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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

#551

Post by npoc »

738292748 wrote: post #387
wlesieutre wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people want to say “I’m a bitcoin fanboy” to justify it that’d be one thing, but there’s always this insinuation that any day it’s going to find its killer use case that isn’t already solved better by a centralized system instead of only existing to buy in hopes of the price goes up

The killer use case has existed from day 1: remove the middleman. That is banks, or goverments. That's it. There's literally nothing else to it. Speculating on its value, while possible, has nothing to do with its purpose.

Its purpose is to provide an escape hatch from fiat currency that steals people's wealth, available to everyone in the world, ultimately shutting down the global scam that is central banking.

It is the hardest money that mankind has ever seen, digital, with an issuance schedule that is set in stone - no select few people have the ability to effortlessly print it, stealing the wealth of the rest and corrupting the world at its core, causing third world poverty, endless wars, corrupt media etc.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#552

Post by zubairq »

pavlov wrote: post #531

My prediction is that Bitcoin will become fully institutionalized within twenty years, to the point that the “Bitcoin” held by investors are entirely disconnected from the theoretical blockchain. A similar thing happened with stocks. Not so long ago they used to be physical pieces of paper. You could trade shares peer-to-peer and even anonymously by handing over the share certificate to someone in person. For dividen…

Actually a huge amount of Bitcoin that people bought from large institutions over the last 5 - 10 years was already not on the blockchain.

(1) a customer would go to an exchange’s website and purchase 1 Bitcoin

(2) the exchange would add 1 to an internal counter representing the Bitcoin balance for that customer on their internal SQL database

(3) the exchange would use / trade that money sent by the customer to try to make a profit before the customer sold their Bitcoin and withdrew their money

This is how big scandals like FTX and others disasters happened. Also known as “fractional banking”

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#553

Post by MacsHeadroom »

marenkay wrote: post #419
a_gnostic wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At the price of putting someone else into starvation which you ignored…

Markets are not zero sum. Value is "created* in a growing market.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#554

Post by sowbug »

lottin wrote: post #520
fearface wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, weird that you’re comment is so high up, but shows how little crypto knowledge is around in HN. A Bitcoin is a Bitcoin, but it consists of smaller units called Satoshis. Like Dollar and Cents. Since the beginning of Bitcoin. A fork is a copy of the underlying source code of Bitcoin, which in itself has no value at all. You would also need to find people who run nodes for your fork and start convincing exchanges t…

If you fork the bitcoin blockchain you have now two ledgers, each one telling you that a certain number of bitcoins really exist. Who is to say that one is right and the other is wrong? In this scenario, it's debatable how many bitcoins are in existence.

You might want to read the Bitcoin whitepaper. There is zero ambiguity in the situation you describe. That is the essence of the proof-of-work (or proof-of-stake, take your pick) solution to the Byzantine generals problem.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#555

Post by smoldesu »

npoc wrote: post #540
kibwen wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The main problem here is that you're looking at the energy use as a waste. It's absolutely not, but in order to understand why, you need to understand what's wrong with the current monetary system and the terrible effects it is having on the world. You're also missing that bitcoin's game theory means that it will ultimately only use unwanted/wasted energy. Bitcoin miners can mine anywhere in the world and those tryin…

> but in order to understand why, you need to understand what's wrong with the current monetary system and the terrible effects it is having on the world.

Are we about to find out why, or do I have to pay for your memoir to understand? I've been dying to hear you expand on this for a while now.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#556

Post by markburns »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #524
markburns wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not really a problematic upper bound for global transaction volume on transactions per second with the lightning network. There are other problems in terms of adoption and infrastructure etc, but the actual potential for humankind to have a single currency global low-barrier payment system is there. But this is more like the early days of the internet. The internet seemed pointless to most people even as late…

> There's not really a problematic upper bound for global transaction volume on transactions per second with the lightning network There unfortunately is, to open a channel you have to make a Bitcoin transaction, and you can't use lightning without opening a channel. Bitcoin processes a max of ~220M transactions per year so to onboard the world onto lightning with only one channel each would take a few decades. A rea…

It's possible I'm too optimistic on this point. I feel I have a good grasp of how bitcoin works, but when it gets to layer 2 it gets fuzzier. The initial discussions sounded really promising, as they seemed to mirror HTTP on top of TCP/IP. And we all know how much of a slow burning revolution that turned out to be.

