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Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

bloomberg.com

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Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#111

Post by kodah »

kemonocode wrote: post #101

I won't say much about the article as it's a topic that has been discussed plenty of times before (The merits and faults of Bitcoin) with often inflammatory results, but I will definitively say it's pretty easy and rather intellectually dishonest to attack it only whenever there's a dramatic price swing. Where were all these articles during all those price lull periods? Also, if we're pointing fingers, the influence…

> Where were all these articles during all those price lull periods?

People are motivated to talk and report based on a myriad of things, but lately this perception of "power" has been center stage. If you ask these people I imagine they would tell you that when Bitcoin hits a high it makes those people, and Bitcoin, very powerful while when it's $8 they're just nobodies wasting time in a dark room and coming up with memes like HODL.

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#112

Post by random5634 »

177tcca wrote: post #78
random5634 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hey guys, want to get coffee" - is a historically common (and yes, now bad way) of asking if a group of folks, of any gender, want to get coffee. The insistence that someone is focusing on genital's and have a pervasion when asking this really does seem like a projection on the part of the folks making that claim, and I have noticed the genitals things come up over and over now in this context - it seriously is WEIR…

Texans had "y'all" right the entire time.

Haha. Doesn't work where I am as southern accents are seen as racist in a way - and also I'm not southern so would be weird on that level - but I like it if you were in the south!

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#113

Post by betterunix2 »

tiku wrote: post #93
WJW wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets back to the "gambling vs investing" debate we had on the front page yesterday. What is the fair value of bitcoin? It will never provide dividends or other types of future cashflows, so that aspect of its fair value is zero. The remaining part is purely speculative in that it is based on what other people will pay for it. It is not at all clear to me that having more (relatively uninformed) speculators will…

One of the values of bitcoin is the price miners get for it. If they lose money on selling their newly minted bitcoins they won't sell. So it's related to power prices, the difficulty of mining a new coin.

That sounds like a restatement of the "labor theory of value" which makes no real sense, as it assumes that "someone" is always willing to buy. Why should anyone be motivated to buy Bitcoin, beyond the classic "great fool theory" trap?

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#114

Post by dmingod666 »

wayneftw wrote: post #63
dmingod666 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is a claim that an anonymous currency is owned in major part by a certain gender the burden of proof lies on the people making a claim.. I don't think anyone can actually prove these numbers.. If I say 70% of cash is held by group 'x'. prove me wrong, you can't. No one is going to be able to do that. Let me know if you have a link to MtGox sharing gender breakdown of their owners..

> I don't think anyone can actually prove these numbers.. Nobody is making a court case out of it, except for you. Everybody else is just using their common perception, that it is indeed mostly men holding bitcoins because it’s mostly men talking about it and it’s commonly known that mostly men are into computer technology. Let me know if you can’t justify a correlation between those things and I’ll help you “read th…

"Men own most bitcoins"

"Mostly men are into computer technology."

Where exactly in the bitcoin purchase or process the gender of a person relevant or disclosed? Why do people try to drag gender into things where it has zero relevance.

I'm not trying to be a lawyer, the point is, that this argument has as much logic as "Aquarians are better swimmers." You can't prove or disprove it.. either way, it's irrelevant..

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#115

Post by seibelj »

yawnr wrote: post #81
gruez wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you're a business, right? Does offering to buy 500 euros off your friend because he have some left over from his european vacation make you a MSB?

Your friend would be the money transmitter in this case and at that scale no one would care, but if he did it with 1000 “friends” then, well yeah. People have gotten arrested and charged for operating on localbitcoins without proper licensing.

There is a difference from selling a few cars to strangers, and setting up a car-selling business which would then be subject to a bajillion rules and regulations.

The same for selling bitcoins. You can do it a few times but if you make it a business you become a MSB.

