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How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

nytimes.com

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Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#111

Post by saalweachter »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #73
saalweachter wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another critical difference is that there are commodity uses of gold. The price of gold will never go to zero ; it might go to $100 or $10 per oz if all speculation and hoarding were removed from the market but it wouldn't go to $0.

Sure but what's the importance of that fact? If I buy an ecoin at $1500 and it goes to zero and if I buy gold at $1510 and it goes to $10 it's the same loss. I guess what's the real importance that gold has a floor which is marginally above zero and bitcoin doesn't if both of those floors are far below the current price level.

It's valuable because you can, if you do some research, make some pretty educated guesses about what the floor is in the gold market. That tells you whether you are risking 10%, 25%, 75%, or 90% of your money while speculating.

And, uhh, if you don't know why having a good idea of your potential downside is useful when investing, maybe consider finding a trustworthy financial adviser?

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#112

Post by chrisco255 »

0wing wrote: post #35
TheBiv wrote: post #3

>> They said they might look at selling when the value of all the Bitcoin in circulation approaches the value of all gold in the world — some $7 trillion or $8 trillion compared with the $310 billion value of all Bitcoin on Tuesday — given that they think Bitcoin is set to replace gold as a rare commodity. But then Tyler Winklevoss questioned even that, pointing out the ways that he believes Bitcoin is better than go…

If you understand the computer science behind Bitcoin, you'll realize how ridiculous the false equivalency to gold is. 1. The claim of "rare" doesn't exactly hold true. Consider the 10,000 BTC pizza - how did this happen? This was the direct result of Satoshi's economic policy, granting vast sums of BTC to mint out very quickly very early for a short duration to the very small pool of people who ran the software. Sat…

On 1) the exchanges may be unregulated, but there's dozens, if not hundreds of exchanges. Implying that exchanges are manipulating the spot price across the board is ludicrous. There's also exchanges like EtherDelta, which are entirely run by a smart contract on the Ethereum block chain, so it's independently verifiable that the trades are fairly executed.

2. BTC is being used as the reserve currency for almost all exchanges. BTC has a vast network and even as popular as ETH has gotten, it has some ways to go before it's accepted at the same level as BTC. The others, like LTC & XMR also rarely have trades delimited in their currency.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#113

Post by colordrops »

sytelus wrote: post #74
TheBiv wrote: post #3

>> They said they might look at selling when the value of all the Bitcoin in circulation approaches the value of all gold in the world — some $7 trillion or $8 trillion compared with the $310 billion value of all Bitcoin on Tuesday — given that they think Bitcoin is set to replace gold as a rare commodity. But then Tyler Winklevoss questioned even that, pointing out the ways that he believes Bitcoin is better than go…

That's quite a balony. - Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other. - Gold has practical use in industry which puts lower bound on its value. BTC has no lower bound. - Gold is exchangeable virtually in any country and any culture regardless of how technologically advanced that society is. - Thousands of years of history has proven that humans have almost natural lust for this shiny metal and it gets…

Just because gold is better in some ways that bitcoin doesn't invalidate the GP's point that bitcoin is better than gold in some ways. One quick example among many is that you can transfer it nearly instantaneously without geographic bounds.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#114

Post by tuxxy »

loceng wrote: post #101
pingec wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One disadvantage of gold I can think of is you cannot hide it in your head.

No one can steal it from you with 50%+1 CPU resources though.

Have you seen how much processing power is in the Bitcoin network? Do you know how expensive an attack like this would be?

By the way, you can only double spend with the 51% attack.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#116

Post by AnimalMuppet »

dahdum wrote: post #105
bradleyjg wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could pick any number of gold-like commmodities, but like Bitcoin, gold has had a history of large expenditures to acquire it. Both are buoyed by that past. I would have put that the other way around ("like gold, bitcoin ...") but even so the scale of the relevant histories are not even in the same ballpark. Bitcoin has had held value for seven years. Gold for more than seven thousand years.

Gold has had some ridiculous swings along the way too, though I doubt anything like BTC. The scale is incomparable, but every year the history grows and the likelihood of permanent acceptance increases.

