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Bitcoin breaks above $20k

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461–470 of 473 posts

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#461

Let's pay tribute to the very first Hacker News thread about Bitcoin back in May, 2009 with this classic comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852 > Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency.

What a nice find!!

The author of that comment is Co-founder, CEO at Pachyderm (W15) pachyderm.io, and First employee at RethinkDB (S09).

This goes to show that, despite you might be a smart individual like Joe Doliner, you can be absolutely wrong about the future.

To be clear: I have a high opinion of Joe Doliner; in this particular stance, he was obviously very wrong about the future of Bitcoin. Like most other people.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proper currencies are used to pay your bills: anything else is speculative. You might think this is a silly definition, because it means that the determination of how "proper" a currency is depends on where that person lives. And that's absolutely correct. I have no functional use for Turkish Lira. The only reason I would possess any is because I'm speculating that the value of Lira will increase relative to the curr…

> I have no functional use for Turkish Lira. The only reason I would possess any is because I'm speculating that the value of Lira will increase relative to the currency I use to pay for my needs. Or if you’re in Turkey or Northern Cyprus.

I'm neither, so it serves no use for me, other than for speculative purposes; and that's my entire point.

If the OP wants a metric to use to gauge how "proper" a currency is, that metric should be primarily weighted by 1) how many people need to use it day-to-day, 2) the volume of goods and services transacted it in every day.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#464
post #94

It's kinda sad that the pricing or market capitalization is the only thing that is being talked about in the "cryptocurrency community", instead of focussing on how the technology can be useful for society. Like for example if you look at /r/Bitcoin, there's a sidebar with "Submit text/link NOT about price", yet virtually every post is about price, even if just indirectly (Paypal joins the cryptocurrency bandwagon an…

I think this is representative of a bigger problem within the developed world: the top problem on many people's mind is "Other people have money and I don't." This manifests in a lot of other areas as well: stock market speculation, people asking for government handouts, folks looking for get-rich-quick startup ideas, glorification of the "side hustle", etc. And I think the root cause of that is that productivity gro…

That’s an elegant and insightful way to describe what’s going on in the developed world. Do you have a vision for a way out of the quagmire of speculation affluenza for the few and envy for the many without opportunity to you know.. make things again?

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The premise of A is incorrect. (Banks cannot only lend out ONLY every penny they have...) Banks have (until March 2020) been able to lend out 10x the amount of pennies they have... aka assets listed on their books. Now they are able to lend out an infinite amount of pennies they have. Theoretically all money is "loan money". That's how money is primary created through fractional reserve banking, through loans. I own…

Let’s say there are only two banks in the world for simplicity. 1)You start with boomer’s 1M of savings in BankA 2) The bank lends out 1M of that to Judy who deposits it in bank b. 3) bank b lends out that 1M to James who deposits it into his account in bank A. 4) bank a lends out that 1M to Jesse who buys a house from Karen. Karen deposits the money in her account at bank b. 5) bank B lends that 1M out to Jordan who…

I mean exactly what you just laid out there. That's how money is created. By loaning it out to others in exchange for hard assets... Or at least that's how it was created prior to the reserve requirement being eliminated.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#466
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ethereum was only about a year old at the time. When Bitcoin a year-and-a-half old, it had a bug that required a five-hour chain rollback. >Bitcoin people will object and say that was a bug with the blockchain itself. However, sample code on ethereum.org had vulnerabilities similar to TheDAO's bug, so arguably it was a platform issue on Ethereum as well. I think the main difference here was that bitcoin never had a…

Propose another large Bitcoin rollback and see how the community reacts. The idea that the longest chain always wins has been a core value in Bitcoin since its inception; the manual rollback was a complete violation of that. It was also necessary for success, but the Bitcoin community has little grounds for moral superiority here.

I'm pretty sure that rollbacks to fix bugs in the chain itself would still be ok today.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#467
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you notice? Not sure what you are trying to allude to.

Plenty of individual transactions (at least on this recording time scale) and not a flow as an economy would daily. Plus some odd transactions where money is allocated to several wallets at the same time. I wish it had the relative size included in the visualization.

This is a real-time visualization so I wouldn't expect anything else even if it was showing USD, it's not like the supermarket immediately turns around and sends my payment to someone else as soon as I grab my grocery bags.

If you just take a 10 min snapshot of transactions in any currency I don't expect to see a lot of transactions flowing to each other.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology adoption has changed since those analogies were developed. Bitcoin has been consistently "around the corner" from mass market for a decade now, while other technologies have been released and adopted.

> Bitcoin has been consistently "around the corner" from mass market for a decade now do you even know how old bitcoin is?

Yes, I do. I was using it in 2011, pre bubble, when forums were rife with self-proclaimed futurists even then, predicting Bitcoin's success as a currency.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you up to speed on the dark net markets? Most have closed. The last one in use, Empire, had an exit scam this summer. Before that, Wall Street Market was taken over by feds and used as a honey pot - where they used traced bitcoin transactions to arrest dealers/people involved. Any drug dealers still doing online trading prefer Monero, and even then, I would still say that using a currency solely to buy drugs onli…

> Are you up to speed on the dark net markets? Yeah actually. If you think Empire was “the last one in use” you obviously have no idea what you’re talking about. There are more DNM transactions happening now than ever before. There are closer to 20 markets in operation, XMR makes up less than 10% of the transactions. I’m sure many dealers would prefer Monero, but few customers do.

Empire was the last one that was relatively trusted.

Most of the new ones that aren't invite only are suspected honey pots until they go a period of time without busts or exit scams.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is saying that it is, but by your logic APPL is a great currency.

First of all, comparing 2 things doesn't insinuate that they are the same. Second of all, just because US classifies bitcoin as an asset, doesn't mean the rest of the world has to agree with that. My country doesn't. And from the wikipedia page of bitcoin: "It is a decentralized digital currency"

Right. It's a hobby currency like I originally stated. Having characteristics of assets, like you said, doesn't make an asset a good currency.
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