251–260 of 309 posts
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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
Has anyone ever tried to sell a billion dollars worth of Bitcoins and collected?
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Unless they are a government, shorted bitcoins, or own a massive stake in a competitor etc. PS: Remember the value of Bitcoin is limited as a function of the cost of that 51% attack. If the price increases by 10x the transaction fees need to also increase by 10x or Bitcoin becomes less secure.
This idea comes back many times... but I don't see a reason why government would want to short bitcoins or disturb the market to get their hands in it. 1. They have BEP printing press; instead of stealing or brute forcing into bitcoin and then selling the loot for $, the might as well ask Bernanke to print few thousands more sheets of 100 dollar bills (of course not legally but i'm sure there is some overprint like i…
Someone shorting Bitcoin on the other hand has an economic incentive to destroy it. The cost benefit of doing so scales with the size of their short vs the current hashing power. But, a malware writer may have access to a 51% attack briefly without owning any equipment.
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The 51% attack allows you to double spend. It doesn't allow you to steal other people's coin.
Technically, a 51% attack would allow one to confirm non-standard transactions and pretty much do anything. Granted, this would immediately be apparent to any of the other 49% of nodes and cause a fork, but still...
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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.
And it hasn't displaced anything, has it? I still don't expect it to do anything of the sort.
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True, but someone with an end stage terminal illness shouldn't buy a car.
Someone I know was in such a situation. He bought or leased (I don't remember) a nice car a week before he passed. The payments got passed on to his children, who didn't want to deal with that in the wake of their dad's death.
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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 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
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The question is how soon is soon. I remember saying the exact same thing 3, 4 yrs ago when these 2 same guys were then saying bitcoin would go to $10000. It was something like $600 then and I thought they were totally nuts and that was a sign of a bubble if anything. Now I wish I had bought a few coins back then
> Now I wish I had bought a few coins back then This kind of regret is exactly how you know it is a bullshit scam. No real-world investment behaves like bitcoin. It is massive, souped up penny stock designed to suck in libertarians and tech nerds. Plus, who the fuck wants to adopt a "currency" where only the early investors get to be rich? Like, a vast majority of the BTC wealth is in a tiny, tiny fraction of people…
Isn't that also true of fiat currencies though? Most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, and passed down through families as inheritance over centuries.