How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

Post by sumedh » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 3:27 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #299

sumedh wrote: post #297

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Why would the miners mine Bitcoin in the first place if there was no incentive? Once the mining stops, they make money by transaction fees. Do you expect people to work for free?

I don't expect people in multi level marketing aka pyramid scheme to work for free either. But, their are plenty of incentive structures with good and bad rewards. One option for a hypothetical digital currency is to stagger payments so a miner gets say 1/2 of their reward in 10 years. I am only saying the current structure ends up as a scam, not that the eventual successful currency can't solve these problems.

Post by wellboy » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 4:11 PM UTC

once_inc wrote: post #242

jhall1468 wrote: post #196

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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.

Post by Fnoord » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 5:59 PM UTC

chrisbennet wrote: post #296

Fnoord wrote: post #285

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Whether you or I find it impressive or not is a personal value you or I have. For me, it depends on the sport. Some sports are simply elitist. Cricket is an example, tennis is another, hockey yet another. There's many more. You could even see the very notion of sport is elitist. Poor people need to focus on the bacon alone. Furthermore, when I learn about the circumstances of certain sports(wo)men I get touched. Lanc…

Accomplishing difficult things from a disadvantaged position is more impressive than those accomplished by someone without those disadvantages, but it doesn't mean the latter accomplishments are not impressive. The world is full of people who want to tear down other peoples accomplishments - "Accomplishment X isn't that impressive because of starving people in country Y." Using that standard, nothing done by anyone w…

Post by chrisbennet » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 10:12 PM UTC

Fnoord wrote: post #305

chrisbennet wrote: post #296

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Accomplishing difficult things from a disadvantaged position is more impressive than those accomplished by someone without those disadvantages, but it doesn't mean the latter accomplishments are not impressive. The world is full of people who want to tear down other peoples accomplishments - "Accomplishment X isn't that impressive because of starving people in country Y." Using that standard, nothing done by anyone w…

> Accomplishing difficult things from a disadvantaged position is more impressive than those accomplished by someone without those disadvantages, but it doesn't mean the latter accomplishments are not impressive. It means it gets lost like tears in the rain. At one point, one gets bored by the accomplishments and its about outliers within the winners. That's how an overstimulation of signal tends to work out. > The w…

Post by Fnoord » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 2:41 PM UTC

edanm wrote: post #308

Fnoord wrote: post #305

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> Accomplishing difficult things from a disadvantaged position is more impressive than those accomplished by someone without those disadvantages, but it doesn't mean the latter accomplishments are not impressive. It means it gets lost like tears in the rain. At one point, one gets bored by the accomplishments and its about outliers within the winners. That's how an overstimulation of signal tends to work out. > The w…

"I'm arguing these [of the Winklevoss] are no accomplishments; they're expected. If something's expected of you, how is it an accomplishment if you reach that goal? You'd only be disappointed when you wouldn't reach the goal." I think you're just mistaken about the percentage of rich people who achieve something like participating in the Olympics. I don't think it's expected in the way you seem to think it is.