Funny that crypto is being called industry.
As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
131–140 of 327 posts
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#132Wonder how this effects Lykke.com
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. When the MPAA wanted action taken on torrented movies, they didn’t just throw their hands up in the air and go “whelp, it’s decentralized!“, they went after the authors of the protocol, the ISPs, hell even domain name registrars (that listed torrent websites). You can still torrent films, but you could get prosecuted or fined. Furthermore, some content is completely censored from torrent sites. All that t…
>You can still torrent films, but you could get prosecuted or fined. You could, but national laws still vary a lot, and in some countries, the MPAA simply has no power to do anything. Routing BT traffic through those countries with a VPN makes it pretty difficult for them to take action. >but regulators will understand how the tech works eventually... Maybe, but they have no power over laws in different countries.
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Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#134Long
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#135The most remarkable thing about BTC is diffusion of responsibility. If it was issued and marketed by a single entity the participants would be in hot water by now for violating the Securities and Exchange laws. However here we had one non-affiliated group of bigger miners issuing the coins and another group of volunteer enthusiasts hyping them up. Since the second group was not hired by the first, the first group can…
I assert that the diffusion of responsibility is a key feature of decentralized technology precisely because it renders us unable to "nip it in the bud".
And yet, should it become illegal for people to exchange fiat for crypto and for domiciled entities to own crypto all the decentralisation in the world wouldn't help.
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't bitcoin costs adjust to a shrinking miner population as well as it adjusts for a growing one? If so, the answer is never. As people give-up, the costs for the remaining ones reduce so that at some point it's lucrative again. The interesting question is at what price people will stop speculating on its price and run to an exit? I don't think anybody can answer this one.
The difficulty adjustment only occurs after a certain number of blocks are mined. If the price drops rapidly enough that most miners shut down, it might never get to the difficulty adjustment.
That would have to be a pretty spectacular decrease. The difficulty changes every 2016 blocks, which is typically 2 weeks. If 3/4 of all miners dropped out, it'd take 8 weeks instead. Once that difficulty change kicks in, it'd likely be a pretty big drop, yo-yo'ing in miners that may have been unprofitable before. Keep in mind that many miners are operating with little to no marginal costs (ie electricity costs) so there will always be someone mining even when it seem irrational.
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difficulty (amount/cost of power required) goes up over time when the price goes up because more miners join the network as it becomes more profitable, which means that on average new coins are produced more often. The network targets a certain rate of production and it does this by increasing the difficulty. If the price drops and miners leave this will happen in reverse and coins will not be produced fast enoug…
Forgive me as I don't quite grok bitcoin. Does the math to calculate a coin change based on... price? For some reason I assumed the mathematical difficulty just naturally increased as part of what in my mind is "the mathematical problem" vs. number of coins.
Not exactly, but they loosely correlate. Difficulty changes with overall hash rate. There have been times when the hash rate was increasing even as the price was going down. Miners have a different profitability calculus than investors/speculators.
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they’re dormant, by definition they’re already unprofitable to operate. If the price decreases further, only the most efficient miners will remain, not the least efficient of them.
Unprofitable to operate in friendly conditions* If you can flip a switch and 10x the hashrate of a network, all under your control, and you don’t care about killing the chain in your attack, it may be a perfect exit for you if you no longer want to play the mining game. There’s actually a mining pool doing something like this on smaller PoW bitcoins https://sharkpool.cash (not associated, just think it’s interesting)
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Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#139What puzzled me is how comes blockchain startups did not sell their crypto for fiat just after their ICOs. I recommended this to several of my blockchain customers but none of them listened. I dont know if that was motivated by greed or something else. According to Game theory there is no benefit in not selling the crypto for fiat: if you raise lets say 10million during an ico (typical amount raised 6m ago), there is…
What is even involved in finding a buyer for $10mm btc in usd and then getting that usd into a legal/compliant bank account? Sounds non-trivial. It's my understanding from some work I did for a crypto startup that there is approximately zero usd/btc liquidity, the apparent "usd liquidity" and "usd price" last year was actually dominated by tether-btc and tether-eth liquidity. There was not actually a functional usd/b…
There's off exchange buyers and sellers of crypto who deal in orders of > 1M usd.
It's fairly trivial to go from 10M BTC to 10M of a stable coin. Can't speak on how difficult it is to do 10M stable coin/btc to us bank
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assert that the diffusion of responsibility is a key feature of decentralized technology precisely because it renders us unable to "nip it in the bud".
And yet, should it become illegal for people to exchange fiat for crypto and for domiciled entities to own crypto all the decentralisation in the world wouldn't help.
I don't really see the connection.
It seems to me that such a move will make decentralized money more valuable and more likely to be used, not less.