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Sleeping beauty Bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2B
ksynwa wrote 13 hours 24 min ago:
Someone who is involved in crptocurrency explain this to me. If I was
this person, could I just sell these bitcoins today and get something
like $2B in cash? Or is it more complicated than that?
bookerjt wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
Think about it: for you to collect your $2b someone has to be willing
to give it to you and believe they will get it back in the future by
buying your bitcoin. Who would do that?
Then you just magically deposit $2b into your bank account? Riiiight.
That’ll set off epic levels of warning lights and in the US the
feds would be up your ass instantly.
I bet it’s a freaking nightmare to sell off that much btc.
janandonly wrote 13 hours 8 min ago:
Yes. Although selling all at once on a small exchange will not give
you the best price.
Better to sell lump sum.
Or call them to make an over-the-counter deal. A lot of ETF companies
like Blackrock get their coins that way.
yahoozoo wrote 17 hours 12 min ago:
tfw when you spent many Bitcoin on Silk Road back when it was only $8 a
coin
sizzle wrote 18 hours 9 min ago:
I remember getting a slick new GPU card and learned about Bitcoin
mining with my idle gpu power to collect these Bitcoin worth cents,
like collecting soda cans for recycling type of $ and thought it wad a
terrible waste of my idle processing power compared to harnessing my
idle gpu for the noble cause folding proteins at foldingathome.org
I downloaded the bitcoin mining client and everything to see how it
worked and had some faucets slipping me Bitcoin for free…
ur-whale wrote 19 hours 21 min ago:
I find it amazing how much these type of tech articles exert themselves
to systematically avoid posting any materially useful information.
Do you see a BTC address in there? A link to blockchair? Did I somehow
miss it?
In fact, I've noticed that this is a systematic trend, not just with
cryptos.
Most tech. journalists systematically talk about stuff without ever
posting relevant links to the actual event.
dandanua wrote 21 hours 20 min ago:
Hm, I can't recall when The Sleeping Beauty was making billions of dark
money. This is some perverted fairy tale. The sleeping beauty is our
current world, that allow all the scams, launderings, murderings to
happen.
r33b33 wrote 21 hours 56 min ago:
Ah yes, the dreaded Chinese Quantum Stealth attack.
Synaesthesia wrote 22 hours 9 min ago:
I was also around when bitcoin just started out. Many people wanted it
to be a global revolution in finance.
But instead it turned into a game of "hodl" to get rich.
Scams were openly perpetrated in the forums.
I became completely disillusioned. What exactly does bitcoin offer the
world today?
mancerayder wrote 10 hours 17 min ago:
Potential?
I am trying to buy a property, and I've been moving money around to
prepare for a down payment. It's July 4th weekend. I initiated some
moves in the afternoon of July 3. But an ACH transaction in the U.S.
takes "1-3 business days." First of all, why "1-3" and not "1" or
"3" or "2"? Secondly, why business days? I get paged at night and
on the weekend if something breaks at work, but the banking laws or
customs say that computers only move my money 9-5 during holidays?
Computers are taking non-human-holidays?
I don't get it. If bitcoin won't disrupt this, something else
should.
I have been trading it weekly/monthly really simply, and it's a few K
a month of profit. So I think it's useless at the moment other than
as a scheme to gamble. I think there's a bit of a trust issue.
yladiz wrote 9 hours 27 min ago:
This is a US issue. In the EU you can do an instant bank transfer
below a certain amount at any time, for free (after they mandated
the fees away recently), and many other countries have systems that
allow instant bank transfers. You don’t need a completely
different way of dealing with money to get improvements to the
current system.
mancerayder wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
Fair point. I don't know how many years we were behind the rest
of the civilized world in terms of having chips on our
credit/debit cards. And we still have the magnetic strip.
Well, we also use "feet" and "cups" instead of base 10
measurement system.
sarbanharble wrote 14 hours 50 min ago:
The only answer that makes sense to me is this: BitCoin is a scam
started by the oil industry as a way to tie currency to exponentially
hungry power consumption.
p3rls wrote 15 hours 37 min ago:
Facilitates scams and has set consumer web tech back a few years, but
other than that not much.
Spacecosmonaut wrote 16 hours 45 min ago:
Bitcoin is the only immutable peer to peer system ever created
(barring advances in quantum computing, and even then the protocol
can be updated). In a world headed toward web 3.0, generative AI
content & virtual reality, I think there is tremendous value in a
trustless and immutable peer to peer system. In fact, I think we NEED
it, and should as a society happily bear the power consumption that
underpins the security of the network.
Controversial, I know. However, already we cannot trust that a
digital picture is genuine. There is currently no solution to this
problem. In the near future, I imagine that the raw data of your
camera will be associated with a token on a blockchain (not bitcoin,
but a dedicated high-capacity blockchain). Such a system would allow
us to determine that a picture was indeed taken with a physical
device, and thus that the events depicted have a bearing in the real
world.
My bet is that we are headed toward a future where blockchain is
ubiquitous. Where everything of value is underpinned by a specialized
blockchain. When you order groceries, the origin of the produce and
raw ingredients are all embedded in blockchain. In virtual reality,
every digital product has a specialized blockchain. Every kind of
transaction; compute, assets, AI, will all be underpinned by
trustless peer to peer systems.
All these specialized blockchains trade security for throughput. My
bet is that Bitcoin will act as a security guarantor in our future
digital society, where the state of every blockchain is periodically
validated on the Bitcoin network. Thus, I bet that every transaction
in the future will have an associated Bitcoin cost. Thats why I own a
small amount of Bitcoin.
FabHK wrote 16 hours 25 min ago:
> Bitcoin is the only immutable peer to peer system ever created
What about the other thousands of other public blockchains, many of
which are extremely similar (DOGE, BCH, LTC, ...)?
> In a world headed toward web 3.0, generative AI content & virtual
reality
... Metaverse anytime now.
> there is tremendous value in a trustless and immutable peer to
peer system.
Personally, I think there is much more value in trusted systems.
> In fact, I think we NEED it
... because the world didn't work at all prior to 2009?
> and should as a society happily bear the power consumption
In contrast, I think if we were to eliminate Bitcoin and other
crypto, we'd save 1% of electricity with very few negative side
effects, but a significant reduction in crime, frauds, and scams.
> already we cannot trust that a digital picture is genuine.
Solutions to this problem might well involve digital signatures and
hardware enclaves in cameras (installed by trusted centralized
camera producers which could publish the public keys of each sold
camera once), but I don't see how public blockchains would add any
value. The signature of the picture embedded in the picture speaks
for itself.
> My bet is that we are headed toward a future where blockchain is
ubiquitous.
Gott forbid.
> When you order groceries, the origin of the produce and raw
ingredients are all embedded in blockchain.
Apart from the fact that I don't see the benefit of that, the
oracle problem makes this impossible, I fear.
Spacecosmonaut wrote 15 hours 30 min ago:
Let me clarify that I dont think any of what I described is a
given. I think its one of the more likely outcomes of our future.
I think its prudent to own a small amount of Bitcoin (or basket
of cryptocurrencies) in order to hedge against that future or
someting close to it.
> What about the other thousands of other public blockchains,
many of which are extremely similar (DOGE, BCH, LTC, ...)?
They are simply not as secure and could be attacked by well
funded actors. Perhaps in time another blockchain will win out.
>... Metaverse anytime now.
Just curious. Do we disagree about where this (technological
progress) is headed, or is it the timeline? I think its quite
likely that we will spend more and more time in vitual or
augmented reality. For good or ill.
> Personally, I think there is much more value in trusted
systems.
I prefer the absence of a central authority. Perhaps im cynical.
> ... because the world didn't work at all prior to 2009?
We dont need crypto right now either. I simply think that the
only good outcome of our digital future is a trustless one, and I
think blockchain will play a central role there.
> Solutions to this problem might well involve digital signatures
and hardware enclaves in cameras (installed by trusted
centralized camera producers which could publish the public keys
of each sold camera once), but I don't see how public blockchains
would add any value. The signature of the picture embedded in the
picture speaks for itself.
The value of blockchain is in the absence of a trusted
centralized camera producer that can be pressured.
> Apart from the fact that I don't see the benefit of that, the
oracle problem makes this impossible, I fear.
The oracle problem is solved in the same way the camera problem
is solved. By digital signatures of real world interactions of
the machines in the production chain.
I think the world will lean into trustless systems over trusted
systems, lets see. That is not to say that I dont think the world
would continue to function on trusted systems, I just think it
makes dystopian outcomes more likely.
MattRix wrote 16 hours 34 min ago:
It’s not clear to me that most of those use cases will be served
better by a blockchain rather than a regular centralized service…
but also examples like the camera don’t really work, because
someone could still use the camera to photograph a generated image
(for example), or hack the camera itself.
On top of that, up until this point in time, Bitcoin has been the
opposite of secure. The entire history of it is filled with people
constantly losing money and being scammed with no real recourse.
PartiallyTyped wrote 16 hours 35 min ago:
Bitcoin is not trustless. It has as much value as the collective
trust in it. Once that trust disappears, the value tanks.
Reality is that you can’t bootstrap trust.
FabHK wrote 16 hours 23 min ago:
Not to mention the fact that you can hold Bitcoin trustlessly,
and you can transfer it to someone else trustlessly, but then you
have to trust that they send to you in return what they promised.
See Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar: Irrationality, Extortion, or
Trusted Third-Parties: Why It Is Impossible to Buy and Sell
Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain. arXiv:2110.09857,
arXiv, 19 Oct. 2021. arXiv.org, [1] .
[1]: http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857
PartiallyTyped wrote 15 hours 52 min ago:
Thanks a lot for the link!
gexla wrote 17 hours 28 min ago:
This! I was around looking for alternative "currencies" before
Bitcoin even existed. But they were flawed,because they (such as
Libertycoin) were shady centralized systems. Each of them were shut
down by the US government. Bitcoin would have been the answer, but I
lost interest before it became a thing (or it was already a thing and
I somehow never come across it, because I never saw it as an accepted
option.) This would have appealed to my geek nature. But I think I
would have still lost interest in it after finding that Bitcoin also
wasn't the answer due to difficulty in spending it. I likely would
have cashed out at like $5 per coin to buy a bunch of pizzas.
ur-whale wrote 18 hours 45 min ago:
> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
I fully agree that Bitcoin did not become what it was originally
built for (a currency system for the internet), and as a matter of
fact, for very valid reasons:
- custody is really hard, and damn near impossible for most
people, including people who like to think of themselves techies and
who all end up getting caught with their pants down when exchanges
get hacked because they forgot the number one tenet of Bitcoin.
Please repeat the mantra after me: Not Your Keys, Not Your coins.
- the 10mn confirm thing is a pain for small, casual transactions
- scalability (it won't and was never designed do what eg VISA can
do in terms of TX/second)
- most people are downright horrified when they realize the
non-reversibility aspect
- most people don't understand what money actually is and hot it
works in the first place, so seeing the advantage of BTC is damn near
impossible
- etc...
HOWEVER: that absolutely does not mean that Bitcoin isn't amazing and
useful.
Bitcoin has simply become something else entirely, a kind of
financial instrument that had no equivalent up until now and which
has turned out to be profoundly useful to a very large class of
people (go ask USA - one of the country with the worse divorce laws
on the planet - men in the middle of divorce proceeding for their
opinion on the topic of assets that can't be confiscated).
Oh and yes, I already hear the shouts from the back of the room:
skirting the law!drug dealers! criminals! cyber-ransoms! Won't you
think of the children!. One single word to counter this argument:
there is thing called the USD which is used for the exact same thing
as all the above "use cases" (and worse, like toppling foreign
governments) and has never been considered evil for some reason.
I do understand and feel for folks who looked forward o Bitcoin as a
replacement for the dollar, lubricating internet commerce and why
they are disappointed. I was one of them and it took me a long time
to understand what Bitcoin actually was.
However, if you fall in the category of the disillusioned, please
consider: something else will come around to solve the problem of
internet currency. It won't be Bitcoin. It maybe layer two stuff, who
knows.
But on the other hand, Bitcoin has become something extremely useful
(and even without trying to analyze the why, the price is an
inescapably clear proof of that).
Its singular properties as a financial instrument make it something
that no other thing in tradfi can boast having:
- demonstrable finite supply, and therefore a rather predictable
outcome on a long term timeline.
- first mover advantage (aka network effect). Other cryptos might
be better and get better all the time technically, might better for
the environment, but at this point, displacing BTC in terms of
mindset and allocated capital ... good luck
- demonstrated long term hedge against inflation (it's been 15
years, and if you can afford to ignore volatility at the one year
scale, it's undeniable). On that topic, I can't NOT post this link:
[1] - transactions are impossible to censor, be it by corps or
sovereign entities (for me personally, the number one attractive
trait, a basic unbreakable defensive guarantor of individual
freedom). This goes from simply giving you a ton of actual leverage
in e.g. a divorce, to being able to work your way around tyrannical
governments (see the Canadian truckers who got all their bank
accounts frozen for daring to disagree with the thugs in charge).
- operates 24/7 trustlessly and outside any jurisdiction
- quasi-instantaneous transmission of value across borders,
geographies, distances, etc ...
- pseudonymity and privacy. While not perfect in this regard, you
neighbor could be a freaking multi-billionaire and you wouldn't have
the first clue.
- you can physically disappear and travel with *ALL* of your
wealth at an instant notice.
- it cannot be confiscated short of physically torturing the
relevant information out of you. And even then, you can protect
yourself by not knowing the full secret to accessing your BTC. And
this assume people know you have them.
- etc ... the list is long
TL;DR: Bitcoin won't replace Paypal, and that's actually a good
thing. It has become an entirely different beast, probably as, if not
more, useful than what it was designed for originally, specifically
when it comes to being a tool that protects individual freedom
against the excesses of the group.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg
TheCapeGreek wrote 16 hours 2 min ago:
All of the "you can anonymously and safely hold tons of wealth that
can't be taken from you" points you make fall apart when the
following two are true:
- For the majority of financial transactions you might want to
make, fiat is still what you need, because realistically very
little IRL uses any L2 solution. Thus, you need a fiat off-ramp...
Like an exchange.
- Exchanges mandate you identify yourself to them - KYC/AML and
all. Governments might not be able to know which wallet is yours,
but they sure as hell can and have secure those off-ramps this way.
I've seen plenty of pro-BTC arguments on a technical level about
privacy, resilience, independence from central banks, etc. but
fundamentally I've never seen anyone able to come up with something
that can out "your opponent is the government and no technical
project can overcome a legal obstacle".
ducksinhats wrote 19 hours 5 min ago:
>What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be decades
from now.
Can you do the same for any fiat currency for next week?
It offers stability and a mathematical escape from very fallible
humans controlling monetary systems.
wqaatwt wrote 12 hours 2 min ago:
> stability
That’s the opposite of stability unless you have an entirely
static economy with no growth.
Adopting an extremely deflationary asset as a “currency” is one
way to get the no growth part I suppose. It certainly wouldn’t be
stable.
We’ve (well some, anyway..) learnt that lesson with the gold
standard and permanent boom and bust cycles prior to the 1930s. It
was anything but stable in the short/medium term.
FabHK wrote 16 hours 15 min ago:
Discretion in money supply is a feature, not a bug.
But yeah, put 1% of your savings in each of the 20,000 coins with
strictly limited supply. Their value must surely rise, right.
chupchap wrote 18 hours 19 min ago:
> I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be
decades from now.
How does that help, when the value it translates to doesn't stay
the same? Also the conversion value will be impacted by changes in
fiat currency.
OtherShrezzing wrote 18 hours 28 min ago:
I don’t think it really does offer that escape, now that
there’s so much institutional investment in it. It’s
essentially tied to the decisions of 5 or 6 monetary policy
committees, in the same way APPL is, because the risk free rate
from the Fed or ECB is still the most significant factor in capital
flows.
tobias3 wrote 18 hours 42 min ago:
That's not completely true. If there is consensus among
participants (especially exchanges) to change Bitcoin (fork) they
can do it.
Can't do that with Gold.
msgodel wrote 18 hours 40 min ago:
That would be a different (forked) currency then.
tobias3 wrote 16 hours 7 min ago:
Or it would be Bitcoin classic and have less/no value. See ETC
vs. ETH. All depends on how many (important) market
participants use which version.
retube wrote 18 hours 49 min ago:
> I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be
decades from now
So what? if you say "scarcity", that by itself has no value. plenty
of things are scarce, but are not valuable, no one wants it.
And anyway, bitcoin is not even scarce. there are thousands of
other coins now, anyone can create one, these will / are diluting
the $$$ going into btc
MangoToupe wrote 17 hours 25 min ago:
Not to mention this will effectively be an overestimate given
loss of bitcoin to wallets whose owners lost the key.
i_cannot_hack wrote 18 hours 50 min ago:
> I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be
decades from now.
As this story itself demonstrates, you clearly can't, and it
already has the potiential to affect markets: "18.04 million
bitcoin sits in dormant accounts. Sizable inactive accounts that
wake up after years of dormancy draw investor attention because of
the potential market impact if those coins are sold."
It's impossible for you to know if the accounts are dormant
intentionally or because the owner has died or lost access - and in
the latter case the coins are effectively lost or destroyed in
every practical sense. So you can't even say how many usable
bitcoins exist at this very moment, and it is even more impossible
for you to tell exactly how many accounts will be lost in the
future.
account-5 wrote 18 hours 50 min ago:
I wouldn't describe bitcoin as stable.
lolc wrote 18 hours 52 min ago:
Funny thing is, we don't know how many keys are lost. They say it's
deflationary, and I say it's deflating to zero through key
attrition. And people pay for burning electricity meanwhile. Weird
game.
kragen wrote 18 hours 29 min ago:
We know it's not a large fraction, or anyway wasn't a large
fraction a year ago, because the fraction of all mined Bitcoin
that hasn't moved in the last year is only about 25%.
throw101010 wrote 15 hours 22 min ago:
Even if it was known and it did tend to zero I don't see the
issue, Bitcoin is divisible, almost infinitely if you count L2s
system (e.g. Lightning Network operates on a millistaoshi base
unit instead of satoshi). Inaccessible bitcoins mean that the
accessible ones are more rare so in a way it benefits other
holders this way.
