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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

#191

Post by majormajor »

maehwasu wrote: post #177
seppin wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So was buying a bunch of bitcoin in 2013. It's a bet only a few people could (should have) made.

I know plenty of people with jobs that supported them just fine who were able to acquire a lot of bitcoin early. Most of them abandoned it, and it had nothing to do with privilege or immediate need.

There's a difference between "early" and 2013. In 2013 I knew one person who'd gotten wildly lucky and already retired from buying and mining Bitcoin early, but the people buying hundreds of bitcoin at that point, with the prices in the $100+ range already, were all pretty well-off to have that much disposable cash to toss on a gamble.

Investing 100K then to have 18M now or whatever is a gamble you can only take if you're already doing quite well.

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

#192

Post by dahdum »

ufo wrote: post #178
dahdum wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok...last 10 minutes proved your point. That was bananas.

What happened?

Coinbase added Bitcoin Cash to GDAX.

BTC plummeted from mid $17.8k to $14.9k in 15 minutes, now back to $16.6k. ETH from $857 to $700 same period, back to $771 now.

Good times...

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

#193

Post by majormajor »

perseusprime11 wrote: post #165
jhall1468 wrote: post #159

Earlier 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?

What if your game idea is half-baked, incomplete, and generally kinda crappy, the engineers realize you don't have a complete idea, but then go on and develop a fully-baked similar idea on their own later, and it becomes a hit?

Let's add some ambiguity to our "poor genius"/"brilliant thief" scenario :)

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

#194

Post by svachalek »

varjag wrote: post #86
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…

Should just point out that gold was made illegal in multiple cultures on several occasions.

Some may be surprised to learn this includes the U.S. from 1933-1974.

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

#195

Post by 21 »

saalweachter wrote: post #184
21 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those "assets inside" AAPL are still dollars. User payed dollars for AAPL share which ended up in a dollar account or a treasury bond. Stop being so obtuse. Otherwise I can also say the same thing, that you can literally put dollars into Bitcoin by buying GBTC shares, since the dollars become "assets inside" the Bitcoin Investment Trust company.

Sure, the Bitcoin Investment Trust is no different than any other stock. Buying shares of GBTC entitles you to a share of its assets and earnings, same as any other company. But what are those assets worth? AAPL owns patents, inventory, raw material, real estate, subsidiaries, investments (stocks, bonds, commodities, T-bills, the whole shebang) and straight-up cash. You can add all those together and you can evaluate…

I was never discussing what AAPL or Bitcoin is worth or not.

Just the claim that "you can't put dollars into Bitcoin, because there is a seller on the other side which takes the dollars" somehow applies to Bitcoin in a special way. My claim is that this is true for most assets out there, stocks, commodities, or financial contracts.

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

#196

Post by jhall1468 »

loceng wrote: post #188
jhall1468 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How much is spent on war directly (that we know about) every year globally?

The US military budget is $600B. Not sure what your point is though. A 51% attack doesn't give a government control, it just allows it to double spend. And that's until a hot patch to increase the required number of confirmations resolves the issue.

Besides there's a huge supply problem here. ASICs need to be manufactured. You can't just buy several hundred thousand of them. The whole point of Bitcoin is that it's prohibitively expensive to just perform a 51% attack and impossible to entirely regulate.

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

#197

Post by krallja »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #118
relics443 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but someone with an end stage terminal illness shouldn't buy a car.

Why not? What would they be saving their money for?

Doesn’t matter. If you’re going to die soon, get a lease. Fill the car up with the remaining dollars.

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

#198

Post by randomsearch »

gfody wrote: post #183
randomsearch wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How well you think bitcoin’s potential worked out is likely to depend on exactly when in the next six months you decide to sell. Then again, being able to anticipate irrational investment in bitcoin is arguably also a skill, assuming it’s not just dumb luck.

if you sell in the next six months you lose. at this point crypto is a hedge against our mad max style post apocalyptic future.

As much as I disapprove of throwaway comments, this did make me chuckle. It does also make a serious point.

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

#200

Post by bmelton »

joering2 wrote: post #166
victor106 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 blockch…

> or simply forcing ISPs to ban traffic on mining ports now that NN is gone

If the government can force ISPs to implement content-neutral routing, what on earth would stop the government from forcing ISPs to mandate content-neutral routing for everything except mining ports, or going even further to demand that DPI be used to investigate the content of all ports to prohibit mining activity?

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