This ^^^ I chuckled a little bit when he said hashes people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for... annd those dollars are printed on paper with old dead guys on it. Ahh the world this guy lives in must be an interesting one.
it's intriguing to me that no one has pointed out the inherent value of BitCoin: You can commit nearly anonymous transactions over long distances with it. It's value over international currencies is in proportion to the size of the black market transacted via BtC. There are many people out there who don't try to get rich, they simply mine a handful to buy small amounts of drugs on the internet. The "convenience" of t…
you honestly don't think the Feds won't develop a program that automatically tracks bitcoin wallets and finds their owners? I think it's obvious they will.
That analogy is quite a reach, the guy behind silk road wasn't killing anybody or planning to. With that said, I agree there's risk involved in having the Silk Road hold your money and you can expect it might be seized by law enforcement. That doesn't make the government in the right morally for doing so despite the law saying they can- which was exactly my point in the first place. I'm not sure we're really on diffe…
That analogy is quite a reach, the guy behind silk road wasn't killing anybody or planning to.
Unless this is some weird language trick where hiring a hit man somehow doesn't count as "planning to kill somebody," I'm assuming you are unaware that he was hiring a hitman.
Also, if I understand it correctly, many of those coins were not preallocated to any sale. They were just sitting there to be used in the future. So whether they would be used for drugs or something legal is irrelevant.
The question still remains, what is the legal basis of confiscating the coins?
SR was an illegal drug marketplace - what more legal basis are you expecting?
Yeah, my grandma has also run into some troubles when trying to send an email. She had to: - Investigate which PC she should buy - Find someone willing to sell a PC at a fair price. This is a problem because PCs get old really quick, and some vendors will try to sell you old PCs at their original prices. I don't know how they expect PCs to be useful if they go down in value so fast. Why buy a PC today, when you can b…
When someone tries to use email and fails, they can lose some time. When someone tries to use bitcoin and fails, they can lose their home. When silk road 2 lost their users' bitcoins to theft, there was a comment on Reddit about a silk road user who became homeless because they had converted their savings into bitcoin and stored the coins in silk road's webwallet. When the coins were lost, so was their home, since th…
a lot of these people don't have that good of arguments, so they instead use crappy metaphors to make their points. they take something that is totally different than bitcoin and try to use that to make their point. but they need examine f it is a valid analogy. I don't think a PC, a consumer good, can be compared to something that's supposed to function as a currency. one is a store of a value and one has a functional use. if your grandma wants to save her money she should by stocks or bonds or something with low volatility. if she wants to send an email she should get a computer, not for storing value, but for it's functional
use. and if she wants to get around town she should by a car, even though they depreciate. I don know how op ever thought it made sense to compare bitcoin and computers.
$200 000 seems to be a big anti troll bid blocker. But i bet someone is going to get rich and buy them way below market price.
Almost by definition, they will be sold at "market price." It's the "market price" of buying 3K blocks of Bitcoin as opposed to the "market price" of the daily Bitcoin exchanges.
If the government somehow seized a giant comic book collection, they wouldn't try to sell them off individually on eBay. They would auction it off in 1 block, and interested parties who know how to maximize its value would bit on it.
Isn't this a bit presumptuous? Ross William Ulbricht hasn't yet been convicted of anything. I know that they aren't selling his personal bitcoins, but in the (highly unlikely) event that he is found innocent, wouldn't that mean that the Silk Road assets need to be returned to him? How then can they sell them now?
Well no, because it's been proven already that Silk Road was a drug exchange, and thus the money is dirty drug money and confiscated by the government. Whether Ulbricht was the mastermind behind the exchange and should be incarcerated is yet to be determined (I believe), that takes a longer lawsuit than a court order to shut SR down and seize its assets.
That counts as supply. Silver in the earth also exists prior to sale, but it only counts when you actually sell it.
By this logic, withdrawing money from the ATM increases money supply... Also, the expected amount of silver in the ground is factored into the current price of silver. It's really only when new deposits are discovered that there is an impact to the price. Actually pulling known silver deposits out of the ground has a negligible effect on the price.
Except fiat economics are a bit more complicated than that. Everyone getting a 100% wage raise would increase money supply (and by extension massive inflation).
A very stretched example follows, be warned: An online shop selling clothing also happens to sell firearms illegally. Its assets are seized. What about money from pending orders for the clothing? It seems to me it's obvious in this case. Couldn't SR users start a class action lawsuit against gov for seizing their assets stored on SR servers? This is assuming not everything sold there was illegal (this might be wrong)…
there are times when analogies are very helpful.. this isn't one of them. instead of comparing it to that, let's talk about what it actually is. an illegal black market for drugs. you're either being greedy, disingenuous, or crazy if you think their money should be returned. if anything they are lucky the government doesn't pursue the users with legal action.
Is having bitcoin on a website illegal, even if you don't buy anything?
The price has tanked today as a result of this. http://cryptowat.ch/btce/btcusd/1hr/ Market started going crazy earlier today when DPR's seized coins started to move. https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN4... The downtrend is only accelerating.
Was this a deliberate attempt to tank the price and weaken the currency? Or just no different than the government selling the Ferraris that it confiscates from drug dealers?
> Now, if the good was completely fungible, risk-free and totally liquid (think cash), there would be no expected discount because of risk.. just transaction cost. How is that not the case here?
In the "not completely fungible" part. It is apparently hard to trade that many bitcoins for the equivalent amount of government-backed currency or goods. To be fair to Bitcoin, it's not the only "currency" with that problem... during the Argentinean crisis, many local governments paid their workers with alternative currencies ("patacones" and others) which rapidly devalued. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patac%C3%B3n_…
I think you mean the liquid part, not the fungible part.