They also serve the network as a form of security bounty, let's
say tomorrow we discover a way to break encryption "soon"
pepople will be provided with a path to safer addresses but
these old addresses, the ones for which a public key is known,
act as an incentive to look for such security flaws.
wqaatwt wrote 12 hours 0 min ago:
Point is that it encourages hoarding money instead of
engaging in anything that’s productive. Technical issues
are secondary.
throw101010 wrote 9 hours 9 min ago:
Nobody prevents you from spending and replacing bitcoins,
besides maybe the governments that insist on taxing smaller
transactions as if it wasn't a currency.
You should ask them why they've generated about 58 million
millionaires and 2,700 billionaires worldwide. That's some
actual "hoarding" you should be concerned about, instead of
concern trolling about Bitcoin.
kragen wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
It sounds like you aren't familiar with the
anti-deflation argument. I've summarized it in [1] ,
which you will probably want to read.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44471609
wqaatwt wrote 8 hours 22 min ago:
> Nobody prevents you from spending..bitcoins
Well besides common sense.
If you own a deflationary asset/currency which is
guaranteed to appreciate as long as the economy is
growing (well it wouldn’t if btc became a global
currency but that’s another matter) there is no reason
for you to invest into anything unless it offers a
disproportionately high return (or buy goods/services now
if you can delay buying them)
It would just reduce risk tolerance for investors and
increase the real cost of borrowing significantly.
That’s how deflationary currencies work (we know that
based on several hundreds years worth of empirical
evidence).
satyrun wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
Not to mention you can't have a robust credit market
built on top of a deflationary currency.
Imagine you take out a 30 year mortgage in 2025 with 12
periodic payments of .01 BTC a year.
Imagine offering a 10 year bond that will make
quarterly payments of .01 BTC. What is the price of
this bond? It is just a meaningless question
practically.
throw101010 wrote 7 hours 30 min ago:
Did you miss the word "replace" that you have removed
in your quote?
None of what you said applies to what I have suggested.
lolc wrote 17 hours 55 min ago:
Where did you get this number? All I can find is much higher,
showing more than half of the coins have not been moved over a
year. [1] [2] Edit: If I understand correctly around 15% of
coins has not moved in even ten years. So more than 20% of all
the mined coins up to mid 2015 have not moved since.
[1]: https://en.macromicro.me/charts/32355/bitcoin-supply-l...
[2]: https://charts.bitbo.io/dormant-coins/
kragen wrote 17 hours 12 min ago:
Maybe I remembered it wrong, or maybe I was just out of date.
Thanks for the correction! Still, that's basically pointing
at key attrition being a fairly minor phenomenon.
FabHK wrote 16 hours 17 min ago:
People complain about 5% inflation, and you call 20% or so
of money supply gone "fairly minor"?
kragen wrote 9 hours 41 min ago:
Yes; we're talking about 20% or so over 16 years, which
is 1.25% per year, four times lower than the 5% per year
inflation you're saying people complain about. And the
anecdotal data suggests that that key attrition was
concentrated in the early years, not just before there
were Bitcoin ETFs, not just before there were exchanges,
but before even the Bitcoin pizza.
But the big issue from my point of view is not the actual
key attrition rate but the uncertainty of the money
supply, because from my point of view, these are the
important questions about key attrition:
- If Bitcoin goes to zero, what order of magnitude of
money will the investor class lose? 200 trillion
dollars, 20 trillion, 2 trillion, 200 billion, 20
billion, or 2 billion?
- How much money and power has Bitcoin transferred to its
early adopters: 2 trillion, 200 billion, 20 billion, 2
billion, or 200 million?
- How much impact could awakening dormant coins have on
the market? If Satoshi, or for that matter Hal Finney's
heir or another early participant, started liquidating
his early coins, would that be a tenth of the usual daily
trading volume? Ten times? A hundred times?
Questions like these are why lolc brought up key
attrition in response to ducksinhats saying, "It offers
stability and a mathematical escape from very fallible
humans controlling monetary systems."
A key attrition rate of 99% or 90% to date would result
in very different answers to these questions. But 20% or
50% to date is fairly minor in this context.
FabHK wrote 6 min ago:
Yes, good point. In terms of those macro questions, the
key attrition is a minor issue.
josephg wrote 18 hours 52 min ago:
> It offers stability
Hahaha what? Bitcoin has insane volatility.
user_7832 wrote 18 hours 52 min ago:
But what's the (inherent, or even otherwise) benefit of this?
torbid wrote 18 hours 25 min ago:
If the goal is to hoard a currency itself instead of use it as
the exchange between real investments then this makes perfect
sense, but those people shouldn't be upset when we tell them we
don't directly accept their "currency".
This sentiment models a correction to a complaint I first heard
with people who tell us everything fell apart since we ended the
gold standard. They ignore that we raised all boats rapidly when
we didn't pin everything to governments ability to fight gold
hoarders for small amounts of gold entering the market. Even gold
hoarders are better off in terms of what the market has created
to exchange for their gold because that exchange ceased to be
limiting on market expansion.
One could say the US economy was exponential both before and
after the currency change, but as with Moore's Law, it gets
harder to remain exponential if as few as one limiting factor is
emerging.
_trampeltier wrote 19 hours 25 min ago:
When Bitcoin started, a banc transaction was still like 3 days, 5 if
there was a weekend in between. Also global transaction. Still a lot
of countrys have different and strange systems.
sharperguy wrote 19 hours 25 min ago:
Explaining bitcoin to someone who has no interest in it is like
trying to explain to your mother in law that she should remove
windows and switch to linux. From their perspective it just seems
unneccesarry and overcomplicated.
globular-toast wrote 19 hours 14 min ago:
Unnecessary and overcomplicated? Compared to what? Have you ever
taken out a mortgage? Ever tried to send funds overseas? Ever
wondered how entire cities are built by the people who run the
money?
Does your mother in law know what fractional reserve banking is? A
bank run? Can they explain what happened in the 2008 financial
crisis? No? They why would they need to know how Bitcoin works
beyond just "trust me, it does"?
FabHK wrote 16 hours 7 min ago:
No mortgages or funding of productive enterprises in crypto land
anyway.
I have sent money overseas, fast, cheap, securely, with fiat.
The externalities of the bad US retail banking system are
enormous. First we got PayPal with Thiel and Elon, then crypto.
:-/
sharperguy wrote 17 hours 58 min ago:
It's not the how but the why. If you know you need bitcoin you
know. If everything seems fine without it why would you bother?
Lerc wrote 19 hours 43 min ago:
Perhaps another way to think of it, is what would it take to be less
disillusioned?
What was about it that made you think it might be a good thing? Have
those aspects gone now or is the problem that there are new factors
that put you off it?
Most importantly, what could be done to get you back onboard with the
idea? I'm not really a fan of "Bad thing is bad" and like to think
in terms of "This thing has a bad aspect, what could be done to fix
it"
To my mind, I was not expecting Bitcoin to increase in value this
quickly. Few people probably were. On the other hand if the end
point of Bitcoin was to replace money, then I can see how it would
have a high value at that endpoint. That presupposes that it
reaches that endpoint. The perceived value (barring the mood based
fluctuations of speculation) depends on the proportion of people who
believe in that outcome and when they think it will occur.
When Bitcoin came out I thought that it was indeed like email for
money, and that it would take a similar amount of time for it to be
used by people in general. I figured it would be 20 or 30 years
before the average person had even heard about it. Turns out I was
quite wrong there.
I don't think Bitcoin is particularly impressive as an investment
today, the risk when it comes to retaining value is some unknowable
but probably quite high. The risk of holding and retaining your
balance adds another layer to that. For the value of the mining
reward to stay level with an external currency there has to be around
a 20% increase per year to keep up with the halving. Exceeding that
rate is what lead to the increase in energy expenditure. While it
has increased more than that so far, the one rule of exponential
growth is that it cannot continue forever.
It might have a few doublings left in it, but it is slowing down and
with a risk level where you could probably find a lower risk way to
double your money in a similar timeframe. Maybe it hits a million,
but when? If it takes long enough you're better off with an index
fund.
Bitcoin sits around $100,000 today, that's way higher than its
current utility. I feel like the value should represent the
aggregate impression of where Bitcoin will be in the long term. I
mostly think this is true and bubbles represent the flow and ebb of
the faith that has no logical support. I used to think that nobody
could sustain the delusion of value when it is not apparent for many
years on end. House prices have led me to think that maybe people
can pretend that their thing is worth more than it actually is for
many years without faltering.
I guess the world is in a funny place now. For even an index fund to
be long term stable, some counties have to continue to exist, and
people are beginning to have doubts about even that.
la_fayette wrote 19 hours 56 min ago:
> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
It is a highly reliable, global-scale P2P software system, we can
analyse, experiment with and learn from.
FabHK wrote 16 hours 20 min ago:
Global scale using 1% of world electricity that can do 7
transactions per second, because the thousands and thousands of
nodes don't trust each other and all do the same work.
edhelas wrote 18 hours 44 min ago:
.torrent be like: hold my beer
Quarrelsome wrote 20 hours 5 min ago:
they laugh at the guy who spent 10 bitcoin to buy pizza back in the
early days, but you can't directly buy pizza today with bitcoin.
thaumasiotes wrote 19 hours 40 min ago:
10 bitcoin? It was 10,000 bitcoin.
cinntaile wrote 19 hours 46 min ago:
10000 bitcoin
sipsi wrote 20 hours 48 min ago:
it's not made in rust
karel-3d wrote 20 hours 49 min ago:
You can get rich by... having it
Sort of like gold I guess.
I have never figured out "lightning network", their "solution" for
payments. (bitcoin payments are so impractical that they have a
different, separate system to use for actual payments, that works
completely differently.) Seems very convoluted. I need to pay a huge
fee just to make a channel so I can receive anything? And there is
something about liquidity? I implemented bitcoin stuff and still
cannot figure lightning out.
bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart.
LikesPwsh wrote 19 hours 1 min ago:
In the long term everything goes to zero, so an asset that pays no
dividends but has significant storage costs isn't much good for
investment.
Bitcoin holders as a group are constantly losing money by
definition. Some of them cash out at a profit, I suppose.
ahazred8ta wrote 9 hours 58 min ago:
It's the miners who are hemorrhaging hard currency.
It's currently costing $8-10 billion per year to keep the BTC
blockchain alive, but blockchain fees are paid when transacting,
not when HODLing, so it's not a storage cost.
hx8 wrote 11 hours 24 min ago:
I'm trying to figure out what the significant storage costs for
bitcoin are. It's a bit higher than a Robin Hood stock because
it costs fees when buying/selling, but it's significantly lower
than gold/silver which really require some investment in physical
security or a vaulting service.
FabHK wrote 16 hours 19 min ago:
> Bitcoin holders as a group are constantly losing money by
definition
Modulo market cap representing unrealized PnL, but yes otherwise.
Miners and exchanges take a good cut.
p2detar wrote 19 hours 11 min ago:
> bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart
That’s what my broker and many others do. They buy a pool of
crypto and resell to investors. You don’t get a wallet, you
can’t transfer your crypto at all. It just sits there until you
sell it. The most distilled Hodl practice ever.
edit: typo
omnee wrote 19 hours 27 min ago:
You can't get rich with gold. And haven't been able to for a long
long time. It usually preserves wealth due to its long term real
rate of return of around zero. But as BTC is new enough, the early
owners have indeed become very rich.
hx8 wrote 20 hours 54 min ago:
> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
Aside from perhaps gold, bitcoin is the most successful currency in
the world not associated with a central bank and state.
It's the most liquid asset that is not issued by a central bank. At
any point you can issue a transaction to anyone else in the world,
without the possibility of a third party intervention. I've had
issues pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for
money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly
flagged as fraudulent and blocked.
jowea wrote 7 hours 44 min ago:
> It's the most liquid asset that is not issued by a central bank.
At any point you can issue a transaction to anyone else in the
world, without the possibility of a third party intervention. I've
had issues pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available
for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions
incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked.
Issuing a transaction may be easy, but I don't think that's
meaningful when people get hit with issues similar to "pulling cash
out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or
having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as
fraudulent and blocked" on the on and off-ramps.
mystified5016 wrote 13 hours 39 min ago:
Almost nobody uses it as a currency. The vast majority of people
cannot buy daily goods, food, gas with bitcoin.
It is an investment vehicle, not a functional currency. For most
people you can't use it as a currency if you tried.
paulryanrogers wrote 13 hours 42 min ago:
> At any point you can issue a transaction to anyone else in the
world, without the possibility of a third party intervention.
With KYC and other regulations ramping up, how true is this in
practice?
I guess you can get some of that benefit with a wallet only you
control. But most folks can barely handle using a custodial wallet.
Transactions are also public by default, for better and worse.
anileated wrote 16 hours 29 min ago:
The difference between a currency and store of value is not an
exact line, but however vague that line is it is somewhat clear on
which side Bitcoin is, and it is not the currency side.
MangoToupe wrote 17 hours 28 min ago:
> currency
Well given that you basically can't spend bitcoin anywhere, it's
definitely not a currency.
tim333 wrote 14 hours 4 min ago:
I did manage to use some to buy an eSIM. Still not a very good
currency.
diggan wrote 16 hours 0 min ago:
> Well given that you basically can't spend bitcoin anywhere
Grand statement coming from someone who hasn't been everywhere.
raggles wrote 19 hours 43 min ago:
I don't really follow bitcoin, but last I checked over 75% of block
confirmations came from the top 3-5 mining pools. That seems a
hell of a lot more centralized than the traditional finance system.
diggan wrote 16 hours 0 min ago:
> That seems a hell of a lot more centralized than the
traditional finance system
Most countries/systems have one central bank, even if we assume
there are only 2 mining pools and they "control the network",
wouldn't a central bank still be more centralized?
Besides, the mining pools don't "own" the network, anyone can
participate, which kind of makes the whole "more centralized than
a central bank" argument kind of weak.
raggles wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
Right, but bitcoin is global, not just for one country. And
while anyone can participate in theory, in practice the big
mining pools always get their first. And if a quorum of mining
pools gets together, they can fork the blockchain or do all
sorts of other shit. Without those mining pools confirming
transactions you can't even spend your bitcoin. As a
functional currency, I just can't see how this is any better,
like in any way. Probably why it hasn't actually become a
functional currency and is just a traded commodity that
everyone is hoping like hell won't crash and burn one day.
Ferret7446 wrote 4 hours 46 min ago:
Forking the blockchain is impractical. You need enough
compute power to maintain both forks for some period of time,
which means you've effectively halved your compute power.
And all that gives you is the power to double spend, after
which one fork's transactions are "revoked". This is not a
huge problem; regular financial transactions also get revoked
(e.g., chargeback). The amount of compute needed to protect
transactions for, e.g., half a day (which is much much
shorter than the potential chargeback interval) is basically
impossible.
> do all sorts of other shit
There's not much shit they can do, without breaking the
fundamental cryptographic primitives that make it work. They
can't steal money. They can double spend, as above, or they
can delay transactions with a probability proportional to
their ownership of compute, integrated over a period of time.
If they own 80% of the compute, and they really really don't
want you to perform a transaction, then they can block it for
10 minutes with 80% chance, 20 minutes with 64% chance, 30
minutes with 51%, an hour with 26%.
Compare that with Visa which has blocked transactions it
doesn't like (e.g., porn) for years.
And even this blocking is economically disincentivized. If
you want to get a transaction through and the "mafia" don't
want it, you can offer a higher transaction fee. Either the
"mafia" will have to accept your transaction, or give up the
enticing fee to someone else. Transaction processing is a
free market.
And compute dominance is something that needs to be
maintained indefinitely. Obtaining compute dominance does
not guarantee future dominance (unlike with proof of stake
systems, which is IMO one reason why proof of work is
superior).
cyphertruck wrote 19 hours 26 min ago:
The traditional finance system is that a single central bank,
owned by a cartel of rich banks- chase, jpm, etc-- issue the
currency, charge us to use it and get first dibs on the benefits
of monetary inflation -- google "cantillon effect".
The now much more diverse mining space is much better than
completely centralized in one entity current system.
And bitcoin community has a way of working to fix weaknesses
wherever they find it... there is active campaigns to diversify
mining, as you pointed out those are pools-- and pools are being
made obsolete. behind those pools are thousands or tens of
thousands of mining operators, of all sizes, as it's viable at
industrial as well as individual scale-- many use it to heat
their house for less than the alternative, the earnings don't
have to cover the full cost to be beneficial to people.
FabHK wrote 16 hours 41 min ago:
Nonsense. While thousands of commercial banks are formally
shareholders of the 12 (not one) Federal Reserve Banks,
> the "ownership" of the Reserve Banks by the commercial banks
is symbolic; they do not exercise the proprietary control
associated with the concept of ownership nor share, beyond the
statutory dividend, in Reserve Bank "profits." … Bank
ownership and election at the base are therefore devoid of
substantive significance, despite the superficial appearance of
private bank control that the formal arrangement creates. [1]
See also
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve#Legal_st...
[2]: https://www.atlantafed.org/about/federal-reserve-syste...
Angostura wrote 17 hours 49 min ago:
Your claim is that European, Canadian, UK, Australian central
banks are 'owned by Chase, JPM etc'?
Matthyze wrote 18 hours 26 min ago:
Googling "Cantillon Effect" gives suprisingly few results. Out
of the top five results, two are Bitcoin-related, one is
Reddit, and one is the Wikipedia page of Richard Cantillon
himself.
The top comment on /r/AskEconomics is:
"The cantillon effect doesn't really exist in any significant
capacity. Central banks nowadays announce their actions well
ahead of time, that means before the actual expansion of the
money supply, people know this expansion will happen, and
markets price in that expansion. So there really isn't much
benefiting from being "early".
Beyond that there really isn't much empirical evidence on the
cantillon effect to exist in any significant capacity."
Since I know little about this topic I'd appreciate HN's view.
zer00eyz wrote 16 hours 37 min ago:
Cantillon's essay is not terribly difficult of a read and the
"Cantillon Effect" has to be the least interesting part of
it. It and Smiths Wealth of Nations are both free on the web
and well worth the read.
whoknowsidont wrote 8 hours 24 min ago:
What is the point you're trying to make?
Shaanie wrote 18 hours 45 min ago:
FED is owned by private corporations?..
aziaziazi wrote 18 hours 17 min ago:
OP mixed the "central bank" as an unique one (it doesn’t
exists, although MFI could be representative for the west)
and the multiple national ones (FED for the US). They
arguments doesn’t hold as the national ones creates money
and the are much more numerous and diverse in interest around
the world than the ~5 bitcoin pools mentioned ahead.
