711–720 of 747 posts
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That doesn't stop them from shutting things down. The result is the same: You no longer have it. An offline wallet would help, if you can avoid jail.
So you're basically saying that it works with an offline wallet? Wasn't that the original point?
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> It effectively establishes a billion dollar bounty for any party who can rewrite enough blocks to erase it. I don't really agree with that statement. Yes, someone could mount a 51% attack to rewrite that block. However, it would be pretty straightforward to see what was happening (and which nodes were the malicious actors). If that did happen, the possible outcomes would be: 1. The value of bitcoin would fall to ba…
> 1. The value of bitcoin would fall to basically 0. The reason bitcoin has any value at all really has to do with trust - belief that the protocol is secure and can't be broken. In this case, an easily detectable spending "override" would cause faith in the protocol to evaporate. That seems a little out there. (1) There is something like 1 person who uses bitcoin to move billions of dollars around. The small-time us…
Yes, but why bitcoin then?
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You assume the value of bitcoin is somewhat logical, the Etc 51% attack proves otherwise; in the short term holders would rather sustain the delusion.
This is an important perspective. Many BTC investors are unsophisticated retail investors, and are often "true believer" and magical thinking types. They're this decade's version of gold bugs.
I note that my emails from seekingalpha recently have ads saying "Vote in 2020! Free Gold Victory Coin For Supporters - Claim Yours Now".
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Yes, that's what the “AS” stands for.
To be a bit more specific, the ASIC is a computation built in hardware. It can do that computation and that computation alone. The algorithm in Bitcoin does absolutely nothing useful -- you are just hashing a random number and seeing if the result is below a certain value. Since you can't change the computation on the ASIC, it's absolutely useless for anything except mining bitcoins.
From the top twitter comment: > 0.06BTC in fees? Why so expensive? Just gotta say, its pretty amazing we live in a world where 1 billion dollars can get transferred pseudo-anonymously in a reasonable time frame, only costing the transfer party $600. As a really stupid, non-real-world comparison, Western Union has a transfer limit of $2500 per transaction, and a $20 fee per transaction. If you were to initiate a $1,00…
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Are you in the US? While I've never personally done Norbert's Gambit my understanding is that it's extremely popular for Canadian investors to do if they want to get USD. Might not be vice-versa. The most common use case I'm familiar with is within RRSPs, as there is sometimes a tax advantage to using US-listed ETFs within them. Most brokerages charge 1.5-2% to do currency conversion so it would be a lot better deal…
That's weird? Why is paying the ETF spread twice cheaper than paying the CAD/USD spread once?
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>Right now you own nothing but some promise in some database controlled by bunch of potentially corrupt individuals governed by potentially repressive institutions. Are you describing Bitcoin or fiat currency?
you don’t understand how bitcoin works if you have to ask this question.
[1]https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066
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No human being would ever transfer 1B through 'Western Union'. I am sorry, but that's not a legit comparison.
As a really stupid, non-real-world comparison
So, people are continuing the theme of redundant comments initiated by the original.
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Yes but the key difference is with cryptocurrency the person that owns the wallet still has to sign the transaction, there is no other way. It's a push model instead of pull. Compare this to traditional banking where a 3rd party (the bank) can aquiesce to a government request without your knowledge or approval.
I feel confident that any major state actor could completely disrupt the bitcoin market. In traditional banking the government wants to maintain the value of its fiat currency. But the government doesn't care one iota about the value of Bitcoin except potentially for its own nefarious purposes.