> Gold has had some ridiculous swings along the way too...

The Spanish pulled a large amount of gold out of their New World colonies. It reduced the price of gold in Europe... by 20%. That seems to me to be not much of a swing, given the magnitude of the event.

The biggest swing that I know of was when the US allowed the price of gold to move. The US held the price of gold at $35/oz from (about) 1932 to (about) 1975. When they allowed gold to float, it went to $200/oz, dropped to $100/oz, then went to $800/oz. But I'd ascribe that set of "ridiculous swings" to government messing with the market, not to gold itself.

Off topic, but too fun not to mention: An ounce of gold weighs more than an ounce of feathers. This is because an ounce of gold is a troy ounce (1/12 of a pound), and an ounce of feathers is an avoirdupois ounce (1/16 of a pound).

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#117

Post by justboxing »

sytelus wrote: post #74
TheBiv wrote: post #3

>> They said they might look at selling when the value of all the Bitcoin in circulation approaches the value of all gold in the world — some $7 trillion or $8 trillion compared with the $310 billion value of all Bitcoin on Tuesday — given that they think Bitcoin is set to replace gold as a rare commodity. But then Tyler Winklevoss questioned even that, pointing out the ways that he believes Bitcoin is better than go…

That's quite a balony. - Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other. - Gold has practical use in industry which puts lower bound on its value. BTC has no lower bound. - Gold is exchangeable virtually in any country and any culture regardless of how technologically advanced that society is. - Thousands of years of history has proven that humans have almost natural lust for this shiny metal and it gets…

> willybot, spoofing

Interesting. First time I'm hearing about these two. Anyone know of any real life instances where someone perpetrated this w.r.t. bitcoins / crypto trading?

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#118

Post by MichaelApproved »

relics443 wrote: post #77
dingdongding wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone and their uncle knows a crash is coming A crash is always coming. Be it stock market or bitcoin. Everyone knows that but nobody knows when. It is just like saying we all are gonna die. Nobody knows when.

True, but someone with an end stage terminal illness shouldn't buy a car.

Why not? What would they be saving their money for?

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#119

Post by mtgx »

felipeko wrote: post #15
TheBiv wrote: post #3

>> They said they might look at selling when the value of all the Bitcoin in circulation approaches the value of all gold in the world — some $7 trillion or $8 trillion compared with the $310 billion value of all Bitcoin on Tuesday — given that they think Bitcoin is set to replace gold as a rare commodity. But then Tyler Winklevoss questioned even that, pointing out the ways that he believes Bitcoin is better than go…

There's a difference about Gold's rarity and Bitcoin's. Gold is rare on its kind and rare on its abundance. It may be hard to mine more gold, but it's way harder to find another gold-like commodity. Bitcoin is only rare in the abundance sense. It is hard to mine more bitcoin, but it's pretty easy to find a (arguably better) substitute for what it does. I can agree with it being better (having more utility) than gold,…

That doesn't make much sense. I think you set up a rather arbitrary definition for this.

Here's my attempt: Gold is just a "metal" just like Bitcoin is a "cryptocurrency." There are many types of metals and other materials. Some can directly replace gold while others have way different uses - just like cryptocurrencies.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#120

Post by badosu »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #116
dahdum wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold has had some ridiculous swings along the way too, though I doubt anything like BTC. The scale is incomparable, but every year the history grows and the likelihood of permanent acceptance increases.

> Gold has had some ridiculous swings along the way too... The Spanish pulled a large amount of gold out of their New World colonies. It reduced the price of gold in Europe... by 20%. That seems to me to be not much of a swing, given the magnitude of the event. The biggest swing that I know of was when the US allowed the price of gold to move. The US held the price of gold at $35/oz from (about) 1932 to (about) 1975.…

Off topic, but too fun not to mention: An ounce of gold weighs more than an ounce of feathers. This is because an ounce of gold is a troy ounce (1/12 of a pound), and an ounce of feathers is an avoirdupois ounce (1/16 of a pound).

As a native from a country that uses the metric system, this sentence is both amusing and saddening.

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