Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone who has a miner can generate bitcoin. Only the FED can create new USD.
Sure, but what's the importance of that fact?
I think the former method of creating currency is fairer and more transparent.
The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market
101–110 of 327 posts
Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm no libertarian, but wouldn't the fact that you can buy bitcoins with traditional fiat currency throw a wrench in this being a valid experiment? Since anyone that received an "unfair advantage" with government-issued fiat can turn around and use it to get an unfair advantage in bitcoin as well?
Yes. Just the same as generational wealth in the real world. The problem with meritocracy is that ocracy implies some power over the system and in a true meritocratic system the first generation would corrupt it to help their kids. Meritocracy is an oxymoron because the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome is a gradient, not a line.
Doesn't the Law of Large Numbers imply that equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are one and the same thing?
Or to put it another way, how do you measure "equality of opportunity" if not by "equality of outcome"? If your theory of "equality of opportunity" differs from the measured "equality of outcome", doesn't that automatically mean you've omitted some characteristic of the real world from your theory?
Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market
#103I read an interesting analogy yesterday in a poker chat of all places. The guy basically said, let's put bitcoin to buy a coffee litmus test. If I were to buy a cup of coffee in the current frenzy, I would be at the cashier waiting a day for the transaction to go through and when it does go through the fee for transaction would be greater than cost of the coffee. If that is true, how is bitcoin better? Would that tra…
For a cup of coffee you probably don't need to wait a full day to be certain the transaction has gone through. Blocks are mined on average every 10 minutes and pending transactions are broadcast immediately and (assuming a large enough fee is paid) will be included in the next block. For a $3 purchase, you probably don't even need to wait for it to be included in the blockchain (although to protect against double spend you do).
But the poker guy is right, bitcoin is not really appropriate for replacing credit cards for small purchases at the minute for several reasons:
1) You must wait between 1-20 minutes to get your transaction included in the next block.
2) You must pay a fee that could be 100% of the total transaction or more (for small purchases).
3) You must pay capital gains tax on your purchase (possibly at the short term capital gains rate even), which complicates your tax reporting.
Issue 1 and 2 may be solved with technological solutions soon, if the lighting network (distributed settlement layer on top of bitcoin) is successful.
Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm no libertarian, but wouldn't the fact that you can buy bitcoins with traditional fiat currency throw a wrench in this being a valid experiment? Since anyone that received an "unfair advantage" with government-issued fiat can turn around and use it to get an unfair advantage in bitcoin as well?
Yes. Just the same as generational wealth in the real world. The problem with meritocracy is that ocracy implies some power over the system and in a true meritocratic system the first generation would corrupt it to help their kids. Meritocracy is an oxymoron because the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome is a gradient, not a line.
Even if you create a popular/useful coin based on a *cratic system (e.g. iron workers get X number of coins) and try to evenly distribute the coins, they will cluster over time to people to game the system. Perhaps some game detection could penalize those folks and rebalance the distribution.
Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imperialism is not capitalism, they are orthogonal concepts. I would argue they are very tied, but that is a much larger argument not needed here. To give the short and incomplete version, they are both derived from the idea of exploiting others for profit. The level of exploitation is just much less in capitalism and masked behind the guise of fairness, ignoring power dynamics, original capital, and exponential gr…
I think you're a hypocrite. If you think people in Africa aren't getting paid enough, why are you not selling your PC / smartphone to help them out? It's easy to tell other people how to spend their money helping the poor, but when it comes to your own wealth, you're still typing into this tech forum.
> If you think people in Africa aren't getting paid enough, why are you not selling your PC / smartphone to help them out?
Because that would not solve the problem, and it's quite naive to think it would. This gets into lots of debates in ethics that are far from solved.
I do however donate regularly to groups that do economic development in African communities across the world though (more than the cost of a new iPhone annually), so no, I am not a hypocrite (fully at least).
In fact, if you want a great non-profit idea, make a company that translates bitcoin profits into economic development in those communities. My donations have recently been coming from said profits.