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#116

Post by moistly »

random5634 wrote: post #66
dmingod666 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are repeating my point.. My point was, why do you want to attribute gender to things where it isn't directly relevant.. How does the author know the gender breakdown of a currency where we can't even figure out who the person behind the bitcoin address is...

"Hey guys, want to get coffee" - is a historically common (and yes, now bad way) of asking if a group of folks, of any gender, want to get coffee. The insistence that someone is focusing on genital's and have a pervasion when asking this really does seem like a projection on the part of the folks making that claim, and I have noticed the genitals things come up over and over now in this context - it seriously is WEIR…

Are you telling us that you’ve never heard a woman say to her group of female friends “Hey guys, wanna xyz?”

It’s 2021. “Guys” has been gender neutral since basically forever and a day. It was so in my schools in the 70s/80s, and by my mother’s recollection, the same back in her school days.

And it pretty much has to be so: we lack a good alternative second person plural.

Note though that “guy” (singular) is gendered.

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#117

Post by betterunix2 »

hertzrat wrote: post #110
betterunix2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's crazy about that? There are strong technical arguments against Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is an environmental disaster that uses as much energy as a large country to process a tiny number of transactions. The security of Bitcoin is backwards, requiring honest parties to do more work than attackers. Ultimately Bitcoin was not even designed to solve any specific technical problems, just a vagu…

And with the main goal being decentralization, almost the entire blockchain is controlled by a few groups of miners and hoarders. It’s as or more centralized than ordinary currency

Except that "decentralization" is not a specific goal; it is vague and open-ended. Bitcoin has always relied on central authorities of some sort -- for a long time the peer-to-peer bootstrapping strategy was highly centralized (in an IRC channel), and everyone takes for granted the role of IANA and RIRs in making all Internet applications possible. So why should we complain about miners, hoarders, and exchanges? When you never specifically define your goals, it is easy to ignore inconvenient "problems."

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#118

Post by howdydoo »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #109
ur-whale wrote: post #16

Any article that uses the sentence "mostly men" in the first paragraph is highly likely not worth reading.

"This type of cancer affects mostly men." "Women make the majority of the school's Computer Science enrollment which used to be mostly men."

That must mean cancer is sexist. No wonder people hate it so much.

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#119

Post by CyberDildonics »

tromp wrote: post #45
barbegal wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I remember when you could send Bitcoins and your transaction was practically guaranteed to get into the next block. I had fun solving puzzles created using Bitcoin scripts. If you could solve the puzzle you could win some Bitcoins. Transaction fees were so low as to be irrelevant and you could send small tips to anyone you wanted, buy beers, gift it to strangers to try out... But even then you could see that Bitc…

Running a fully verifying node doesn't require that much space, since you can prune away older blocks once verified (if you're fine with not being able to seed other nodes). It does take a fair amount of time to download so many GB of history.

This is not true in any sense. After 11 years of use, a $10 vps can download the entire chain in under an hour and a half. A fast cable modem connection can do it in under three hours.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is 231 GB, the bitcoin chain is 381 GB.

Call of Duty + Red Dead Redemption 2 = bitcoin's entire chain.

This is about $6 USD of hard drive space. The throughput of bitcoin is about 1.5 -kilobytes- per second. At that speed reddit.com would take 36 minutes to load.

Re: Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

#120

Post by glitchc »

Fiat money works because government has a strong say in its creation and valuation, and govt. is elected by the people. Lobbying and other private interests aside, by and large, the system is still beholden to the opinions of the citizenry.

Decentralized finance, while originally designed to give more power directly to the people (Nakamoto’s “one CPU one vote”), is now clearly shown to be beholden to an oligopoly of private interests. It’s important to point out the reality behind the fallacious narrative of “the people are in control,” so that people wake up and realize that DeFi without govt. intervention is a bad thing.

An individual has zero say in Bitcoin prices. At least with fiat currency, if they don’t like what’s happening, they can change the govt. to one that is more aligned with their collective fiscal view.

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