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Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

cointelegraph.com

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Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#391

Post by aurareturn »

rvz wrote: post #34
moose_man wrote: post #5

This is so sad. Crypto (including Bitcoin) serves as a money funnel while takes from economically insecure middle class retail investors and pours it into the pockets of the tremendously wealthy.

Crypto is one of many. Just like SPACs, crowdfunding and the entire VC landscape are always finding millions of ways to dump on retail after they made their 100x on unprofitable startups (90% of them have failed) founded by their friends racing to the IPO finishing line. This is why they have to continuously raise money and breathlessly celebrate it on social media and even on this site as if "raising capital" into t…

That's just wrong.

At least with SPACs, they're securities and you can see their finances before you invest. They're also regulated by the SECs and audited.

With the vast majority of crypto, people who start them don't intend for them to be useful. People who start them intend to scam retailers. That's it. They make up a shitcoin, throw flashy parties, spend on marketing, and then sell their shitcoin on retail. Retail knows it's all a scam too but it's a game of musical chair.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#392

Post by marenkay »

david_shi wrote: post #354

Bitcoin exists to solve the principal-agent problem that comes with delegating control of the money supply to singular institutions. If you look at the history of empires, from the Romans to the Han, it is littered with instances of societal decline as a direct result of inflation and overspending. This unilateral currency debasement is much harder if the collective (and global) definition of money is determined by d…

Bitcoin just like capitalism is a horrible failure making life worse for humanity and no proof exists it made anything better. Both accelerate the destruction of the planet and humanity.

It’s ridiculous to claim any of this is good just because you think you have a chance to get some imaginary part of the big cake.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#393

Post by lmm »

obviouslynew wrote: post #307
cornholio wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin just needs to fill needs (or wants) not met by anything else. That want being, in this case, the need to evade financial regulators and easily move large amounts of money untraceable. There is basically no other thing Bitcoin does better than traditional electronic cash, especially with the transaction fees reaching current values. Is it a legitimate want? It's a complex question involving personal and poli…

By your logic then, Signal is just a method for terrorists and child predators to communicate? Do you hold that opinion of Signal?

Signal definitely makes life easier for terrorists and child predators; the question is whether it has decent uses whose benefits outweigh that cost. (And, while I'm cautiously in favour of cryptography, I don't think that question is by any means trivial). Cryptocurrency has no such positive use cases; the only case where it has an advantage over regular payment methods is crime.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#394

Post by ac29 »

TapWaterBandit wrote: post #370
ksjskskskkk wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fidelity et all have all the dollars. if there's a fork, they will probably own 51pct alone. you will be asking about THEIR fork.

Lol this comment is funny because you clearly don't understand how Bitcoin works but are convinced it will be a problem. Owning the most bitcoin (or even a majority of the bitcoin) doesn't mean you control the network......

The bitcoin network is ultimately controlled by the economic weight of its largest holders. If the big funds control enough bitcoin, they will have the power to pick which fork holds value. Miners and node operators can operate on whichever fork they want, but that doesnt mean Coinbase or Fidelity or whoever is going to recognize that fork.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#395

Post by Aunche »

obviouslynew wrote: post #346
Aunche wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I view Bitcoin the same way I view Herbalife. I don't have any issue with the product. I'm bothered by the misleading claims made by proponents to benefit themselves.

Well Herbalife is a corporate entity, that has governing leadership that you can challenge its 'claims' because the corporate entity makes them, sells it to people who don't know better etc. Conceptually, that means that Herbalife gives people false information, they take that and perpetuate it in their MLM for their benefit. Bitcoin, is piece of open source software that was released on the internet 13 years ago run…

I used a leaky analogy, so I'll explain more precisely what I mean. When someone tries to sell their MLM, they pretend that they want to help you get rich, but it's obvious that they just want to help themselves. I get the same vibe from Bitcoin enthusiasts. For example, they'll claim that Bitcoin will help the poor in countries with hyperinflation but that seems disingenuous. Perhaps it's not fair to expect the regular Bitcoin holder to actively help the unbanked thousands of miles away, but there doesn't even seem to be a curiosity in the entire Bitcoin community about whether it's actually it's actually used that way, let alone how to encourage adoption and what the macroeconomic implications of this.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#396

Post by thinkmassive »

smoldesu wrote: post #206
npoc wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I offered the Lightning Network as a single example. I don't agree with you, but it's largely irrelevant at this stage. The fact is that Bitcoin is very likely to absorb a vast percentage of the worlds value simply as it is. Once this has happened its value will stabilise and it will become useful as a unit of account/day-to-day currency. By this point, there will be far more motivation to focus on developing solutio…

> The fact is that Bitcoin is very likely to absorb a vast percentage of the worlds value simply as it is. You present this as a fact, but the actual valuation of Bitcoin doesn't seem to support this claim. John McAfee bet (and proverbially lost) his testicles on broad estimations of Bitcoin's continued growth. Without extraordinary evidence, you can't make claims of extraordinary provenience. > there will be far mor…

> If you need an L2 transaction layer to solve an issue inherent to an L1 chain, you're kinda just admitting that the base layer is flawed.

