181–190 of 309 posts
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So was buying a bunch of bitcoin in 2013. It's a bet only a few people could (should have) made.
I know plenty of people with jobs that supported them just fine who were able to acquire a lot of bitcoin early. Most of them abandoned it, and it had nothing to do with privilege or immediate need.
I think the Winklevoss twins were rightly ridiculed for thinking they invented Facebook. However, they've made two prescient bets and deserve credit for those: (1) Getting Facebook stock instead of cash as part of their legal settlement; (2) Not only seeing bitcoin's future potential, but investing in it and sticking with it. While the final result on the second one is still TBD, they deserve credit for investing in…
Absolutely. The Social Network made them out to be moneygrubbing fools, but everything else I've read shows them to be actually quite intelligent and prescient.
I think the Winklevoss twins were rightly ridiculed for thinking they invented Facebook. However, they've made two prescient bets and deserve credit for those: (1) Getting Facebook stock instead of cash as part of their legal settlement; (2) Not only seeing bitcoin's future potential, but investing in it and sticking with it. While the final result on the second one is still TBD, they deserve credit for investing in…
How well you think bitcoin’s potential worked out is likely to depend on exactly when in the next six months you decide to sell. Then again, being able to anticipate irrational investment in bitcoin is arguably also a skill, assuming it’s not just dumb luck.
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AAPL buying/selling itself is a direct link between the assets inside AAPL and its stock price. Money can literally be "put into" and "taken out of" AAPL.
Those "assets inside" AAPL are still dollars. User payed dollars for AAPL share which ended up in a dollar account or a treasury bond. Stop being so obtuse. Otherwise I can also say the same thing, that you can literally put dollars into Bitcoin by buying GBTC shares, since the dollars become "assets inside" the Bitcoin Investment Trust company.
But what are those assets worth? AAPL owns patents, inventory, raw material, real estate, subsidiaries, investments (stocks, bonds, commodities, T-bills, the whole shebang) and straight-up cash. You can add all those together and you can evaluate each of them based on how their value can change over time and under different market conditions.
What assets does GBTC hold? If the answer is "Bitcoin", you've just recursed on "What is the value of a Bitcoin?"; if the answer is "Bitcoin, cash, other cryptocurrencies, and a whole lot of other assets", great, you can evaluate each of them independently and add them all together. But again, you're recursing on the value of cryptocurrencies without really coming any closer to an answer.
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I still can’t get my head around the fact that Mark stole their idea and ran with it, and it was the twins who were made to look evil. What if this happens to any of us?
Ideas are worthless. Undoubtedly he took their concept, but I sincerely doubt he developed a complete copy of their idea. Whether or not their idea would have worked is up for debate. But it's a pointless debate, because ideas are worthless... Unless of course, they are patented.
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By allowing you to double spend, it reduces confidence in coins you buy to zero, which reduces the value of all coins to zero. You still have your coins, but they aren't worth anything.
Which is exactly why no one would spend the crazy amounts of money it takes to execute a 51% attack. It would be like self-immolation. Billions of dollars in equipment and energy and you'd have 51% of a worthless network. In practice, you would have to control much more than 51% of the network, because you'd have to catch up to the 49% that are still hashing away.
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Is this not similar to the diminishing release of bitcoins?
Exactly the point. Satoshi created the issuance curve of Bitcoin to mirror the amount of gold that was dug up.
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How expensive, $100M?
You're off by a factor of 20. The current hash rate is 17.5 million terahashes per second. Ant Antminer S9 goes for $2800 and produces 13.5 terahashes per second. In order to get to 51%, you'd need a $2 billion dollar investment.
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What do you mean gold is rare on its own kind? Aren't there tons of other pretty metals? There doesn't seem to be any unique property of gold (other than sociological) that would help it defend against competitors like bitcoin or any other new asset.
There aren't that many metals that behave similarly to Gold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_metal
You cannot invent a new noble metal. You can't fork an existing noble metal.
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How well you think bitcoin’s potential worked out is likely to depend on exactly when in the next six months you decide to sell. Then again, being able to anticipate irrational investment in bitcoin is arguably also a skill, assuming it’s not just dumb luck.
if you sell in the next six months you lose. at this point crypto is a hedge against our mad max style post apocalyptic future.