Last week a FB friend discusses with his connections the winning investment strategy wrt the virus. They agreed that BTC (besides gold) is a safe heaven. It was @ $8k back then (now it's $5k).
Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
61–70 of 83 posts
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
a service like paypal would not have helped in a (dramatic) example like the hypothetical jew in nazi germany. the nazis would have given paypal a list of known jews and told them to freeze their accounts if they wanted to continue doing business in germany.
Oh come on man, you think that Germany directing a foreign country to freeze assets during the lead in to a war is a more likely way for a Jew in Nazi Germany to lose their hidden savings as compared to them trying to smuggle a USB wallet as they get stripped of all their belongings, clothes, and dignity and loaded on a train? Are they gonna hide it in their butthole and hope they don't have to take a dump until they…
You don’t need a physical token. All you need is the seed, which you can store in your head. Educate yourself.
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
it was always funny that people with a prepper mentality touted bitcoin as some sort of rock stable currency in times of crisis when government money was going to be worthless despite the fact that it basically takes an electricity source the size of the country to keep the whole thing running. What are you going to do in the post apocalypse, get a team of people with an abacus to calculate hash functions?
I'm not really a big bitcoin guy (own a few hundred dollars worth), but this seems like a straw man. I really doubt that anyone is buying bitcoin for the collapse of industrial civilization. The more prepper-case for bitcoin comes from either very high inflation, financial instability, and/or severe capital controls. It's not implausible that these conditions coexist with the continued existence of industrial civiliz…
Because a public personal ledger of every cent you ever transacted is perfect for protecting you from an authoritarian regime willing to use force against you...
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not really a big bitcoin guy (own a few hundred dollars worth), but this seems like a straw man. I really doubt that anyone is buying bitcoin for the collapse of industrial civilization. The more prepper-case for bitcoin comes from either very high inflation, financial instability, and/or severe capital controls. It's not implausible that these conditions coexist with the continued existence of industrial civiliz…
Because a public personal ledger of every cent you ever transacted is perfect for protecting you from an authoritarian regime willing to use force against you...
See Monero. Transaction senders, recipients, and amounts are hidden by default.
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not really a big bitcoin guy (own a few hundred dollars worth), but this seems like a straw man. I really doubt that anyone is buying bitcoin for the collapse of industrial civilization. The more prepper-case for bitcoin comes from either very high inflation, financial instability, and/or severe capital controls. It's not implausible that these conditions coexist with the continued existence of industrial civiliz…
Because a public personal ledger of every cent you ever transacted is perfect for protecting you from an authoritarian regime willing to use force against you...
It's obviously not as simple as you conjecture. For the simple reason that the blockchain is simply a record of transactions on anonymous public keys. Generating a new private-public key pair can be done trivially and secretly.
Everyday thousands of illicit transactions are carried out on the blockchain. The US government has never shown a shortage of force when it comes to stopping drug dealers. Yet the number of people who've been arrested based on blockchain analysis can be counted on one hand.
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would expect bitcoin to work properly with as few as 3 people... And any computer can calculate hashes.
This is a point I see a lot of people miss about Bitcoin's power consumption. It doesn't have to use as much electricity as it does, as the difficulty is adjusted to mining capacity. The reason why so much electricity is being used on BTC is a result of an arms race between miners, not a necessity of the technical specification. Bitcoin would still operate correctly with less mining capacity. What is sacrificed is th…
How quickly would the difficulty adjust? My understanding is that there is an algorithm that slowly adjusts difficulty. If a big chunk of the ASIC miners went offline and mining reverted to individual GPUs, it might be a very long time before the difficulty reverted to something reasonable.
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tend to measure bitcoin by how its proponents sell it. It has failed at all of these things - Being a fast/cheap payments network Being a decentralised cash equivalent Being a store of value The shift hasn't already happened - large businesses that have accepted bitcoin in the past have almost all stepped back from it citing a variety of problems, but mainly boiling down to it not being worth the effort, and nobody…
> ...anyone that actually thinks BTC is the way of the future would be a fool to part with it. Namely these mainly Silicon Valley based Billionaires: Jack Dorsey, Peter Theil, Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz, Tim Draper. Add Mark Cuban in there, too if you want, but he's not SV based. Seriously, if you want to put your money where your mouth is I can essentially prove your 1st/2nd points right now. The 3rd will tak…
I have no bitcoin and would never give one red cent to the shabby, frequently fraudulent outfits that call themselves exchanges in order to obtain any.
