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How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

nytimes.com

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Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#131

Post by CPLX »

21 wrote: post #44
saalweachter wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money isn't "put into" Bitcoin. Every USD "put into" an exchange in exchange for Bitcoin was simultaneously taken out by the person on the other side of the trade. The future value of Bitcoin in USD is entirely dependent on people in the future wanting to buy Bitcoin for USD; if no one wants to, it is not worth any USD.

You can say the same about many (most?) things. Every USD "put into" AAPL is simultaneously taken out by the person on the other side of the trade. Very few things truly destroy money, and I'm pretty sure all of them are done by banks or treasuries.

This is factually incorrect. Apple can and does issue stock and buy back shares.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#132

Post by 0wing »

chrisco255 wrote: post #112
0wing wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you understand the computer science behind Bitcoin, you'll realize how ridiculous the false equivalency to gold is. 1. The claim of "rare" doesn't exactly hold true. Consider the 10,000 BTC pizza - how did this happen? This was the direct result of Satoshi's economic policy, granting vast sums of BTC to mint out very quickly very early for a short duration to the very small pool of people who ran the software. Sat…

On 1) the exchanges may be unregulated, but there's dozens, if not hundreds of exchanges. Implying that exchanges are manipulating the spot price across the board is ludicrous. There's also exchanges like EtherDelta, which are entirely run by a smart contract on the Ethereum block chain, so it's independently verifiable that the trades are fairly executed. 2. BTC is being used as the reserve currency for almost all e…

1) Unregulated exchanges are likely operating as fractional reserve pools. Also notice how historic charts show steep, often 90° falls in spot price? Low liquidity and high latency allows exchanges to take in new deposits and delay withdraws while they shuffle funds from new deposits to pay withdraws.

EtherDelta is only compatible with Tokens generated within the Ethereum network, i.e. digital "assets" produced not by mining but by writing a separate contract that immediately creates or "pre-mines" millions of Tokens.

Pre-mined Tokens are a gimmick that amounts to a gift card for a Business, but the marketing tries to claim this is a magic software network where a limited amount of giftcards are released into the wild and you need to horde the giftcards to use the services offered by the business. Please feel free to show proof where this is not the case.

2. BTC is not a "reserve currency", it's merely referenced in the form of a ratio for other crypto-assets. BTC could fall to $0.001 USD and you would simply see the ratio as BTC 6 : 1 OTHER-CRYPTO

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#133

Post by 21 »

CPLX wrote: post #131
21 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say the same about many (most?) things. Every USD "put into" AAPL is simultaneously taken out by the person on the other side of the trade. Very few things truly destroy money, and I'm pretty sure all of them are done by banks or treasuries.

This is factually incorrect. Apple can and does issue stock and buy back shares.

Please explain how issuing/buying back shares destroys dollars.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#134

Post by lern_too_spel »

chrisco255 wrote: post #106
loceng wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one can steal it from you with 50%+1 CPU resources though.

The 51% attack allows you to double spend. It doesn't allow you to steal other people's coin.

By allowing you to double spend, it reduces confidence in coins you buy to zero, which reduces the value of all coins to zero. You still have your coins, but they aren't worth anything.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#135

Post by [deleted] »

sverige wrote: post #57
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean gold is rare on its own kind? Aren't there tons of other pretty metals? There doesn't seem to be any unique property of gold (other than sociological) that would help it defend against competitors like bitcoin or any other new asset.

Gold is rare in several senses: In addition to being a rare element, it is the most ductile metal, the most malleable metal, and one of the best conductors of heat and electricity. It is very stable and doesn't oxidize. It is easy to alloy and easy to refine back to pure state. It is one of three metals that naturally occurs in its elemental state. It is the easiest metal to work for jewelry and other purposes. It is…

[deleted]

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#136

Post by wils1245 »

meritt wrote: post #64
dahdum wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are linked very closely, especially with a volatile market like crypto. Besides, the volume is 10x what it was when Novogratz unloaded $250M on a smaller market cap. A billion would certainly move the price, but it doesn't appear it would crash it.

I was playing around with automated trading algorithms this summer on GDAX. With a bankroll of only $2.5k USD I was routinely contributing $500k+ worth of trading volume each day (that's only 100 r/t trades with $2.5k). Surely there's a lot more sophisticated high-volume trading algorithms taking place than what I did. Take a look at GDAX's full book [1] -- Even going all the way down to a BTC price of $8600 (-50% cu…

It’s been so crazy to see things like that just papered over in thread after thread. People talk about trading volume as though they have the faintest idea what the true, non manipulative volume is. The term “market cap” being thrown around as though anything remotely close to the figure could be realized.

I’m starting to lose sympathy for the people who are ultimately going to get hurt when this crashes. The signs are not hard to see at all.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#137

Post by jonas21 »

dcosson wrote: post #125
sytelus wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite a balony. - Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other. - Gold has practical use in industry which puts lower bound on its value. BTC has no lower bound. - Gold is exchangeable virtually in any country and any culture regardless of how technologically advanced that society is. - Thousands of years of history has proven that humans have almost natural lust for this shiny metal and it gets…

> Gold has practical use in industry which puts lower bound on its value. How did that work out for oil a couple years ago? Yes there's some lower bound on gold, but if it turns out it's lower than you thought, or if the supply can be altered to manipulate the price and drive it even lower, it's not very useful. Given that gold prices 20 years ago were somewhere around 1/6 the maximum price in that period ($300 vs $1…

I don't think the comment you're replying to is trying to argue that gold is a particularly good investment -- just that Bitcoin is worse.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#138

Post by notahacker »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #122
sytelus wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite a balony. - Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other. - Gold has practical use in industry which puts lower bound on its value. BTC has no lower bound. - Gold is exchangeable virtually in any country and any culture regardless of how technologically advanced that society is. - Thousands of years of history has proven that humans have almost natural lust for this shiny metal and it gets…

> Gold is exchangeable virtually in any country and any culture regardless of how technologically advanced that society is. Your other arguments are not bad (well, it varies), but this one is very weak. You do know that a lot of 3rd world citizens now have access to cell phones? Technology is pervasive nowadays.

The fact that even millions of people who earn a BTC transaction fee per week have access to dumbphones is rather irrelevant to the observation that cultures who are resistant to banking are likely to continue to value gold jewellery over exotic computer-based financial instruments that don't look good around their neck. And that's even assuming a hypothetical world where many developing world citizens actually have practical access to BTC and local markets for exchanging BTC for goods.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#139

Post by kharms »

Lon7 wrote: post #62
aplummer wrote: post #21

Does anyone know the actual value of the money put into bitcoin so far vs this market cap of recent sale price x count? I'm keen to know actually how many people could withdraw at similar sale prices to now before it evaporated. Because it's so exponential, I would imagine a rapid sale of 5% would remove 90% of the value, but I'd love to know the specifics.

Bank of America and Bitcoin both have market caps of ~$290 billion. Bank of America usually sees huge trading volume for a stock and it traded about $1.8 billion of volume today. BTC/USD alone has done $3 billion today. I realize it's not a perfect comparison, but I think it highlights the fact that large sales aren't going to just decimate bitcoin's value.

Can you cite the BTC/USD $3 billion? Specifically USD, not tethers, not other crypto valued in USD.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#140

Post by Rmilb »

cdolan wrote: post #109
sytelus wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold exploration had been going on for thousands of years which means every new piece of gold is being discovered at much higher cost. So while supply increases, prices don't go down.

Is this not similar to the diminishing release of bitcoins?

Exactly the point. Satoshi created the issuance curve of Bitcoin to mirror the amount of gold that was dug up.
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