The Wealthy Are Hoarding $10B of Bitcoin in Bunkers • Hacker News Board

Re: The Wealthy Are Hoarding $10B of Bitcoin in Bunkers

#271

Post by simias » Wed, May 09, 2018, 4:18 PM UTC

smokeyj wrote: post #217

21 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least if the current "1%" hoard dollars or euros in their mattress they slowly lose their wealth thanks to inflation. Long story short, they don't.

Not only that, things you need like energy food and education aren’t included in core inflation. So what happens is, the finance people use freshly printed money to buy up the things all the poor little people need. But let’s not call it speculation. Crypto is a democratizing force in a corrupt and unaccountable world.

So your point is that the current system is broken because our currencies are not truly inflationary if you're super rich and powerful because you get to print money so we should switch to a currency that's deflationary by design so that they don't even have to bother printing money? How does that work?

>Crypto is a democratizing force in a corrupt and unaccountable world.

Assuming that cryptocurrencies are successful they might cause some turmoil in the top 1% as early adopters with thousands of BTCs become the new 1% and current rich people who missed the bus might drop among the pleb. But after this initial period what happens? People who HODLed thousands of BTC will be hugely rich and remain so, people who don't have a lot of money still have to pay for housing and food so they can't save money to bridge the gap.

And I don't really see how Bitcoin are going to help with corruption and accountability when one of its main use cases today (beyond speculation) are powering online black markets.

Re: The Wealthy Are Hoarding $10B of Bitcoin in Bunkers

#272

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, May 09, 2018, 4:19 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #256

TeMPOraL wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Exactly. That's why more and more people getting involved in scams and get-rich-schemes on a platform with superlinear and unbounded energy upkeep is something that worries me deeply. Energy and climate is something that very well may break our society.

> Energy and climate is something that very well may break our society. Unfortunately, if you run almost any process that humans are doing right now that has even 1% growth, in 1000 years, that's a factor of 21000x (.5% is 146x), and we're dead. So pretty much everything has to reach an S curve and stabilize, or we are totally F'd. Population, energy usage, land usage, food, trash, inflation, everything.

That's another reason to invest in space exploration :).

But yes, we should be minimizing wasteful growth where we can. Food will have to grow in lockstep with population, but the growth of trash is something we can reduce. And there's especially no need to add artificial high-growth energy sinks like cryptocurrencies to the mix.

Re: The Wealthy Are Hoarding $10B of Bitcoin in Bunkers

#273

Post by mywittyname » Wed, May 09, 2018, 4:20 PM UTC

smokeyj wrote: post #217

21 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least if the current "1%" hoard dollars or euros in their mattress they slowly lose their wealth thanks to inflation. Long story short, they don't.

Not only that, things you need like energy food and education aren’t included in core inflation. So what happens is, the finance people use freshly printed money to buy up the things all the poor little people need. But let’s not call it speculation. Crypto is a democratizing force in a corrupt and unaccountable world.

> Crypto is a democratizing force in a corrupt and unaccountable world.

Howso? The ultra-wealthy elites managed to seize control of crypto in like two years. They control all of the major mining ops and a huge % of the coins themselves.

Re: The Wealthy Are Hoarding $10B of Bitcoin in Bunkers

#274

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, May 09, 2018, 4:20 PM UTC

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #244

TeMPOraL wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I'd be fine with all that if not for the elephant in the room - the superlinearly growing, unbounded energy upkeep required to support cryptocurrencies. That one single reason alone outweights all the potential benefits you allude to.

This is only true for mining-heave cryptos and is already massively improved in newer projects, but yes, atm it's bad

Given that PoS is still not adopted in a meaningful way, I feel those differences are merely constant factors, they don't change the trend. But I might be wrong about that, I'm not up to date with bleeding-edge cryptocurrency developments.

Re: The Wealthy Are Hoarding $10B of Bitcoin in Bunkers

#275

Post by 21 » Wed, May 09, 2018, 4:21 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #269

21 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least if the current "1%" hoard dollars or euros in their mattress they slowly lose their wealth thanks to inflation. Long story short, they don't.

I really need to hear the long story.

There are many ways of holding currency without being affected by inflation. This is what wealth management plans do.

