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Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

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Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#841
post #398

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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.

Sure, that's because a good piece of jewelry shares the same property of a good money: its scarcity. Gold was introduced to humanity as an ornament, but eventually humans discovered a better use for it.

> Sure, that's because a good piece of jewelry shares the same property of a good money: its scarcity.

That is absolutely FALSE.

Good "money" requires a tiny bit of inflation, otherwise there's no incentive into spending, but hoarding.

When people start hoarding money, rather than spending or investing it, economy starts freezing.

Cryptocurrencies are a living example of that: there is absolutely NO incentive into using them to trade, only to hoard them. Why use them today if price goes up? Non sense. Indeed nobody uses them to trade, ever. There's less people spending Bitcoin for goods today, than there was in 2016 when the amount of people in the sector was a magnitude lower.

In fact, even the narrative on websites like Bitcoin's have long moved from the "currency" to the "store of value" argument.

You're compounding many wrong and false information and building an absolutely distorted idea of how money and finance works.

At the end of the day, that's history repeating itself. As wealthy people accumulate real wealth, poor people chase pieces of paper or ridiculous blockchain hashes.

If you're happy, why stop you.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#842
post #824

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Your money, your call. But I'm wondering - why wouldn't you invest in business? Business are, after all, the drivers of economy. While cryptocurrencies could theoretically grow to "infinite" (finite supply and all. combined with fiat monetary policies), there must be some realistic limit to the growth, where the price starts to converge. For BTC, that price is somewhere in the single digit millions. Could make a long…

None of them offer the probability of bitcoin. It's the most asymmetrical bet I've ever seen. The only reason it's not already $10M/BTC is that noone understands what it is - many people think they do, but they don't. As someone who has studied the subject for 100s of hours, I haven't come across a single valid argument for why it won't absorb all the stored value in the world over time. The hardest part is just bein…

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Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#843

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I disagree with pretty much every point here, wow. ChipMixer provided a little bit of disconnect, but there was a research paper a while back that ran something like 5 transfers through it and managed to identify their mixing transactions with 90% precision. Law enforcement is most likely constantly tracking those, similar to how the NSA runs some significant percentage of Tor entry/exit nodes. Second, recognize the…

I'm going to need more context here on the ChipMixer claims. Let's say a tracked party deposits amount A in CM style mixer, and then receives private keys corresponding to amounts B, C, D, E, F, G, previously deposited in the blockchain, which happen to add up to A minus a random 0 to 4% mixing fee. You have full view of A and know that it's being deposited to CM with 100% confidence. As long as nothing moves on the…

But we don't have to search for those keys in all of the deposits that CM ever made - only in the ones that stopped churning and mixing. Maybe they try to control the dynamics of their lots to be statistically indistinguishable from the withdrawals - but that requires a vastly larger pool of capital and continuous operational effort, and I have a hunch they do not in fact do that.

Furthermore, if you are a client, how long are you willing to keep your money in private keys that you know CM also has? Even if you don't mistrust them, you still need to worry about the exact scenario that happened - they get busted and all their private keys get seized. So chances are those amounts leave the CM network of addresses pretty quickly, even if they don't get added up in a single address. So now all that combinatorial explosion drops down to a pretty tractable k-NN classification problem.

I would advise against making strong statements like "logically impossible" about things that seem to require a lot of very narrow conditions like perfect actor behavior and strong stationarity in order to be true.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#844

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cryptocurrencies are primarily a tool for grift, crime, other shady purposes. their existence is a net negative hence my hope bitcoin and with it the whole market for currencies to go to zero. but what about cash you might ask? cash has always been used for everything of course both good and bad but transporting millions of some fiat currency in a briefcase is a lot harder than stealing some wallet with monkey jpegs…

This is a very first world, privileged perspective. There are billions of people in the world who don't have access to stable local currencies or payment systems. I've personally hired people in Africa and Phillippines who prefer being paid in stablecoins than their local currencies (not that there is an easy way to pay them in their local currencies).

oh it very much is a priviledged take -- but the solution isn't to replace something when it's broken but fix the existing thing and the thing here would be governments and their policies towards their money and central banks if they have them.

the fiat system of currencies has worked and could work but wholehearted replacement of them is akin to just throwing up one's hands and not vying to fix the underlying problem. doing so would do far more good than just making it easier to pay someone but would mean an overall more stable government for the people long term.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#845
post #708

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Some people are just like that. The same thing happens on the other side of the fence alarmingly often, where someone will claim Bitcoin is the second coming of Christ and sell their home before knowing basic technical details about the network. Or people who fully understand the system, and deliberately lie about a coin's functionality for petty gain. On either side there are people promoting altruistic regulation a…

I don't believe for a second that Bitcoin or any other DLT will be the world's reserve currency. But the amount of hubris and preoccupation about this here on HN is really something else. I've long learned not to try to engage in any kind of serious discussion about possible interesting aspects.