The FED is quite powerful and US strongly influence many
other banks but that’s by situation, not by design.
HumanOstrich wrote 11 hours 31 min ago:
Reading your comments is rather painful with all the typos.
I recommend improving your typing and proofreading habits.
aziaziazi wrote 10 hours 1 min ago:
May you point them out? Not English native and I’ll be
glad to improvise my writing.
jazzyjackson wrote 3 hours 47 min ago:
evem tho unique starts with a vowel, we say a unique,
not an unique, I guess because it's pronounced like
"younique", long u. Short u would still be an tho. As
in, "An understanding"
"It exists" is correct
"It doesn't exists" is incorrect, exists becomes exist,
"it doesn't exist"
the "does" in "doesn't" absorbs subject-verb the
conjugation, does is now the verb that needs to agree
with the subject, it. Exists returns to it's infinitive
(unconjugated) form, exist.
"They arguments doesn’t hold" typo they ought to be
the, those or their, not sure what you meant. Since
arguments is plural you want don't, not doesn't,
alternately "the argument [singular] doesn't hold"
'national ones creates money' subject verb agreement
again, either one creates or ones create
"and the are" s/the/they
"bitcoin pools mentioned ahead": ahead doesn't quite
apply to comment threads, like on a road you have cars
in front (ahead) and in back (behind), but with
comments it's above and below, because you scroll up
and down, not forward and backward. You could also say
aforementioned referring to something mentioned
earlier.
dotancohen wrote 16 hours 38 min ago:
Same could be said for the large bitcoin pools. That
happened to come about by situation, not by design.
littlestymaar wrote 20 hours 17 min ago:
- It's not a currency.
- It can absolutely blocked by third parties (either the exchange
you use or the mining cartels can).
- in practice its liquidity is tied to the liquidity of the
”stablecoins” (USDT and the likes) and as such it's not “the
most liquid” since the liquidity of those stablecoins is higher.
kragen wrote 18 hours 37 min ago:
I don't use an exchange, and the mining pools (which are not
cartels) cannot block a transaction, only delay it until a
different pool mines a block, typically ten minutes later. I
don't think this sort of intervention by a pool has ever been
observed.
The stablecoins you mention are arguably more liquid than
Bitcoin, but, except for DAI, they're issued by central-bank-like
institutions such as Binance and Coinbase. You're right that
they're not officially central banks, but that just means you get
all the drawbacks of central banks without the advantages.
littlestymaar wrote 17 hours 15 min ago:
Without an exchange your bitcoin is not a liquid asset, it's
even less liquid than most commodity for which there are
digital exchange marketplace. You can sell it over the counter,
but that makes it an asset comparable to real estate in terms
of liquidity.
The fact that the pools haven't intervene until now doesn't
change the fact that they can definitely do it, and would if
pressured by governments. Economic sanctions using the US
dollar weren't a thing until they were.
And you only need to have leverage against 50% of the mining
power to make that happen, which is pretty straightforward
given how centralized the power structure of bitcoin is
(although less centralized than for most crypto, for which the
developer has full control).
kragen wrote 16 hours 51 min ago:
The other day I walked up to a newsstand and asked the
newsguy if he wanted to buy US$100 of Bitcoin. He said sure,
checked the price, did some calculations on his cellphone,
and proposed an amount including a commission for him. I
agreed, scanned his QR code on my phone, and posted my
transaction to the network. I walked to a nearby shopping
mall to pee, and then saw that the transaction was confirmed.
I walked back to the newsstand. He handed me a US$100 bill.
I didn't sign anything, make any appointments, buy any
insurance, walk into any offices, present any identification,
or even tell the guy my name. The total time involved was
about 20 minutes, but only because I wasn't using Lightning.
I had a similarly informal and short, but more argumentative,
experience with the previous transaction, at a winery whose
owner loudly insisted that he hadn't received the money...
until he realized he was checking the wrong phone.
You are so full of shit comparing this to a real estate
transaction that I am at a loss for words. You're about as
full of shit as the winery guy. He, too, was blathering all
sorts of nonsense at me about Bitcoin that showed he didn't
have the faintest idea what he was talking about.
The scenario you're talking about is a 51% attack where big
mining pools collude to ensure that nobody else can ever mine
a block (because it might allow the laundering of tainted
coins). That would be a global and extremely obvious
disaster for the Bitcoin network, and it would be remedied by
whatever measures were necessary to end the attack, possibly
including a hard fork or strategic bombing.
Remember that the world's investor class now has 2 trillion
dollars tied up in Bitcoin, and they do not want to see it
collapse, and such a successful attack would greatly undercut
investor confidence in the value of the asset. The Bitcoin
crowd has enough pull that they extracted a pardon for Ross
Ulbricht and got a friendly SEC head this year. Even before
that, when one or another pool would grow to the point where
it might be able to mount a 51% attack, it would get hit by
DDoS attacks to bring it down.
You're comparing that to a bank declining a credit card
transaction because you're in another city.
Governments have been pressuring Bitcoin miners for over 15
years; it's outright illegal in many countries. The
hashrate dropped by more than half when the PRC outlawed
Bitcoin mining. The effect on the functioning of the network
has been pretty much undetectable.
wqaatwt wrote 12 hours 7 min ago:
> He handed me a US$100 bill.
Seems like an extremely inconvenient process and it’s
unlikely you’d easily find that many people to agree to
this unless without a significant premium (>5-10%).
Also $100 is not a lot.
kragen wrote 8 hours 56 min ago:
I can't imagine what process of transferring cash could
be less inconvenient than someone handing me a small
piece of paper? And the commission was less than 5%.
The fact that it wasn't a lot is precisely why this is a
good example of Bitcoin being more liquid than real
estate. You can't sell US$100 of real estate, not even
here in Argentina.
wqaatwt wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
> can’t imagine
Really? You can’t imagine any process which would
take 40x less time than 20 minutes?
Sure bitcoin is more liquid than real estate. That’s
rather obvious and not a particularly high bar. It’s
not particularly liquid compared to actual money or
many other financial instruments though.
kragen wrote 7 hours 57 min ago:
You seem to be selectively quoting me in a way
calculated to give the false impression that I said
something obviously false instead of what I actually
did say, which was obviously true. What motivates
this extremely discourteous behavior?
Rebutting the grandparent's claim that Bitcoin was no
more liquid than real estate was one of the main
objectives of my comment. I am glad that you agree
that their claim is obviously false, but I think it's
unfortunate that you didn't respond to their comment
to say so.
I agree that Bitcoin is less liquid than dollars,
which is why I was making the exchange, actually.
For other financial instruments, it depends on who
you are, and whether you have an account with a
stockbroker. You can't open an Interactive Brokers
trading account with US$100, and it's going to be
challenging if you are in Venezuela. You are going
to have a hard time finding newsstands that will
accept your SPY shares, but they are more liquid than
Bitcoin in the sense that, given that IB account, you
pay much less to convert them into dollars even if
you have to cross the spread, and if you're willing
to wait 20 minutes, you have an excellent chance of
earning the spread instead of paying it.
But none of that compares for convenience with a guy
handing me a US$100 bill.
wqaatwt wrote 6 hours 56 min ago:
> that Bitcoin was no more liquid than real estate
You did take something that was clearly a hyperbole
very literally.
kragen wrote 5 hours 16 min ago:
I notice you haven't answered my question. What
motivated you to treat me in this extremely
discourteous way?
We're talking about this quote:
> Without an exchange your bitcoin is not a
liquid asset, it's even less liquid than most
commodity for which there are digital exchange
marketplace. You can sell it over the counter,
but that makes it an asset comparable to real
estate in terms of liquidity.
There is nothing in the tone of this utterance
that suggests that it's joking, sarcastic, or
hyperbolic; it's a series of apparently serious,
sincere, literal claims which simply happen to be
completely unrelated to reality.
what wrote 2 hours 38 min ago:
Try selling more than $100 to the guy at the
news stand and you’ll see how liquid it is.
Imustaskforhelp wrote 14 hours 22 min ago:
See people like you are the reason why I wouldn't even want
to ever invest in bitcoin because atleast you, are so full
of yourself that you called someone full of shit just
because he said that bitcoin is highly illiquid which is
true.
Your personal experience may be different and we are
willing to hear it but don't treat it as the final truth. I
am pretty sure that it was damn awkward asking.
Here I am in my country where I don't even ask for UPI
payments to cash because its sometimes awkward and this guy
is loading bitcoin of all things and saying its liquid
lmaoo and like if it wasn't awkward.
Saying truth cut you so bad that you had to bad mouth the
other person for the sake of it. Grow up at this point,
man. This is highly against everything the ethos of
hacker-news stands for.
kragen wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
I hope your social anxiety problems improve, but I can
assure you I don't share them, as you have assumed I do.
It sounds like you also might not understand what the
word "liquidity" means in a financial context.
What "cuts" me is not people uttering uncomfortable
truths but people confidently spewing total bullshit with
evidently no concern for its truth-value or even
verisimilitude. It's even worse when it seems to be
motivated by partisan struggle, as in this case. Both
confident bullshit and partisan struggle are enormously
corrosive to the collective epistemic endeavor.
wqaatwt wrote 20 hours 51 min ago:
> successful currency
Calling it a currency is a huge stretch. It’s an extremely
successful token/“asset” but it’s about as much as a curren…
as gold is these days if not less (based on what most people use it
for).
kragen wrote 18 hours 41 min ago:
Last week I happened to visit a grocery store that accepts
Bitcoin payments.
MangoToupe wrote 17 hours 27 min ago:
Huh. Were you in El Salvador by any chance?
kragen wrote 16 hours 50 min ago:
Argentina. I didn't try it because I don't have Lightning
set up.
Lerc wrote 6 hours 56 min ago:
That's the case where I think it will pick up. If the
reason for its lack of use is perception based, then
instances where its utility outweighs perception will gain
ground.
There are numerous places and times around the world that
you can look at the situation that occurred and see that
Bitcoin would have been a boon had it been established at
that time.
Future instances will exist like that, and perhaps that's a
good enough role for it to exist on it's own. It can be
the candle that provides light when the power goes out.
The irony of course that it doesn't work if the power goes
out, but that's another degree of infrastructure damage
entirely. It might even be sufficient to ensure the power
doesn't go out during some crisis.
kragen wrote 5 hours 3 min ago:
Bitcoin in particular can remain operational in extremely
degraded conditions.
Its relatively long average block interval (10 minutes)
and strictly limited maximum block size limit the total
bandwidth requirement for a full node to a few kilobits
per second, and you can easily run that on a laptop that
consumes a few watts, easily supplied from a relatively
inconspicuous solar panel or handheld gasoline generator
run at a 1% duty cycle. Blockstream supplies a satellite
feed of the blockchain that requires no internet
connection, just a groundstation that costs less than a
laptop and uses slightly more power.
Outbound bandwidth requirements from the place where the
power has gone out are many orders of magnitude smaller.
A Bitcoin transaction is a few hundred bytes, so outbound
bandwidth requirements for transmitting one transaction
at a time are a few bits per second without adding
significant delay, and because the transaction is valid
indefinitely in the absence of double-spending,
potentially down to a small fraction of a bit per second
if further delays of hours or days can be tolerated.
Now, it's true that power needs to stay on somewhere for
the miners to keep running, and the miners need to be
able to transmit their mined blocks to the rest of the
network fast enough to avoid many orphaned forks, which
requires bursts of somewhat higher bandwidth. But
keeping the power on somewhere is much more likely than
keeping it on everywhere.
I don't understand LN2 well enough to do this kind of
analysis on it, but I'd expect it to be less tolerant of
such extreme infrastructure degradation.
MangoToupe wrote 16 hours 45 min ago:
Argentina also makes sense. Solidarity.
Lerc wrote 19 hours 34 min ago:
I wouldn't call it successful as a currency given its state at
the moment either.
I would say that much of the reason for that is because of the
perception of the currency that is widely held. It's not much
good because people think it's not much good. I bought a few
things online years ago with Bitcoin and it worked pretty much
the way it should, but most of those places that accepted it
stopped . Mostly they stopped due to the public perception.
I do wonder if it has a chance to become useful once it is old
enough to not be considered interesting, and the idea of holding
something while it increases in value dies.
wqaatwt wrote 13 hours 29 min ago:
Even if places accept bitcoin they almost universally price
their goods in $/€/£/.. meaning that bitcoin is only a
transfer mechanism. So it’s not really a “currency” in
that situation either.
I mean if somebody accepts precious metals, jewels etc. as
payment in lieu of actual money that doesn’t mean those
things suddenly become a currency.
hx8 wrote 11 hours 35 min ago:
When I said "most successful" I didn't mean it was a complete
success, just that this is the best we've done without a
state. Currencies are hard, history is full of them failing.
Maybe when an asset is liquid enough, it becomes like a
currency.
wqaatwt wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
Gold/silver worked reasonably well for thousands of years
and unlike bitcoins they functioned as an actual currency.
Even if you can pay for stuff with bitcoin it’s not a
currency until people actually start setting prices based
on it.
> liquid enough
I’m sure I could find people who would accept Apple’s
stock in lieu of actual money, that wouldn’t make it a
currency
adultorata wrote 21 hours 18 min ago:
You can move $2 billion worth of capital PERMISSIONLESS with a click
of a button, the only thing you need is the private key, are you
being disingenuous on purpose or what?
Synaesthesia wrote 20 hours 11 min ago:
Yeah that is awesome, it's great technology but it's still not
anywhere close to a revolution.
lifty wrote 21 hours 55 min ago:
A fixed supply, digital bearer asset. It’s nobody’s debt. Not
that many of those. And US debt, even though it’s still the
predominant reserve asset, things are slowly changing. And yeah, btc
is still not a proper currency.
wqaatwt wrote 20 hours 49 min ago:
A hyper deflationary asset cannot ever be a proper currency.
samrus wrote 19 hours 50 min ago:
exactly this. these people dont understand that their own
speculatory practices are what makes this a terrible store of
value. its unstable, they even have to rely on literal
stable-coins but they still dont see the problem
for the sake of argument, is there any way to introduce monetary
policy into crypto currency so as to correct for unwanted
inflation/deflation? without compromising on its decentralization
promise
qqqult wrote 18 hours 13 min ago:
> for the sake of argument, is there any way to introduce
monetary policy into crypto currency so as to correct for
unwanted inflation/deflation
yeah and you don't even need to change bitcoin - just use a
stablecoin over-collateralized by BTC built on the bticoin
network. In essence these systems work with $1 of the
stablecoin backed by $N dollars (N > 1.6) of the the backing
asset (BTC). Then they use a smart contract system of price
oracles, liquidations & interest rate curves to balance supply,
demand and risk parameters. It's pretty much an
over-collateralized lending protocol that issues its own asset
that is pegged to $1
This has worked well for the past 11 years with MakerDAO on
Ethereum and it's stablecoin DAI. I think at its peak the DAI
stablecoin had around $7 billion in circulation and was about
5-10% the size of USDT, now it's about half that. However,
high treasury interest rates and low interest in decentralized
stablecoins have made more "traditional" stablecoins like USDT,
USDC vastly more profitable and successful. In recent times
even DAI has been trying to become more like USDC and USDT with
treasuries held in intermediaries
dovys wrote 21 hours 57 min ago:
Speculation, get rich quick schemes and scams. They will exist no
matter what. At least the barrier to entry to get scammed is higher
with crypto than just online payments
t1E9mE7JTRjf wrote 16 hours 42 min ago:
> They will exist no matter what
Ok, so then they're not a bitcoin thing then right?
Synaesthesia wrote 20 hours 12 min ago:
No, scamming people is much easier with crypto. The transactions
are irreversible, for one.
FabHK wrote 16 hours 21 min ago:
Indeed. The Economist estimates the modern scam industry to be as
large as the illicit drug trade by now, around $500 bn annually
in revenue. Enabled in large part by crypto (pig butchering,
ransomware, rug pulls were not a huge thing before crypto).
akritrime wrote 19 hours 20 min ago:
As it is with cash.
PartiallyTyped wrote 16 hours 34 min ago:
Cash is backed by a government, which can coerce parties into
following the law.
superjan wrote 18 hours 52 min ago:
And crypto scamming is anonymous, low risk and can be
automated. Scamming people for cash requires you to get close
to each of your victims.
HeartStrings wrote 22 hours 33 min ago:
Chinese quantum computer just broke Bitcoin address.
rlt wrote 22 hours 24 min ago:
What makes you think that?
udev4096 wrote 12 hours 8 min ago:
They successfully broke 22 bit RSA [0], which is definitely
something to worry about
[0] -
[1]: https://www.earth.com/news/china-breaks-rsa-encryption-wit...
arthurcolle wrote 22 hours 50 min ago:
Imagine you have one of these addresses precomputed and you see it in a
flashed alert
Do you sweep to a new address or what?
EDIT: Hypothetically, not running on Majorana-2
smeeger wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
why did i not mine bitcoin in 2010? fuck
rexpop wrote 22 hours 48 min ago:
Because it's a stupid waste of resources, and you had better things
to do.
m3kw9 wrote 23 hours 44 min ago:
The guy found his hd at the dump?
bravesoul2 wrote 23 hours 49 min ago:
Might be the Pizza guy! The other thing they may have a small fortune
in forked coins too. Like Bitcoin Cash.
ProllyInfamous wrote 1 day ago:
Trivia: there are only five publicly-traded companies with marketcaps
larger than bitcoin's:
nVidia
Microsoft
Apple
Amazon
Google
BTC's marketcap is also larger than all the silver in the world...
