201–210 of 361 posts
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If everybody woke up at once, came to their senses, and realized bitcoin was all just a waste of time and literal energy, and turned off their machines, bitcoin would be "shut down".
Nope, because then the next day someone would start mining again in the hope that people would want BTC someday.
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$300k to $25K? That seems awfully cheap. Where did prices drop so much?
Condo towers in Miami that were being put up and finished as the crash arrived, were often entirely empty and couldn't find any buyers. You could buy cheaper units for $30k to $50k. It was common to see 50%-70% haircuts, drops from $180k to $90k etc. Over six years (2003-2009), Miami added 23,000 condo units for a city of 400k. In Dec 2008, nearly half of those remained unsold. Las Vegas saw some similar action. It s…
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Ok can you talk more about your failure case then? What are the conditions like what exactly is the end result. There are 0 exchanges?
A bug is discovered allowing fraudulent creation of bitcoins, and no easy or timely fix is possible. That or governments outlaw it entirely.
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Someone announces they have had a large quantum computer for a while and have cracked every public key on the blockchain. That'd probably do it. Quantum Jubilee, y'all. The year of decryption, all private keys revealed, all captive coins set free. It's just a matter of engineering at this point. Give it roughly 10 years.
Not only cryptography coins,even traditional banking,e-commerce,and our modern society would go down. Quantum for all.
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If all the miners go away the difficulty requirement will drop on its own to maintain the 10min block rate. No need to fork anything: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
As I commented in another thread: the difficulty adjustments happen periodically after a certain number of blocks , not after any given period of time. If the hash rate decreases, the adjustment slows down along with everything else. A 5%/day sustained drop is enough to halt transaction processing entirely. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16161326
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That was planned for. Like there's only 20million Bitcoins tops.
It has nothing to do with the issue rate of Bitcoin, frisbee-on-the-roof is potentially a real problem. Say Bitcoin crashes down to $1 tomorrow, such that it's no longer profitable to mine. A bunch of miners go dark. What happens to the block time? Now remember that difficulty readjusts every 2016 blocks. If there are now 1% as many miners, that means a 1000-minute blocktime and potentially up to 1400 days per adjust…
And I feel like people for example aren't talking about the fact that technology doesn't really go away. Like any technology we've ever invented is still used somewhere. This will very much be like bitcoin.
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Everything is based on faith to a certain extent. None of us (that I'm aware of) have crystal balls that see the exact future. Even companies that have lots of assets behind them could potentially make catastrophic fuck ups that tank their stock (i.e. BP and their Deepwater Horizon spill) in an instant.
Look at the BP chart: yes, it dipped but having a real business meant that it didn’t go anywhere near zero and came back up. Something based on faith can drop all the way to zero and stay there because e.g. everyone bailed to something else and there was no reason to come back.
"If everyone stopped using google tomorrow, their stock would go to zero. Investing in google is based entirely on faith."
Do you agree with this statement?
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> these articles always pretend a 20% selloff is the beginning of the end There are individuals in this thread claiming "there will always be buyers" and that the probability of Bitcoin becoming worthless is zero. The point of the article isn't that Bitcoin is doomed. It's that there is a substantial non-zero probability it ends up worthless. That such an elementary claim about a volatile asset is controversial almos…
Ok can you talk more about your failure case then? What are the conditions like what exactly is the end result. There are 0 exchanges?
There are so many glaring issues with BitCoin that it's insane that there are people who are dumb enough to buy it at these prices. 1) 96% of it is controlled by 4% of people. That means if it were to become a currency 96% of the wealth in the world would have to be given to 4% of people either through goods or a fiat currency. 2) It's just a matter of time before enough people lose their private keys that the total…
There are so many glaring issues with BitCoin that it's insane that there are people who are dumb enough to buy it at these prices. 1) 96% of it is controlled by 4% of people. That means if it were to become a currency 96% of the wealth in the world would have to be given to 4% of people either through goods or a fiat currency. 2) It's just a matter of time before enough people lose their private keys that the total…
> 96% of it is controlled by 4% of people Is that true? Source please
It also depends on what you mean by "controlled by". Large amounts of Bitcoin have been deposited in exchanges where the coin "owners" have no control over the coins. For example Bitfinex stores about 1% of Bitcoins in a single wallet [2]
[1] https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-19/cryptocurrency-con...
[2] https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3D2oetdNuZUqQHPJmc...