Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got 2 coins off a guy in a coffeshop about 1 year ago for $20. I sold them today for about $1600. About 2 years ago I almost dropped $1000 on bitcoins but was talked out of it by family and friends. It feels weird. I can't connect bitcoins to social or economic value. The "china explosion" of btc price won't last imho. And while I like bitcoin, it's just a currency and not an investment, as in it doesn't generate v…
Did you get actual cash for the transaction, or some kind of goods or service? I'm having a hard time finding people who actually got CASH MONEY for a bitcoin.
Richest Bitcoin Addresses
151–160 of 208 posts
Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
USD is more stable because gov/banks/etc. are all staring at it all day, as well as their country's population. Not saying I trust them but I'd rather have a bill backed by the US gov than by Satoshi Nakamoto. He's the single person YOU rely on -- the one who designed the mining system, currency caps, etc. Ridiculous. USD is more distributed than Bitcoin just because people are always watching theorizing monitoring U…
You provided no proof that USD is stable, just a bunch of handwaving. > He's the single person YOU rely on. For security, no. The protocol is public. So I assume you mean only by market manipulation. But how so? Is this the same way I rely on Bill Gates not to trade all his money to a foreign currency?
Inflation figures for USD are readily available. That it is more stable when considered against most goods and services than bitcoin is not something about which there is any room for serious dispute.
Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole price of Bitcoin is an illusion that they use to get people to keep buying. It's the result of a bidding war. There is an article here about that basically explains (this is my interpretation not his words) how the price of BTC is kindof like the sticker price on an item in the store. It doesn't represent the real value, it's simply the value as perceived by consumers and is, in a way, fixed -- http://falkv…
Falkvinge thinks they will be worth 100k-1000k in the future. If we accept that (which I don't btw) is it so weird that people want to spend 700 today for something that might be worth 100k in a few years?
Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're wrong about that. 51% attack publication didn't kill it. Silk road bust didn't kill it. Selfish miner attack publication didn't kill it. I'm not saying that a flood of sellers won't lower the price dramatically. But to say a rumour is "all it will take" is to ignore recent history.
> 51% attack publication didn't kill it. Are you talking about some new attack? The "51% attack" is a security property that fell out from the design of bitcoin: A cooperating group of people needs "51%" of the computing power to break bitcoin.
Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Way smaller scale but back in 2011 I heard about bitcoins and crunched some numbers. I realized that at the current price (~$16), I was able to make profit mining them on my desktop since it would only cost about ~$12 in electricty per coin. I got myself 3 or 4 coins (I wasn't even in a pool at that point) but then the price crashed in late 2011 and I eventually forgot about it. Since then I've reformatted and I reme…
I got 2 coins off a guy in a coffeshop about 1 year ago for $20. I sold them today for about $1600. About 2 years ago I almost dropped $1000 on bitcoins but was talked out of it by family and friends. It feels weird. I can't connect bitcoins to social or economic value. The "china explosion" of btc price won't last imho. And while I like bitcoin, it's just a currency and not an investment, as in it doesn't generate v…
You might be wrong ;) This week, Yi Gang (a very high-ranked chinese government official: no less than the Director of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange and Deputy Governor of the People's Bank of China), said he would personally adopt a long-term perspective on the currency! See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6782870
Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't bitcoin easily manipulated? Let's say I have 1% of all bitcoins. I sell half of them, wait for the price to fall, and buy back to have 1.1% of all bitcoins. Repeat each few weeks, and let's say there's 20 people that realized this and have enough bitcoins for this to be feasible. End result = currency that's mostly owned by a few people. And when everybody realize this - bubble collapses. At least that was my t…
You might working with an oversimplified model of the market. If you have 1% of all bitcoins, you're not going to be able to sell them all at the highest standing offer-to-buy (OTB). If the highest standing offer to buy is at $700, it's not going to be an offer to buy all 120,000 of your BTC. It might be an offer to buy 100BTC. So you sell 30BTC at $700 and then move on to the next lowest OTB, which might be 20BTC@$6…
i know thats kindof a tangent but.... seriously, i'm curious
Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin address is a hash of public key. So, without address reuse you should break both EC, RIPEMD-160 and SHA-256
DES was broken about 23 years after it was designed. I'd be surprised if 30 years into the future (probably earlier given the incentives we have to break crypto today are so much than those we had in '98) if these algorithms weren't broken. There is actually no precedent of a cryptographic system relying on computational hardness surviving for more than a generation. And given that our fundamental theoretical underst…
>There is actually no precedent of a cryptographic system relying on computational hardness surviving for more than a generation.
That's because cryptosystems relying on computational hardness aren't that old.
>And given that our fundamental theoretical understanding hasn't really evolved beyond, "we think a bunch of these problems are hard", things are likely to stay that way for a while.
These assumptions haven't really broken though. You give an example of DES, but that doesn't rely on computational hardness assumptions. Asymmetric crypto with a trapdoor function does. There hasn't even been a big breakthrough in the original prime number factorization assumptions of RSA/DH.
Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
They actually did. Much of the western US was "homesteaded" through the federal government. Basically, head out west and settle, plant your flag and you can have that land for free.
yea but that involves work in a sense. You have to tend to this land and develop communities or the land is worthless. I'm sure the value grew over time as the residents were able to make it into a nicer place. They didn't just buy a few bytes of data & see the value appreciate by 9billion% just for sitting on their fat asses. And that's the other issue. Land is an ACTUALLY limited resource. We don't know how to pull…
Or really anyone who buys a stock early for a company that becomes huge.
I mean, if you buy bitcoins right now you are speculating that it will become a stable currency at some point. It offers a bunch of interesting and disruptive features that cut out a lot of middle men.
Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
USD is more stable because gov/banks/etc. are all staring at it all day, as well as their country's population. Not saying I trust them but I'd rather have a bill backed by the US gov than by Satoshi Nakamoto. He's the single person YOU rely on -- the one who designed the mining system, currency caps, etc. Ridiculous. USD is more distributed than Bitcoin just because people are always watching theorizing monitoring U…
You provided no proof that USD is stable, just a bunch of handwaving. > He's the single person YOU rely on. For security, no. The protocol is public. So I assume you mean only by market manipulation. But how so? Is this the same way I rely on Bill Gates not to trade all his money to a foreign currency?
This is not the observation of one person or perspective. It's the actual purchasing power of USD.
Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why do Bitcoiners believe so much in a currency that allowed the originator to pull so much wealth out of thin air? Even if you don't believe in bitcoin, the problem with fiat currencies is that they are insecure. > Baaaaaw Bitcoiners' wealth are disproportionate to their merit Just like in fiat currency, in Bitcoin, lots of people who don't "deserve" anything are rich. Deal with it or go back to your imaginary uni…
greed-monger! Currency is something relatively stable, it's not a trading platform. I spoke about it in this way the other day -- One should not have to consult an exchange rate to figure out how much their currency is worth. They should know what it's worth by how much it costs for a dozen eggs. If that number changes rapidly (dozen eggs costs 1 BTC Monday, 3 on Friday, .5 next month, 100 in the future, .002 after t…
This is just not true for many currencies that have undergone hyper-inflation and hyper-deflation. You are only comparing btc to the most dominant currencies in the world right now, and btc obviously is not one of the most dominant currencies.