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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

#211

Post by QAPereo »

pingec wrote: post #95
sytelus wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Rubber hose...

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

#212

Post by Retric »

chrisco255 wrote: post #172
lern_too_spel wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unless they are a government, shorted bitcoins, or own a massive stake in a competitor etc.

PS: Remember the value of Bitcoin is limited as a function of the cost of that 51% attack. If the price increases by 10x the transaction fees need to also increase by 10x or Bitcoin becomes less secure.

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

#213

Post by rotoava »

ashnyc wrote: post #78

If both items are products that store of value. If it cost 1x amount of energy to mine gold and 3x amount energy to mine bitcoins and keep it secure. Should bitcoin be value more than gold ?

I find this link it looks mine gold cost far more energy consumption. (6.6 vs 123.3 In 2016) https://srsroccoreport.com/bitcoin-vs-gold-which-ones-a-bubb...

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

#214

Post by saalweachter »

21 wrote: post #195
saalweachter wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the Bitcoin Investment Trust is no different than any other stock. Buying shares of GBTC entitles you to a share of its assets and earnings, same as any other 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…

I was never discussing what AAPL or Bitcoin is worth or not. Just the claim that "you can't put dollars into Bitcoin, because there is a seller on the other side which takes the dollars" somehow applies to Bitcoin in a special way. My claim is that this is true for most assets out there, stocks, commodities, or financial contracts.

So let's imagine you buy $1000 worth of AAPL, $1000 worth of pork bellies, and $1000 worth of BTC. Then, simultaneously, AAPL decides to close up shop, no one is interested in buying pork bellies anymore, and the Bitcoin network shuts down.

What do you now own in each case?

AAPL liquidates all of its assets, pays off its debts, and distributes the balance to its former shareholders. You probably don't get $1000, you probably get something like $50 or $100.

Someone delivers some number of physical, frozen pork bellies to you.

And from Bitcoin you get nothing.

This is what I mean when I say all of the buying doesn't actually "put money" into Bitcoin: it is an investment with no underlying value. With all other markets, what you think of as a two-party trade, between the buyer and the seller, is actually a three-party affair, between the buyer, the seller, and the company or asset being traded. "Putting money" into a company ultimately results in that company having more money to build out their business with; "putting money" into a commodity ultimately results in more producers producing more of the commodity. "Putting money" into Bitcoin ultimately results ... in nothing.

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

#215

Post by spookthesunset »

dahdum wrote: post #43
felipeko wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

"So I'd agree that the sum of all e-coins will surpass gold, but I see no reason for Bitcoin to do it alone." 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. So many tokens and blockchains are coming out with incremental improvements or niche capabilities, but in the end I think consolidation of market cap…

Or, as a much more probable alternative, the whole blockchain fad dies out as it should. The blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. It is cumbersome, slow, and an absolutely ginormous energy pig. The only thing it is good for is speculation and giving a particular type of libertarian an-cap a hardon. It is useless for mainstream anything.

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

#216

Post by spookthesunset »

Lon7 wrote: post #62
aplummer wrote: post #21

Does anyone know the actual value of the money put into bitcoin so far vs this market cap of recent sale price x count? I'm keen to know actually how many people could withdraw at similar sale prices to now before it evaporated. Because it's so exponential, I would imagine a rapid sale of 5% would remove 90% of the value, but I'd love to know the specifics.

Bank of America and Bitcoin both have market caps of ~$290 billion. Bank of America usually sees huge trading volume for a stock and it traded about $1.8 billion of volume today. BTC/USD alone has done $3 billion today. I realize it's not a perfect comparison, but I think it highlights the fact that large sales aren't going to just decimate bitcoin's value.

> BTC/USD alone has done $3 billion today.

Given those figures come from the completely unregulated, unaudited, incredibly sketchy exchanges themselves, I would take that with a huge grain of salt. Odds are good a vast majority of that $3 billion is trades using funny money or, for all you know, made up out of thin air. Easy to just trade with yourself all day...

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

#217

Post by spookthesunset »

tinkyada wrote: post #84
relics443 wrote: post #27

This seems like a good indicator of a bubble. Everyone and their uncle knows a crash is coming, and these guys are shooting nonsense about regret and disappointment. 1b is a lot of money. Even for these guys.

The question is how soon is soon. I remember saying the exact same thing 3, 4 yrs ago when these 2 same guys were then saying bitcoin would go to $10000. It was something like $600 then and I thought they were totally nuts and that was a sign of a bubble if anything. Now I wish I had bought a few coins back then

> Now I wish I had bought a few coins back then

This kind of regret is exactly how you know it is a bullshit scam. No real-world investment behaves like bitcoin. It is massive, souped up penny stock designed to suck in libertarians and tech nerds.

Plus, who the fuck wants to adopt a "currency" where only the early investors get to be rich? Like, a vast majority of the BTC wealth is in a tiny, tiny fraction of people who were mining BTC way back in the day. How in the holy heck is that something you'd want in a mainstream currency?

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

#218

Post by Agathos »

dcosson wrote: post #125
sytelus wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Gold has practical use in industry which puts lower bound on its value. How did that work out for oil a couple years ago? Yes there's some lower bound on gold, but if it turns out it's lower than you thought, or if the supply can be altered to manipulate the price and drive it even lower, it's not very useful. Given that gold prices 20 years ago were somewhere around 1/6 the maximum price in that period ($300 vs $1…

> How did that work out for oil a couple years ago?

Do you think there's a new technology on the way that will increase the supply of gold the way fracking increased the supply of natural gas and oil?

Fun to think about asteroid mining...

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

#219

Post by sumedh »

Retric wrote: post #209
ce4 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin has >200k [1] unconfirmed transactions in the mempool, summing up 4.3m us$ of fees alone. fee to get your transaction into the next block is around 22$ [2] right now. Starting to look less and lesser like a currency, becoming more and more a security. edit add links: [1] https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions [2]: https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

Looking less like a security and more like a scam.

How is it a scam?

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

#220

Post by spookthesunset »

wils1245 wrote: post #136
meritt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was playing around with automated trading algorithms this summer on GDAX. With a bankroll of only $2.5k USD I was routinely contributing $500k+ worth of trading volume each day (that's only 100 r/t trades with $2.5k). Surely there's a lot more sophisticated high-volume trading algorithms taking place than what I did. Take a look at GDAX's full book [1] -- Even going all the way down to a BTC price of $8600 (-50% cu…

It’s been so crazy to see things like that just papered over in thread after thread. People talk about trading volume as though they have the faintest idea what the true, non manipulative volume is. The term “market cap” being thrown around as though anything remotely close to the figure could be realized. I’m starting to lose sympathy for the people who are ultimately going to get hurt when this crashes. The signs a…

> The signs are not hard to see at all.

Oh but this time it's different™

Seriously though, given all these trades occur on god knows what kind of sketchy exchanges for all we know half that stuff is literally random inserts in a database with no bearing in reality at all. Toss in "innovative" things like Tether and who really knows what the true value of BTC is.

This stuff is gonna fail, and fail hard. Hopefully for good. BTC and the whole crypto bandwagon is a massive, massive waste of energy.

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