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Bitcoin surges in Zimbabwe after military seize power

timeslive.co.za

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Re: Bitcoin surges in Zimbabwe after military seize power

#101

Post by chesimov »

pwaai wrote: post #20

I feel like there are whales that simply manipulate the price based on news. There's little evidence to suggest bitcoin has any usage in zimbabwe in practical day to day usage. Therelies the problem with bitcoin, why would someone in zimbabwe pay 1 week of their salary to move 3 weeks of pay and still not be sure if the money will still be there tomorrow?

If you read about what has already happened in Zim, you'll understand why people would do that sort of thing with ease at even the thought of upheaval. I agree with you on the whales but man... back in the 2000s people were desperately trying to change fiat into anything at all that would hold value. Consumer goods like dvd players, you name it. Hyperinflation is no joke. On a side note in places like SA bitcoin is viewed as less volatile than fiat a lot of the time.

Re: Bitcoin surges in Zimbabwe after military seize power

#102

Post by sillysaurus3 »

lend000 wrote: post #81
eighthnate wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin is too big for a few "whales" to have a sizable effect on major price trends Bitcoin is tiny as currencies go or as industries go. What is it $100 billion "market cap"? > Whales are not gods. Sure. But in such a tiny volume entity like bitcoin, any large player can easily move markets. It doesn't even have market makers or any real rules yet.

> It doesn't even have market makers or any real rules yet. Blatantly false -- you clearly don't monitor crypto exchange order books full time (I do). Even most small-cap altcoins have active market makers running 24/7 for ALT/BTC, ALT/ETH and ALT/USD (where supported). > But in such a tiny volume entity like bitcoin, any large player can easily move markets. Do you know from experience? There are some extremely low…

Do you know from experience? There are some extremely low market cap altcoins -- you should give it a try. I do not think manipulating markets for any length of time is as easy as sideline commenters seem to believe, and it certainly is difficult to make it profitable.

Ripple (XRP): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15203894

Re: Bitcoin surges in Zimbabwe after military seize power

#103

Post by Retric »

freeloop3 wrote: post #88
Retric wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to ban mining in a country when you control the backbone infrastructure. At which point there is no difference between cryptocurrencies and any other foreign currency.

Foreign currency can be confiscated. A brain wallet cannot

A foreign bank account is as easy to hide as a cripto wallet.

Re: Bitcoin surges in Zimbabwe after military seize power

#105

Post by xorcist »

gruez wrote: post #49
bduerst wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For POS transactions though don't you want it to be instant? 3-12 blocks is half a hour to two hours wait. The chart shows 30 satoshis/byte to take 40 minutes to a 19 hours total wait.

i think that's strawman at this point. even if bitcoin had 1GB block sizes, bringing the wait time to 1 block (10 minutes), it's still not going to be acceptable for POS. it's either going to be on-chain with no confirmations, or through layer2 protocols.

Orphan blocks are common, one block has never been considered secure. Early in Bitcoin, a best practice emerged to consider six blocks secure. So that takes an hour, best case.

(Given the insane hash power now maybe that standard can be lowered, but on the other hand it's not common to get a spot in the next block anymore.)

So point of sale was never a good fit for Bitcoin. What most real world merchants do when the amount is small enough is to eat the risk. Even if it's easy to double spend in practice most customers won't bother for a can of coke.

Re: Bitcoin surges in Zimbabwe after military seize power

#106

Post by elmar »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #53
thephyber wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With what? Zimbabwe has been in a hyperinflation downward spiral for almost two decades now[1]. If you hold your Zimbabwe Dollars overnight, they are only worth a fraction of what they were the day before. In hyper-inflationary periods, people would rather buy goods immediately than hold onto cash because the cash depreciates FAR faster than commodities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe#/m…

His joke is that Zimbabwean dollars are toilet paper.

there have been several problems with clogged pipes on Zimbabwe due to the usage of dollar notes as toilet paper.

Re: Bitcoin surges in Zimbabwe after military seize power

#107

Post by nikcub »

drdaeman wrote: post #73
nikcub wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 137,000 satoshi price quoted isn't an average - it's the price to have your transaction almost guaranteed to be accepted in the next block It also shows 30 satoshi a byte gets you transaction accepted in 3-80 blocks, which based on experience is usually 3-12 blocks - and that works out to be 50c for the average transaction

I believe, dust collection is prohibitively costly. And if one's using Bitcoin any actively, they'll end up generating a lot of dust, I think. At the current BTC/USD rates, I have a few dollars worth of dust. However, it's spread over 17 inputs, so it's basically unspendable. It would require ~3.1KB transaction so even at 30sat/byte the fees would be, like, 0.00093 BTC ($6.5 at $7K/BTC). For poorer countries even $2-…

Many wallets and users don't do dust sweeps anymore since it associates all the utxo's with a single user and reduces your privacy

Theres nothing wrong with having many utxo's of varying sizes - good wallets will give you a choice on how to select them when composing a transaction (such as Electrum) and you can sweep part of it back to yourself in what would otherwise look like any other transaction

Re: Bitcoin surges in Zimbabwe after military seize power

#108

Post by xorcist »

uncoder0 wrote: post #96
SilasX wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You definitely do want it to be instant, but this isn't quite an apples-to-apples comparison. That two-hour figure is the amount to get the transaction to the point of irreversibility so it can be re-spent without worry. The equivalent figure for credit cards is ~45 days and checks can take a week to clear. But you're right, making transactions on chain is not going to be practical in an untrusted environment and it…

What you're describing sounds like zero confirmation transactions which bitcoin used to support before RBF. You can't reliably take zero-conf in btc anymore though. So you have to wait for settlement to turn over goods or services.

Zero conf was never secure. Many did demonstrate double spends long before RBF was thought of.

Still, that argument was made against RBF and was enough of a hindrade to consensus that RBF was made opt-in. And it still is. So you are absolutely free to accept zero conf transactions, and take the risk, as long as you don't accept those who flag for RBF. Most wallets won't even make them by default (which in my opinion is stupid with the fees we have today).

The argument for a golden age before RBF isn't a good one. It was never reliable. And what little reliability it had is unchanged.

Re: Bitcoin surges in Zimbabwe after military seize power

#109

Post by Apocryphon »

Could there be a future type of financial vehicle based on news? Since political instability has market effects. From what I understand, prediction markets are simply like sports betting. But what I'm thinking is something that's pegged to currency / commodity price fluctuations.

Did the Saudi purge similarly boost crypto value as well?

Re: Bitcoin surges in Zimbabwe after military seize power

#110

Post by ryanlol »

Kiro wrote: post #90
johnvonneumann wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average transaction cost has been shown to be a bad metric, context: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7b7jj1/john_newber...

24 hours? I want it to confirm in 1 second for even less fee than that. How else can Bitcoin become a serious mean of payment?

How else can wire transfers become a serious means of payment??
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