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The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

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Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#141

Post by tialaramex »

pjc50 wrote: post #77
tialaramex wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you that has a transaction tax on account transfers? Not the US certainly, and not anywhere in the EU.

There's a proposal (not implemented yet) for a 0.1% "Tobin tax" in the EU: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-deepe...

Sure, which is why I said on account transfers. A Tobin tax wouldn't impact those, the one the EU wanted was for financial instruments. e.g. if you buy and sell a new financial product on average fifty times per day to take advantage of some weird quirk - because you can make 0.001% per trade this way, the Tobin tax makes that money losing and you stop doing it.

Is that a good idea? I'm not sure, and apparently enough EU states weren't sure that this never got past Council.

But even if it's a great idea and gets implemented it doesn't care about moving money from one account to another itself which is all we're talking about here.

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#142

Post by gonehome »

cletus wrote: post #52
grubles wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the point is with Bitcoin you don't have to trust RBC to not freeze and/or abscond with your $1B.

Nor can you reverse a transaction when someone steals your Bitcoins. The traditional financial system is far more suitable to people’s needs than Bitcoin is.

The most interesting bitcoin story I read somewhere was about a Ukrainian living in the Russian controlled portion of the country getting out with his wealth intact.

The border was controlled by corrupt Russian guards that would steal things of value. You could pass the border occasionally to visit family on the other side, but it was risky to take anything.

He put all his wealth into bitcoin, memorized his wallet seed words like his life depended on it, crossed the border with nothing, and then regenerated his wallet on the other side.

I thought that was pretty cool.

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#143

Post by andrewzah »

gruez wrote: post #119
erfgh wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do have to trust yourself to have 100% flawless security because one slip and you lose that $1B to a Chinese hacker with no hope of ever getting it back.

It's not limited to cryptocurrency. eg. companies losing millions from phishing https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/27/phishing-email-scam-stole-10...

The point is that there are options available to you when you use i.e. a credit card to spend money, versus bitcoin. With btc you will never, ever have a chance of getting it back once it's spent or if someone takes control of your wallet.

To be fair, debit cards and wire transfers have a similar issue. However there are still ways to get your money back in some situations.

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#144

Post by dmix »

ipython wrote: post #131
whb07 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because the poor people can't move $10 around without paying $3 for it. Have you ever tried moving small amounts of money in poor countries ?

That’s my point, however you said it clearer than I did. I don’t see how bitcoin making it easy for billionaires to move money equates to poor people being able to use it to move $10.

Bitcoin makes it easy for people with a billion dollars in bitcoin to move it around (or any value).

There’s no way it’s then suddenly a cost effective way for normal currency billionaires to move money around. Converting that amount to BTC would require serious fees and resources.

So this point is largely moot to any wider discussion.

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#145

Post by joosters »

whb07 wrote: post #116
joosters wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you not heard of M-Pesa? Very popular mobile phone-based money transfer service, low fees ( far less than $3 or the 30% you claim), you can even pay companies directly with it

Yes I've heard of it. So bitcoin is this but better. I agree with you.

Faster than bitcoin, cheaper than bitcoin, easier to use than bitcoin, more reliable than bitcoin, far more widely accepted than bitcoin. Hmm...

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#146

Post by aey »

erfgh wrote: post #99
grubles wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the point is with Bitcoin you don't have to trust RBC to not freeze and/or abscond with your $1B.

You do have to trust yourself to have 100% flawless security because one slip and you lose that $1B to a Chinese hacker with no hope of ever getting it back.

Not quite. You can bribe the miners with your old private key if you act fast enough :)

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#147

Post by andrewzah »

gonehome wrote: post #142
cletus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nor can you reverse a transaction when someone steals your Bitcoins. The traditional financial system is far more suitable to people’s needs than Bitcoin is.

The most interesting bitcoin story I read somewhere was about a Ukrainian living in the Russian controlled portion of the country getting out with his wealth intact. The border was controlled by corrupt Russian guards that would steal things of value. You could pass the border occasionally to visit family on the other side, but it was risky to take anything. He put all his wealth into bitcoin, memorized his wallet se…

That's one use for btc that I hadn't thought of. Neat! However one still has to be careful to somehow fund a cold wallet without linking your ID via the transactions.

I.e. to use an exchange like binance or coinbase, I have to link my US ID. So if a government actor were after me, they could easily find out about my cold wallet by viewing my transactions, no?. I guess I could -not- divulge the seed words, but that's assuming I'm not being accosted/tortured either.

I would have to use a btc atm (none near me...), swap a visa gift card for btc (and take a ~10-20% haircut...) or find someone to trade cash for coins, which is its own issue.

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#148

Post by hocuspocus »

mindcandy wrote: post #135
ipython wrote: post #39

Unpopular opinion: why do we care so much about making it cheaper for rich people to move money around? Do we think somehow that will “trickle down” to us mere mortals and put western union and their ilk out of business?

Remittances are one of the big, obvious use cases where crypto can save poor people a ton of money. To the tune of a collective $40-50 billion a year. https://academy.binance.com/blockchain/blockchain-use-cases-...

Call me when a blockchain-backed remittance service reaches even a small fraction of the customer-base of companies like Transferwise or CurrencyFair.

If it was an efficient way to cut on fees, everyone would do it. Yet almost nobody does.

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#149

Post by lawn »

gonehome wrote: post #142
cletus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nor can you reverse a transaction when someone steals your Bitcoins. The traditional financial system is far more suitable to people’s needs than Bitcoin is.

The most interesting bitcoin story I read somewhere was about a Ukrainian living in the Russian controlled portion of the country getting out with his wealth intact. The border was controlled by corrupt Russian guards that would steal things of value. You could pass the border occasionally to visit family on the other side, but it was risky to take anything. He put all his wealth into bitcoin, memorized his wallet se…

I've read similar stories of people escaping Venezuela with their wealth.

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#150

Post by dylkil »

kchoudhu wrote: post #121

Pretty sure the fund I work for moved several billion dollars for free on Friday...and will do the same thing again this Friday, the Friday after that, and the Friday after that. Cryptocurrency's obsession with fees is baffling. Fees are not why moving money is hard.

Whats worse is Bitcoin's security depends on high fees, but you have articles like this celebrating low fees.

Satoshi intended for bitcoin to scale to hundreds of millions of transactions, all paying sub cent fees. All those fees would add up to millions of dollars per day. The fees are what secure the chain when the block reward runs out. Around 2014/2015 some devs who worked with blockstream started campaigning to keep the block size limit at 1mb. They succeeded and now bitcoin can only process an average of 350k transactions per day.

In order to provide the same financial incentive to miners when the block reward gets too small to matter, the minimum fee on the network will need to be $25 per transaction.

But ye, horray, this whale got to send big cash for a "low fee"

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