FabHK wrote 21 hours 32 min ago:
Though their market cap is somewhat meaningful, and reflective of
some value created (flawed as that measure may be). Unlike Bitcoin.
globular-toast wrote 18 hours 49 min ago:
Bitcoin (capital B) is valuable. An individual BTC is not, but
that's true of any currency. We can argue until the cows come home
about how valuable these things really are. Speculation in these
markets makes it too difficult to judge. People will bet on these
things not because they are delivering lots of value to us right
now or in the future, but just because they think they'll still be
around in the future. That gives monopolists like the ones above
the advantage, regardless of value delivered.
dsp_person wrote 1 day ago:
Just a hair under google, it crossed earlier this week I think. This
list is fun to look at
[1]: https://8marketcap.com
wredcoll wrote 1 day ago:
Wait til you see the market cap of the shitcoin I just released!
msgodel wrote 1 day ago:
Is this why Martin Shkreli quit streaming? Did he actually crack them?
fusionadvocate wrote 1 day ago:
Quantum shorts got to him first.
cedws wrote 1 day ago:
I really wonder if Satoshi’s fortune is gone forever. Maybe the CIA
found his real identity and uncovered his keys. Dumping that much BTC
on the market would crash the market and probably even tank other
financial markets.
udev4096 wrote 22 hours 0 min ago:
Satoshi disappeared right after Gavin announced that he was going to
give a talk about bitcoin at CIA, just one of the many conspiracy
theories
ekianjo wrote 1 day ago:
did the rumor that Satoshi was Paul Leroux go anywhere? since he is
now in the hands of the intelligence services for a while this could
be a good explanation for Satoshi not being able to access its coins.
wmf wrote 1 day ago:
My theory was always that Satoshi burned the coins from the
beginning. There never was any fortune.
josu wrote 20 hours 24 min ago:
He may have burned the keys, not the coins. The process of burning
the coins is by sending them to an address such as:
1111111111111111111114oLvT2
amjnsx wrote 20 hours 57 min ago:
I see it as the ultimate honeypot. If those coins haven’t moved
yet the network is secure.
monster_truck wrote 19 hours 18 min ago:
I think you mean canary. Honeypots are decoys by definition
changoplatanero wrote 1 day ago:
Why would the cia want to crash the market?
swarnie wrote 19 hours 33 min ago:
Why would they throw a dozen South American coups, import tonnes of
crack to the inner cities, conduct illegal human experimentation or
attempt the assassination of multiple democratically elected world
leaders?
Honestly no idea, they seem a little fash-y for any logical
reasoning that i can comprehend.
Maybe they had another insurgency to fund and didn't want it going
through the vast ^official^ books?
ekianjo wrote 1 day ago:
the CIA actively relies on many means, including BTC, to organize
their activities.
dofubej wrote 1 day ago:
The day Satoshi finally decides to move some btc around, I wonder how
many automatic emails, api calls, etc will be performed because of so
many people setting up alerts.
andy99 wrote 1 day ago:
Most interesting to me is that people are worried about a $2B
transaction moving the market.
How does that compare to the market depth of actual currencies or
commodities? BTC, being objectively worthless, must be much more
sensitive to people wanting to sell I'd expect.
ur-whale wrote 18 hours 32 min ago:
> being objectively worthless
Since we're on the topic of being objective, how is, objectively,
something that trades at close to 110k USD per token, "worthless"?
I believe the word "objective" does not, objectively, have the same
objective meaning for everyone.
monster_truck wrote 19 hours 14 min ago:
It's only 0.09% of what's been mined so far. There's ~2.4T USD in
circulation? So pretty similar
bboygravity wrote 1 day ago:
How is BTC objectively worthless (I'm guessing you mean "intrinsicly
worthlesss"?) as opposed to USD or other major currencies?
lottin wrote 20 hours 58 min ago:
The expected discounted value of all bitcoin's future cash flows is
zero. This is because the only cash flow that a bitcoin investor
can expect from an investment in bitcoins is the revenue from
selling the bitcoins in the market... and the market value of
something that has no use case and is held for speculative purposes
only (i.e. has no intrinsic value) will tend to zero in the long
run.
A fiat currency that is issued by the government has no intrinsic
value either, but there's one crucial difference compared to a
cryptocurrency: in the case of a government-issued fiat currency
the central bank will intervene the market, by making use of its
prerogative to conduct monetary policy, to ensure price of the
currency doesn't drop to zero.
lrhegeba wrote 16 hours 38 min ago:
My house also doesnt generate cash flow/interest by itself, must
have an intrinsic value of zero. Surprisingly it can be used as
collateral for a loan as long as other people assign a (however
disputable) value to it.
So, of course you could be right when all (not just you) other
people decide that BTC has a value of zero. Meanwhile i use my
BTCs as collateral.
Value is more of a social judgment, not a law of nature. Hence
the misconception?
lottin wrote 16 hours 25 min ago:
Houses do generate income, called "rent". Either you rent out
your property and get paid an explicit rent, or you live in the
house in which case you get
paid in kind. So, bad example!
tasuki wrote 14 hours 41 min ago:
Agreed. How much future cash flow does a kilogram of gold
generate?
Gold has very little "intrinsic" (industrial) value. Most of
its value is pure speculation. Would you say gold and bitcoin
are rather similar then?
lottin wrote 13 hours 44 min ago:
Like bitcoin, gold is too a "bubble asset", but unlike
bitcoin, gold is a physical object with use value and
limited availability.
The thing about gold is that its price appears to to be
negatively correlated with the economic cycle. Because of
this some people argue that it makes sense to include it in
a portfolio of stocks and bonds, so that the volatility of
the portfolio is reduced, although personally I would
advise against it.
ur-whale wrote 18 hours 27 min ago:
Your definition of "worthiness" is entirely flawed. It seems to
be base on some random economics textbook definition of "value".
I am getting tired of repeating the exact same thing on HN, but
TL;DR:
. there is no such thing as intrinsic value, it is a
fundamentally flawed concept.
. the only reliable tenet in economics (as in: having always
be observed to work) is the law of supply and demand, which
"value" derives from: if demand>supply, value appears. End of
story.
. why there is demand in the first place is a many-colored
and complex affair, which economist recurrently (and predictably)
fail to analyze and forecast.
lottin wrote 17 hours 45 min ago:
Asset pricing theory is a well established field within
economics. Of course it comes down, in the end, to the law of
supply and demand, but that doesn't mean that we have to stop
here. The law of supply and demand doesn't explain why there's
a supply and a demand in the first place.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_pricing
amjnsx wrote 20 hours 45 min ago:
And this has proven successful in many countries such as
Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Argentina
FabHK wrote 15 hours 58 min ago:
A fiat currency is indeed just an accounting unit, but it has
some floor against falling to zero, as it can legally
extinguish any debt, and is needed to pay taxes.
Even so, sometimes they fall to basically zero. What chance
does crypto have when sentiment turns against it?
lottin wrote 20 hours 5 min ago:
Generally speaking it has been successful, more so than the
gold standard. It's true that sometimes states fail, but that's
not something a monetary system can prevent from happening, or
insure against.
samdoesnothing wrote 16 hours 57 min ago:
Leaving the gold standard has been so successful, as
evidenced by the inflation crisis leading to rising cost of
living and housing shortages in every western country.
lottin wrote 16 hours 32 min ago:
Inflation and a rise in the cost of living are different
things. Inflation means an increase in the (nominal) price
level, whereas the cost of living is measured in real
prices, specifically real wages.
immibis wrote 19 hours 39 min ago:
And the Bitcoin blockchain is just another state, with just
another monetary system, which you can diversify into or not,
and it can fail or not.
lottin wrote 19 hours 7 min ago:
A blockchain is not a state. A state is a political entity
that rules a territory through the monopoly of violence.
immibis wrote 13 hours 59 min ago:
[1]: https://write.as/no-time-like-tomorrow/a-blockch...
lottin wrote 11 hours 28 min ago:
Sorry to say, but you're deluded. A blockchain is made
of "information". Information has no coercive power.
A blockchain can't enforce laws. It can't stop
illegitimate violence. It can't perform any of the
functions of a state. Not even remotely.
PartiallyTyped wrote 1 day ago:
It's not backed by a government, and while some may say that's a
good thing, I think it is not.
Without institutional backing, crypto is just a number in a
database that people agree is worth something—for now.
If that collective belief evaporates, there’s no court, no army,
no tax base, and no GDP to catch it. Contrast this with fiat
currency, which—while not backed by gold—is backed by coercive
power and taxation.
Let’s start from something even more fundamental. How do you
bootstrap trust? Suppose two pseudonymous entities online want to
exchange money for services. Such a system will likely need a
reputation system to establish the trustworthiness of entities.
That system needs to be tolerant to Sybil attacks (i.e., forging
multiple identities), while also ensuring the service provider
isn’t exploited by a buyer who refuses to pay after receiving the
work.
But this exposes a deeper issue: trust cannot be bootstrapped from
scratch. It needs either:
A shared history (which pseudonyms lack),
An external authority (which decentralization avoids), or
A system of credible, enforceable consequences (which requires
identity or stake).
Without these, any trust system collapses into a prisoner’s
dilemma. Each actor is incentivized to defect (cheat) unless:
There’s a future cost to cheating (reputation loss that
matters),
There’s a benefit to cooperation over time (e.g. recurring
jobs),
Or there's a credible mechanism to enforce fairness (e.g.
escrow and arbitration).
But even escrow only works when dispute resolution is possible and
trusted. And dispute resolution requires either a neutral
arbitrator (who must have their own identity and incentives) or
hard-coded, binary rules, which rarely capture the complexity of
creative or service work.
More fundamentally, trust-based systems are built on recursive
assumptions:
You trust X because X has a good rep.
X has a good rep because others say so.
You trust those others because…?
Eventually, without a root of trust—whether a state, a court, a
verified identity, or long-standing social capital—the entire
structure becomes circular. There’s no ground truth. Just
reputation built on sand.
And so, the real limitation isn’t crypto per se—it’s that
trustless systems don’t exist. At best, we shift trust: from
institutions to code, from names to keys, from legal consequences
to probabilistic deterrents. But the requirement for trust itself
never goes away.
In a pseudonymous setting, the cost of betrayal is minimal. A buyer
can stiff a seller and vanish. A seller can deliver garbage or
nothing. Reputation can be reset at will unless there’s an
expensive cost to identity creation or a strongly linked personal
history—which violates pseudonymity.
Thus, bootstrapping trust in such environments is not just
technically hard—it is philosophically incoherent without
compromising at least one of the pillars: privacy,
decentralization, or enforceability.
It follows that if you can’t bootstrap trust, you can’t
bootstrap anything that depends on it—including money. Money, at
its core, is a social contract, a belief system upheld by
collective trust. We accept currency in exchange for goods or
services because we trust that others will accept it from us in
turn. That belief is reinforced by institutional structures:
central banks, governments, legal systems, and ultimately,
enforcement mechanisms.
But the moment that trust breaks down, the system unravels. If
people no longer trust that their money will hold value tomorrow,
they will try to offload it as fast as possible, converting it into
hard goods, foreign currency, or anything perceived as more stable.
This behavior accelerates inflation—sometimes catastrophically.
We’ve seen this repeatedly in history:
In Weimar Germany, the collapse of political and institutional
trust after WWI led to hyperinflation, with prices doubling every
few days.
In Zimbabwe, trust in government policy collapsed alongside the
economy, and the currency became worthless.
In Venezuela, rampant inflation was fueled not just by bad
economic policy but by the public’s loss of faith in any
institutional ability to right the course.
The underlying mechanism is always the same: money ceases to
function as a store of value when the population no longer trusts
the system that issues and manages it. Once the shared illusion
cracks, even fiat currency—backed by laws, taxes, and
armies—can become just colored paper.
Now contrast that with crypto. Cryptocurrencies claim to solve this
by removing central authorities and placing trust in mathematics
and distributed consensus. But this is not true
trustlessness—it's merely replacing institutional trust with
collective belief in code and game theory. And the cracks are
showing: when confidence drops, as in market crashes or protocol
failures, value disappears just as quickly—if not faster—than
in fiat regimes.
So the uncomfortable truth is this:
Money only works if you believe it will still work tomorrow.
Without enforceable trust, money becomes unstable. Without shared
trust, money becomes meaningless.
And that brings us back to the core issue: you cannot build a
functioning economy without some root of trust. Whether that root
is institutional, social, or cryptographic, it must be anchored,
persistent, and costly to betray. If it’s not, the system becomes
inherently fragile.
The reason I used pseudonymous here is exactly because we assumed
govs are bad. If govs are good, then crypto degenerates to just a
slower system for transactions.
FabHK wrote 15 hours 55 min ago:
> Money only works if you believe it will still work tomorrow.
Yeah. When crypto goes down, it'll be epic.
> If govs are good, then crypto degenerates to just a slower
system for transactions.
That's how I see crypto: an inefficient and ill-regulated
substitute for money, though suitable for crime. If governments
turn bad, stable money is just one tiny part of the problem.
anothernewdude wrote 1 day ago:
Other currencies get their value because the governments that
provide them make people pay taxes. If you want to pay the tax the
US government charges you, you're going to need some USD - so
there's guaranteed demand, and hence intrinsic worth.
There's also other debt that the US government provides in USD -
which provides value as well, in the form of bonds.
BTC has no such driver of wealth. Except perhaps money
laundering/transfers without AML provisions.
analog31 wrote 1 day ago:
This doesn't explain why the currencies of different countries
behave differently.
In my view, money is a technology. People use a technology if
they find it to be useful. I know this sounds circular, but bear
with me. A "major" currency is designed to be useful as a medium
of exchange, temporary store of value, and tool of government
economic policy. For it to serve these purposes, a government has
to moderate its own behavior to some extent.
Thus my view is that the value of a major currency is based, not
on the expectation of paying taxes in the future, but on more
general expectations of the future behavior of the government.
With that said, paying taxes is good use for money that's a short
term store of value, because you rarely need to hold onto your
tax money for more than a year before paying it.
andy99 wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah bitcoin is (at best[0]) a kind of consensual hallucination,
worth something because people believe it is. Fiat is someone
with a Navy telling you it's worth money, it's very different.
[0] in practice there's a difference between the idea of a
distributed digital currency and the ponzi schemes they give rise
to I'm real life. Bitcoin is some greater fool thing, it's not a
medium of exchange.
logicchains wrote 1 day ago:
>Other currencies get their value because the governments that
provide them make people pay taxes
That's demonstrably false, because countries like Zimbabwe and
Venezuela experienced hyperinflation (the complete devaluation of
a currency) in spite of the fact that their governments were
still forcing people to pay taxes with those currencies. So
clearly that alone is not enough to provide intrinsic worth to a
currency.
notahacker wrote 17 hours 54 min ago:
Countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela printed those currencies
in vast quantities to pay bills instead of raising [most of]
that money through taxes. Taxes owed in previous quarters were
worthless compared with the new trillion dollar notes
Zimbabwe's central bank issues to pay government officials, and
most private transactions were black market so they weren't
seeing them returned in taxes. Zimbabwe and Venezuela are the
defining example of how a currency which isn't backed by
mountains of debt and taxes is reliant entirely on speculators'
confidence...
PartiallyTyped wrote 1 day ago:
The reason for that devaluation is that trust was eroded. GP's
premise is correct, that fiat has value because of governments,
but the reasoning here is not fully correct. The value is in
the trust that the government and the institutions will
continue to function properly.
nwienert wrote 1 day ago:
People value a way to store money securely in a place that
can’t be physically robbed, that can be sent internationally
with low fees quickly.
You don’t need anything else.
For years the haters on here would screech “but it’s
volatile” - not really anymore. I wonder what they’ll decide
to hate it for now, rather than changing priors.
FabHK wrote 21 hours 19 min ago:
According to your theory, all the thousands of shitcoins are
valuable. But they're not.
There must be further reasons, then, that the price of Bitcoin
is so high. And they're purely sentiment, I'd argue. If that
changes, there's little to prevent the price from going down
very far very fast. Unlike fiat.
nwienert wrote 7 hours 8 min ago:
I mean i mentioned its volatility has gone down.
People use stablecoins as well for the same reasons.
Shitcoins are different.
samdoesnothing wrote 16 hours 51 min ago:
No, according to their theory a coin can be valued for its
intrinsic properties, not that it will be.
alecsm wrote 1 day ago:
I wish I had access to my old wallet. I mined around 1.5BTC with my
laptop and I deleted the wallet after a while because it was worthless.
amjnsx wrote 20 hours 42 min ago:
Has it ever been worthless (post pizza guy). There’s always been
someone who will give you some fiat for them.
qingcharles wrote 22 hours 59 min ago:
Same. I mined 32 BTC circa ~2010-2011. Then I did a clean install and
forgot I had everything saved on the HDD and nothing written down. I
remember them being worth about $1 a pop at the time and thought
"fuck it", but I never bothered minting any more.
userbinator wrote 1 day ago:
I think many others, including me, have also the same experience of
mining a few and then either forgetting or deleting them because they
thought it'd never turn out to be worth anything.
paulpauper wrote 1 day ago:
you probably would have sold it at $100 or something anyway
alecsm wrote 1 day ago:
I know, that's why I'd like to have the wallet now :)
Even if BTC hits 1 million in the future, 150k now would be life
changing.
twright wrote 1 day ago:
This is definitely something I remind myself of for any investment
I sell and later on explodes. For bitcoin there were way too many
highs that I definitely would have sold at.
freedomben wrote 1 day ago:
Yep. I used to pay my Dish Network bill with BTC. Youth is wasted
on the young and hindsight is 20/20
paulpauper wrote 1 day ago:
Price is dumping today, i wonder how much of a role this is playing.
those coins will be hitting an exchange likely. This has always been
the problem with bitcoin.. the implicit assumption is that many coins
are lost , but if the early adopters start cashing out, prices will
fall fast. Institutional buying and retail is still small relative to
the early adopters. There are many people , miners who are quietly
siting on huge fortunes.
Scoundreller wrote 1 day ago:
And it’s a major US holiday, whatever that indicates.
barkingcat wrote 1 day ago:
Probably North Korea.
bix6 wrote 1 day ago:
Where did they transfer them? I see fck in a few lol.
EGreg wrote 1 day ago:
On a side note, if quantum algorithms break elliptic curve
cryptography, then wouldn’t Satoshi’s wallets and others be
flooding the market with coin transfers?
The BTC network will need to require all addresses with large Bitcoin
UTXOs to send them to new wallets, that are quantum-resistant, by a
certain date, or lose the ability to move that money.
notnullorvoid wrote 1 day ago:
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no proof that a
general solution to elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem can't
be found.
It's reasonable to assume that a solution hasn't been found yet
though, otherwise that would be the world's best kept secret.
xoralkindi wrote 16 hours 46 min ago:
Shor's algorithm, originally designed for integer factorization,
can also be adapted to solve the discrete logarithm problem in
polynomial time on a quantum computer. There is also the less
efficient Grover's algorithm can also be used for unstructured
search problems on a quantum computer.
notnullorvoid wrote 14 hours 2 min ago:
I was thinking more along the lines of solving in polynomial time
on a conventional computer.
wmf wrote 1 day ago:
That's downstream of P vs NP.
