How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by MarkMc » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 1:44 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #98

milcron wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other. There is 80% more gold aboveground today than there was in 1980.

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.

Of the additional 80% gold I'd guess about half represents profit for gold miners or tax or mining royalties. So 40% of the gold supply has come at zero marginal cost.

Also keep in mind that a technological breakthrough could produce a sudden glut in gold supply, as we have seen recently with oil and gas fracking.

The main reason the price has gone up is that the world population is in aggregate far richer than in 1980. What's more, Indians and Chinese (who are culturally inclined to invest in gold) have seen their wealth grow particularly rapidly, so the proportion of world assets stored in gold has likely increased.

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

#202

Post by glitch003 » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 1:50 AM UTC

cohnnton wrote: post #173

TheBiv wrote: post #3

>> They said they might look at selling when the value of all the Bitcoin in circulation approaches the value of all gold in the world — some $7 trillion or $8 trillion compared with the $310 billion value of all Bitcoin on Tuesday — given that they think Bitcoin is set to replace gold as a rare commodity. But then Tyler Winklevoss questioned even that, pointing out the ways that he believes Bitcoin is better than go…

can someone explain why bitcoin is rare? there are COUNTLESS cryptocurrencies out there. The only reason bitcoin is believed to be rare is blind belief, much like believing in santa claus.

There will only ever be 21 million BTC. I mean, it's right there in the code for Bitcoin. Yes you can fork or create new cryptocurrencies, but they don't have the mining power of BTC, and they are inherently NOT BTC. So Bitcoin is rare, cryptocurrencies are not.

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

#203

Post by glitch003 » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 1:53 AM UTC

0wing wrote: post #35

TheBiv wrote: post #3

>> They said they might look at selling when the value of all the Bitcoin in circulation approaches the value of all gold in the world — some $7 trillion or $8 trillion compared with the $310 billion value of all Bitcoin on Tuesday — given that they think Bitcoin is set to replace gold as a rare commodity. But then Tyler Winklevoss questioned even that, pointing out the ways that he believes Bitcoin is better than go…

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…

>as the market is informed there will be a decline in BTC's spot price and once this falls below the cost of OPEX for miners, the hardware goes offline and the network will cease to function.

I don't think the network would cease to function. If that happened, the difficulty for the network would drop drastically, and GPU miners would come back online, similar to the early days of BTC

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

#204

Post by drewvolpe » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 1:56 AM UTC

bogomipz wrote: post #169

stevenj wrote: post #80

I 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 B…

Early bitcoiners met with a lot of people with the means to invest. Almost all of them passed. Committing to investing and sticking with it through the ups and downs takes good judgement, courage, and healthy dose of luck.

It's no different from startups. A lot of investors were pitched by AirBnB and almost all of them passed. Fred Wilson from USV even had PaulG badgering him with emails telling him to invest and he still passed.

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

#205

Post by microtherion » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 1:59 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #74

TheBiv wrote: post #3

>> They said they might look at selling when the value of all the Bitcoin in circulation approaches the value of all gold in the world — some $7 trillion or $8 trillion compared with the $310 billion value of all Bitcoin on Tuesday — given that they think Bitcoin is set to replace gold as a rare commodity. But then Tyler Winklevoss questioned even that, pointing out the ways that he believes Bitcoin is better than go…

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…

> Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other.

"BitCoin" is just a particular name for a bunch of numbers. If every single wallet in the world disappeared today, you could restart a new block chain tomorrow, and would get numbers just as good as the bitcoins were (And in fact, the # of Bitcoins doubles every time there is a fork). Any scarcity is purely by fiat and consensus.

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

#206

Post by pmorici » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 2:08 AM UTC

rubicon33 wrote: post #150

stevenj wrote: post #80

I 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…

The deserve credit for what? For getting lucky on FB settlement and BTC rise? I mean, it's not like they actually built something meaningful and productive... Not sure how much "credit" they deserve.

They didn't just buy btc and sit on it. They also contributed greatly to the ecosystem. They built and run the Gemini Bitcoin exchange, they are trying to get a Bitcoin ETF approved, the CBOE bases their futures pricing on mechanisms they put in place. They have done a ton and built a ton.

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

#207

Post by Retric » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 2:31 AM UTC

maehwasu wrote: post #179

moduspol wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gold is far more unlikely to be made illegal by governments. Empirically this has not been the case, particularly in the US [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

Was just about to link to this. I'd also mention that gold confiscation was heavily used by the Nazis. Gold is great as a store of value when things are good, and incredibly shitty when your government turns on you.

Unlike bitcoin the government has no way to track gold. Burry it 10 feet under your garden and it can stay there for your great grandchildren.

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

#208

Post by Retric » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 2:32 AM UTC

svachalek wrote: post #194

varjag wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Was not illegal to own, was illegal to hoard which is a critical difference.

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

#209

Post by Retric » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 2:34 AM UTC

ce4 wrote: post #141

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…

Bitcoin has >200k [1] unconfirmed transactions in the mempool, summing up 4.3m us$ of fees alone. fee to get your transaction into the next block is around 22$ [2] right now. Starting to look less and lesser like a currency, becoming more and more a security. edit add links: [1] https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions [2]: https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

Looking less like a security and more like a scam.

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

#210

Post by gfody » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 2:35 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #190

gfody wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

how does computing-resource-and-network-intensive digital currency have any value at all in most Mad Max post-civilizational-collapse scenarios?

the resource-intensive aspects all fall off with population as difficulty plummets