One simple tool used for this:

> Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (or TIPS) are the inflation-indexed bonds issued by the U.S. Treasury. The principal is adjusted to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the commonly used measure of inflation. When the CPI rises, the principal adjusts upward. If the index falls, the principal adjusts downwards.[8] The coupon rate is constant, but generates a different amount of interest when multiplied by the inflation-adjusted principal, thus protecting the holder against the official inflation rate (as asserted by the CPI)

Re: The Wealthy Are Hoarding $10B of Bitcoin in Bunkers

#276

Post by tialaramex » Wed, May 09, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #16

Clubber wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between keeping cash in a bank which is FDIC insured and putting money in investments; particularly in the US where robbery was/is called investment strategy.

Nobody is going to keep a billion dollars in a savings account, which FDIC insurance would not even come close to covering anyway.

Can you just loan your money directly to the US Government?

In the UK the "National Savings & Investment" bank is actually outright owned and operated by the British government, specifically for this purpose. Instead of raising money commercially with a debt security, and then having banks buy that take savings from their customers to afford the securities and keep a cut as profit, the NS&I gets rid of the middle man and just borrows money directly from citizens at a decent interest rate with zero risk‡.

‡ Obviously the government itself might fail, but you're exposed to that risk anyway, so it didn't add any risk to involve NS&I here.

Re: The Wealthy Are Hoarding $10B of Bitcoin in Bunkers

#277

Post by mywittyname » Wed, May 09, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #124

laglad wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your points are valid. IMO the key tradeoff b/w gold (analog) and bitcoin (digital) is extra resiliency vs usability. If there were a systemic collapse breaking governments, knocking off power and telecom networks etc, gold would be immediately most valuable. But more quickly than fiat, bitcoin would be useful. Power and telecom systems are more resilient to systemic collapse (& have more bouncebackability) than a fu…

Paper currency is often used after the government backing it collapses.

Not only that, people will use anything as currency in the absence of fiat. Cigarettes, tea bags, polished rocks, etc.

Re: The Wealthy Are Hoarding $10B of Bitcoin in Bunkers

#278

Post by baq » Wed, May 09, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

kolinko wrote: post #215

mkirklions wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are only a given number of total bitcoins in existence, which many (myself included) would argue makes it a poor currency. I have always question who says this. What makes you think deflation would be bad? My conspiracy is that governments require inflation to print themselves out of bad policy. Without government abilities to do this, the government performs poorly. Common citizens do not lose 2-4% of their…

I don't agree with people talking about a deflationary spiral (has it ever happened?), but there is another issue. In a deflationary model, old money gets more and more valuable with time. In 50 years, it's possible that one Bitcoin will be worth 10M€. What happens then when someone finds a stash of 100k BTC on their grandpa's attic? They can destabilise the whole economy. With inflationary currencies it's never an i…

> I don't agree with people talking about a deflationary spiral (has it ever happened?), but there is another issue.

these happened all the time before central banks were created; see the two-century CPI plot: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-inflation-since-1775-20...

Re: The Wealthy Are Hoarding $10B of Bitcoin in Bunkers

#279

Post by graphitezepp » Wed, May 09, 2018, 4:28 PM UTC

lolsal wrote: post #128

Kiro wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, if things really go that sideways bitcoin will be the only valuable currency in the world.

If you approach me on my farm and ask to trade BTC for pork or collard greens I will laugh in your face. Sorry.

Don't apologize the notion is deservedly laughable. BTC only has value in a technologically advanced society that you expect to continue. If you are concerned with societal collapse it is the absolute worst thing to expect to have value.

Re: The Wealthy Are Hoarding $10B of Bitcoin in Bunkers

#280

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, May 09, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #16

Clubber wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between keeping cash in a bank which is FDIC insured and putting money in investments; particularly in the US where robbery was/is called investment strategy.

Nobody is going to keep a billion dollars in a savings account, which FDIC insurance would not even come close to covering anyway.

> Nobody is going to keep a billion dollars in a savings account, which FDIC insurance would not even come close to covering anyway.

If you spread it around 4,000 banks (there are 5,593, so this technically possible), it would, since the limit is $250,000 per depositor per bank per ownership category (I'm assuming avoiding the overhead of manipulating ownership categories, which could shrink the number of banks needed further.)