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Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

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Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#321

Post by alwillis »

root_axis wrote: post #134
jacquesm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used it seriously. Paying people in countries without a functional banking system is a real problem and bitcoin nicely helped with that. I also collected some donations for reocities.com which helped to keep it alive. I never bought any, just mined a bit and I never sold any either.

> Paying people in countries without a functional banking system is a real problem and bitcoin nicely helped with that Bitcoin isn't a solution to this problem because regions afflicted with non-functional banking systems have very little options for converting or spending bitcoin.

Except that bitcoin can be converted to any fiat currency. The people with dysfunctional banking systems can trade bitcoin for fiat in a peer-to-peer manor. Somebody up the chain can trade bitcoin for USD or any other fiat currency.

1,000 sats is worth about 10 cents USD but $14 Jamaican dollars.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#322

Post by alwillis »

kozak wrote: post #39
vbezhenar wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With current Bitcoin volatility it's crazy to store money with it. I really love tech which allows me to remember passphrase and having all money locked inside my brain, so I would certainly use it if it weren't so volatile.

Which is fine until you want someone to be able to inherit your money.

That’s already covered: https://keys.casa/bitcoin-inheritance-plan/

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#323

Post by alwillis »

wgerard wrote: post #81
wpietri wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking you will know the day and hour of your death is extremely bad estate planning. Any wealth is potentially inheritable, because you can die at any time. (And yes, that is a shortcoming of cash. Which is why we've invented other ways to store value, and approximately nobody stores their money in random holes on other people's property.)

Uh I mean, not that I'm a cryptocurrency enthusiast by any means, but wouldn't prudent estate planning include a prepared will or some sort of next-of-kin document that includes a mechanism for access to your accounts/passwords/passphrases?

There’a an app for that: https://keys.casa/bitcoin-inheritance-plan/

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#324

Post by alwillis »

arcticbull wrote: post #253
repomies691 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead, all effort is going into a building a flawed second layer that is theoretically unsound and a usability nightmare. I don't know much about LN and actually I'm quite sceptical about it. However I have tried it now couple of times with different wallets and it seems to work very fluently from user perspective. And saying this as a very old bitcoin user, so I'm used to sending bitcoin payments a lot, LN payme…

LN requires an on-chain transaction to open a channel and another to close a channel which means it'll take 70 years to open a channel for everyone on earth and then close it once, assuming the blockchain does nothing else. If an intermediate node loses power all your channel money is locked for over 48 hours. It's also not even Bitcoin and could work just as well with any other cryptocurrency or probably even dollar…

There are over 10,000 LN nodes right now, with a capacity of nearly $8 million and growing quickly. The site is called “1ML” because the goal is to get to 1 millions LN nodes: https://1ml.com

You have nodes running on smartphones now; as soon as you launch a LN app, the channel is opened. There are billions of smartphones out there, so the 70 years you quoted is not a thing.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#325

Post by blotter_paper »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #299
blotter_paper wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's properties are more in line with a store of value, especially the deflationary aspect, but the line between a store of value and a currency is blurry. Gold also has more properties of a store of value than a currency, and it's used more as a store of value globally, yet some parts of North Africa and the Middle East are using the gold dinar as a currency. It can be both.

not in a modern tax regime, not really. If it's a store of value, like say bonds, then it's property. You have to report gold transactions, too, after all.

If you wanted to know how it's taxed, you could've asked that directly. I didn't see anything in your question about how it was taxed. Short answer specific to the US (IANAL): capital gains on every transaction, counting transactions between different cryptocurrencies as if you'd sold your original currency for USD and then bought the other cryptocurrency using USD. These are just arbitrary laws though, they have nothing to do with the actual properties of a given cryptocurrency.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#326

Post by spurdoman77 »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #303
panarky wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between Tether and Madoff is that people have been loudly yelling "scam", in public, for years about Tether. When Madoff collapsed, his investors were shocked. If Tether collapses, precisely zero people will be surprised. When it's common knowledge that it's a scam, is it still a scam?

Probably we can think of Tether as a type of lottery

If the dollar peg has staid for years, how risky lottery it is to do short term value transfers with it? It is obvious that it shouldnt be used for long term value storage. However since it has been called out as a ponzi scheme for years and still maintains the peg, these articles start to be more like advertisements for it.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#327

Post by perl4ever »

ur-whale wrote: post #287
Animats wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tether is starting to look like a Madoff-scale Ponzi scam. What maintains the $1 price of Tether is a continual net inflow of cash. Tether is known not to be backed with sufficient real assets.[1] If there's a period of net outflow from Tether, the whole house of cards comes crashing down. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tether-reverses-claim-of-1...

> Tether is known not to be backed with sufficient real assets. You just gave a definition of fractional reserve banking.

illiquid != insolvent.

If I have a house, I can't turn it into cash immediately. I may have a fraction of my net worth in cash. That's not the same thing as only having the small amount of cash and nothing else.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#328

Post by perl4ever »

alwillis wrote: post #313
mamon wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditional banking serves pretty much everyone on earth, without running into performance issues, so if Bitcoin is going to replace those banks then yes, it must do the same. And it was Bitcoin fanboys who declared that Bitcoin is here to replace fiat money, so you set that goalpost yourself.

No. Traditional banking doesn’t even serve everyone in the United States, with 55 million people unbanked or underbanked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbanked

Not having a bank account doesn't mean that the financial system isn't being used. If I get a paycheck and take it to a check cashing place, I'm still relying on the financial infrastructure and the banks and crypto isn't a viable alternative.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#329

Post by briatx »

lawn wrote: post #279
briatx wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, instead Bitcoin forks: https://www.forks.net/list/Bitcoin/

Which doesn't in any way alter the supply of Bitcoin. It's like saying I would dilute the value of the US dollar by printing billions of my own "fork dollar".

Each time it forks it creates the same supply of bitcoins virtually indistinguishable by anything other than name and mining nodes.

Sure, the limit of Bitcoin Core is still set at 21M, but that limit is quite arbitrary and in time maybe more malleable than people currently believe.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#330

Post by vkhorikov »

Chlorus wrote: post #273
askmike wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but nobody was saying "the internet is a bust" Many people were saying this, Paul Krugman (one of the leading economists) went as far as comparing the internet to the fax machine: "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most peopl…

> Many people were saying this, Paul Krugman (one of the leading economists) went as far as comparing the internet to the fax machine: And he caught a bunch of shit for it, even at the time. You keep trying to conflate critics of Bitcoin, many of whom have technical & finance backgrounds, with the largely non-technical crowd that didn't understand the web back in the 90s. > I'm too young to live through it, but lucki…

> You keep trying to conflate critics of Bitcoin, many of whom have technical & finance backgrounds, with the largely non-technical crowd that didn't understand the web back in the 90s.

People today are as illiterate about economics as they were about the Internet back in the 90s. Just look around and see how many people know what Austrian econ is.

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