I've been around cryptocurrency since around 2014, and I don't think the problem is hubris and preoccupation. People genuinely don't want cryptocurrency in their internet. The opportunity to spend more money online is not attractive to anyone. Conceptually Bitcoin and a lot of other networks can be nerd porn, but socially they are an unmitigated disaster. Self-custody wallets are like banks where individuals control their own money; a great idea until the scammers come by. By using managed-custody, you're not even owning P2P currency anymore and still exposing yourself to risk from a centralized institution. The broken "ownership" model caused thousands of people to lose their NFTs and tokens when exchanges went under or social engineers found their phone number.

Additionally, there are a lot of companies on HN that will try to sell you a terminal in an Electron webview for $9.99/month. Users on HN have to be diligent, so a lot of people will lash out against benign technology. Some of them probably also correctly identified scams and ran their owner out of town on a rail. That might be hubris, but I more think that both the investors and the inventors on HN are tired of reading "Yet Another Money Solution" after 10+ years of watching the old one collapse.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#846
post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By definition you can do all 3. Spend by selling convert to fiat and then buy whatever you want. "Holdl"(sic) just say long despite what sanity or logic says. Trade buy/sell like anything else.

I can sell the art on my wall and spend the earned money. That doesn't make art a currency or spendable. Trading and holding sure sounds possible :)

it sure does. wanna launder money? sell your art -- sounds like it's a currency to me ;-)

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#847
post #645

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Why would ETFs become a main way? Bitcoin is still a currency, can I trade, holdl or spend my ETFs?

> Why would ETFs become a main way? About 70% of the S&P 500 stocks are held by mutual funds or ETFs rather than individually held. If you trade stocks and would like to buy bitcoin (as an investment) are you going to do it with an ETF through your broker where the money is protected fairly well by law and insurance, or manually and make sure you don't loose it, or through an unregulated crypto exchange? Use of Bitco…

where's the stat about btc being used to buy things from?

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#848
post #834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us figured out that mankind ceased to use shells and beads (and many other things much more fixed in supply than Bitcoin) aeons ago because few people were required to settle their debts or taxes in them, and therefore their future value was entirely dependent on volatile collector sentiment rather than a broad segment of society needing them. I wonder when Bitcoiners will catch up...

No. Good attempt, but that's not the right answer. At least it was better than "because you can make jewellery out of gold and it's got some industrial uses". Let's look at it another way. Why did the people/government choose to make bank notes legal tender, when they already had gold as legal tender? Why was gold legal tender in the first place? Why not beads? I wonder when you'll catch up with bitcoiners?

> Why did the people/government choose to make bank notes legal tender, when they already had gold as legal tender

The notes came into play because of demand for credit, and the monopolist of legal force in the territory preferred to legislate legal tender as something they had control over and earned seigniorage from, which was incidentally also easier to maintain a balance of supply and demand in (if they were minded to do so).

What states absolutely aren't looking to denominate debt in is a volatile synthetic asset whose limited supply is mostly in the hands of shady, unproductive foreigners, which was created out of explicit hostility to credit markets but is now propped up entirely by a speculative asset bubble.

Now that you understand that, you can finally catch up with non-Bitcoiners!

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#849
post #829

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You sound like you are in a cult.

Well, I certainly passionately believe in something that a lot of people think is garbage. I'll agree with that. The thing is, I used to think like them until I put in the time to seriously learn. Now I'm enlightened (yep, I just made it worse) Personally I think it's one of mankind's most important discoveries. It will improve the world more than most people could imagine. And it's going up forever.

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Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#850
post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hi…

There’s a very small number of mining pools that control Bitcoin. All the USA has to do to force a hard fork is order them to run alternative mining software.

Ethereum miners weren’t very successful at stopping the proof-of-stake transition. Why would Bitcoin miners be any different?
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