41–50 of 72 posts
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Illegal operations would obviously not rely on banks.
I think you would surprise yourself with that comment. Illegal operations do indeed rely heavily on banks.
>“All it would take would be one terrorist incident in the U.S. funded by bitcoin for the U.S. regulator to much more seriously step in and take action, he said. “That’s a risk, an unquantifiable risk, bitcoin has that another currency doesn’t." You can't make this up... or maybe I'm not understanding something. So, what's currently funding terrorist attacks?
I don't understand the comment either. It's not like terrorist groups are currently un-funded. Cash is still king around illegal activities of all kinds. Why is using bitcoin for illegal activity any different than untraceable cash?
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Big difference is that Bitcoin has all the right conditions for a bubble pop. If someone did a 51% attack, this would cause people to lose trust in the currency, everyone would cash out, creating a bank run, which would be a self-accelerating process that drives the price even lower. So even if the network recovered the next day, it would take a long long time to rebuild that trust. Whereas with the internet, if some…
I disagree that everyone would cash out. There have been crashes of bitcoin before. None "to zero" but pretty substantial, and not everyone "cashes out" right away.
But the previous crashes weren't caused by any real news of a significant weakness of Bitcoin, so if there was news like that, then the crash would be worse than we've seen.
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I think the point is that bitcoin is very fragile and any powerful enough state-actor can bash it to the ground. There are various ways to achieve this, from shorting to propaganda, to attacking (hacking) large exchanges or miner networks and so on. Only time will tell of course, maybe that is already priced in.
Fail to see how is Bitcoin fragile. It has been running non stop for past 8 years churning out a block every 10 minutes without fail while being under constant attack from hackers, governments, it has its own internal governance issues, hard forks, technical issues, scaling debates. And yet it is growing in liquidity and scale. I doubt state actors can do anything about it.
It's very easy to ban - make it illegal to sell Bitcoin, force ISPs to block international sites that do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that bitcoin is very fragile and any powerful enough state-actor can bash it to the ground. There are various ways to achieve this, from shorting to propaganda, to attacking (hacking) large exchanges or miner networks and so on. Only time will tell of course, maybe that is already priced in.
Easier: make exchanging bitcoin for real money illegal.
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If Bitcoin hits $1M per coin, then Satoshi Nakamoto will be the world’s first trillionaire. Not a bad return for 10 days of mining.
10 days of mining alone = 1440 blocks = 72K BTC at 50 BTC/block. $1M per coin gives $72B, not $1000B.
> How do you know when to get out of a bitcoin investment? That's the thing. When Bitcoin succeeds, you won't have to get out of the investment.
If the best case scenario is Bitcoin hits $1,000,000 per coin and never moves again, why would anyone ever put more money into it? The only value Bitcoin has is appreciation. If it ever becomes stable it will necessarily be worthless.
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Fail to see how is Bitcoin fragile. It has been running non stop for past 8 years churning out a block every 10 minutes without fail while being under constant attack from hackers, governments, it has its own internal governance issues, hard forks, technical issues, scaling debates. And yet it is growing in liquidity and scale. I doubt state actors can do anything about it.
He's saying it's fragile in that the US Government could ban it and the value of the coin disappears overnight. It's very easy to ban - make it illegal to sell Bitcoin, force ISPs to block international sites that do.
The Bitcoin code is open source. Anyone from anywhere can download the code and run a local copy. Your coins are securely stored across computers all over the world. Your balance cannot be frozen by any authority. Maybe central exchanges that convert fiat to Bitcoin could be regulated, but mining cannot be stopped, transactions cannot be stopped. Unless governments all over the world shut down electricity and internet.
At that point question mark is on the government that does this rather than Bitcoin.
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I think the point is that bitcoin is very fragile and any powerful enough state-actor can bash it to the ground. There are various ways to achieve this, from shorting to propaganda, to attacking (hacking) large exchanges or miner networks and so on. Only time will tell of course, maybe that is already priced in.
The same thing could be/could have been said about the internet as a whole.
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He's saying it's fragile in that the US Government could ban it and the value of the coin disappears overnight. It's very easy to ban - make it illegal to sell Bitcoin, force ISPs to block international sites that do.
Actually it is not that easy to ban. The Bitcoin code is open source. Anyone from anywhere can download the code and run a local copy. Your coins are securely stored across computers all over the world. Your balance cannot be frozen by any authority. Maybe central exchanges that convert fiat to Bitcoin could be regulated, but mining cannot be stopped, transactions cannot be stopped. Unless governments all over the wo…
Please lets not start this debate. Times and times again it has been proven that software is not secure. OpenSSL was also thought to be secure for quite some time too..