Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 747 posts

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#291

Post by ForHackernews »

Merrill wrote: post #174
hurrdurr2 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is just me, but I don't actually consider having a couple million dollars as "rich", I know a couple folks worth hundreds of millions, and the way they behave are certainly different.

A couple million dollars is a retirement nest egg. You can stop working, stretch it carefully until you die, and leave a small sum to your heirs. To be very rich requires upwards of $100 million. Then you can access high paying investments which will generate enough income to afford a couple houses, hire help, buy a boat and a plane, and have enough left over after taxes to increase your assets to offset inflation. A…

Yes, yes, the wealth curve is essentially a vertical line at the right-hand edge. Don't pity the poor decimillionaires.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#292

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

the_gastropod wrote: post #196
mikeryan wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Penny Pinching does not make people rich and is not "often" why they're rich. This is a horrible misconception.

It sounds like you may hold the misconception. Only ~12% of millionaires inherited their wealth. The remainder are "self-made", in that they lived below their means, and saved.

There's a difference between spending below one's means and penny-pinching. Penny-pinching is refusing to tip the waiter, it just makes you an asshole.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#293

Post by mirimir »

coldtea wrote: post #245
hnal943 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rich people would consider being soft and cynical as virtuous? There's no way to read the quote in a positive manner.

Of course there is: soft => more refined and subtle, cynical => more wise to the world.

I read "soft" as more mellow and chilled out, and less stressed about (what seems) trivial stuff. In a way, even kinder. And from what I've read by rich people (such as Diane Disney Miller) cynical is a lot about the difficulty of establishing genuine relationships.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#294

Post by tromp »

skizm wrote: post #163
shorts_theory wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the part which confuses me about Bitcoin the most. It's meant to be anonymous, yet with some diligent data mining, it can become pretty clear who's who from their spending patterns by observing the ledger. How is that remotely anonymous?

The ledger does not record in person transactions. Theoretically, I can hand you a USB stick containing BTC and no one would know until it is sent to another wallet.

That is not a secure method of transfer. Giving someone a copy of your private keys just makes you joint owners, where either one can spend the money.

The recipient would be wise to immediately spend the coins to an address only they know, unless they have absolute trust in the giver.

As they say: not your keys, not your bitcoin...

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#295

Post by SolaceQuantum »

bluetomcat wrote: post #228
diminoten wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the quote is to demonstrate that using poor-folk calculations to try and figure out what things cost for rich folk is pointless, and has been for the past ~100 years.

Poor people measure their stuff by its momentary monetary value, rich people measure their assets by their long-term projected intrinsic value. Rich people look for good value, not a good price. The rich man’s mentality can also work for middle class people if every purchase they make is a long-term well-informed decision, rather than flying with the pop culture of what everyone else is currently buying, wearing or v…

Note that this is constrained by IRL effects that middle-class people experience that rich people are much less vulnerable to.

With enough money, you can afford to wait for a good deal because you don't need the money right now to live. When you're wealthy, you can brave health issues, accidents, sudden crossings with the law, etc. without ever truly touching the money-in-wait for a good deal. When you're middle-class you definitely don't have as much cushion.

This is similar to the logic of "the best time to buy is a recession", except its difficult to buy during a recession purely because it's more likely that a middle class person's cushion is gone due to economic conditions and thus has no money to buy good deals.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#296

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

algorias wrote: post #252
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fidelity found that only 12 percent of millionaires inherited at least 10 percent of their net worth-- 88% are self-made. https://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/on-retirement/articles/...

That statistic sounds highly suspect: if I inherited $5M 30 years ago and am now wort $50M, do I count as "not having inherited my wealth"?

They say the first million is the hardest, so I imagine getting that for free makes the rest of it much easier if nothing else.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#297

Post by xvilka »

AdamGibbins wrote: post #242
danielmg wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bacs limit is £20 million per item but is 3 day clearing. The £250k limit is FPS (instant clearing) I believe, or your bank.

You're correct, sorry. AIUI there's a higher limit for corps/govs too. Banks often have lower limits than these but I've no doubt they'll lift them if there's need. For those not familiar, FPS offers 2h (normally instant) transaction speed.

Having bank transfers in 2019 so slow is outrageous. It's the time when trading bots produce millions in a split second. But bank transactions require hours and days. And they dare to call them fast!

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#298

Post by bluntfang »

mlindner wrote: post #90
compiler-guy wrote: post #81

As far as the fees being so cheap, and every one else guessing about how expensive it would be to do it in a normal banking situation, F. Scott Fitzgerald is relevant: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is…

Important qualifier on that that's missed for most "the very rich". The "rich" are often quite penny pinchers. My grandfather is "rich" (several millions, and in a very cheap place to live in the midwest) but he lived his entire life being extremely strict on spending and controlled personal finances very carefully. He still complains when there's large money to be spent on something that should be cheap.

While I don't disagree that your grandfather was wealthy enough to not worry about things, "several millions" isn't in the same ballpark as the people we're talking about in this thread.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#299

Post by rtkwe »

legohead wrote: post #264

Well now that I have a place to ask this question... Could someone explain to me about 51% attacks and if bitcoin is vulnerable to one? Hypothetically, a government decides to put forward enough resources to perform a 51% attack on bitcoin. Is that possible? If not, why? And is this something to actually worry about, or could something be done to combat it?

In a degenerate case with enough power a single entity could mine several blocks faster than the main chain can mine one. In that environment they would be able to reverse any given transaction essentially by making a transaction waiting for that to get several confirmations (blocks created after that transaction is included) and waiting for whatever real world purchase went through then releasing the other blocks they had mined without that transaction included. The client is programmed to chose the longest chain available so the old public chain is abandoned in favor of the attackers new chain which doesn't include the initial spend. Now according to the blockchain Alice never sent Bob the BTC so the money is back in Alice's address and Bob is out whatever real world or off chain changes were made.

There's two ways to do this either tactically to reverse your own transactions or randomly to essentially screw over everyone and sow FUD in the reliability of BTC transactions.

One good note is as far as I know the Lightning network shouldn't really be vulnerable to this (except maybe for channel opening?) because either party can submit the most recent transaction and have it reflect on the BTC chain.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#300

Post by stale2002 »

trollied wrote: post #42

It’d be very interesting if this was part of the court ruling against Craig Wright: https://cointelegraph.com/news/craig-wright-challenges-court...

Craig himself has stated, under oath, that he does not have access to the keys that control the original Bitcoin that Satoshi mined.

He himself, under oath, has admitted that he does not have access to those keys.

Post reply on HN