EGreg wrote 1 day ago:
I have been saying for a decade
Satoshi isnt gonna move wallets 1 through 10
But he probably had wallet 55, 182 and 281-290 and has been spending
this whole time. Any founder of a crypto project can do that.
dzhiurgis wrote 1 day ago:
Can they be spending sidechain coins quietly or is that visible too?
tromp wrote 19 hours 51 min ago:
You can visibly send BTC to the Liquid federated side-chain, where
amounts in txs are hidden.
gnabgib wrote 1 day ago:
Discussion landed in another thread (74 points, 32 comments)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466896
jedberg wrote 1 day ago:
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466896
throw0101d wrote 1 day ago:
Perhaps also see the linked page "Top Dormant for 5 years Bitcoin
Addresses":
*
[1]: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-dormant_5y-bitcoin-addresses...
throw0101d wrote 1 day ago:
Personally I think that this can be considered on the "bug" side of
Bitcoin's finite number coins: if, over time, they are lost, then
there's a smaller quantity† of currency that is useable to actually
do stuff with.
This can make the 'rate of deflation' that occurs worse:
* [1] * [2] * [3] † I am aware of satoshis.
[1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral
[2]: https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2014/06/the-perils-of-bitcoin-...
[3]: https://crypto.bi/deflationary/
Gigachad wrote 1 day ago:
I don’t think that’s much of an issue for usage. Since a bitcoin
can be divided in to 100,000,000 satoshis. There would only need to
be a handful of coins left accessible for the system to be usable.
Being deflationary I agree is a problem, but not the idea that there
aren’t enough usable coins left.
globular-toast wrote 18 hours 58 min ago:
Everyone always repeats the "deflationary bad" mantra, but I wonder
if it really would be. Is the world really going to come crashing
down if people only spend on things they need rather than endlessly
cycling through shit they don't?
jMyles wrote 13 hours 40 min ago:
> Is the world really going to come crashing down if people only
spend on things they need rather than endlessly cycling through
shit they don't?
In broad strokes, this is perhaps the most important question of
environmental sustainability which stems from monetary policy.
Second most important is the matter of how much energy is spent
on security (eg, in the case of bitcoin, the horrifying amounts
of power spent on SHA256 hashing, and in the case of USD, the
perhaps even more horrifying energy consumption of the global
petrodollar empire).
We spend so much deliberation on this second question that we
often ignore the first: what monetary policies will make us chill
out on the whole
importing-plastic-shit-we-don't-need-from-the-other-side-of-the-e
arth thing?
walls wrote 14 hours 17 min ago:
It's only a problem for capitalism.
kragen wrote 17 hours 42 min ago:
The concern is that capitalism allocates resources to the
production of socially valuable goods because corporations can
raise money to buy the means of production of those goods before
producing them by selling shares in their future profits to
investors who are willing to accept some risk of bankruptcy in
exchange for those future profits, which result from consumers'
rational judgment that the goods are sufficiently valuable to
them to be worth buying at a price higher than the cost of goods
sold.
None of the links in this chain is perfect†, but one of the
weaker ones is where investors are willing to accept risk. A
guaranteed deflationary currency is a risk-free way to get a
return on your investment, so companies have to offer a higher
rate of return, narrowing the set of goods that can justify such
investment.
But the same criticism can be leveled at Treasury bonds and (to
many people's minds) real estate, so I'm skeptical of it, and
anyway "risk-free" is not a good description of Bitcoin.
______
† Consumers knowingly buy socially harmful goods such as
cigarettes, they unintentionally buy worthless goods because
producers lie to them, investors are largely speculators driven
by herd mentality rather than rational assessors of future
returns, corporations cheat investors due to principal–agent
problems, and externalized costs and benefits such as pollution
aren't measured at all. Still, it's a damn sight better at
organizing economic production than the Great Leap Forward, the
Southern slave plantations, or the medieval guilds.
wqaatwt wrote 7 hours 1 min ago:
There is plenty of empirical evidence from the 1800 to 1930s
showing how a deflationary currency affects the economy.
Amongst other things getting stuck in permanent boom and bust
cycles wasn’t that great.
> But the same criticism can be leveled at Treasury bonds
Not to the same extent. Bond returns are usually barely above
inflation. e.g. back in the second half of the 1800s you’d
get 4% interest plus 1.5-2% average yearly deflation (since the
economy was growing due to technological progress/etc. yet
money was relatively very scarce).
patrickhogan1 wrote 1 day ago:
Fair point. It seems largely that bitcoin is a store of value rather
than a currency that you do stuff with at this point.
amelius wrote 1 day ago:
> useable to actually do stuff with
You mean actually buy stuff? Come on, everybody knows that BTC is
used mostly for speculation ...
oleganza wrote 1 day ago:
I love how people bring up deflationary spiral as a "peril" while the
prerequisite for it is the universal and smashing success of Bitcoin.
The only "problem" Bitcoin poses for economies is for governments to
fine-tune their local economies via currency production and related
controls. In that sense, we should watch how events unfold in Turkey.
* among major "regular" economies, Turkey has the highest % of people
holding crypto (≈20%). Second only to special zones UAE and
Singapore (31%, 24%).
* Turkish lira is steadily inflated over the last 30-40 years, well
over 10% and recently over 50%.
* Turkey does not have mandate for pricing goods in local currency:
you can pay in dollars or euros, along the local lira.
* When you enter Istanbul airport, Every. Single. Gate. is marked
with BTCTurk ad, inside and outside - the major crypto exchange in
the country.
* Istanbul city market is full of traders who use USDT on Tron.
The experiment of social game "Bitcoin" boils down to this: will the
people self-organize the functioning economy with monetary freedom,
while the gov loses its grip on it; or will the economy collapse
without government's regulation and protective management?
tootie wrote 1 day ago:
This is just a convenient way to access stable western currency.
Having been to Russia and Argentina during their worst inflation
years before crypto, they solved their issues by asking for US
paper dollars. Crypto is just saving them currency exchange fees.
And there's no way Turkiye is behind the value of BTC. It's still
driven by speculators.
throw0101d wrote 1 day ago:
> Turkish lira is steadily inflated over the last 30-40 years, well
over 10% and recently over 50%.
Because the authoritarian government took over the previously
independent central bank and lowered interest rates. Higher
inflation was predicted by mainstream economists, and they were
right.
* [1] *
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/20/turkeys-erdogan-s...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_interventions_under...
dialup_sounds wrote 1 day ago:
Thank God that would never happen in the US.
ars wrote 1 day ago:
> and smashing success of Bitcoin.
It's a success today, we haven't gotten to when they stop issuing
any more, and mining is funded by transaction fees. I suspect there
are going to be some problems then.
latchkey wrote 1 day ago:
Like what? As far as I can tell, it will solidify its store of
value.
throw0101c wrote 1 day ago:
> Like what? As far as I can tell, it will solidify its store
of value.
Which is the bug:
> No currency should be able to buy the same basket of goods
over very long timespans through hoarding. If you want to
retain the purchasing power of your money, it should
participate in society via investment.
*
[1]: https://twitter.com/dollarsanddata/status/159265180975...
oleganza wrote 1 day ago:
That’s a “hot take” that people take as an axiom. What
if it isn’t? What is the precise definition of
“participating in society”? What level of earning and
spending is considered morally good and who’s to decide
that? (Meta questions arise when discussing conflicts of
interest of the deciders.)
TheDudeMan wrote 1 day ago:
Losing some bitcoin is effectively equivalent (over the long term) to
distributing it to all other holders (proportionally). So this is
fine.
slavik81 wrote 1 day ago:
You can't actually know if they are truly lost or not, though. Any
dormant wallet could reactivate at any time, just like the wallets
in this story.
throw0101d wrote 1 day ago:
> Losing some bitcoin is effectively equivalent (over the long
term) to distributing it to all other holders (proportionally). So
this is fine.
To those that have, more will be given. What about those that do
not have?
wmf wrote 1 day ago:
Slavery.
nosefurhairdo wrote 1 day ago:
Which is equivalent to deflation, which parent suggests is harmful
to bitcoin's viability. In order to claim that "this is fine" you
would need to refute the claim that deflation is bad.
DonHopkins wrote 1 day ago:
Given the context, "this is fine" is obviously an ironic
reference to the cartoon dog sitting on a chair at the dining
room table with a mug of coffee in a burning house meme.
echion wrote 1 day ago:
Normally I would say you're right, but I read the context
opposite to you; I read the "fine" as a straight/literal
statement: the author of "this is fine" is disputing the
author's parent's statement that "this can be considered [a
bug]".
hn_throwaway_99 wrote 1 day ago:
> Which is equivalent to deflation, which parent suggests is
harmful to bitcoin's viability.
Deflation is built into Bitcoin by design and is one of its most
notable features regarding its coin growth schedule. This pros
and cons of that approach have been discussed ad infinitum in the
crypto community.
agumonkey wrote 1 day ago:
I wonder when did cypherpunks started to discuss this kind of
mechanisms for digital currency. Was it obvious from day one or
an idea that came later in the design phases.
kragen wrote 17 hours 29 min ago:
Not only were they already discussing it when I joined the
list in 01992, cryptocurrency was a major, if implicit, part
of Tim May's crypto-anarchist manifesto which I think he
presented at Hackers in 01988: [1] He wasn't specifically
calling it out as having a fixed money supply or even
fungible tokens, though. And it wasn't until Satoshi figured
out how to do without a central issuer like Xanadu, Digicash,
or e-gold that we realized it was possible. At the time that
Satoshi cut the knot, we were all convinced it was impossible
because of Zooko's Triangle.
Chaum founded DigiCash in 01989, incidentally, based on a
paper he wrote in 01982 presenting a cryptocurrency design
for untraceable payments, but backed with dollars by a
central issuer, like Tether.
However, there was always a strong association between
cypherpunks and right-libertarian free-market ideology, which
is where you find gold bugs and Austrian economists. You may
remember that one of the minor plot points in Atlas Shrugged
was that Galt's Gulch went back to specie money (tiny pennies
stamped from gold) because its value wasn't dependent on
government fiat.
[1]: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/artic...
wmf wrote 1 day ago:
Cypherpunks were discussing digital gold and Austrian
economics in the 1990s. I wouldn't say there was any kind of
consensus but the ideas were out there.
throw0101d wrote 1 day ago:
> Was it obvious from day one or an idea that came later in
the design phases.
The Bitcoin paper came out in 2009, and the deflationary
criticism was already recorded in 2010:
* [1] 2014 article:
*
[1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Deflationary...
[2]: https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2014/06/the-perils-o...
lumost wrote 1 day ago:
The finite nature of btc, low transaction volume, and
increasing cost of mining made deflation a given. The
original designers simply did not solve this problem. BTC’s
dominance in the crypto community suggests that this trait
was advantageous for BTCs growth as existing holders are
incentivized to add additional use cases/transaction volume.
logicchains wrote 1 day ago:
There were early attempts at inflationary cryptocurrencies
too but they didn't catch on; all other things being equal,
people prefer to hold currencies that gain value over time,
not lose value.
jimkleiber wrote 1 day ago:
And the word currency, or current, implies movement, no?
So I think it's the issue of thinking people will use it as
a currency, not that it is not a valuable asset
crystaln wrote 1 day ago:
Deflation is what you want for investment assets. Btc is primarily a
value store and commodity like gold, not a currency. Deflation is a
good thing when you are parking value.
throw0101d wrote 1 day ago:
> Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.
And is deflation a good or bad thing for the livelihood and
well-being of human beings?
How many people in the US has a mortgage or some kind of debt
(student, medical)? Inflation makes the burden of debt easier,
deflation makes it worse.
And the Top (0.)1% already has an easy enough time with
parking/generating value. Deflation would only help them more (and
make things hard for everyone under them).
rufus_foreman wrote 15 hours 22 min ago:
>> How many people in the US has a mortgage or some kind of debt
(student, medical)?
Approximately zero of them have debt denominated in Bitcoin.
Meaning that the main drawback of deflation does not apply to
Bitcoin.
logicchains wrote 1 day ago:
Inflation punishes savers and rewards debtors, i.e. it
disincentivises the more economically productive behaviour.
throw0101d wrote 1 day ago:
> Inflation punishes savers and rewards debtors, i.e. it
disincentivises the more economically productive behaviour.
Quite the opposite.
Deflation encourages hoarding of cash because it just sits
there and increases in value. "If you want to retain the
purchasing power of your money, it should participate in
society via investment." — Nick Maggiulli
NeutralCrane wrote 1 day ago:
Saving isn’t economically productive, on a societal level.
Spending is. Investing is.
Deflation inherently disincentivizes doing anything with the
currency other than sitting on it. Want to buy something?
You’d be better off waiting and buying it tomorrow because it
will be worth less in your deflationary currency at that point.
No one has an incentive to lend their money to others to use it
more productively, so no growth occurs. No one buys anything,
producers can’t sell anything, and no one can get capital to
start any business ventures. The sole, viable way to accumulate
wealth is to take the currency and stuff it under the mattress.
This results in a society much like Europe described in a Jane
Austen novel, where wealth is simply inherited and the upper
class doesn’t actually serve an economic function. They just
exist to perpetuate their wealth and dole out subsistence wages
to those who work their estates and have absolutely no chance
of improving their station.
It’s an inherently broken system and a perfect example of
Chesterton’s fence by tech types assuming they know better
than everyone else.
thunderfork wrote 1 day ago:
Isn't saving (i.e. sitting on assets) less economically
productive than spending? Inflation rewards productivity by
making productive use of money the only way to avoid loss over
time?
mrbombastic wrote 1 day ago:
The original bitcoin whitepaper was titled: “a peer to peer
electronic cash system”
solumunus wrote 1 day ago:
The initial intention does not change the practical reality.
throw0101d wrote 1 day ago:
>> Btc is primarily a value store and commodity like gold, not a
currency. Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.
> The original bitcoin whitepaper was titled: “a peer to peer
electronic cash system”
The goalposts, they move.
spankalee wrote 1 day ago:
This is one reason why Bitcoin isn't a good currency. Deflationary
trends give holders a lot of incentive to keep holding and never
spend.
latchkey wrote 1 day ago:
It’s a solid store of value. One can borrow against that held
BTC, and as it appreciates over time, the loan-to-value ratio
improves, without having to do anything. Also avoids capital gains
taxes since you're not spending it.
andrewmcwatters wrote 1 day ago:
Bitcoin is the world's number one store of value for converting
young, impressionable men's wages into thin air and moving those
dollars to other people instead.
It's a compelling rival to multi-level marketing for women in that
both prospects entice low-socioeconomic standing peoples into
thinking they are building value instead of consuming it.
foogazi wrote 1 day ago:
You can buy a lot of pizzas with it now
cmdli wrote 1 day ago:
You can't buy a single pizza with it now. Only by exchanging it
for an actual, better currency
mindcandy wrote 1 day ago:
You can buy a pizza from me with Bitcoin now.
I’m not a vendor or even a chef. But, anything is negotiable.
serial_dev wrote 1 day ago:
When I listen to Bitcoin discussions, one of the advantages people
bring up is that there is a limited number of it and you can’t just
“print” more.
Considering this, while it is true that all this makes deflation
worse, I’d assume most bitcoin hodlers would not mind this.
strogonoff wrote 22 hours 25 min ago:
It is under-appreciated that inflation actually is desirable in a
working economy.
Look at it this way. If your money (in money form) is worth less
tomorrow than today, you are incentivised to spend it, thus fueling
economic activity of all sorts (from going out and buying a drink
to buying a car, traveling, investing). If your money is worth more
tomorrow, then you are incentivised to tighten your belt and not
spend for as long as you can. At scale, this negatively affects
production, economic mobility, and so forth; the rich get richer
and hoard the money. I do not believe any of today’s economies
can be healthy and competitive (or even functional) with a
deflationary currency.
walls wrote 14 hours 16 min ago:
> the rich get richer and hoard the money
Well thankfully we're safe from that!
strogonoff wrote 14 hours 1 min ago:
Definitely, if anything we need more of it, right?
rufus_foreman wrote 15 hours 27 min ago:
>> If your money is worth more tomorrow, then you are
incentivised to tighten your belt and not spend for as long as
you can. At scale, this negatively affects production, economic
mobility, and so forth
By your logic, bonds are bad for the economy.
strogonoff wrote 13 hours 57 min ago:
Care to write more than a sentence and explain your logic?
rufus_foreman wrote 12 hours 43 min ago:
When you invest in bonds, they are worth more tomorrow than
they are today. So you would have the same incentive to put
off spending as long as you could as you would owning a
deflationary currency. If that is bad for the economy when
you're holding a deflationary currency, it should be bad for
the economy when you're holding an appreciating asset.
strogonoff wrote 20 min ago:
I don’t think bonds are currency. You buy bonds, you
spend money, now your money is doing something in the
economy as opposed to if you just held on to it.
kragen wrote 17 hours 36 min ago:
The US currencies were either literal precious metals, or
gold-backed and/or silver-backed, throughout the 19th century
until the Great Depression, except for a couple of brief
suspensions. Consequently the average rate of inflation was
zero. That was the period that it went from a fractious group of
rebel colonies to the center of world economic development. So,
while I'm sympathetic to the idea that a fiat currency with a
predictable inflation rate might stimulate the economy, I think
you are making an unjustifiably strong case for it.
strogonoff wrote 13 hours 32 min ago:
Britain coming off the gold standard made the pound more
competitive. Prior to that, when pound was backed by metals,
they increasingly suffered high unemployment, runs on gold and
everything.
In the US it was nothing good either after a few years since
WWI: manufacturing fell, unemployment rose[0], etc. I guess it
did not help that Britain ended the gold standard which helped
their exports, and US adopted protectionist policy which tanked
its trade. I don’t need to retell this all but basically the
depression ended with the US abandoning the gold standard and
entering controlled inflation.
Perhaps the reason for these rosy takes on deflationary
currencies in the US is that not many people are still alive
who lived through the depression…
By the way, the US did suspend the gold standard during WWI.
Why, you ask? Well, it so happened that some debt was due, plus
people from across the pond were selling stocks in US
companies, and so what happens at that point (when you don’t
have much monetary control) is ships full of US gold floating
off into the misty ocean.
Correct me if I am wrong, of course.
