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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

#241

Post by kennywinker »

wslh wrote: post #147
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…

Yes, I really think that the Winklevoss twins deserve a prequel and sequel of The Social Network movie and also directed by David Fincher. There are two rare events. I assume the Winklevoss twins were exposed to less risky ventures in their life but they chose the risky ones.

It's not really risky if you're already rich and you only stand to be "slightly less rich" if you bet wrong.

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

#242

Post by once_inc »

jhall1468 wrote: post #196
loceng wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

A simple fork invalidating coins originating from the double spend would be enough. You've just spent $2B to achieve something that the network can invalidate with a dozen lines of code. It would set a bad precedent, but it did cost you a lot of money.

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

#243

Post by sah2ed »

joering2 wrote: post #225
ce4 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

That still boggles my mind. I thought the whole idea was to remove middle man that not only authorize (or not transaction) but also charge hefty fees? I was told for long time it is free to buy or sell with bitcoin. What am I missing?

The Bitcoin network doesn't do away with the concept of a middle man completely, it merely replaces one mutually trusted middle man (like the Visa card network) with several untrusted middle men (anyone that can afford a mining rig).

If one untrusted middle man produces a proof of work for a transaction request, the other untrusted middle men verify the PoW to be valid, if there is consensus §, they collectively agree to append the transaction to the next block on the blockchain. The untrusted middle man is then rewarded for their efforts by being paid the mining fee that was accruable for the transaction.

[§] If 2 or more untrusted middle men solve the PoW for a transaction request independently, i.e. they are competing to be rewarded with the same mining fee, then the untrusted middle man with the longest confirmations from other nodes on the network is the one whose block will be appended to the blockchain, the others will be discarded.

Would appreciate any corrections to my gross simplification.

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

#244

Post by cslarson »

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.

Gemini is a nice exchange.

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

#245

Post by inciampati »

jhall1468 wrote: post #159
perseusprime11 wrote: post #155

Earlier 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.

Knowing them, knowing him, having been there at the time, I can only confirm that they designed the entire rise of Facebook using the principle of exclusivity to build interest in users 1) outside Harvard, 2) outside the ivies, 3) outside colleges, etc. Zuckerberg was right (edit: correctly saw he was able, not morally right)toun with their ideas, and deserves credit for executing them to perfection.

At the time I thought they were foolish for not having a contract and for not having built up enough technical skill to understand that Zuckerberg was taking them for a ride. This is definitely true, but they corrected the problem and have recovered brilliantly.

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

#246

Post by Kiro »

jpm_sd wrote: post #143
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…

BTC is far more likely to hit zero than to outstrip gold.

I claim the opposite. The truth is that neither of us knows so your comment is nonsense.

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

#247

Post by raverbashing »

kennywinker wrote: post #241
wslh wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I really think that the Winklevoss twins deserve a prequel and sequel of The Social Network movie and also directed by David Fincher. There are two rare events. I assume the Winklevoss twins were exposed to less risky ventures in their life but they chose the risky ones.

It's not really risky if you're already rich and you only stand to be "slightly less rich" if you bet wrong.

It's not one or the other

If you settlement was 10Mi (example), sell 1Mi shares in cash: congrats, you're rich now, then invest the remaining 9Mi in higher risk stuff

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

#248

Post by raverbashing »

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…

Even more than that

BTC has zero value if the network stops (you could say it could have some value but "infinite illiquidity" which is basically the same)

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

#249

Post by usrusr »

tomaskafka wrote: post #238
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 could have bought enough BTC to pay a house in cash today, when I first dabbled with it, even as a freshly working student. I didn't.

At the time, did you (not) expect bitcoin to succeed in becoming a payment method, displacing paypal and credit cards, or did you (not) expect bitcoin to become "digital gold", of little use except for being something that most of the time more people want to buy than sell? If it was the former, there is very little to beat yourself up about.
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