays-for-Parent) under the hood. Hopefully they move over to Samourai Wallet if they are satisfied with the service. In addition to CPFP-based boosting more advanced users may opt-in to RBF-based boosting which is also available in the wallet. Both options are available to Samourai Wallet users free of charge.

The post This New Tool Can Help Bitcoin Users Deal With Stuck Transactions appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.