[0] “Did you know that every 1% the unemployment goes up, 40
000 people die?” — The Big Short.
kragen wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
As far as I know, you're right about those historical facts,
but both of us can see only a small part of the picture.
There are hundreds or thousands of countries in the world
over eight thousand years since money was invented, and we've
discussed a 225-year period in two of them. That doesn't seem
like good justification for strong generalizations.
amjnsx wrote 20 hours 23 min ago:
This argument falls apart when you consider technology though.
And even daily essentials. No one would not buy food and water
because they can get more in future. They need it now.
The same goes for technology. We all know next year’s iPhone
will be better than this year but we still buy them…because we
need them now.
I’d argue inflation’s incentives are worse - the constant
need to invest/spend so that your money doesn’t lose value. It
means money flows into anything and everything like zombie
companies, over consumption, property. Those on the poorest end
are just trapped because as soon as they get any money it starts
depreciating.
strogonoff wrote 19 hours 0 min ago:
> We all know next year’s iPhone will be better than this
year but we still buy them
Next year’s iPhone will not only be better, but also (even
with the same price tag) cost more, inflation-adjusted. That
factors into the decision to buy now.
> I’d argue inflation’s incentives are worse - the constant
need to invest/spend so that your money doesn’t lose value.
It is a problem when it is at extreme, like in unstable
countries where money can be a liability to unhealthy degree.
However, I’d argue it should be a liability to a smaller
degree.
What you highlight is the ever-present conflict between
personal benefit and societal benefit. Obviously for an
individual it is more preferable that the value of their money
increases; I would never argue that. However, for society as a
whole it is more preferable if the value of money decreases at
a stable rate.
Perhaps this is why all major economies settled on the idea
that an amount inflation is crucial to have.
amjnsx wrote 16 hours 11 min ago:
I do not buy into the idea that “everyone did it then it
must have been a good idea”.
We’ve already seen the negative side of fiat currencies in
how they eventually collapse (Zimbabwe, Venezuela,
Argentina) and even in more developed countries wages have
not kept up with inflation. Money is trending to zero People
are trending to destitution.
We saw it recently in the UK - where public sector workers
were not given pay rises because the government argued it
would fuel inflation. So how does that even make sense.
strogonoff wrote 14 hours 3 min ago:
Let’s continue this discussion when you show me a
successful economy with a deflationary currency.
The only reason you can provide examples of failed states
with inflationary currencies is because all currencies are
inflationary. This is not a coincidence, perhaps because
deflation does not correlate with things going well. For
some famous examples of deflations, read on The Great
Depression in US and Lost Decades in Japan.
mkleczek wrote 21 hours 57 min ago:
More and more people claim this system of stimulated growth is
actually wrong and the root cause for global warming.
strogonoff wrote 21 hours 46 min ago:
Sources who claims this, and details as to how?
I disagree that it is the cause.
The mechanism does not distinguish between “bad economic
activity” and “good economic activity”. I.e., the same
mechanism applies to positive progress (carbon dioxide
sequestration, more expensive technology and techniques
reducing environmental impact, etc.), it just requires proper
incentive alignment and accounting for bad faith actors via
regulation.
A deflationary system with limited supply makes kings and
ultimately defeats itself, as your money is decreasingly
evidence of your effort and work and increasingly evidence of
you having held to it for a while. (It is also a quality of the
current system, but less so, and it should be even less so, not
more so.)
throw0101d wrote 1 day ago:
> When I listen to Bitcoin discussions, one of the advantages
people bring up is that there is a limited number of it and you
can’t just “print” more.
Which can limit economic growth. When money was based the amount of
gold available, there were long periods of economic stagnation
because of liquidity issues:
* [1] * [2] The stagnation only ended when new sources of shiny
rocks were found (California; New World).
I find it a dumb idea what whether or not people can get credit to
start/expand businesses would be dependent of solving math
problems. Yes, credit creation can be "too easy" and become a
problem, but making it "too hard" (or physically/mathematically
impossible) is even more dumb.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine
mindcandy wrote 1 day ago:
> I find it a dumb idea what whether or not people can get credit
to start/expand businesses would be dependent of solving math
problems.
That’s quite a mischaracterization. We can at least agree that
Bitcoin’s supply is set up to increase at a pre-set rate over
time. The math problems are the means to enforce that rate. Not
the controlling factor.
fpoling wrote 1 day ago:
In US in 19th century stocks of banks that went bankrupt were
used as a sort of paper money to solve the problem of money
availability.
So the finite amount of base money would just mean that
derivative products would be used as practical money.
logicchains wrote 1 day ago:
>there were long periods of economic stagnation
During the "long depression" GDP was still growing at 3-4% so it
was hardly stagnation.
throw0101d wrote 1 day ago:
> During the "long depression" GDP was still growing at 3-4% so
it was hardly stagnation.
I don't know of many things that are viewed positively that
have been given a label with "depression" in it.
> Figures from Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz show net
national product increased 3 percent per year from 1869 to 1879
and real national product grew at 6.8 percent per year during
that time frame.[32] However, since between 1869 and 1879 the
population of the United States increased by over 17.5
percent,[33] per capita NNP growth was lower. Following the end
of the episode in 1879, the U.S. economy would remain unstable,
experiencing recessions for 114 of the 253 months until January
1901.[34]
> The dramatic shift in prices mauled nominal wages – in the
United States, nominal wages declined by one-quarter during the
1870s,[14] and as much as one-half in some places, such as
Pennsylvania.[35] Although real wages had enjoyed robust growth
in the aftermath of the American Civil War, increasing by
nearly a quarter between 1865 and 1873, they stagnated until
the 1880s, posting no real growth, before resuming their robust
rate of expansion in the later 1880s.[36] The collapse of
cotton prices devastated the already war-ravaged economy of the
southern United States.[17]
> Thousands of American businesses failed, defaulting on more
than a billion dollars of debt.[35] One in four laborers in New
York were out of work in the winter of 1873–1874[35] and,
nationally, a million became unemployed.[35]
* [1] Seems like a grand-ol time.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression#United_S...
ghghgfdfgh wrote 22 hours 48 min ago:
If Congress had not demonetized silver in 1873, the metal’s
decreasing value would have curbed the deflation of the time.
I believe that this was one of the US Government’s greatest
mistakes ever, because the reaction to the economic crisis in
the 1870’s had a profound effect on the failure of
Reconstruction. Friedman wrote a paper on this, called “The
Crime of 1873.”
doublerabbit wrote 1 day ago:
What happens when all bitcoin is mined, societal collapse?
Hamuko wrote 1 day ago:
We have other coins too.
cjbgkagh wrote 1 day ago:
It will go from the near totality of people acquiring their
bitcoins through purchase to actual totality.
MaxPock wrote 1 day ago:
It pains me because I learnt about bitcoin way back in 2010 and
toenail wrote 17 hours 38 min ago:
Why pain? Bitcoin is still there for you.
paulpauper wrote 1 day ago:
You probably would have sold or lost them anyway. Probably a tiny
percentage of people from 2011 still held
zoklet-enjoyer wrote 23 hours 31 min ago:
As someone who has been into crypto since 2012 and isn't rich, yep
pixelpoet wrote 1 day ago:
... and? What is happening with people's attention span?
AndrewDucker wrote 1 day ago:
You're supposed to be able to fill in the second half of the
sentence based on context. They consider it to be obvious from the
first half.
pixelpoet wrote 1 day ago:
They must be an expert in number theory. I have a marvelous
continuation of this sentence which
sixQuarks wrote 1 day ago:
I learned about it here, but everyone said it was a scam and not to
buy
charlieyu1 wrote 1 day ago:
I learned about it from my friend, but couldn't bother with
downloading a wallet client and mining etc
rasz wrote 1 day ago:
It is still a scam. Its just that critical mass of delusional
people bought into it like Gamestop or Tesla stock. Even super
obvious scams like Nikola take years to register price wise.
CamperBob2 wrote 1 day ago:
A superposition of wrong and right if there ever was one.
SoftTalker wrote 1 day ago:
Easy to kick yourself in retrospect but if we could see the
future we'd all be millionaires. AAPL was $0.28 in 2002 (adjusted
for splits, something like $12 at the time).
creatonez wrote 1 day ago:
> Satoshi-era
Not true in the slightest. Satoshi was already gone by 2010, and in
2011 there were ~8000 transactions per day from folks outside of
Satoshi's circle.
udev4096 wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
What? Satoshi's last publicly known email was on April, 2011 to Gavin
[0], stating the following:
"I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy
figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle. Maybe
instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to
your dev contributors; it helps motivate them."
Also, let's not forget, it took BTC ~1.5 years to gain any amount of
traction at all. Nakamoto was in for a long run and his sudden
disappearance is always going to be mysterious
[0] -
[1]: https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/gavin-andrese...
duttish wrote 1 day ago:
Whoever got these wallets better sell them and get a good security
company on rotation quickly before anyone find out who they are. Seems
like wrench attacks been been happening a lot more the last year.
sampl3username wrote 1 day ago:
You just need to swap them for monero and then monero for litecoin or
bitcoin again. Now you have anonymous, untraceable coins.
udev4096 wrote 21 hours 53 min ago:
Someone actually did that, a few months ago. 320M in BTC was
converted to monero and the price of monero increased by 50% [0]
[0] -
[1]: https://slashdot.org/story/25/04/28/198238/monero-likely-p...
cedws wrote 1 day ago:
Not quite that simple, that’s vulnerable to an Eve-Alice-Eve
attack. If $1B in BTC moves around in short succession the TXs can
be linked easily. You need a mixer that splits up the amount to be
paid out, and even then it needs to be done piecemeal.
dzhiurgis wrote 1 day ago:
Do all outputs from exchange are automatically trusted? Seems
like any should be tainted forever. Or is it impossible to tell
whats from mixer?
cedws wrote 1 day ago:
There are companies (Chainalysis) that track blockchains and
‘grade’ wallets according to who they’ve transacted wit…
If enough of a wallet’s funds are from a mixer it may be
scored a grade lower than the exchange’s KYC rules allow to
do business with.
drexlspivey wrote 1 day ago:
Monero daily volume is like $50m lol
onlyrealcuzzo wrote 1 day ago:
I doubt there's enough liquidity to swap that kind of money...
Marsymars wrote 1 day ago:
I don't really get these; there's not a ton of difference between
using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of Bitcoin vs using a
wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of any other liquid asset
that could be used to buy bitcoins.
bravesoul2 wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
What does Micheal Saylor do?
jedberg wrote 1 day ago:
This is the other edge of that double edged sword of "no
regulations". It's a lot easier to steal bitcoin with no
consequence because there isn't an entire financial system backed
by people with guns to help you if you are wronged.
diggan wrote 1 day ago:
> there isn't an entire financial system backed by people with
guns to help you if you are wronged
It's not the "financial system" that comes and hunts criminals
with guns, but police, acting based on what laws they seen has
been broken. And stealing $3 billion is as illegal if it was
Bitcoins, as if it was Euro or USD.
hnaccount_rng wrote 12 hours 39 min ago:
The point isn't about a change of legality. It's about a change
of enforceability! In the normal regulated financial system
_every_ entity you can interact with is known to someone who is
a) good at keeping paper traces and b) extremely motivated to
provide them, given appropriate motivation, i.e. a properly
formed request by authorised parties. And that limits the
number of times you can do anything scammy to "few" before you
need to switch identities
So in your scenario: The 3 billion will reappear at some point
and they will raise flags. And at that point there is a
convenient rendezvous point between law enforcement and the
perpetrators. And we can all quibble about whether the
authorisation is appropriate or not (not all "requests" are
requests and most won't even need anything close to a court
order). But it's damn convenient to follow the money
Larrikin wrote 1 day ago:
There are essentially no criminals that are stealing crypto
where the police will have jurisdiction. It's main use case
outside of speculation is committing international fraud and
theft with no consequences.
dist-epoch wrote 1 day ago:
You are confused. The people with guns will come for you if you
steal bitcoin and they know who you are.
> Bitcoin thief sentenced to 5 years in prison for stealing $1
billion in crypto and laundering it with his social-media rapper
wife ‘Razzlekhan’
[1]: https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/11/15/bitcoin-thief-sent...
paulpauper wrote 1 day ago:
No, he was changed with laundering.
BJones12 wrote 1 day ago:
If I had 8 billion in cash in my bank account and put in a transfer
order, they'd block it, call me, make me come into a branch, make
sure there weren't any burly guys with wrenches escorting me in,
and maybe call the FBI if anything seemed off.
And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks
of waiting for the transfer to actually happen, during which time I
could call and cancel.
Marsymars wrote 1 day ago:
Alright, so I can see it as a matter of scale.
Recently there was a local case of someone extorting people by
leaving threats in the mailboxes to not burn people’s houses
down in exchange for $1k in bitcoin.
But who would keep $8B in bitcoin without some protections in
place to ensure that it can’t be easily transferred away, given
the associated upside/downside? That’s... roughly as foolish as
keeping $8B in actual cash/gold/gems (notwithstanding the
logistical problems with the size/weight) under your mattress.
paulpauper wrote 1 day ago:
But the criminal's stolen BTC are tainted. Exchanges will not
accept them. procession of them is a crime
FabHK wrote 21 hours 28 min ago:
How fortunate that exchanges are centralized institutions that
can be held accountable by law.
jhasse wrote 1 day ago:
Mixers will though.
paulpauper wrote 10 hours 24 min ago:
and then those bitcoin are tainted too due to association
with the mixer
yieldcrv wrote 1 day ago:
> And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or
weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen
or you get a better bank to begin with
most banks that call their slow processes "security purposes" are
actually just putting up barriers to maintain liquidity. the
banks that go bust are the ones that got clientele based on
making it convenient to transfer
onlyrealcuzzo wrote 1 day ago:
Also, for the rest of your life, you'd be able to get the people
arrested who stole the money.
So they'd either to kill you after, and it would be obvious why,
and there'd be an easy lead on who.
Your odds of getting away with stealing that kind of money
conventionally are essentially zero.
andylynch wrote 1 day ago:
Bitcoin doesn’t ask questions when you unexpectedly want to make
a very large transfer to a new payee. Your banker will.
paulpauper wrote 1 day ago:
But exchanges will if you deposit that much, and will freeze your
$ if they don't like your response.
udev4096 wrote 21 hours 55 min ago:
Why would you even use a central exchange? It makes no sense.
The person holding an absurd amount of coins would not be
stupid to throw it all away like that
paulpauper wrote 10 hours 24 min ago:
then there is no way to liquate anything close to that much
without a centralized exchange
yieldcrv wrote 1 day ago:
looking at the address types this just looks more like a security
rotation to a stronger hashing method
p0w3n3d wrote 1 day ago:
F word is what caught my eye first
jedberg wrote 1 day ago:
If you have $8B in BTC, is there any reasonable way to turn that into
any fiat currency? USD, EUR, anything? Can you even buy that much
USDC?
protocolture wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
You would have to arrange a bunch of off market transactions,
Probably spread over several different exchanges. Doable, but I
reckon you would end up with closer to 6 billion
Thorrez wrote 19 hours 25 min ago:
Why are you asking about $8B when the article is about $2B?
jabroni_salad wrote 22 hours 4 min ago:
Seems like a "buy borrow die" type of scenario to me.
bravesoul2 wrote 23 hours 45 min ago:
Start an ETF?
dist-epoch wrote 1 day ago:
If you don't want to bother, you can auction it and some hedge fund
which wants to buy will take it from your hand.
yieldcrv wrote 1 day ago:
yes, that’s why the exchanges are nearly $100bn companies
between multiple corporations buying $1bn per week, retail, and
nation states, there is a large appetite for this amount with a few
phone calls
paulpauper wrote 1 day ago:
nah, they are worth that much because of inflated valuations
FabHK wrote 21 hours 23 min ago:
Yes. And note that Coinbase for example charges retail around
1.5% or so on average, but only a few basis points to
institutional clients last time I ran the numbers. Surprise.
pawelduda wrote 1 day ago:
Sure you can. If you do it over a few months, it will get absorbed by
market because there are buyers (as of today). Though this is kind of
unprecedented, so markets could find this kind of event bearish and
front run your sells which tanks the price. But I can't imagine I'd
care if I held for 14 years. There is also USDT which is much bigger
than USDC.
diggan wrote 1 day ago:
Also if you approach Coinbase/Kraken/$exchange and tell them you
have X million to offload, they'll probably let you do it
off-market, so no one (except for the ledger, obviously) would
really notice.
bgwalter wrote 1 day ago:
If the Bitcoin Sovereign Wealth Fund scam that was announced after
Trump's election is launched, there will be a price bottom that is
financed by public funds.
I'm not sure what has come of it. Trump is doing well with his own
coins: [1]
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/uae-fund-buys-100-m...
[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-07-02/donald-tr...
nandomrumber wrote 1 day ago:
Loans using the BTC as collateral.
Buy good / commodities with BTC and resell them.
Sell the BTC.
Probably not all $8 gigadollars at once, but is there any reason you
would immediately need that much?
jedberg wrote 1 day ago:
> but is there any reason you would immediately need that much?
Because you worry that BTC will crash and want it in something more
stable?
nandomrumber wrote 1 day ago:
Well, one way to lower the price would be to put eight billion on
the market all at once.
PoshBreeze wrote 1 day ago:
BTC is volatile but it isn't going to crash tomorrow or any time
soon at least not by the amount that would make sense to sell
with a wallet this old.
mindcandy wrote 1 day ago:
Compared to the “Magnificent Seven”, Bitcoin’s volatili…
has put it in the middle, while it’s performance puts it at
or near the top depending on the time window. [1]
[1]: https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/research-and-ins...
[2]: https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/06/bitcoin-has-...
lottin wrote 21 hours 25 min ago:
I find it odd that someone would make a comparison between
bitcoin and other financial assets, as if bitcoin was just
another financial asset and its theoretical price wasn't
zero... which is a pretty big market anomaly. Normally, when
you find a market anomaly, you try to explain it. But these
analysts, they pretend that there's no anomaly. They just
don't talk about it, in the hopes that nobody will notice.
jeanlucas wrote 3 hours 29 min ago:
Well, what should they compare it to then?
Good has a value much higher than its use and most of its
current value is just the faith that it is a store of
value.
But I don't find odd comparing gold's return to s&p
coolspot wrote 1 day ago:
Someone just got out of jail.
