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Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

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Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#131

Post by DoctorBit »

bduerst wrote: post #122
Buge wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't share blockchain history, then you don't automatically get some of the new coin by holding some of the previous coin. So there are no issues with exchanges and shorts. Also if you do share history, it is much much harder to start, because you start off with the previous difficulty which is very hard to mine on. If you start a new altcoin with a clean history, the difficulty starts off very low. Bitcoin C…

XT and Classic did fork the blockchain and had the history though, meaning for a time they were an alt-coin with history. That's completely counter intuitive to what you're saying about Matt's example not having a history.

No. XT and Classic were code forks, not blockchain forks. If certain runtime conditions had been met, they would have become blockchain forks, but those conditions were never met.

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#132

Post by slg »

goodplay wrote: post #117
gregschlom wrote: post #91

"There is no single obviously correct solution to these issues. Instead, each decision was sort of weird and contingent and reversible: not the immutable code of the blockchain, but just humans sitting around and trying to figure out which approach would cause the fewest complaints. In that, it's a bit like the Dole settlement process -- only instead of a neutral judge making decisions based on written contracts and…

>they're very valuable if and only if you cannot use the protection [..] I don't think that's entirely fair. They're also valuable to those who want to transfer money without ridiculous fees, excessive bureaucratic friction, and many mandatory middlemen. What other system would allow you to instantly be able to accept payments without giving an exorbitant portion of your revenue?

But the "ridiculous fees, excessive bureaucratic friction, and many mandatory middlemen" are what buy you the protection. The fees from necessary middleman seem ridiculous when nothing goes wrong, but that is how Visa pays for a chargebacks or fraud protection. The governments bureaucratic friction might seem excessive, but that is how they ensure people are paying their taxes which goes to fund the court systems that help mediate disputed contracts.

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#133

Post by runeks »

> To use an imperfect analogy from corporate finance, you could think of the fork as a spinoff. For most of PayPal’s life, it was owned by eBay. Holders of the EBAY ticker owned the parent company eBay, which encompassed eBay proper as well as PayPal. On the day of the spinoff, eBay stockholders received, for each EBAY share they owned, one PYPL share. At the same time, they got to keep their existing EBAY shares.

This is a misleading analogy, because EBAY holders can only be granted PYPL shared because EBAY owned PYPL. So unless BCH was an existing entity before the fork, which was covered under BTC already, this analogy doesn’t capture what happened here.

We’re not talking about companies, were talking about distributed databases. Databases contain information, and can be copied, as opposed to a company. A better analogy would be someone scraping Twitter, making a copy called Twooter with all past tweets from Twitter, and then forking off from there with their own “twoots”. In other words: it’s a copy, not a stock split.

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#134

Post by aqme28 »

ajross wrote: post #124
sowbug wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're thinking of this event as a split, dividend, or spinoff, then it doesn't make sense. But it's more like a company cloning itself but adopting a different vision/mission, and awarding shares to all existing shareholders. They could have started fresh like the zillion other cryptocurrencies that have started up since 2009, some of which appear to have real value. You wouldn't look askance at those, at least f…

> it's more like a company cloning itself but adopting a different vision/mission, and awarding shares to all existing shareholders. And that doesn't sound... insane to you? I mean, skipping the problems with physics where a "split" company would have to clone its employee talent pool as well: such a company would share the same products and the same markets and the same sales channels and have zero share of all of t…

Why do you say "zero share" of the same sales channels? It's literally the exact same audience/"customers" as BTC. 100% share.

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#135

Post by ballenf »

gregschlom wrote: post #91

"There is no single obviously correct solution to these issues. Instead, each decision was sort of weird and contingent and reversible: not the immutable code of the blockchain, but just humans sitting around and trying to figure out which approach would cause the fewest complaints. In that, it's a bit like the Dole settlement process -- only instead of a neutral judge making decisions based on written contracts and…

Not everyone lives under a strong rule of law that we enjoy and take for granted or has access to stable currency. But, it's kind of ironic that if things turn really south everywhere, the infrastructure needed to maintain blockchains will go also go down. Exactly when such a thing would be pretty handy.

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#136

Post by rspeer »

tanderson92 wrote: post #82
thefalcon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good call. I've only ever read this and, interestingly, the semi-related Dole article, but they were both superb. Subscribed.

Don't miss out on the incredible "Arbitrage Discovered", one of the best things he has ever written: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-02-27/arbitrage...

I want to hear the epilogue to that story, but disappointingly the story seems to have gone quiet since it was reported.

Is Max-Hervé George still making 68% ROI per year at Aviva's expense? Did Aviva weasel out of it? Did they pay him off at a level he deemed acceptable? Did they go with the economical alternative of hiring a hit-man?

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#137

Post by [deleted] »

bduerst wrote: post #122
Buge wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't share blockchain history, then you don't automatically get some of the new coin by holding some of the previous coin. So there are no issues with exchanges and shorts. Also if you do share history, it is much much harder to start, because you start off with the previous difficulty which is very hard to mine on. If you start a new altcoin with a clean history, the difficulty starts off very low. Bitcoin C…

XT and Classic did fork the blockchain and had the history though, meaning for a time they were an alt-coin with history. That's completely counter intuitive to what you're saying about Matt's example not having a history.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#138

Post by homero »

makomk wrote: post #27
cwkoss wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the average cryptocurrency trader is much lower-information than you are estimating. There are hundreds of rubes who see "Bitcoin Cash" and think that because it suddenly jumped to the 3rd largest cryptocurrency by market cap, lots of people are talking about it, and its cheaper than Bitcoin, this could be their chance to get the elusive short-term 3x+ crypto ROI. Many of these people have no concept of the l…

Pretty much. BCH bulls who find out about the supply issue have been assuming that it can't be that much of a big problem, that most people who wanted to sell must've done so by now anyway, and of course there's no way to tell how much supply is actually locked up. BCH bears are mostly irrelevant to the price since, unless they expected it to be worth enough to justify locking their BTC in less reputable exchanges du…

There's thousands of people like me checking every minute if we can deposit bch to sell. There's millions waiting and I'm hoping to be the first.

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#139

Post by [deleted] »

makomk wrote: post #9
thefalcon wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line of argument makes little sense. In the markets that do offer a way to buy and sell it, there's still a market setting the price. This idea that there will be totally different market forces at work once more people have access to the market is silly. I would not buy a $400 BCH today if I wasn't also willing to buy a $400 BCH when transaction volume is 1000x what it is now. If anything the fact that there's…

People who want to buy BCH have relatively unrestricted access to the market since most of the exchanges have reopened BTC deposits. (Of course, whether they can withdraw that BCH is another story entirely.) Most people who want to sell do not have access since BCH deposits are either not available or require multiple days worth of confirmations. Can you see the problem here?

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#140

Post by homero »

thefalcon wrote: post #15
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm not a bitcoin nor market expert but jandrese laid down his opinion, which sounded like it made sense to me. I was hoping for a well informed response but your comment just reads like you wanted to call names versus explain your reasoning why you think jandrese's argument doesn't make sense. Perhaps's that's not what you intended but if you had an explanation for why parent's response doesn't work I'd love to r…

My point is that there is no driver for the price to crash. There will not suddenly be a surprise supply of BCH found that will flood the market. Everyone knows that there is 1 BCH for every BTC out there, and that almost none of that is currently able to be exchanged on a market. That includes every single person who is driving up the price of BCH by purchasing it in the limited markets where it is available.

There's thousands of people like me checking every minute if we can deposit bch to sell. There's millions waiting and I'm hoping to be the first..
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