Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin will rise again. Bitcoin removes the need to trust a bookie/agent to move money offshore. Whenever flow of money is possible between a safe haven and a corrupt/socialist big country with high tax rate/more population burden. Money flows to the safe heaven. Bitcoin is one such way to move money from african nations/india/china to safe haven like Switzerland, Singapore, UK etc... I am talking about illict gains…
The religiosity of this post is fitting.
As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
231–240 of 327 posts
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course if you are filthy stinking rich, it's because you participated in a distributed scam in order to defraud money from those "bandwagon shirt-losers."
You mean, like pension funds trading the stock market?
The stock market is people trading ownership stakes in corporations with actual value under a regulatory regime that implements proper safeguards.
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure OTC services exist (I believe Coinbase has one) but I think the whales spending $10m on BTC might have an inkling about buy low and sell high – aka they are decidedly not buying during the period between August 2017 and today, which is exactly the period they would need to be buying at scale for all these startups to unload their disintegrating assets.
You are very wrong, OTC markets are very liquid right now. Also $10 million in BTC isn't very much, you can trade this on the public markets without slipping very much if you really want to.
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much longer are you personally willing to wait for blockchain tech to succeed before you would give up on it?
Tim Berners-Lee created the first hypertext database called Enquire that was similar to a wiki in 1980. How many years did it take before e-commerce on the web was successful?
The browser first became accessible to the general public in August 1991, and the graphic browser in September 1993. Amazon was founded in mid 1994 and had a revenue generating website delivering books from a million product catalogue the following year.
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
As others have pointed out, the difficulty adjusts both up and down depending on the total work being done by the network, so no death cycle is possible. Additionally, even when there are rapid drops in value (and thus mining), people still want to transact Bitcoin, so transaction fees go up and become a significant percentage of the overall value of a new block, thus compensating miners for the reduced value of the…
>As others have pointed out, the difficulty adjusts both up and down depending on the total work being done by the network, so no death cycle is possible. It's true that the difficulty adjusts both up and down, however it does so over 2016 block intervals. If a sufficiently fast and large drop in value/hashrate occurs, the chain could well 'death spiral'. The drop simply has to occur within the adjustment interval (2…
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that the biggest issue is frankly bullshit. Bullshit in the sense of complete lack of sensitivity to the truth so long as it leads to the outcome they want. Technology isn't at fault here but bullshit is on so many levels it isn't funny. The stupid internet rumors and social media manipulation? Bullshit because they want to influence people - they don't care if it is true or not. Company valuations? They don'…
We're going to see a lot of bullshit regulation on the internet and a lot of opportunists taking advantage of the current chaos to push their own agenda. Unfortunately we handed them the weapons they need to push these arguments by building toxic (or at least very naive) platforms like Facebook and Bitcoin. It's a shame really but the tech community has itself to blame for a lot of this. The power struggles that have…
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any large miner will be profitable mining long before they have more dormant hashing power to 51% bitcoin.
Can you explain why this is the case, especially when the value of BTC is declining? The capital costs (ASICs and the power hookups) are sunk costs, and if it stops being profitable to opwerate all the ASICs honestly, or even to operate any of them if you don't have the lowest cost per hash on the network, then it may be quite valuable to attack the network and barely valuable at all to continue mining normally.
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
What investment scam can you not say this about? People in boiler room operations pumping up bogus pharmaceuticals --- for example --- aren't themselves drug researchers and can, of course, tell themselves that they worked not on a scam, but on a product that didn't in the end worked out and simply turned out to be a bad investment.
wolco's point, I think, is that BTC "was supposed" to be a payment mechanism, not a store of value. Those who used it "as directed" ended up no worse for it, while those who "invested" lost their money, but "it's their fault". Please note the ample use of quotes on my part.
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're going to see a lot of bullshit regulation on the internet and a lot of opportunists taking advantage of the current chaos to push their own agenda. Unfortunately we handed them the weapons they need to push these arguments by building toxic (or at least very naive) platforms like Facebook and Bitcoin. It's a shame really but the tech community has itself to blame for a lot of this. The power struggles that have…
In the spirit of this thread, putting "toxic" or "hate" in front of things you don't like IS bullshit.
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that even if the difficulty adjusts, there will be dormant ASICs waiting to be used. If the price lowers enough and enough ASICs are out on the bench, it’ll at one point becoming economically beneficial to turn them all on and attack the network rather than having them collect dust and depreciate.
People vastly overestimate the profitability of attacking a crypto network. There are tons and tons of much smaller coins, that can be attacked for very cheap, and yet attacks are still very rare. IMO, this is because double spends just aren't a very good idea. If you tried to steal money from an exchange, everyone would know it was you doing the attack, and then they wouldn't accept your money in the future, or mayb…
If you try raiding a market the trade will dry up as traders won't want to come where they may be attacked and trading with people who attack traders is bad for business given the precedents it establish for property rights. Essentially even if you could seize it all it would be worth a fraction of the value because nobody wants to give their goods/money to 'dicks who steal stuff from traders' for the same reason you don't go to barbecues with cannibals. This is one way that markets and trade help promote peace - war becomes a losing move and ones who anger others less are better resourced
If they want to take everything by force you need to seize the goods and means of production themselves - which also highlights why communist countries have had terrible economies - in addition to all of the economic fallacies. Expropriation scares people off.
Come to think of it this is something that has bitten Haiti with its history and highlights the amorality of the effect. Slaves suffered under conditions so brutal that the slave population was sustained through importation instead of reproduction, greed and economic forces caused slaves to vastly outnumber the masters, and machetes were indispensable tools for sugar plantations. While their grievance was justified they were pretty much embargoed pariahs as a result.
The point being that these phenomenon aren't moral or immoral in themselves and are something that should be kept in mind by all actors.