61–70 of 104 posts
Everyone keeping their bitcoins in exchanges/(think banks, or broker accounts) instead of their own wallets is completely subverting the point of the idea of bitcoin. BTC has some great unique properties as a p2p cryptocurrency - which goes out the window when everything sits in a few exchanges rather than a bunch of wallets.
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They've been around for a few months and were one of the higher volume exchanges. They were doing ~800 BTC in trades/day for the month prior to this, so ~$11k/day with their commission of .006*2 (I think it was .006, and on both sides) they were pulling in ~$130/day.
Everything (transactions, withdrawals, deposits) was free of charge. Only way of profiting legally from the exchange was interest on the capital deposited by users on exchange owners bank account.
You might, extremely conservatively, sell BTC to people in exchange for a promise of a greater amount of future BTC (i.e., you might lend BTC out). Step 1 in that scheme: find anyone who will borrow BTC who isn't either a lunatic (and therefore unlikely to be able to repay the loan) or a thief. After subtracting lunatics and thieves, you're left with people who will take some BTC, sell it for EUR, attempt to make money, and then at a future date buy BTC for with any EUR they've made. I.e., with people who will need to pray almost as hard and as long and with as much chicken blood and magic circles as an exchange that took your suggestion to get interest from a bank. Your borrowers won't have to fear a sudden demand for the money, but they'll still have to fear the BTC:EUR exchange rate.
Meanwhile, approximately 100% of BTC holders are speculating in the currency.
If this kind of thing keeps happening, isn't Bitcoin inherently deflationary? With gold, for example, only a small proportion is ever permanently "lost"; even shipwrecks can be recovered in the future. And of course more gold is always being dug up. But if bitcoins from a fixed set are slowly being lost in various ways, irreparably shrinking the money supply, it seems like it'd have trouble being a viable long-term c…
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I disagree. Regulation has given people a false sense of security, leading to them trusting these unknown and untested entities. Instead of regulation what they need is more transparency. Tell your customers who you are, how you are building your service, what you will do in the case of a disaster. In this particular case you have someone who is playing with the technology without having even a basic understanding of…
What's to prevent a firm from lying about who they are and what they are doing? Without regulations (and accompanying penalties for breaking the rules), it's the wild West. It sounds good on a libertarian check list, but in practice the people who can least afford it get absolutely destroyed.
As for the people who 'can least afford it', well they need to learn how to be paranoid, the sooner the better.
Reputation is, to me, the best way to ensure trust. Build a public reputation through transparency and actions. Of course this takes time, but in the end is better than than an external entity imposing regulations.
And nothing of value was lost.
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You can't. Instance types are fixed. He was likely using an EBS- root configured AMI, where the mount point for EBS is /. These are EBS-backed, but since the EBS block is automatically created when you spool up the instance; it is also automatically deleted when you terminate the instance, unless you specify otherwise.
This is not actually true. If you Stop an EBS-root EC2 instance, the EBS Volume can be safely detached and moved along to other instances, or you can restart the instance and your data will be ok. Additionally, There's no excuse for not snapshotting your EBS volumes of any sort, and these snapshots persist beyond the lifetime of the volume. I find it just a little sad that relatively few (less than all) EBS customers…
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I can sell my BitCoins immediately for about $250 (what I originally put in). How can you sit and say it has "no value"?
Theoretically you can sell them, but what if nobody's buying?
Seriously, was that your best argument?
Supply and demand. Right now there is a demand for BTC which means people can supply them for a cost.