Workaccount2 wrote 1 day ago:
An old friend of mine died 11 years ago from an overdose, and I am
almost certain he used darknet markets to buy other drugs.
It's very likely there is a wallet forever lost with many Bitcoin in
it from his passing. No way his family would have known anything
about it (Bitcoin/dark markets)or cared much anyway circa 2014. I'll
admit I have pondered ways to check this, but it's too far fetched.
I can't help but wonder if the wave of fentanyl that made optiate
addict deaths skyrocket, left a huge wake of forever lost Bitcoin. I
know there was a lot of overlap between addicts and darknet market
users.
Stevvo wrote 1 day ago:
Most addicts would likely not hold Bitcoin in wallet, but spend it
on getting their next fix as soon as they buy it. It's not like
you're thinking long-term, invest in Bitcoin so you can buy more
drugs down the line. There would be leftover change but not big
amounts.
Workaccount2 wrote 15 hours 15 min ago:
He wouldn't heroin from darknet markets and I doubt many addicts
do, they need that on tap locally. But he, and many others like
him, just like drugs in general and have a heroin addiction they
picked up. So the darknet is more for getting lsd, MDMA,
mushrooms, or whatever else.
Xss3 wrote 1 day ago:
You'd be surprised how many of these addicts would be buying for
multiple other less tech savvy addicts and essentially becoming
small time dealers themselves to fund their own habit. If they
got locked up or ODd at the right time there could've been a few
thousand usd in btc in a wallet at a time when each btc was worth
less than 10usd.
jedberg wrote 1 day ago:
Ross Ulbricht got out a few months ago. Could be his.
paulpauper wrote 1 day ago:
he only had $40 million . if he had $1 billion the feds would have
known about it
ur-whale wrote 18 hours 23 min ago:
> he only had $40 million
How could you possibly know?
Or anyone else for that matter, including the thugs who sent him
to jail?
1oooqooq wrote 1 day ago:
lol. Did you read the whole wired piece on how the feds couldn't
find anything under their nose on that case?
mattlondon wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe that guy who was digging up a landfill to find his old HDD
finally found it!
Seriously though, what are the odds that someone has been quietly
spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys
for old wallets?
cyrillite wrote 15 hours 6 min ago:
As Bitcoin increases in value, the reward for breaking into wallets
grows. Satoshi’s is the ultimate target here, followed by wallets
used to burn currencies. Some of these look like they’d only be
brute forceable and that takes more time and energy than we think is
plausible, but I suspect people will find the system isn’t as
secure as expected in some weird and wacky ways as this bounty grows.
Although, I wonder if emptying the wallet is actually harder than
breaking in, in some ways. Let’s say you get into Satoshi’s
wallet (or they still have access), how do you move anything without
spooking the entire market?
xoralkindi wrote 17 hours 7 min ago:
Bitcoin is designed with clever incentives to prevent this kind of
thing. If you can afford to bruteforce wallets the incentive would be
to just mine bictoin which is more probable and it also help secure
the network. If you can bruteforce wallets bitcoin is effectively
worthless. Or you could even use all of that compute to mine
something else for example Monero.
msgodel wrote 17 hours 27 min ago:
Martin Shkreli has been spending the past month or so on Discord
streaming himself doing literally exactly that.
monster_truck wrote 19 hours 51 min ago:
Being seriously serious, if it was even statistically unreasonable to
accomplish this once in this amount of time, it would be apocalyptic.
A whole lot more than bitcoin would crumble.
I've personally always been a fan of the idea that the only reason it
exists in the first place is to be a 2-trillion-pound canary for
sha256
cm2187 wrote 21 hours 6 min ago:
Or maybe someone just got out of prison!
max_ wrote 20 hours 49 min ago:
Ross Ulbricht?
hsbauauvhabzb wrote 21 hours 36 min ago:
At that scale self-hosted compute probably offers a decent roi.
qwertox wrote 21 hours 44 min ago:
> what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s
of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?
I've been wondering the same. But in this case it's multiple wallets,
so it's very unlikely.
whatsupdog wrote 1 day ago:
He had only 7500. The recent move involves 60,000 according to some
Reddit threads
paulpauper wrote 1 day ago:
this would be highly improbable. the odds of only remembering enough
of the key to brute force it, is slim.
guessing a whale's key? zero
throw310822 wrote 1 day ago:
> what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s
of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?
Even if that were possible, you could brute force one wallet. Not
eight wallets closely related to each other.
bbarnett wrote 20 hours 20 min ago:
Better odds: old man theory.
Some dude had the wallets on a usb drive. Maybe he mined in the
very early days, never really thought of it, and ended up aged and
not cognitively aware, his memory wonky.
Recently, he just passed on.
His offspring cleaned out his garage or whatever, found a usb
stick, looked on it for photos, and found this.
taneq wrote 23 hours 17 min ago:
> closely related to each other.
Like, sequential? Because if you were brute forcing...
Scoundreller wrote 1 day ago:
Keys created with an RNG that turned out to be a little too
predictable?
Or some other flaw found in a wallet’s key generation?
Kinda like what happened here: [1] (Or exactly that but nobody
tried to attack this again with moar power?)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195493
mattlondon wrote 20 hours 23 min ago:
Yeah - assuming this was not the rightful owner (which it might
well be), my gut is that perhaps someone found an implementation
flaw/quirk in some old wallet code/keygen/RNG that effectively
reduced the keysize down to something more manageable for
brute-forcing. In ye olden days Bitcoin was still something of a
curio for geeks and nerds and not the industry it is now, so it
would not be unreasonable IMO for there to be some
slightly-less-than-perfect implementations floating around from
hobbyists or open source etc - the stakes were lower then.
If there was say a vulnerability in a specific wallet version it
would be quite possible to narrow down search space to only the
wallets/addresses around that point in time etc as well, making
it easier to target your brute-forcing efforts.
It will be interesting to see if any other dormant wallets from
around the same era wake up too.
HeartStrings wrote 22 hours 33 min ago:
It’s quantum computer.
pyman wrote 1 day ago:
One of my students believes Elon Musk and Peter Thiel created
Bitcoin. Here's the summary of the 5 page doc he presented:
In 2000, according to Peter Thiel, he met with the E-Gold team in
Anguilla.
Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to
build a similar digital currency.
In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital
currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts
and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on
banks.
By 2004, there were over a million E‑Gold accounts. Banks
weren’t happy about it. Meanwhile, Elon and Peter understood
exactly how much potential this new kind of digital currency had.
In 2007, the banks took the founders of E-Gold to court for
running an unlicensed money‑transmitting business. That same
year, the E-Gold engineers were out of work.
Bitcoin was invented in 2008, the same year Elon was broke and
busy trying to save both SpaceX and Tesla from going bankrupt.
His theory is that Elon and Peter hired the smartest engineers
from the E-Gold team and asked them to build blockchain so they
could create their own version of E-Gold. The team worked on
Bitcoin from 2007 to 2010 under the alias of Nakamoto.
OtherShrezzing wrote 17 hours 59 min ago:
Just applying Occams Razor here, this whole story makes more
sense if the E-Gold engineers just bootstrapped this project
without Musk/Thiel involvement.
E-Golds most talented 1-2 engineers weren’t poor people, and
could definitely afford a 5 year career break.
bbarnett wrote 20 hours 35 min ago:
Any team involved would have long ago spilled the beans.
Conspiracies are impossible to maintain, once more than one or
two people are involved.
franktankbank wrote 12 hours 16 min ago:
This is the dumbest idea I ever hear smart people say.
kragen wrote 18 hours 7 min ago:
Except for the secrecy of Colossus, Crypto AG, the 9/11
hijackings, Bill Cosby drugging and raping dozens of women,
Peter Thiel funding lawsuits against Gawker, the Manhattan
Project, the CIA-funded coup against Mossadegh, Stuxnet, the
Five Families, most of what the NSA does, the Stealth Bomber,
and so on.
Almost all of those remained secret longer than the 17 years
we're talking about here, and due to selection bias, I am
forced to omit the much more successfully kept secrets,
because I don't know about them yet.
bbarnett wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
The selection bias, is discounting the endless conspiracies
exposed daily.
People go to jail, are caught out, fired, relationships
break up, governments fall, because conspiracies of even a
few people fall apart. It's a regular thing.
You're mentioning some things, of which some were known
during the time. The FBI had reports of the 9/11
hijackers, Bill Cosby was known by many but the women were
paid off with cash or jobs (until they rightfully went
public), and things such as the CIA and the Manhattan
project are laced with highly patriotic people, and the
death penalty or life in jail, along with people
sequestered and watched by immense security.
Secrets are very difficult to keep.
The things you think of were enormously unusual in that
they were kept.
They were the exception to the rule.
kragen wrote 7 hours 44 min ago:
Very plausibly the identity of Satoshi is already known
to more people than Cosby's rapes or the 9/11 hijacking
plans, before everybody knew about them. The hijacking
plans weren't even well-known inside the FBI! And it's
also very plausible that the people involved in Bitcoin
were either strongly idealistic, facing death penalties
for disclosure (for example, if they work for the
Mossad), or both.
I agree with your weakened claim that secrets are very
difficult to keep, but much of modern society is built on
institutions that are very good at keeping them: armies,
intelligence agencies, and even companies with trade
secrets.
I agree that Satoshi was probably just one or two people,
and the difficulty in keeping secrets with more than a
few people is one of my reasons for that. But you said it
was impossible, not difficult, which is much too extreme
to be justifiable.
(I think it's about 50% likely that it's one of a couple
of dozen people I've met personally, but I wouldn't be
able to convince anyone else. So you might be talking to
one of the people in the position of Bill Cosby's friends
before the news came out.)
jasonvorhe wrote 20 hours 42 min ago:
If this at least involved Len Sassaman somehow, I'd find it at
least worthy of digging in to this. Pass. Musk and Thiel being
true cypherpunks? Come on. Musk hasn't had a single idea on his
own, Thiel is way too busy coming up with ways to enslave
everyone. No way they had anything to do with creating Bitcoin.
kragen wrote 18 hours 20 min ago:
Len went on for years about what a stupid idea Bitcoin was.
pyman wrote 7 hours 27 min ago:
Agree. He was not impressed with Bitcoin
pyman wrote 20 hours 0 min ago:
Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, Peter Todd, and Adam Back were
definitely part of the team after the paper was published.
But Len Sassaman? I don't think so.
> Musk and Thiel being true cypherpunks?
Even cypherpunks had bills to pay.
And who was hiring in 2007? The same people who disrupted the
banking and oil industry with PayPal and Tesla.
xoralkindi wrote 17 hours 28 min ago:
People always forget about the great Wei Dai, who like
Nakamoto is already sort of pseudonymous, he also created
Bmoney which is allot like Bitcoin. He is also the creator
of the Crypto++ cryptography library for C++ (bitcoin is
written in C++)
From all the OG Cypherpunks he ticks allot of the boxes.
pyman wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
True. Nothing gets built in isolation. Bitcoin was the
result of decades of work by cryptographers, economists,
investors, and engineers
AuryGlenz wrote 22 hours 28 min ago:
Fun personal fact - the only reason I didn't invest more in
Bitcoin (which would have definitely been enough to be FU
money) was because I had some E-Gold when it was shut down.
DoesntMatter22 wrote 21 hours 35 min ago:
Worse fun personal fact. I was planning to buy 5000 bitcoins
on a Friday after work. A coworker convinced me and it made
sense. Bitcoin was less than 2 a coin at that point.
Then I go down the elevator in my building and there is a
huge crowd of people. It ended up being 50 cent the rapper
and a few other famous people.
It was so surreal and unexpected I completely forgot about
Bitcoin for a few months. And by then I could stand the fact
it had tripled (or something) and I had missed it.
Would have been hundreds of millions. Could have lost the hdd
or had sold later but I'd always hold some.
Lol so now I blame 50 cent that I didn't buy Bitcoin
tony69 wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
You would’ve sold it way before it became FU money
DoesntMatter22 wrote 12 hours 21 min ago:
I doubt it, Ive held my Tesla shares since the beginning.
bbarnett wrote 20 hours 28 min ago:
Indeed. That's what so many miss.
One of the doge creators sold all his early doge for a
used car. He'd hit the jackpot, a $5k return on
something he rolled out in under a day's work, for fun.
He didn't make the wrong decision. All his coin was
worth 5 bucks, then 5900. What would you do?
l0ng1nu5 wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
It was jack.
razemio wrote 22 hours 49 min ago:
I do not think that Elon would not claim he is the inventor by
now.
The team theory makes this entirely unbelievable. Something
like this can only be pulled of by 1-2 person's whith
exceptional self-restraint.
pyman wrote 20 hours 29 min ago:
Peter Thiel said in one of his podcast he believes it was the
E-Gold team who created Bitcoin under the alias of Nakamoto.
He also confirmed he knew the team. But no one knows the
names of the engineers or who financed them.
All we know is that Elon and Peter revolutionised the finance
industry with PayPal.
qoqpop wrote 20 hours 5 min ago:
Video where he said he knew the team? In the main video, he
just speculates that some people at the conference made
bitcoin. Never provided even a claim to having evidence.
pyman wrote 18 hours 53 min ago:
You've just created an account to ask that question? Wow
:D [1] [2] [3] "Peter Thiel met with the e-gold team in
February 2000 on the Caribbean island of Anguilla to
discuss making PayPal interoperable with e-gold. The goal
was to challenge central banks by creating a system where
PayPal and e-gold could work together. Thiel believed
this collaboration could spark a revolution against
traditional financial institutions."
Actions speak louder than words.
- Thiel met with digital currency pioneers in 2000.
- Thiel chose not to partner with E-Gold because he
needed to stay compliant and bank-friendly.
- A few years later, Bitcoin quietly appears, solving the
exact problems E-Gold ran into.
- No names. No funding trail. No way for banks to know
who the enemy is. Just Bitcoin wallets full of money.
It doesn't sound like a bunch of idealistic cypherpunks
building tech to save the world. It sounds like a few
smart, well-connected people who understood how money
moves, got frustrated with the banking system and their
fees, and built a way to create wealth and move value
without paying commissions.
The cypherpunks laid the groundwork for the encryption
banks, governments, and corporations now depend on. They
were never interested in dodging taxes or avoiding bank
fees.
[1]: https://kqmarkets.co.uk/article/did-peter-thiel-...
[2]: https://protos.com/is-peter-thiel-inner-circle-b...
[3]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-...
yellow_lead wrote 23 hours 42 min ago:
My counterpoint is that if Elon were involved in any way at
all, he would have taken credit for it publicly by now.
pyman wrote 20 hours 7 min ago:
JPMorgan moves $10 trillion a day, according to Jamie Dimon.
So there's the unwritten rule: you never upset the banks
because that's the last thing you'll ever do.
So why would the richest person on earth do that? He's not
crazy.
latexr wrote 16 hours 14 min ago:
> So there's the unwritten rule: you never upset the banks
because that's the last thing you'll ever do.
What are they going to do? Whack him mafia style and make
it look like an accident? Here’s a more realistic rule:
“If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you
owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem”.
[1] > So why would the richest person on earth do that?
He's not crazy.
You mean the guy who is so insecure he constantly lies,
even about the most inconsequential things… [2] The guy
who is so uninformed and gullible he falls for any
conspiracy theory… [3] [4] The guy who jeopardised
billions by buying into a random tweet accusing a business
partner without proof… [5] The guy who invested all his
time and energy electing someone like him, only to then
(predictably) have a falling out… [6] I mean, maybe he
isn’t crazy, but that isn’t really an effective
defense. Crazy people at least have an excuse.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/214064-if-you-owe...
[2]: https://archive.ph/20250127023632/https://www.nyti...
[3]: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-li...
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u8_fp1TtJE
[5]: https://voz.us/en/world/250308/21932/mexican-tycoo...
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Musk_f...
notahacker wrote 18 hours 24 min ago:
Back in the real world, plenty of people publicly
associated with running major cryptocurrencies (and Craig
Wright!) are walking around talking about how they invented
the cryptocurrency and how it revolutionises banking, and
plenty of people inventing infrastructure for promoting
Bitcoin are doing deals with banks, whilst Elon is the sort
of guy who goes to extreme lengths to piss off both
political parties in the country that he and his businesses
and his lucrative government contracts are based in,
including ranting into the void about the most powerful and
most sensitive man in the Western world is in the Epstein
files when they had a fallout...
AdamJacobMuller wrote 1 day ago:
Perhaps plausible until you mention that they hired a team to
build it.
There's no way, even if it was a single-digit number of people
team that they would remain silent. If it was just Elon/Thiel I
could perhaps believe it.
Also keep in mind that there were some very desperate years for
Elon where his companies were extremely close to bankruptcy,
wouldn't he have tapped into that bitcoin if he had access to
it?
pyman wrote 20 hours 19 min ago:
> wouldn't he have tapped into that bitcoin if he had access
to it?
That's not how business works. You borrow, then borrow some
more, and focus on having a long term plan to cover the
interest, so you don't upset the banks or end up broke again.
Doesn't Elon sell Bitcoin whenever he needs a few hundred
million these days?
The fact that we don't understand how someone could've come
up with something like PayPal or Bitcoin might be exactly why
Elon and Peter are the richest people on the planet.
> There's no way, even if it was a single-digit number of
people team that they would remain silent.
JPMorgan moves $10 trillion a day. Would you sleep at night
knowing you publicly admitted being involved in a project
whose only mission is to bring them down?
PUSH_AX wrote 22 hours 2 min ago:
Because Elon is so humble…
DoesntMatter22 wrote 21 hours 39 min ago:
Seems fairly humble to me in that he's always thanking the
team and giving them most of the credit.
quinndexter wrote 20 hours 0 min ago:
The definition of humility is not "doing the bare
minimum."
DoesntMatter22 wrote 12 hours 21 min ago:
Can you name me a self made billionaire who is more
humble?
FireBeyond wrote 1 day ago:
> Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had
plans to build a similar digital currency.
> In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the
digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their
bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger
dependency on banks.
This doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Except PayPal wasn't invented by Elon or Peter. It was Elon's
company's plan to build the digital bank but they were failing
quite spectacularly at it.
They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a
working prototype, etc.
Elon lasted four months as CEO of PayPal, trying to convert it
from Java to ASP until the Board didn't ask him to resign, but
fired him, the morning he left on his honeymoon after getting
married.
PayPal is a complete red herring there. Elon had no
participation in ideas on digital currency there.
pyman wrote 19 hours 48 min ago:
So you are contradicting what Luke Nosek, the co-founder of
PayPal, said?
