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Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

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Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#331

Post by jessaustin »

hnbad wrote: post #200
anonporridge wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> magical pseudo-currency that solves all problems and unexplainably makes everyone richer and richer That's not what's exciting about bitcoin. What's exciting is that it is the first digital, global money that isn't protected by the proof of violence of the state. The US dollar is the world reserve currency because the United States is the best in the world at deploying destructive power, and the British and French…

Except crypto isn't currency, it's an artificial resource with no inherent usefulness beyond exchange. States won't give up their currencies because that would put all of them in the position of, say, Liberia, rather than the position of the US, EU or China who can literally print money to pay. And even if all state currencies vanished over night, this would change nothing for individuals because the vast majority of…

States won't...

El Salvador is considered by many to be a state.

Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#332

Post by mensetmanusman »

Siira wrote: post #310
worrycue wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to print more would actually be a benefit as it allows for inflation. Central banks typically aim for 1-3% inflation to get people spending money and allowing the economy to function instead of just hoarding it.

“Hoarding” money, also known as saving in esoteric circles.

The funny thing is that death or mental illness by a hoarder means the btc go poof until the end of time.

Therefore, over a long enough time scale, the number of available BTC tends towards zero.

Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#333

Post by fsflover »

nuerow wrote: post #295
fsflover wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government can print USD for themselves, effectively stealing money from everyone through inflation. With bitcoin, even "small group controlling 90%" can't do that.

> The government can print USD for themselves, effectively stealing money from everyone through inflation. Not quite. The only people bitten by inflation in the long run are those who stockpile cash and intend to perpetually live off capital gains without contributing anything to society. Meanwhile, the vast majority, which are either salaried employees or own businesses, see both their income and expenditures adjust…

> The only people bitten by inflation in the long run are those who stockpile cash and intend to perpetually live off capital gains without contributing anything to society.

This is completely missing the point. People with big amounts of cash never keep it, they invest in something to avoid inflation. The only people who suffer are poor people who happen to have a small amount of USD saved for a rainy day.

Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#334

Post by jessaustin »

Someone should put together some sort of counter-BTC investment vehicle, so all of these loud-and-proud BTC skeptics can put their money where their mouths are. It's really unfair to them that the only people benefiting from BTC price movements are those who hold BTC.

Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#335

Post by toofy »

throw0101a wrote: post #308
toofy wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think any serious person has ever implied the stock market has no regulations/protections. I mean, are you surprised that some things are illegal? Of course not, no one is surprised by this. Could you imagine what a clusterfuck the market would be with no regulations?

> Could you imagine what a clusterfuck the market would be with no regulations? Generally regulations are written after clusterfucks have occurred to reduce the risk of them happening again. It's the same reason we have building codes: after a Great Fire or two happens in a given city, fire breaks are usually mandated.

Absolutely. This is why in the digital currency realm we’ll absolutely see a repeat of many the exact same grifts over and over again that we’ve already gone through and already figured out how to mitigate. But we’ll just fall for them all over again.

It’s amazing to me how many times we’re repeating the same mistakes over and over again that we’ve made in the relatively recent past because “it’ll be different this time because technology!” or whatever—and i don’t only mean in the coin sphere.

I work, live, breathe, eat and play with technology however, quite a few people, usually those falling for marketing hype have deluded themselves pretty hard. Humanity scale chaotic complexity problems still exist and technology isn’t even close to solving those and won’t be for a long, long time.

Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#336

Post by argentinian »

nuerow wrote: post #295
fsflover wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government can print USD for themselves, effectively stealing money from everyone through inflation. With bitcoin, even "small group controlling 90%" can't do that.

> The government can print USD for themselves, effectively stealing money from everyone through inflation. Not quite. The only people bitten by inflation in the long run are those who stockpile cash and intend to perpetually live off capital gains without contributing anything to society. Meanwhile, the vast majority, which are either salaried employees or own businesses, see both their income and expenditures adjust…

> This is in fact one of the often ignored aspects of inflation, as well as taxes: a way to mitigate or avoid concentrations of wealth detrimental to society.

As somebody living in Argentina, a country with usual double digit inflation, your argument is complete bullshit.

Here the wealthy are not affected by inflation: they can save in real state, strong currencies, shares... And the same rich families stay rich for generations. We also have very high taxes.

Inflation harms the poor more than the rich. Try living in Argentina for some years and you will learn.

Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#337

Post by UncleMeat »

dannyw wrote: post #287
arcatek wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they start to play with different rules, one of the hard fork remaining branches (or both) will be refused by everyone on the network and be worthless. There's no telling whether it'd be the "hijacked" branch or the original one - assuming they control 50%+ of the mining power, there's a decent argument that the remaining miners would follow their lead if only to stay on the largest branch.

What miners do is irrelevant: the code known as bitcoin, with a 21M hard cap, simply will reject any block that creates more than its allowed bitcoins as invalid, the same way it rejects a random string of bytes as invalid.

In the sense that updating the code to do something else would make it “not Bitcoin”, sure. But I really don’t think this matters to much of anybody if the “OG Bitcoin” drops to zero and the hard fork with new behavior wins.

Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#338

Post by woah »

H8crilA wrote: post #296
glenvdb wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've revealed plainly that you haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Miners can't change the protocol of the entire network. The only malevolent thing they could do is perform a 51% attack if they all colluded together. And even that wouldn't achieve much, so there's not much incentive to do it. All they can do is a double spend. They would've been better off spending that energy on mining blocks to be rewa…

Well, Ethereum miners decide on changing the protocol like all the time.

Also wrong. For an Ethereum (or bitcoin) upgrade that requires a hard fork to be accepted as “being Ethereum”, all the users running Ethereum nodes need to be OK with it and update their full node software to that version.

Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#339

Post by nuerow »

argentinian wrote: post #336
nuerow wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government can print USD for themselves, effectively stealing money from everyone through inflation. Not quite. The only people bitten by inflation in the long run are those who stockpile cash and intend to perpetually live off capital gains without contributing anything to society. Meanwhile, the vast majority, which are either salaried employees or own businesses, see both their income and expenditures adjust…

> This is in fact one of the often ignored aspects of inflation, as well as taxes: a way to mitigate or avoid concentrations of wealth detrimental to society. As somebody living in Argentina, a country with usual double digit inflation, your argument is complete bullshit. Here the wealthy are not affected by inflation: they can save in real state, strong currencies, shares... And the same rich families stay rich for…

> As somebody living in Argentina, a country with usual double digit inflation, your argument is complete bullshit.

The only bullshit I spot is this idea to use Argentina, or Zimbabwe or Venezuela, as the posterchild of responsible monetary and economic policies, when they are actually the result of gross and perpetual mismanagement.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-argentina-faces-an-economic...

Meanwhile most of the world reaps the benefits of sane and responsible monetary policies, and thus is free from hyperinflation, and somehow that's supposed to mean nothing? Only your cherry-picked appeals to emotion matter?

Even the European Union, which has been subjected to quantitative easing policies from around a whole decade and thus has been seeing their central banks print money like crazy, at most only complains about low inflation and mild economic stagnation.

Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#340

Post by worrycue »

Siira wrote: post #310
worrycue wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to print more would actually be a benefit as it allows for inflation. Central banks typically aim for 1-3% inflation to get people spending money and allowing the economy to function instead of just hoarding it.

“Hoarding” money, also known as saving in esoteric circles.

It’s called a deflationary spiral.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deflationary-spiral.asp

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