331–340 of 389 posts
7 years ago: The first bitcoin article on HN with comments! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1532670 One of the posters says the feds will shut it down. I also thought this too. This remains one of the most enduring mysteries of Bitcoin to me. Why has the government taken such a hands off approach?
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This is nonsense. This is being driven by speculation / minuscule interest rates / greed. Very little of the demand for btc in the past year is due to lack of faith in institutions.
Let me try to make the case for why Bitcoin could be a useful beyond greed. I can't really think of many reasons why you would use crypto to pay for a coffee or a sandwich if you live in the West (or frankly, even most developing nations). On the other hand, I can definitely see the utility in a censorship-resistant digital medium to store wealth. To me, this latter use case has much, much more potential to serve the…
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Ordinary people (48.3% of them) aren't on the internet, either. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Even then, there are plenty who are on the internet without really understanding what it is they're using. They just know how to pattern match (netflix.com will take me to movies + tv but no idea how or where it comes from) I think on a surface level, they'd say sure, digital money, why wouldn't that be the future but they assume it comes from an "authoritative" source such as the UN or a government.
How are you interpreting the term "understand"?
Does the average person even understand what a "decentralized asset" is?
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What exactly is a BTC? BTC is man made, and depends upon computers and software. And the people who control the software can change their minds, if they so choose. So what a BTC is now, may not be what it is later, including its scarcity. See also the ETH and BTC forks. Gold on the other hand exists naturally in nature, and doesn't change based upon someone else's whim. So no, BTC is not like gold.
BTC is what the distributed consensus says BTC is. You can’t fake that without pouring billions into building up mining infrastructure to organize a 51% attack and even then the distributed consensus will simply fork around your amazing achievement of successfully doing a single double spend? So yeah, BTC is definitely not like gold, it’s way better.
Suppose a solar flare destroyed all existing digital equipment. What would a physical printout of a wallet be worth?
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money laundering is legitimising illicit profits but disguising them as legitimate income. none of the examples above fits this definition.actually, it is the opposite - protecting your legitimate gains from illegitimate actions of government.
You are right, I am using money laundering to mean 'anonymous monetary transfer of arbitrary size/value', which most governments don't allow as far as I know.
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> The key quality of a fiat currency is that it is spun out of air without intrinsic value. ... as imposed (that is, "by fiat") by some governmental organization. Bitcoin's "true" value may be dubious, but it's most definitely not a fiat currency.
The type of organization that created it doesn't matter.
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What percentage of the value of gold do you think is due to its “inherent” value in jewelry or electronics? I’d wager it’s incredibly tiny, and I don’t understand your argument that gold is a reasonable store of value only because it has some tiny bit of “inherent” value.
It has a lot with it to do, because a lot of today's asset value is based on pure emotions of investors and their feelings and if something is actually physical, which you can see, hold in your hands, which has a very shiny appearance, is being worn by rich people around their necks and is used in the most sophisticated electronics (which itself is required for the world to function nowadays) influences one's feeling…
I don’t really like appeals to “inherent value,” except for assets that can be expected to be desirable to almost any individual in almost any conceivable scenario (like food). Even then, there is some level of social or “network” effect, because in order to trade food you need your trade partner to have confidence that your assets are genuine (e.g. it’s not fake cans of beans) and that there is some fundamental protection of property rights (e.g. you’re not going to trade your canned beans for their eggs, only to immediately steal back their eggs using the threat of force).
In that sense, all “inherent value” is just an abstraction based on your confidence in your ability to predict the future behavior of other humans, which isn’t so different than your decision today to trade fiat currency for cryptocurrency (or even to trade your labor for fiat currency, like most of us do in traditional jobs).
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Name an artist who has stayed anonymous under focused public scrutiny as effectively as Satoshi. The only one I can think of that comes close to this level of exposure is Banksy, and his identity is right there on his Wikipedia page for anyone who really cares to know. Besides, Banksy does plenty of communication despite his supposed anonymity. It's not the anonymity; the total lack of communication from Satoshi is w…
The claim that it was impossible because of human nature is what I’m challenging. You asked for an example: Jane Austen was anonymous until her death.
But that's all beside the point. You misunderstand my claim. I'm not claiming that it's unlikely for Satoshi to want to remain anonymous. What's unlikely is for a successful person to not talk to anyone, not a single other person in the world (as far as we know), about their success. Even people who value their privacy and anonymity very highly typically still want to communicate with other people somehow. Satoshi clearly had good communication skills, and knew how to communicate while remaining anonymous, so if you want to argue that he was some kind of loner recluse who rejected communication with other humans you'll have a tough time convincing me of that.
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Tether hyperinflation. Edit: I should clarify. Bitfinex printed 95 million worth of tether in the last two days , and used it to buy btc. When your prices are denominated in Monopoly money, the sky is the limit.
This wouldn't be the first case that Bitcoin's market volume has been artificially inflated (i.e. Mt. Gox), but doesn't Tether only have a $700MM market cap and $900MM 24H volume? How is that able to affect Bitcoin with its $175BN market cap and $8BN 24H volume? Sidenote: With all this talk about cryptocurrencies, I find it strange that Tether is the only coin whose volume exceeds its market cap; strange in the way t…
"To raise market cap. by 5B, you basically need to raise price by ~3% (%_delta = [(cap_delta / btc_count + current_price) / current_price - 1] * 100%). The total usd amount to change price by desired delta is pretty small, for BTC it is usually around 8M for 1% (easy to check)"