You have fun now with all that name dropping. The track record of cryptocurrencies so far has quite thoroughly shown me and most of the world AFAICT that those points are a bust. It's worse than the systems we already have, in pretty much every way.
I note you don't actually address the points made either.
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the difficulty rebalances periodically (every two weeks, roughly?), it would take a catastrophic decrease in hashing power to affect that by too much. The mining reward stays the same, though it drops by half every few years (one such drop is approaching in May). The network actually becomes non-functional for low transfers the other way - when there's too much interest, and too many transactions, the fees to ge…
It balances after 2016 blocks, not 2 weeks. This is a crucial difference because when the hash rate drops dramatically, those 2016 blocks might take 4 or even more weeks to create.
Yes, it could. There is a hypothetical "stuck network" situation, but that really is dependent on a lot of network power disappearing. Before that you'd end up with a lot of idle hash power and ex-miners wondering what they could achieve in the way of an attack with it...
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...anyone that actually thinks BTC is the way of the future would be a fool to part with it. Namely these mainly Silicon Valley based Billionaires: Jack Dorsey, Peter Theil, Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz, Tim Draper. Add Mark Cuban in there, too if you want, but he's not SV based. Seriously, if you want to put your money where your mouth is I can essentially prove your 1st/2nd points right now. The 3rd will tak…
I have no bitcoin and would never give one red cent to the shabby, frequently fraudulent outfits that call themselves exchanges in order to obtain any. You have fun now with all that name dropping. The track record of cryptocurrencies so far has quite thoroughly shown me and most of the world AFAICT that those points are a bust. It's worse than the systems we already have, in pretty much every way. I note you don't a…
cryptocurrency is what alchemy would look like if it appeared in 2008 instead of the 13th century. Both are the work of people who work up ever more complex technical arguments from fundamentally invalid premises, who try to reify these prwmises by endlessly tweaking their implementation apparatus instead of rethinking their assumptions from first principles.
both phenomena even ascribe these first principles to color coded documents purportedly authored by mythical, pseudonymous departed sages, the emerald tablet of Hermes trismegistus and the white paper of Satoshi nakamoto.
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...anyone that actually thinks BTC is the way of the future would be a fool to part with it. Namely these mainly Silicon Valley based Billionaires: Jack Dorsey, Peter Theil, Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz, Tim Draper. Add Mark Cuban in there, too if you want, but he's not SV based. Seriously, if you want to put your money where your mouth is I can essentially prove your 1st/2nd points right now. The 3rd will tak…
I have no bitcoin and would never give one red cent to the shabby, frequently fraudulent outfits that call themselves exchanges in order to obtain any. You have fun now with all that name dropping. The track record of cryptocurrencies so far has quite thoroughly shown me and most of the world AFAICT that those points are a bust. It's worse than the systems we already have, in pretty much every way. I note you don't a…
> I have no bitcoin and would never give one red cent to the shabby, frequently fraudulent outfits that call themselves exchanges in order to obtain any.
Not that I entirely disagree with your sentiment, but do you realize the biggest exchange in the US/World is actually a YC backed venture based in Silicon Valley?
You're the one that said they were 'fools to be parted with,' yet these are the very VC titans of the Silicon Valley most of you adore, I just took the time to name a few who you were referring to. I personally don't care, they're just like any other person to me.
> I note you don't actually address the points made either.
Not if I'm not paid to, no; I'm a professional, and I'm compensated for my labour/skill set, why would I bother to if I'm not compensated for my time/effort?
I wouldn't ask you to build me a iOS app that I think currently is not available because 'Apple sux, lol' and expect you to do so solely because of my views may contrast with your own. I know you are paid well for what you do, so why ask such an absurd request?
Moreover, I could just prove it to you in practice far more readily rather than just provide a written counter-argument. But you have declined.
Again, this comes down to not wanting to base any of your assumptions beyond anything than just simply stating them to be fact; there seems little to no foresight or effort in them and they seem mainly sensationalist and reactionary.
What's even worse is how broadly you guys generalize things, rather than say: right, I don't understand how this technology benefits me directly, but I can see how it would given the circumstances of someone else. That's my problem with most of these ill-informed criticisms, you cannot see beyond your own position and circumstances, often until it's too late.
Sidenote: Had you purchased BTC 8 hours ago when I made that post, the 'store of value' of your purchase would have yielded an increase in 8% in a matter of hours while everything else in the stock market and fiat currencies is tanking.