But http seems simpler than what I've read about lightning more recently.

Total wild speculation follows:

As for the channels problem, it feels to me like you have something like ISPs or AOL being the thing that's needed to kickstart it. And perhaps the ISPs or AOL in this world are the employers and lightning banks. So yes you need bitcoin to open it, but with an employer you have the potential to have an entity with bitcoin resources and with a reason to send bitcoin to an individual.

Perhaps HD wallets with lightning kickstarter funds apportioned to new employees. This feels similar to the needing a bank account or national insurance number in the UK (social security number? in the US) to start getting paid, or similar to needing an internet connection. Yes you could choose to get paid in bitcoin and have the fees come out of your wage, and this would be similar to getting paid in physical cash today. Or you could get over the slight roadbump to get you onto the lightning network.

What would a real layer 2 look like in your opinion?

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#557

Post by MacsHeadroom »

Mariehane wrote: post #488
tekchip wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This global warming rhetoric against bitcoin is nonsense right? The current financial system doesn't run off as many or more computers in datacenters around the globe? I don't have objective numbers but I'd lay money credit card processing alone dwarfs bitcoin by a pretty good margin.

While Bitcoin is designed to reward high energy consumption the opposite is true for the fiancial system, since lower energy costs would make the different processing entities earn higher margins. Thus, the financial system provides much more utility for the energy it consumes than bitcoin does.

Bitcoin rewards energy efficiency by design, which is why the vast majority of bitcoin mining uses excess fully renewable energy.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#558

Post by roenxi »

pavlov wrote: post #531

My prediction is that Bitcoin will become fully institutionalized within twenty years, to the point that the “Bitcoin” held by investors are entirely disconnected from the theoretical blockchain. A similar thing happened with stocks. Not so long ago they used to be physical pieces of paper. You could trade shares peer-to-peer and even anonymously by handing over the share certificate to someone in person. For dividen…

The possibility of change exists, but one of the hardest promises Bitcoin makes is that you can't change the rules mid-game like what happened with stocks. That is one of the most attractive things about this asset class - if the US regulators want to change how a crypto is traded ... tough biscuits. They have to convince the market participants, globally, to trade the new way. The bar might be orders of magnitude higher than for getting rid of stock certificates.

People underestimate, I think, how much nudging happens at the institutional level which cryptocurrencies might shut down. It is a really exciting experiment from that perspective.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#559

Post by spaceman_2020 »

gigatexal wrote: post #547
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #526

I can't help thinking that Bitcoin ETFs could mark "Peak Bitcoin". When lots of people are trading it at their high street broker in their regular account, Bitcoin becomes just a number in a box - a crypto currency without crypto - with nothing underlying it.

Here’s hoping bitcoin goes to zero

Bitcoin didn’t go to zero with people buying it through shady exchanges operated out of tax havens, and you think Bitcoin will go to zero AFTER its available to every investor in the US through every finance app and is being sold by giant hedge funds?

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#560

Post by zubairq »

gigatexal wrote: post #545
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #218

Looks like these are the 11 tickers? Bitwise (BITB) ARK Invest/21Shares (ARKB) Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF (BTCO) iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) VanEck Bitcoin Trust (HODL) Franklin Bitcoin ETF (EZBC) Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust (FBTC) WisdomTree Bitcoin Trust (BTCW) Valkyrie Bitcoin Fund (BRRR) Hashdex Bitcoin Futures ETF (DEFI) Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC)

The blackrock one is missing?

iShares is blackrock
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