Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

medium.com

41–50 of 86 posts

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#41
post #33
post #17

Pardon my very limited knowledge about those things, but one thing I wonder and find fascinating about bitcoin is this : I understand that a very limited number of people, probably the initial developers, hold a very hight percentage of available bitcoin. (disregard the rest in case i'm even completely mistaken in that assumption...) Those people have an asset with an incredibly high face value. Of course, the market…

Because there's no inherent value and it's just traders making up theories, I would conclude there's this set of game theory: 1. Buy bitcoins or release media PR to pump price 2. Buy future shorts 3. Sell a large enough order to trigger margin calls and stop losses 4. Profit twice from your BTC sale, and short sale 5. If you believe the price will return, buy back in cheaper than you sold due to other panic sellers

Could you please give me your reason for believing that there is no inherent value in Bitcoin?

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#42

Bought at $230, sold at $19450. That's enough roller coaster for me. I'm out for good. Here are my issues with Bitcoin: 1. Transaction times are insane, 30-45 minutes at peak hours. Bitcoin blockchain can only handle ~10TPS. 2. Fees, upwards of $30 / transaction a few weeks ago. This makes it not practical for any real purchasing or as a currency. Both of those issues are solved by IOTA and the tangle, so that's wher…

Way to pimp your altcoin at the end there. IOTA isn’t even in the same league as bitcoin. It’s not decentralized and it’s not trustless. Just use SQL at that point...

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody is ever going to use a currency that costs you $50 to process every transaction regardless of whether it’s for $50k or 50 cents That's pretty much how USD wires work. It's markedly worse if going outside the border. Even at these fees, on friction, fees, and settlement time, Bitcoin still compares favorably.

I haven't successfully used Bitcoin yet, but it was my impression that the $20 or $50 fee was for a reasonably fast transaction, and you could get slower performance for less. If I'm transferring a large amount of money between financial institutions then I expect to wait anywhere from 24 hours to 3 or more days for it to complete. So I'm wondering if a Bitcoin transaction would be significantly cheaper if you were p…

Space on the blockchain is essentially auctioned off. If you are willing to wait a day, the best you can do is wait until there is a block with little enough competition for you to run your transaction at your desired price. This is no cheaper then sending your transaction immidietly if you happen to do so when the price is cheep.

Bitcoin used to have a concept of "priority" transactions that would allow transactions to process regardless of fees if there inputs are old enough; however this is effectivly disabled in modern Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#44

I think Satoshi marketed bitcoin as a currency, but the intention was something that more resembles gold than currency. Bitcoin as a currency does not make sense from a macroeconomic point of view. Whats the incentive of spending something of a fixed resource? Maybe I'm old fashioned but I prefer monetary policy to be decided by a small cabal of professionals.

"resource" ?

proof that it is a resource? If it cannot be used in practical context as a currency then what is this resource?

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#45

I think Satoshi marketed bitcoin as a currency, but the intention was something that more resembles gold than currency. Bitcoin as a currency does not make sense from a macroeconomic point of view. Whats the incentive of spending something of a fixed resource? Maybe I'm old fashioned but I prefer monetary policy to be decided by a small cabal of professionals.

It's not the small cabal of professionals that irks me. It's the method of increasing the money supply to generate inflation that bothers me. Central bank fiat systems use credit to increase money supply, so banks and people who consume large amounts credit (large capital projects) get the hot money first. Inflation does not apply evenly to everyone in the economy at once. As new money works its way into the economy, price levels rise. It's a rigged system for those close to the central bank.

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#46
post #17

Pardon my very limited knowledge about those things, but one thing I wonder and find fascinating about bitcoin is this : I understand that a very limited number of people, probably the initial developers, hold a very hight percentage of available bitcoin. (disregard the rest in case i'm even completely mistaken in that assumption...) Those people have an asset with an incredibly high face value. Of course, the market…

> I'm thinking something like draw regularly, in order to build a war chest to "defend" the cryptocurrency against too violent crashes

Or just print fake money and call it "USD" on your exchange.

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#47
post #17

Pardon my very limited knowledge about those things, but one thing I wonder and find fascinating about bitcoin is this : I understand that a very limited number of people, probably the initial developers, hold a very hight percentage of available bitcoin. (disregard the rest in case i'm even completely mistaken in that assumption...) Those people have an asset with an incredibly high face value. Of course, the market…

You sell a percentage of your (Bitcoin) for (cash) each time-period, and you buy (Bitcoin) with a percentage of your (cash) each time-period. You can put any two assets in the parentheses.

You end up having a balanced ratio of assets according to the relative ratios of those percentages and the current value of each asset, and it will be balanced at a rate according to the total percentage you're trading on (10% means it'd be averaged over 10 time-periods).