Luke: "Many people don’t know this, but the initial mission
of PayPal was to create a global currency that was
independent of interference by these, you know, corrupt
cartels of banks and governments that were debasing their
currencies.”
Why should we believe you and not the person who created
PayPal?
[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/paypal-originally-aim...
FireBeyond wrote 11 hours 19 min ago:
Uhhh... nothing I said contradicts Luke Nosek.
Elon was working on a digital bank, not a global currency.
His company was failing miserably.
Confinity, who made PayPal, and had a first version
working, merged with them.
Elon gets no credit for a 'global currency' idea (nor do I
think he and Thiel invented Bitcoin[1]), because Confinity
was already working on that idea when they merged and
became PayPal properly, in the four months before he was
ousted.
My argument was that Elon wasn't all about the global
currency.
[1] And Elon definitely didn't invent BitCoin. His ego
would never permit him to have kept that a secret for a
month, let alone a decade plus.
pyman wrote 7 hours 35 min ago:
Context matters.
The PayPal mafia (Musk, Nossk, Thiel, Levchin, Sacks, and
the rest) spent years working closely, obsessing over
banks, money, payments, and how to move value on the
internet, questioning everything: What is money? Who
controls it? How do you make it more efficient, global,
and digital?
FabHK wrote 22 hours 3 min ago:
> They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had
a working prototype, etc.
Interesting, need to read about it. So similar story as with
Tesla? Existing opinion nicely confirmed.
bostik wrote 20 hours 0 min ago:
Some of the history between the two companies is covered in
a book, "Paypal Wars.[0]
Among other things it happens to spotlight Musk's
fascination with having "X" as the company name, especially
for a bank.
0:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_PayPal_Wars
everfrustrated wrote 4 hours 56 min ago:
Yup. Also explains why X is trying to move into payments
now.
Elon seems to need to finish a vision he didn't get a
chance to finish back then.
Suppafly wrote 21 hours 8 min ago:
I've got a Confinity Paypal tshirt from a job fair I went
to in 2000 or 2001 from back when they envisioned people
using palm pilots to transfer money. I always think it's
hilarious that people give Elon any credit for doing
anything at the company.
kragen wrote 18 hours 17 min ago:
I saw people using PalmPilots to transfer money on PayPal
in 02001.
pyman wrote 19 hours 34 min ago:
The people who give him credit are the same people who
sold PayPal for $1.5 billion in July 2002:
Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Luke Nosek, Reid Hoffman, David
Sacks, Ken Howery, Jeremy Stoppelman, Russel Simmons.
Elon was removed as CEO in 2000, but he remained the
largest individual shareholder when PayPal went public.
volfonibros wrote 1 day ago:
For anyone else who's been vaguely following the story as it popped
up every few years, the latest news came out a few days ago : he
finally gave up.
nothrabannosir wrote 1 day ago:
That’s definitely also what I would publicize if I actually found
the HDD. :)
londons_explore wrote 21 hours 41 min ago:
Good chance those coins are 100% traceable. They were lost in
the days before good privacy tools like mixers, and the database
of the biggest exchange MtGox was fully leaked so everyone knows
the real name, email, bank details, and date of birth of the
owner of every old coin.
Very pleased I disposed of all mine long ago, and the Blockchain
shows that so nobody tries to kidnap me for the keys.
improbableinf wrote 18 hours 41 min ago:
That’s what someone who hasn’t disposed all of the coins
would say.
bbarnett wrote 20 hours 38 min ago:
In the early days, a pentium 486 in your garage could have made
these coins in a few months.
And you don't need an exchange to transfer coins.
No one knows who owns these wallets... yet. That's why they
are mysterious.
londons_explore wrote 5 hours 29 min ago:
Plenty of address reuse happened back then
rtkwe wrote 1 day ago:
He lost his court battle to force the local government running
the dump to allow him to dig the last I heard. So I doubt it, he
wasn't even allowed to really try.
nixass wrote 1 day ago:
> he finally gave up
Sounds like something someone who found few billion USD on a thumb
drive would say :)
hinkley wrote 1 day ago:
Has he opened a bar instead?
volemo wrote 22 hours 34 min ago:
He named it Puzzles.
stavros wrote 1 day ago:
I wouldn't say anything.
xdfgh1112 wrote 1 day ago:
Source?
[1]: https://x.com/howelzy
volfonibros wrote 21 hours 28 min ago:
I went back to the (french) articles making that claim in
headlines and it turns out to be false, thanks.
He lost his appeal in his case against the city authority to
search the landfill, so he can't ever search for it.
It's a bit buried in his feed in between the announcements about
tokenizing part of these legally inaccessible coins.
bravoetch wrote 1 day ago:
I would say the odds are zero because that's the likelihood of being
able to brute-force anything in the key space.
amy214 wrote 1 hour 48 min ago:
>I would say the odds are zero because that's the likelihood of
being able to brute-force anything in the key space.
you are correct at first pass, but it's a fact wallets have been
cracked many times, perhaps at least 100s of millions of dollars.
The "keyspace" for the cracked wallet is a subset of the nominal
keyspace - the much smaller space covered by either a flawed random
number generator (RNG), or the whole brainwallet fiasco, or a RNG
where a seed is crackable (e.g. milliseconds since 1970 or unix
epoch - some cracks, whitehat, have used this method). That's all
what we know in the whitehat space, surely other tricks exist in
the blackhat space
handfuloflight wrote 1 day ago:
It's not zero.
[1]: https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies
onlyrealcuzzo wrote 1 day ago:
It's close enough.
There are 200 million+ BTC wallets.
They've found 54 out of 200 million+ or about 0.00002% of wallets
- in how many years?
kristopolous wrote 1 day ago:
People are actively doing it. Mostly using clore.ai on their
4090x bundles.
I used to work in the gpu rental space up to about a month ago.
I talked to multiple people dropping hundreds of thousands of
dollars on looking for those keys.
I'd put house odds at say 20:1 that someone cracked it over
someone holding for 14 years and deciding now is strike time.
Also if it's a true crack, then Bitcoin price could collapse
swiftly if someone just snatched a wallet for 200k of compute
or whatever.
That's always been the real existential risk. I talked about it
as the DES problem over a decade ago. Let's see if this is it
dperrin wrote 18 hours 8 min ago:
Just speculating here, but isn't it quite possible someone
wasn't intentionally sitting on it for 14 years and instead
just couldn't access it? For example, if they've been sitting
in prison this whole time. Something like that seems
(statistically anyway) more plausible to me than getting
lucky on guessing a key.
HeartStrings wrote 22 hours 30 min ago:
It’s the quantum computer.
adastra22 wrote 23 hours 18 min ago:
Those people were wasting their money. They could be running
those GPUs from now until the end of the universe and still
have approximately 0% chance of finding a single used key.
kristopolous wrote 23 hours 11 min ago:
Right. Those were the ones I talked to, just by random
chance. It means that there are a lot of them.
This implicates a few things - (1) people win the lottery
every day and (2) it's highly unlikely that the best
techniques are publicly known.
Perhaps there's something that requires $1,000,000 in
investment to yield a 1:100 chance of finding a particular
targeted wallet using some clever shortcuts.
The other explanation is very implausible: a human sits on
wallets without splitting up the funds or derisking
exposure, has wallets with a billion dollars sitting it in.
Now I only have a few million, but even I have something
like 6 brokerages and 12 banks. Even when I was a btc
holder, I didn't keep over $100k in a single wallet.
The snatching theory requires no new revolutionary math, no
substantial breakthroughs, just some clever people with a
lot of resources and a goal.
Either explanation is speculative. I think the "lucky
researchers at some University" theory is more likely then
the "let's wait 14 years until this $1,000 becomes
$1,000,000,000."
Especially because (1) we're not exactly at some high water
mark and (2) if this was just a person with a wallet trying
to do something like pay for life's uncertainties, you can
do basically 100% of that with like 4btc.
However if you successfully snatched the wallet, you're on
a clock before someone else gets it. This is exactly the
kind of movement you'd be doing
Also if some old bitcoiner comes out and says "hey that was
me", we're still up in the air. If I had snatched a billion
dollar wallet, the first thing I'd do is payoff an old
btc'er to claim its there's to prevent market panic.
adastra22 wrote 22 hours 54 min ago:
This isn’t like lottery odds. The space of keys here is
vast. Like unimaginably so. 2^256 is a lot of keys.
If someone had a faster method for breaking elliptic
curve keys, fast enough to have a realistic chance on
GPUs, the repercussions for that would be waaaaaay larger
than merely stealing some bitcoin. This is the same math
upon which nearly all digital security in common use
today is based. It’d be full-on cryptopocalypse.
logsr wrote 20 hours 30 min ago:
the most likely weakness is in the ECC implementation.
i don't understand the math (who does?) but what the
debate over [1] tells me is that very few people know
what a "weak curve" is but people agree that they
exist. this has always made me sketch on ECC in
general, especially since it is also used in Tor.
Another possibility is compromising the RNG used for
creating the pvt sig? which since these are early
addresses they would have been from a very early
version of the software, and might have used a shitty
RNG. If this is a crack it could definitely be state
level actors (who has the US pissed off lately? who
have they not?). Whether it is state/private the goal
would be to extract as much real money as possible
before creating a panic, so will be interesting to see
where the money goes.
[1]: https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/
adastra22 wrote 17 hours 43 min ago:
FYI the “safe curves” charts are garbage
self-promotion for his own crypto algorithms. I
generally respect DJB, but he didn’t even try to be
unbiased with that analysis.
kristopolous wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
You're looking at it wrong. There doesn't need to be a
generalizable, embarrassingly parallel, computationally
lower class, key reduction.
Just this specific implementation with these specific
wallets maybe using a version of the btc code with a
small recently discovered bug that existed say for 3
months in 2011
You can have something extremely localized and get this
result. And this is exactly the behavior people have
long game theoried would happen under such a scenario.
You're implicitly making the claim that just because
you can't find something widely discussed in literature
than any optimization of any kind is impossible and
nobody would ever dare to keep an advantage in stealing
bitcoin wallets secret.
Stuxnet is way less plausible than this yet that
happened.
People have been trying to do this for a decade and
have in aggregate thrown probably north of $100 million
into it through separate efforts. The idea of someone
finally succeeding is kind of expected.
Again the only claim I'm making here is that this is
not only a non-zero chance, but, in my mind, an over
90%.
jjmarr wrote 22 hours 25 min ago:
"larger than merely stealing some Bitcoin"
It's US$2 billion. I can't imagine a better way of
monetizing such an exploit than to convert it into cash
by using Bitcoin.
The US govt can't pay you US$2 billion without it
showing up as a line item in the federal budget. That's
like 20% of the NSA's funding. You'd have to get
authorization from the President and hold some
emergency session of Congress. Other governments would
pay less.
Hacking the normal banking system is also challenging.
If you steal US$2 billion someone is going to notice
and simply undo the transaction because banking doesn't
believe in "code as law".
adastra22 wrote 14 min ago:
Changing global politics (e.g. allowing the complete
decryption of diplomatic messages) has a value and
magnitude of impact that is not easily measured in
dollar terms.
handfuloflight wrote 1 day ago:
How does the equation change with $100m of cloud or GPU compute
as GP speculated? These are all hobbyists.
onlyrealcuzzo wrote 1 day ago:
It would take approximately 6B H100 GPU days to crack every
active BTC wallet.
So if you had 10,000 H100s running, it'd only take ~1500
years.
You'd have a high probability to find key in under ~1000
years, though.
Even if I'm off by 3 orders of magnitude, it would take a
decade and cost billions, and not make financial sense.
FabHK wrote 21 hours 35 min ago:
How do you get that?
BTC private key space is 256 bit. Let's say a billion
wallets, that's 30 bits, so you need to check 226 bits to
hit one wallet.
A H100 does about 1000 TFLOPS at the very most, that's
10^15 or 50 bits per second (generously assuming we can
check on key per FLOP).
6B days of that will give you an additional 50 bits (6 = 8
= 3 bits, B = 1000^3 = 30 bits, day = 10^5 seconds = 17
bits).
Now we're talking 100 bits. But as discussed above, you
need to check 220 bits to hit a key. There's still quite a
gap.
For comparison, the entire Bitcoin network (using 1% of
world electricity) does about 1000 EH/s at the moment,
that's 10^21 or 70 bits per second (so, roughly equivalent
to a million of H100, using the rough overestimating
sketch above).
Per year, that's 70+25 = 95 bits. Still far.
1oooqooq wrote 1 day ago:
*at most ... years.
People always forget those numbers are worst case
scenarios. I mean, you can get luck on the very first guess
too.
relaxing wrote 1 day ago:
If that’s the plan you can guess a number for free, no
outlay needed.
kelseyfrog wrote 1 day ago:
If your guess is generated by a QRNG and many worlds is
true, than one version of you is very happy although
the expected value is 1.03×10−66 USD.
paulpauper wrote 1 day ago:
Active addresses have less entropy too
FabHK wrote 16 hours 3 min ago:
Why? Are you hypothesizing that they used bad RNGs?
nottrueatallz wrote 1 day ago:
Not true at all! Everyone knows there are holes in the crypto
algorithms and implementations which agencies use to achieve
any objective they may have. On top of that there are also
holes across the software and hardware stacks of various
implementations. Just because they run all the researchers
and fund a lot of it does not mean there are no holes.
Especially now with AI, I wouldn't be surprised if an amateur
kicked a bunch of tires and got lucky.
Just because they are not published, does not mean they are
not using them, someone else found them and are using them.
Or they just have the keys from back in the day.
Can't wait to follow this story as it unfolds. The other risk
is Quantum... That is going to be real fun when it starts
making leaps above Moores Law.
There needs to be a industry wide effort NOW! That researches
and generates keys in unconventional ways, different than the
ways they are being generated now. Because Quantum is a
beast. Those keys will need to be Quantum proof, which means
that even if the agent knows the algorithm that is used to
generate the keys they cannot duplicate the keys that were
generated the first instance it was run. Or you can start
doing Hashing across fingerprint, eye and dna data. That is
coming my folks!
celticninja wrote 1 day ago:
You dont understand bitcoin or the math or the cryptography
ehind it.
cluckindan wrote 1 day ago:
Can you look me in the eye and state that you understand
Bitcoin and the math and the cryptography behind it?
Even if you do, there could in theory still be a way to
narrow down the key space or find some other shortcut to
a wallet key, even if nobody has figured it out yet.
celticninja wrote 17 hours 5 min ago:
I understand the math and crypto behind it to a degree.
I don't profess expert knowledge however. But I know
enough to know the GP is wrong and I'm happy to point
that out. If I thought there was any value in
correcting GP claim by claim I would do so. But in
reality it will just end up in me wasting my time
trying to educate someone who doesn't want to be
educated, and if they did they could go and research
the math and cryptography for themselves.
As someone once said, I can explain it to you, but I
can't understand it for you.
onlyrealcuzzo wrote 1 day ago:
It changes that if you attempt to liquidate that much BTC,
BTC crashes and you've got 90% less money than you hoped for.
paulpauper wrote 1 day ago:
if someone could brute force a key, they would target small
inactive wallets , rather than big wallets and drawing
attention to it
handfuloflight wrote 1 day ago:
Do you really think they have no notion of liquidity? Why
would they attempt to liquidate it all at once?
beefnugs wrote 22 hours 49 min ago:
Because maybe this isn't satoshi waking up, but finally
those kidnappers hit that poor guy in the latest "we
found satoshi" documentary
onlyrealcuzzo wrote 1 day ago:
Just the fear of future liquidation would eventually
severely crash BTC.
paulpauper wrote 1 day ago:
yeah, people think it's the selling that makes the
price fall. it is the anticipation . markets are
forward looking
handfuloflight wrote 1 day ago:
Like it's crashing now on this news?
onlyrealcuzzo wrote 1 day ago:
There's ~$188B in Satoshi era wallets.
While ~$8B is huge news, due to the potential that
all ~$188B might be in play, when most investors
probably expected it was not prior to this - or at
least the probability was low enough to barely
factor, it's unlikely to crash BTC.
Further, moving BTC is one thing. Showing signs of
liquidation is another.
That much should be able to get liquidated
intelligently without moving the market.
paulpauper wrote 1 day ago:
It depends how it's sold. Market orders would have
more impact than OTC .
cj wrote 1 day ago:
They could also do a private party transaction to sell
the coins outside of an exchange, in order to hide the
sale and also hide the price of the tokens sold.
This is common practice in the stock market, called "dark
pools" [0]
> Dark pools came about primarily to facilitate block
trading by institutional investors who did not wish to
impact the markets with their large orders and obtain
adverse prices for their trades.
[0]
[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/05...
usrusr wrote 1 day ago:
Outside, as in off the blockchain? That would mean that
after the transaction, both sides would know the key to
the wallet and there would be a race about who lights
up a transaction first.
cj wrote 1 day ago:
After the transaction, you can still send the bitcoin
to the purchaser's wallet.
But since the purchase itself happens off exchange,
there's no record of how much the coins were sold
for, so no impact on market price.
sokoloff wrote 1 day ago:
A large wallet that’s been dormant for years
suddenly becoming active will tend to pressure the
price lower from the implied increase in liquid
supply and fear that the wallet will continue to
distribute coins.
It’s not just the printing of transaction price
that can affect the market.
phil21 wrote 1 day ago:
The vast majority of BTC transactions are done this
way. Anything of any size is traded via OTC desks or
other more private avenues.
IncreasePosts wrote 1 day ago:
Imagine finding a file on an old laptop from when you were just futzing
around 15 years ago. And it was worth $9 billion.
bravoetch wrote 1 day ago:
It's not that. These are addresses with 10k BTC each. That's very
intentional storage even for 2011.
bombcar wrote 1 day ago:
Wasn’t 10k bitcoin the price of a pizza or something back then?
canucker2016 wrote 1 day ago:
10K BTC for two Papa John's large pies. see [1] That's about
US$500M per pie these days ( 1BTC ~= US$100K )
[1]: https://marketrealist.com/what-is-the-bitcoin-pizza-tran...
qqqult wrote 1 day ago:
BTC ranged between $0.30 and $27 back in 2011 so not quite
ETH_start wrote 1 day ago:
April 2011 is not Satoshi era. Satoshi had dropped out of public
Bitcoin forums by late 2010.
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