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Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

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Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#241

Post by Sambdala »

glesica wrote: post #188
latj wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides cost there is also risk- a transfer of this size in the light of day would raise a lot of questions- Where did this money come from? Was tax paid? And depending on the reason for the transaction regulators may interfere or freeze the funds.

Yes, because making sure someone isn't buying a nuke on the black market and is paying the taxes they owe is just terrible. Don't get me wrong, the regulatory framework for money transfers seems to suck, but I don't want to go from "shitty regulation" to "zero regulation", I want to go from "shitty regulation" to "smart regulation".

>I want to go from "shitty regulation" to "smart regulation".

I'm tempted to conclude this is something that happens so rarely you may as well count the times it happens as a rounding error.

It's a bit like saying government will just work if we only vote for the right candidate.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#242

Post by guan »

gergles wrote: post #164
gorrillamcd wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind though, this transaction was nearly instantaneous. Bank Wire transfers take 3-4 days to complete (at least, as far as I know with normal-person quantities of money). Instant international money transfer is amazing!

No, that's ACH. SWIFT (or even FedWire) transfers happen within a few minutes.

Fedwire and other real time gross settlement services (RTGS) are almost instantaneous.

SWIFT transfers usually are not: SWIFT is a way to communicate messages about transfers between banks, but they would still need a way to do the actual settlement. This could be very fast in the case of two large banks in different countries: if you are a customer in bank A, which has a correspondent account with B, and the recipient is also a customer with bank B. Then bank A can use SWIFT to say “please transfer $1 trillion from our account to the recipient’s account”, and that could happen instantly. (It usually doesn’t.)

But if the final recipient is actually a customer at bank C, then the money needs to get from B to C somehow. That could happen in the recipient country’s RTGS—Fedwire if it’s the United States—but it might also be slower, through ACH or an equivalent.

One problem with fast transfers is that many banks don’t have straight through processing for RTGS. This means that the money can get instantly from bank A to bank B, but may not get posted to the recipient’s account with bank B until a clerk gets around to verifying and booking the transaction.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#243

Post by mortehu »

nly wrote: post #133

Hardly. If you tried to sell 195,000 coins you'd wipe out all the exchanges and cause a crash. Talking numbers, you could sell them all on BTC-E right now, bagging you just $7M, and take the price down to ~$36. You can spread that around the exchanges of course, if you're quick, but you're still nowhere near $147M at current market depth.

Why do you seem to think that selling them all at once is the only way to sell them?

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#244

Post by booyaa00 »

csomar wrote: post #190
gergles wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's ACH. SWIFT (or even FedWire) transfers happen within a few minutes.

My experience tell me otherwise with both of them. It can take from a few days to a couple weeks.

What country are you in? In the UK bank transfers happen within a couple of minutes.

You can login to your bank, transfer money to someone elses bank, they'll login, and see the money.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#246

Post by Sambdala »

codexon wrote: post #170
fragsworth wrote: post #64

Consider this: They paid $0.00 for the transfer of $150 million dollars. A direct (i.e. not based on third party credit, regulations, etc.) transfer of wealth of this magnitude between two entities usually consists of a heavily guarded, insured, physical shipment of cash or gold. Depending how safely you want to make the transfer, and how far the entities are on the globe, it can cost hundreds of thousands to million…

While that is true, Bitcoin is far from a bulletproof preserve of wealth. Gold has other uses if it isn't used as a currency anymore. Bitcoin on the other hand can be made completely useless if some critical flaw is found, or the wealth is too concentrated in a few users and the majority decides to switch to a newer crypto-currency.

Gold's other uses wouldn't make gold worth much on their own.

"Legitimate" uses of a commodity that trades more for its properties as money should be thought more of a really crappy put option, that is it sets a low price floor.

For example, it's been estimated that gold's industrial uses would only allow it to be traded in the low double digits per ounce if people didn't desire it for other reasons.

It's just in the case of something that isn't physical and isn't "backed" by any alternative uses, the floor is 0% of the current price instead of 1%, or similar.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#247

Post by charlesism »

nadaviv wrote: post #123
jonknee wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they received $0 worth of assurance that it would be successful. If it were my $150M I would not want to leave it up to the block chain and hope it works.

They received a mathematical assurance that it would work. The relying nodes, blockchain, miners and priority rules are all well-known and straightforward to account for. If you pay enough fees given your transaction priority, it'll get into a block eventually. If you want it to be mined sooner, you can pay higher fees. And even if it won't be mined, the worst case scenario is that you would keep your Bitcoins and ca…

I hear you, but I also notice the developers still have not assigned bitcoin-qt a 1.0 version number. I might go ahead and transfer those millions anyways but the beta status would give me pause for thought.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#248

Post by derefr »

nico wrote: post #219
aortega wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2013 Argentinian here. To buy a house right now you usually have to pay dollars cash because nobody accepts a currency that devaluates 25% per year. The political class here is crazy corrupt and rich like in every third world country, and they are known for using piles of 500 euros bills to stay out of the bank system because euros have more wealth density than dollars.

I'm a little offended by the "like in every third world country" statement. Chile is not like that at all, and we are a third world country. In fact, here we are ranked right under (20th) the US (19th) in terms of transparency: http://www.transparency.org/country#CHL http://www.transparency.org/country#USA_DataResearch Argentina is ranked 102: http://www.transparency.org/country#ARG_DataResearch In all of Latin Ameri…

Chile will probably stop being third-world soon enough, though (I heard something about startup accelerators popping up there?)

There should be a term for "third-world country that's probably going to stay third-world for the forseeable future, excepting a revolutionary change of government." Maybe... dystopia? Argentina is a dystopia.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#250

Post by foobarqux »

fragsworth wrote: post #202
socillion wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is Bitcoin sent frequently, it's also stolen frequently: http://rt.com/news/bitcoin-hacking-stolen-million-417/ http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/250-000-worth-bitcoins-sto... http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/czech-bitcoi... edit: unrelated, someone should make an index of how many Bitcoin threads hit the front page of HN per day.

It's well-known that you can at least secure your bitcoins as well as you can secure gold, if you use cold wallets. The advantage, however, is you don't have to worry nearly as much about the security of a transaction (moving it from one place to another)

Not really. It is much easier to lose or make illegible a piece of paper or data than it is to lose large heavy gold or to damage the gold to a degree that severely reduces its value.
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