Live data from Hacker News

The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market

bloomberg.com

231–240 of 327 posts

Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market

#231

It's interesting to see how this is playing out. Libertarians have long argued that government-issued fiat currency is a tool of state oppression. Now we have a real-world experiment demonstrating on a grand scale what happens when you create a currency by consensual fiat. I'd be interested to hear what libertarians think about this: Is Bitcoin truly the kind of currency libertarians have been advocating? Have I misc…

Bitcoin isn't a fiat currency. It has intrinsic value in the same way that gold does, because it's fungible, divisible, transportable, impossible to counterfeit, etc. So in that sense, I think the answer to your question is yes: Bitcoin is the kind of currency libertarians have been advocating for.

However, I think it's a bit early in the life of cryptocurrencies to make any evaluation about how the experiment is going. To understand why libertarians obsess over currency, I recommend one look at some history[1] instead, and see that fiat currencies have long been associated with war, oppression, and corruption.

To answer your last question, I don't think cryptocurrencies will actually be used unless there is a need for them. If inflation in the U.S. becomes extreme, for example, people will naturally flood to cryptocurrencies as a better store of value and/or way of transporting value. There have already been examples of that happening in countries with currency problems, such as in 2015 when many Argentinians began experimenting with Bitcoin[2].

But for the foreseeable future, most people will probably not notice any big problems using their local currency, and so they will continue to do so.

I personally don't think Bitcoin will last. Instead, another cryptocurrency will take over. Probably many will take turns over the years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Money_and_Banking...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/magazine/how-bitcoin-is-d...

Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market

#232
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this how 250 kWh of energy usage per BTC transaction is supposed to be considered ethical?

It is more ethical than financing wars through deficit spending. A on-chain bitcoin transaction allows an arbitrary number of off-chain transactions.

How many times are people going to try whataboutism on HN? Everyone can recognize it by now.

The existence of war does not absolve you. If your standard of morality is "everything that's better than war is okay", you have approximately no morality.

Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market

#233

Market 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…

Mouse over the orderbook on this page: https://www.gdax.com/trade/BTC-USD It will show you how much money you need to move the market on that exchange.

[deleted]

Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market

#234
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> In some countries, Bitcoin has been outlawed. Very few. In more/most it's just taxable. >> They also endured 90% drops in value from early peaks to troughs. Bitcoin could have gone to zero at any point if the system had failed. (It still could) OK, sure, but again not a massive risk if your initial stake was tiny. And it was a stake rather than an investment - it's not really an investment as you're not investing…

In the end, either one does or does not own the property. They choose when to buy and when to sell. From your perspective, isn't it a massive risk not to sell at this all time high value? If they hold or sell, do they deserve whatever outcome?

> From your perspective, isn't it a massive risk not to sell at this all time high value?

Not really, if you didn't tie up significant proportions of your net worth in the initial buy.

> If they hold or sell, do they deserve whatever outcome?

Deserve is a worryingly moral word to apply there.

My only dispute is that early adopters took a lot of risk. It's not like they sunk their life savings into opening a small business.

Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all people feel the same way or get the same primal brain screams. Who decides who's right?

Whichever side has more hashing power. Err, I mean muscle+weapon power.

Yup, every armed robbery is a brain deciding that it can take stuff by force instead of making/creating/exchanging it.

Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government-issued currencies usually come with legal tender laws and citizens are required to pay taxes using the government money. Since taxes are not voluntary, this creates built-in demand for the fiat money. The creators of alternative competitor-money are punished as well. The libertarian position is that human interactions should be voluntary, so the coercion problem is where libertarians find issue first. A si…

> he libertarian position on wealth inequality is that as long as the distribution of wealth was determined voluntarily (without state privilege, in particular), then there is no problem. I'd like to remind the world there are such things as consequentialist Libertarians who view the value of their policy preferences based on their outcomes rather than the NAP.

Do you have any good reading material on consequentialist libertarians? I only ever run into deontological ones.

Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government-issued currencies usually come with legal tender laws and citizens are required to pay taxes using the government money. Since taxes are not voluntary, this creates built-in demand for the fiat money. The creators of alternative competitor-money are punished as well. The libertarian position is that human interactions should be voluntary, so the coercion problem is where libertarians find issue first. A si…

I'm not a moral realist so I think that libertarian philosophy is nothing but the most venal elements of capitalism congealed in thought, but I should add that the classical formulation of libertarianism is internally incoherent. You omit that for any transaction to be legitimate it must not only be voluntary but must also consist of the exchange of things legitimately acquired in the past, i.e. voluntarily acquired.…

So about bitcoin...

Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upset/uncomfortable - maybe, but at who? The rich family? His own family? Himself? Society? All of those? People on hackernews and in general tend to view "negative" feelings, envy, etc... as generically "bad". These feelings are evolutionary signals from your primal brain that something isn't going right. Its up to you to fix that, however you see fit.

> These feelings are evolutionary signals from your primal brain that something isn't going right. Its up to you to fix that, however you see fit. So rape and pillaging it is then.

I mean those two have pretty clear risks as well. Morality might moderate people's primal feelings but they are even better moderated by understanding opportunity - costs of the actions. Nevertheless, there is nothing inherently "bad" about "negative" feelings. They just tell you something isn't going right and you have to fix it. How you do that - is up to you.

Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market

#239

There's absolutely no source to the claim that 40% is owned by 1000 people. Only at the very end of the article we see a lateral claim, that 17% of bitcoin is held in just 100 addresses. It's not unlikely the same reasoning (i.e. 40% of coins on top 1000 addresses) is used for the larger claim. But that says very little. A bitcoin address after all can be shared by many users, in the same way a bank vault can contain…

"A bitcoin address after all can be shared by many users"

Only in a context of mutual absolute trust, in both honesty and security competence.

Any person who has the password can transfer the whole wallet contents to a new wallet that they alone control, while maintaining plausible deniability.

Any person who unwillingly compromises the password to a third party has compromised the entire wallet.

Re: The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market

#240

It's interesting to see how this is playing out. Libertarians have long argued that government-issued fiat currency is a tool of state oppression. Now we have a real-world experiment demonstrating on a grand scale what happens when you create a currency by consensual fiat. I'd be interested to hear what libertarians think about this: Is Bitcoin truly the kind of currency libertarians have been advocating? Have I misc…

Also since a large number of coins are lost the 40% number understates the size of the whales. Estimates are that 20% of coins are simply lost for good.

Up to 25% lost for good according to this source: https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/rise-of-the-zombie-bit... & https://seekingalpha.com/article/4082979-many-bitcoins-lost-...

Also many wallets are simply unspendable due to transaction costs.

Post reply on HN