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Regardless of whether I am a hypocrite or not, it does not change the facts of the world and bitcoin. Just because my actions do not match perfectly does not mean they shouldn't. That's not a valid argument against my ideas, just against me personally.
> you're still typing into this tech forum
I didn't know using technology is immoral now if others are suffering injustices. Not to mention that there's plenty of utilitarian arguments about cascading effects of convincing others.
Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market
#106Market manipulation is a big risk here. Basically "wolf of wall st" style shenanigans, or the stuff that salomon brothers did in the mortgage bond market in the 1980s. Essentially a few big investors who've cornered the market, acting in concert, can move the market essentially according to their own desire. I read yesterday that the order book for btc was $33 million (don't know what the daily volume is; could anyon…
I don't understand the idea that a whale could move the market and make money off it.
To move the market, you need to spend money.
The only way it works is if you create some kind of momentum and the market continues to go up. But rational markets will sell into the artificial momentum and the price will be be close to where you started. The net result is that you lost money.
I believe there is momentum in markets (they are definitely NOT perfectly rational). But is there enough momentum to really make money with this scheme? I highly doubt it.
Also consider that a group of whales would have to work together to do this. Do you really trust your whale friend to buy at the same time you do? What if he front-runs you and you end up buy the bitcoin he just bought last week for 10% lower?
I don't buy the theory that there are a group of "whales" sitting around planning how to manipulate markets together.
Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any currency or commodity or derivative for which that statement is not true? It seems self-evident that if you own a lot of something like gold, dollars, BTC, sterling, etc. and you sell it, its value relative to what you're selling it for declines.
It only happens if the market is not there to "catch" the sell off. Say there are 1 000 000 X and the current market price is $100 each. If I have 40% of all X and I go to sell it, I first sell to everyone willing to buy X at $100 each. Then I sell to everyone willing to buy X at $99.9 each, etc. Once we stop selling at price Y, we've essentially sold X to everyone who would buy X for between Y and $100. Note that th…
You can look and see exactly how much the price of BTC would move on an exchange by looking at its order book. GDAX's charts[1] makes it easy to see this infact. You can just mouse over the order book and see how many $ it would take to move the price to a certain level.
Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buying any asset pushes the price up and selling pushes the price down. It's a matter of sensitivity. The Chinese government could probably push down the price of USD a few percent by announcing a policy change today, but one guy could potentially push Bitcoin prices down significantly with a keystroke.
At great cost to himself. Dumping coins like that is not free, you pay a huge price due to slippage.
But now they could also own put options.
Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Committed ideological Bitcoin supporters commonly believe in a network effect race condition spiral they call 'hyperbitcoinization' which models a world where a sort of event horizon in market adoption had been crossed, and everyone on Earth is forced to use bitcoin either directly or indirectly. In this techno-feudalist scenario, being one of the Bitcoin 1% or even 10% means the world is at your feet, and if you've…
>and if you've maintained good opsec Don't exchanges verify identity? Wouldn't you be committing fraud by maintaining good opsec? Point being is that someone may eventually leak an exchange database with those details. Then the word's out. Kind of like Equifax.
If you subscribe to the Bitcoin in-universe dogma that views committing fraud and extortion as something that central banks and governments do, not what free market actors entering into voluntary contractual agreements with one another (which are regulated by math and logic spelled out in open source code) do, then maintaining good opsec is not just good business but a moral imperative.
Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But this time it's voluntarily Gambling's rarely been mandatory. If you were going to recommend your folks to have a punt, wouldn't a casino be better? You know the odds then.
No, casinos have the edge, it's almost never mathematically sane to engage with a casino. I considered what would happen if something like bitcoin would become a global internet currency, and any way I sliced it, the upside was too huge not to try.
I don't think you're being creative enough with your slicing. Consider what happens when 90% of the primary world currency ends up concentrated with a few thousand - 100K people in the tech world and if that's really any sort of upside for the world.