Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 486 posts

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

#381

Post by rglover »

jayd16 wrote: post #70
rglover wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decentralized money that government can't touch is the definition of a populous utopia in money terms. Bitcoin, by nature, is the most democratic form of money to ever exist on the planet. That more people don't get behind it and buy at least a little bit is mind boggling. Government fiat is and always will be a source of controlling the population and limiting their ability to build wealth.

I have at least some control (though small) over the politics that control my nation's fiat currency. I feel I have much less control over 51% of the mining community. Considering that, why should I feel its more democratic?

You have absolutely zero control. Countries are owned, not elected. Elections are an illusion to keep you docile and not asking too many questions.

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

#382

Post by argentinian »

nuerow wrote: post #380
argentinian wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, the inflation here is the effect of the perpetual and gross mismanagement. What about your idea regarding inflation as a way to avoid concentrations of wealth? (the idea I quoted and I replied to). That one is unsustainable.

> What about your idea regarding inflation as a way to avoid concentrations of wealth? (the idea I quoted and I replied to). That one is unsustainable. You're free to discuss the facts I've pointed out, instead of going off on a tangent with a non-sequitur regarding Argentina's hyperinflation. It's undeniable that stockpiling cash out of the economy has a deeply negative social, economic, and even fiscal impact on a…

You said that inflation and taxes are a way to mitigate or avoid concentrations of wealth.

As a counterargument I said that rich people don't save in cash and that inflation damages the poor more than the rich, the world bank has evidence for that: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/1...

> Inflation provides an incentive to actually put the money to use,

Inflation provides an incentive to get rid of the money that loses its value over time and instead change it for something else. This not only affects the rich, but also the poor. An effect is that it becomes more difficult for the poor to save and invest. The rich can handle inflation much better than the poor.

I found another article that arguments about this https://mises.org/library/whats-so-scary-about-deflation

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

#384

Post by gitfan86 »

tata71 wrote: post #377
gitfan86 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big difference between BTC and MSFT/TSLA is that successful companies have cash flow. MSFT has a dividend that it pays out every year. TSLA is eliminating debt and adding cash to its balance sheet. If everyone stopped buying BTC and only held BTC and bought another crypto currency, BTC would go to zero since no one would be putting money in. Similar to a pyramid scheme, once there is no new money it collapses. On…

If every new person being born started using cryptocurrency and refused to use USD, since there is no new money, it collapses.

Exactly, currencies have no cashflow. They can go up and down relative to many other things, but essentially their only value is if other people are willing to trade for other things with them.

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

#385

Post by tinus_hn »

danbruc wrote: post #300
dannyw wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depending on your definitions this might or might no be true but it also might be totally irrelevant. There is a protocol and system specification. There are implementations of that specifications. There is a distributed system running those implementations. And the distributed system has a state. Each of those can change and each of those or a combination of them could arguably be called Bitcoin. If everyone would r…

This is like saying because some people own the majority of printing presses, money is worthless.

Money has worth because people accept it in exchange for goods and services.

Bitcoin has worth because people accept it in exchange for goods and services.

It’s not the miners that create value, it’s the merchants. If miners start some fork they’ll leave the main blockchain, which will run fine without them. And they have absolutely no way of forcing anyone to use their fork. Only if the merchants start accepting coins from the forked blockchain will it become valuable. But that’s up to the merchants, not the miners.

There are problems with one miner controlling over 50% of the mining power. This is not such a problem.

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

#387

Post by matheusmoreira »

McGuive7 wrote: post #91

Soooo. . . you're saying a tiny fraction of the population controls the vast majority of the resource? You mean just like every other major resource on the planet? :)

No, this problem goes way beyond wealth concentration. The centralization of mining activities is extremely dangerous. The whole point of bitcoin is to be decentralized so that outside influences are minimized or eliminated. There is absolutely no point to this coin if it's centralized. All the energy spent mining it is being wasted on a useless coin that serves no purpose and whose only valuable quality is its brand.

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

#388

Post by tinus_hn »

thesz wrote: post #356
jstanley wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is you need the economic majority to be on side in order to succeed with a hard fork. Just the top 50 miners switching on their own isn't enough.

Add 50 more - to reduce hash rate even more. Announce hard fork right after difficulty adjustment. And then, suddenly, these who have not forked will be stalled for several weeks. Instead of 10 minutes per block, the time will be 30 minutes and possibly more. And to adjust the difficulty those who have not forked would need... a hard fork? Yes, these 100 miners are pools. But where pool participants will go then? Wil…

The difficulty adjusts automatically. Bitcoin wouldn’t have come this far if it were that fragile.

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

#389

Post by jstanley »

tinus_hn wrote: post #388
thesz wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add 50 more - to reduce hash rate even more. Announce hard fork right after difficulty adjustment. And then, suddenly, these who have not forked will be stalled for several weeks. Instead of 10 minutes per block, the time will be 30 minutes and possibly more. And to adjust the difficulty those who have not forked would need... a hard fork? Yes, these 100 miners are pools. But where pool participants will go then? Wil…

The difficulty adjusts automatically. Bitcoin wouldn’t have come this far if it were that fragile.

It doesn't adjust immediately though. If a large majority of miner suddenly disappears then the block mining rate does indeed drop until the next difficulty adjustment.

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

#390

Post by sowbug »

qeternity wrote: post #198
robocat wrote: post #161

“The 50 richest Americans now hold almost as much wealth as half of the U.S.” - Bloomberg - https://archive.vn/25Bz4 Is there any reason to think bitcoin is that much different from ownership ratios of other financial assets?

Yes, we know who those 50 are, and the wealth they own is in highly regulated markets. We know what they own, how much they own, when they buy/sell. We also dictate that they cannot trade on insider info and must generally play fair. Say all you want about the efficacy of the above measures, they are absolutely not perfect. But it's completely different to bitcoin where none of the above applies, and often the opposi…

Citizens United switched US government to Proof of Stake.

https://twitter.com/sowbug/status/938802817883545600

Post reply on HN