Earlier quoted context omitted.
One disadvantage of gold I can think of is you cannot hide it in your head.
Teeth?
Rather inconvenient for bigger stacks.
Might be popular with the ladies, though.
How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune
161–170 of 309 posts
Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune
#162How will quantum computing impact crypto currencies? Isn't the scarcity based on the slow rate of mining, aka crypto hashing? Seems like its going to be due for some serious future disruption. Until we can find a way to manufacture gold atoms on a mass scale at least gold will continue to be scarce.
If that threat became apparent the protocol would probably just hard-fork to post-Quantum Cryptography.
Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune
#163Earlier 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…
> willybot, spoofing Interesting. First time I'm hearing about these two. Anyone know of any real life instances where someone perpetrated this w.r.t. bitcoins / crypto trading?
Mt. Gox CEO admitted to operating a Willy Bot this summer.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/mt-gox-trial-update-karpeles-...
Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune
#164I think the Winklevoss twins were rightly ridiculed for thinking they invented Facebook. However, they've made two prescient bets and deserve credit for those: (1) Getting Facebook stock instead of cash as part of their legal settlement; (2) Not only seeing bitcoin's future potential, but investing in it and sticking with it. While the final result on the second one is still TBD, they deserve credit for investing in…
I don't really consider it "prescient" to take stock over cash when you're already wealthy. It's more of a privilege.
So was buying a bunch of bitcoin in 2013. It's a bet only a few people could (should have) made.
Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still can’t get my head around the fact that Mark stole their idea and ran with it, and it was the twins who were made to look evil. What if this happens to any of us?
Ideas are worthless. Undoubtedly he took their concept, but I sincerely doubt he developed a complete copy of their idea. Whether or not their idea would have worked is up for debate. But it's a pointless debate, because ideas are worthless... Unless of course, they are patented.
So tomorrow if you hire couple of engineers to build a gaming app, are you saying you will fine if those engineers launch the app by themselves?
Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune
#166Earlier 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.
Similar to BTC
Not really.
If you ask your Shaman to produce a poison and send it to every gold miner in the world and as a result no new gold will be mined, you still won't dig up much by simply putting shovel in your backyard. You would have to go to the last crust level they been at and start to dig from there, which makes it incredible expensive and complicated.
Meanwhile, if for any reason, including breaking a Bitcoin blockchain by state-sponsored actor (or someone powerful enough; or simply forcing ISPs to ban traffic on mining ports now that NN is gone), when miners stop or move to something else, you can pick up from where they left off of and alone mine one bitcoin a minute on your mediocre laptop.
Whether someone will pick up these coins from you at $15k per pop, that's a different story.
Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you seen how much processing power is in the Bitcoin network? Do you know how expensive an attack like this would be? By the way, you can only double spend with the 51% attack.
How expensive, $100M?
You're off by a factor of 20. The current hash rate is 17.5 million terahashes per second. Ant Antminer S9 goes for $2800 and produces 13.5 terahashes per second. In order to get to 51%, you'd need a $2 billion dollar investment.
Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another critical difference is that there are commodity uses of gold. The price of gold will never go to zero ; it might go to $100 or $10 per oz if all speculation and hoarding were removed from the market but it wouldn't go to $0.
And what's that got to do with bitcoin? If you're going to assert that gold can't go to $0 and imply that bitcoin can, you need to also give a good reason why bitcoin can go to $0.
Good reason would be broken or lost blockchain, then all these letters and digits are only worth a thumbdrive you stored them on.
I know it is hard to imagine because generally bitcoin is new technology, but also because of that - its not that it is impossible.
Meanwhile gold is gold; a physical object with very high temperature of vaporization.
Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune
#169I think the Winklevoss twins were rightly ridiculed for thinking they invented Facebook. However, they've made two prescient bets and deserve credit for those: (1) Getting Facebook stock instead of cash as part of their legal settlement; (2) Not only seeing bitcoin's future potential, but investing in it and sticking with it. While the final result on the second one is still TBD, they deserve credit for investing in…
I'm not sure how "prescient" not accepting the first settlement offer is.
Also I'm not sure how "prescient" their seeing the potential of bitcoin was. They were literally sitting on a beach in Ibiza when a stranger approached them and told them about investing in bitcoin.
This same stranger fom the beach them puts them in the touch with the Bitinstant folks. When the brother meet Charlie Shrem and Erik Voorhes from Bitinstant they observe how much those two believe in the potential of bitcoin. See:
https://qz.com/405950/ibiza-the-hamptons-downtown-manhattan-...
Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ideas are worthless. Undoubtedly he took their concept, but I sincerely doubt he developed a complete copy of their idea. Whether or not their idea would have worked is up for debate. But it's a pointless debate, because ideas are worthless... Unless of course, they are patented.
So tomorrow if you hire couple of engineers to build a gaming app, are you saying you will fine if those engineers launch the app by themselves?
That's the risk you take in software in general. What stopped Instagram from copying Snapchat? Nothing. Micrsoft used to snuff out competitors in the office suite space all the time. MSN copied AIM. IE copied Netscape. It happens. You either work with founders you can trust or you don't.