There is more formal analysis of this by people around optimal portfolio theory, math about how to balance your portfolio among a variety of assets to choose a risk level analytically, but this is the rule of thumb version AFAIK.

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#48

Bought at $230, sold at $19450. That's enough roller coaster for me. I'm out for good. Here are my issues with Bitcoin: 1. Transaction times are insane, 30-45 minutes at peak hours. Bitcoin blockchain can only handle ~10TPS. 2. Fees, upwards of $30 / transaction a few weeks ago. This makes it not practical for any real purchasing or as a currency. Both of those issues are solved by IOTA and the tangle, so that's wher…

Way to pimp your altcoin at the end there. IOTA isn’t even in the same league as bitcoin. It’s not decentralized and it’s not trustless. Just use SQL at that point...

Those points are not accurate.

IOTA uses the coordinator as a security measure right now (against 34% attacks) and will be removed once the coin is distributed enough to diminish probability of attacks. So saying it is not decentralized isn't honest. Without the coordinator it is decentralized.

Point two is also refuted once the coordinator is gone.

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#49

Bitcoin will be more relevant soon because there is exponentially more gold/silver/platinum/uranium in the solar system than on Sol-3. It would be silly to ship in paper every 2 years so people could trade "cash" while working at the methane harvesters and excavators. Just keep that price constant and we can finally move forward.

"Soon" is a pretty hilarious term to use here, assuming you're talking about mass scale resource mining in space. We must have very different definitions of that term.

Re: Bitcoin, I've Been Here Before

#50
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there's no inherent value and it's just traders making up theories, I would conclude there's this set of game theory: 1. Buy bitcoins or release media PR to pump price 2. Buy future shorts 3. Sell a large enough order to trigger margin calls and stop losses 4. Profit twice from your BTC sale, and short sale 5. If you believe the price will return, buy back in cheaper than you sold due to other panic sellers

Could you please give me your reason for believing that there is no inherent value in Bitcoin?

Namely the codebase, history, delusional claims, and alternatives (other crypto-networks) that make Bitcoin obsolete.

See also the false equivalency to gold:

If you understand the computer science behind Bitcoin, you'll realize how ridiculous the false equivalency to gold is.

1. The claim of "rare" doesn't exactly hold true.

Consider the 10,000 BTC pizza - how did this happen? This was the direct result of Satoshi's economic policy, granting vast sums of BTC to mint out very quickly very early for a short duration to the very small pool of people who ran the software. Satoshi's algorithm produced BTC in plentiful quantities enabling the 10,000BTC pizza - thus it wasn't rare if you were Satoshi and the dozen other early whales hording as much as possible, until the algorithm begins cutting off the production and limiting later users from producing coins, starving the economy. Now there's a psychological game being played, where public relations and marketing must convince new users to buy in. Because the exchanges are unregulated, they can manipulate the spot price though wash trading and painting the tape [2] (where trades are falsified and you just sell the same item back and forth to your friend for a higher and higher price).

The supply was created by running a piece of software. It's not magic. Most of the supply was produced very early on and as much as 30% of all Bitcoins are owned by less than 100 people.

  Best estimates are that there are about one million 
  holders of Bitcoin;  47 individuals hold about 30 percent, 
  another 900 hold a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 
  about 25% and another million about 20%, with 5% being 
  lost.  So 1/10th of one percent represent about half the 
  holdings of Bitcoin and 1 percent close to 80 percent 
  (http://www.businessinsider.com/927-people-own-half-
  of-the-bitcoins-2013-12). The concentration of Litecoin 
  ownership is similar 
  (http://litecoin-rich-list.blogspot.com).  
  Most of the big wallets have been in place from early on, 
  so sitting back and watching your capital grow has been a 
  very successful strategy.


  The distribution of Bitcoin holdings  looks much like the 
  distribution of wealth in North Korea and makes the 
  China’s and even the US’ wealth distribution look like 
  that of a workers’ paradise
2. Easy migration to more advanced e-cash services, LTC, XMR, ETH, so on See: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/views/all/

3. Bitcoin network requires ASIC miners, largely centralized in China [3]. Assuming the inveitable surpassing of a more advanced cryptosytem making Bitcoin obsolete, as the market is informed there will be a decline in BTC's spot price and once this falls below the cost of OPEX for miners, the hardware goes offline and the network will cease to function. Maximalists will attempt to offer an emergency fork, in any attempt to save their "investment", just as they have developed the lightening network to create centeralized payment hubs, so "investors" can act as liquidity providors and take fees, instead of miners.

4. Electricty usage is unsustainable, GOTO 3

[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/86/is-it-possibl...

http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-inequality-2014-1

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r04gfWfRkE

[3] https://qz.com/1055126/photos-china-has-one-of-worlds-larges...

Post reply on HN