On a similar note, TCP is an admission that IP is flawed. And HTTP is proof that the entire networking stack is a scam.

Clearly, any decent networking protocol would handle any and all information interchange anyone could ever need.

The fact that HTTP is on its third iteration, and it’s still built in top of the same Internet Protocol from 1974, proves that _nothing_ has changed. /s

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#397

Post by 738292748 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #345
Octokiddie wrote: post #205

The strong anti-Bitcoin sentiment on HN is still amusing. It goes way back - 13 years or more. Having read many of these negative comments, I think part of this sentiment boils down to the commenter seeing no point to Bitcoin. Just this thread has examples. It must be more than a little annoying to feel very strongly that Bitcoin is pointless, but to also notice that it's still here. Year after year. If that shoe wer…

There's probably more comments promoting and defending Bitcoin on HN than ones questioning it. The question I have is why do commenters feel the need to respond to any comment about Bitcoin that is not a (sometimes subtle) promotion or defense of it. A reasonable person might think it's because Bitcoin is only valuable if increasingly more and more people buy it. If it's not increasingly popular or if, God forbid, ev…

Well yeah, there's no need to defend it. Literally nothing would change. I'm just against bullshit arguments such as

"any random shitcoin did this, therefore BTC goes in the same bag," or

"no! We should absolutely live in a totalitarian dystopia and have governments that track every move we make. God forbid "

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#398

Post by lmm »

rafaelero wrote: post #289
epolanski wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold is crucial in electronics, jewellery, biochemistry. Also, can't be forked, cloned or replaced by some gold 2.0 with smart contracts or bigger block size. Seriously, imagine comparing a currency, let alone a cryptocurrency to gold. Foolishness never ends.

Gold was a currency and a store of wealth for a long time for multiple societies (even when most of those use cases you listed didn't exist). If only they had the knowledge and wisdom of epolanski from 2024 they wouldn't have made this mistake...

Pretty sure that every society that unilaterally adopted gold used it for jewellery first, and only started using it as a currency and store of wealth once its value had already been established.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#399

Post by a_gnostic »

marenkay wrote: post #392
david_shi wrote: post #354

Bitcoin exists to solve the principal-agent problem that comes with delegating control of the money supply to singular institutions. If you look at the history of empires, from the Romans to the Han, it is littered with instances of societal decline as a direct result of inflation and overspending. This unilateral currency debasement is much harder if the collective (and global) definition of money is determined by d…

Bitcoin just like capitalism is a horrible failure making life worse for humanity and no proof exists it made anything better. Both accelerate the destruction of the planet and humanity. It’s ridiculous to claim any of this is good just because you think you have a chance to get some imaginary part of the big cake.

Bitcoin saved my cousin from starvation. Can the same be said for anti-capitalism, eg. Communism? Nope, because Holodomor.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#400

Post by kibwen »

TapWaterBandit wrote: post #374
smoldesu wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin itself is a scam that wastes energy. Without custodial ownership, scam transactions are resolved no different than legitimate ones. Without diligent regulation, Bitcoin's power usage can easily balloon beyond what any single institution would consider appropriate. Both of those things are demonstrably true, and providing Bitcoin ETFs via regulated exchanges changes neither one.

Lol power usage is such a strawman argument. 1% of all electricity in USA is used watching Netflix but you don't hear people complaining. But running a global permissionless decentralised store of value currency network should supposedly be "super cheap" or it's an environmental disaster and must be stopped.

The reason that bitcoin's energy usage is a philosophical nightmare is because it's a system where energy consumption is the product. As opposed to industries which are "merely" energy-intensive, let's take aluminum refining for example, spending more energy to refine aluminum does not create more demand for aluminum, but spending more energy on bitcoin increases the price of bitcoin, which induces more demand, which increases the price, which incentivizes mining, which costs more energy, and so on in a vicious cycle. Proof of work is a problem; it's conspicuous consumption on a hyper-industrial scale, and it's coming at the absolute worst time in human history for us to be wasting energy, let alone to be inventing the optimal machine for wasting energy at an increasing rate.
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