121–130 of 278 posts
It’s kind of ironic that BTC pollutes more than any prior monetary invention while simultaneously having higher levels of internal income inequality.
“ Less than 2% of the anonymous ownership accounts that can be tracked on Bitcoin’s blockchain control 95% of the digital asset, according to researcher Flipside Crypto.” It’s kind of ironic that BTC pollutes more than any prior monetary invention while simultaneously having higher levels of internal income inequality.
If your transaction counterparty is within 1250 miles of your house it takes less energy to simply drive there in a Tesla with a brick of gold.
It’s also funny because I suspect the overwhelming majority of those accounts simply lost their keys.
am i the only one that gets a warm euphoric feeling going on the crypto subreddits on days like these and drinking their salty tears as it crashes to hell?
>crashes to hell Zoom out.
EDIT: it might be a lawyerspeak, but it is still a good advice: there's a reason why Bitcoin has been down $14k this week and that reason is the settlement with NYAG in the Tether lawsuit. Situation has changed, there's one fewer scam company there to artificially inflate Bitcoin price, so expect downward trend for at least the next few months.
"Mafia" seems a strange and prejudicial word to use here. "Less than 2% of the anonymous ownership accounts that can be tracked on Bitcoin’s blockchain control 95% of the digital asset" - at first I thought this was really astonishing. Now, I'm not so sure. My first interpretation was that 2% of bitcoiners have 95% of the bitcoin - but now I wonder how many addresses a typical person has. e.g. If I create an address…
A naive analysis would completely miss that.
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…
[edit] David Gerard comes to mind - author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain and Libra Shrugged - and HN user (dgerard I think) (https://davidgerard.co.uk/)
More recently Amy Castor, also an HN user (amycastor) (https://amycastor.com/)
And of course Bitfinex’d is back and public again on Twitter. (https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure about this, but does every person using an exchange get their own address? My impression was that they don't and that a lot of transactions are actually settled within the exchange using good ol' relational databases and not the blockchain. If that's the case, then all of these people will get lumped into just a few exchange controlled adresses, which will give an exaggerated impression of concentration.
> I'm not sure about this, but does every person using an exchange get their own address? Definitely not. Exchanges that aren't stupid keep the vast majority of their funds in cold storage, which is held in a small number of addresses. Most people store their bitcoin on exchanges, even though that's a pretty bad idea. Not your keys not your coins. The article is massively misleading. It should say "95% of bitcoin is…
That sounds dumb on their part, as that money isn't doing work that it could. Perhaps they should invest it in the meanwhile. But since it's users' money, maybe set up a provision that only a part of the funds is invested, and the rest stay put, to give them back to the users on demand. Most people don't regularly take out all their coins at once, so the exchange won't need to have them all on hand, most of the time.
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…
To change the Bitcoin price, vote with your dollars, going long or shorting. You will materially impact the order book and resulting price. Other ways exist: starting a company like the ones mentioned in the article.
In contrast, in federal elections you have a vanishingly small chance of casting a deciding vote between two participants in an actual oligopoly (more specifically, a duopoly), who are themselves primarily allied with powerful interests which include the banking sector. Does anyone really believe their reps are responsive to them on issues like monetary policy?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…