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Bitcoin The Almighty Buck

The World's Cryptocurrency is Now Worth More Than $1 Trillion (arstechnica.com) 132

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The world's cryptocurrency is now worth more than $1 trillion, with bitcoin accounting for a large majority of the value. The price of the oldest virtual currency has risen above $40,000, pushing the value of all bitcoins in circulation up to more than $700 billion. From a report: Ether, the cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network, is now worth more than $140 billion. Then there's a long list of less valuable cryptocurrencies, including Tether at $22 billion, Litecoin at $11 billion, and Bitcoin Cash at $8 billion. Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is believed to own around 1 million bitcoins. Most of these were mined in the first two years of Bitcoin's existence when there was little competition. If he still has copies of the private keys that control these coins, that would give him a net worth of nearly $40 billion -- enough to make him among the 40 wealthiest people on the planet. Nakamoto has never publicly revealed his true identity and has not communicated publicly since 2014.
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The World's Cryptocurrency is Now Worth More Than $1 Trillion More

The World's Cryptocurrency is Now Worth More Than $1 Trillion

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  • No. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TheZeal0t ( 5132333 ) on Thursday January 07, 2021 @04:01PM (#60908226)
    No it isn't.
    • People are betting that it'll eventually be worth $1t. That's what counts... I think. This definitely isn't another bubble. This time it's different somehow. I can just feel it, ya know? Hodl!

      • To whom?
        To morons that can't even afford to be ripped off?
        Or to themselve in thos pump & dump scheme?

        I say prison for all the gamblers. Everyone who causes my salary or wealth go down with "inflation" or other forms of making up money and paying with it, must go to prison for the same reason as anyone physically printing money of that quantity and shopping with it an equal amount.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        People are betting that it'll eventually be worth $1t. That's what counts... I think. This definitely isn't another bubble. This time it's different somehow. I can just feel it, ya know? Hodl!

        Indeed! This time it must be the one true thing! After all the other pump&dump scams, this time it is going to stay up! Right?

    • I just invented my own cryptocurrency, which I declare is worth $1 trillion on its own, so the worlds is now $2 trillion.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      No it isn't.

      Indeed. Its actual worth is still zero and that will remain unchanged. The "Trillion" is what those holding it are asking for it, but will not get. Even the ones that are currently still doing the "pump" part of the scam will get much less. Also looks to me like the "dump" step is imminent, hopefully these fools can then stop bothering everybody sane.

    • It might be priced at huge amount of dollars, but the value of just a number is still zero.

      But as even economists do not know the distinction between value and price anymore, such nonsense does not actually surprise me..

    • No

      To clarify: Cryptocurrency is worth nothing. The amount of cryptocurrency, multiplied by the last selling price, may be a trillion dollars, but the value is zero.

  • "Worth" $1 Trillion? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Arthur, KBE ( 6444066 ) on Thursday January 07, 2021 @04:04PM (#60908238)
    Not to me, and not to most people, it isn't.
    • That's a hard one. And I'll be up front. Don't care, will never attempt to mine... There are real world vendors out there that will accept Bitcoin as legal tender to buy actual goods. Newegg is the easiest example. It's worth something to those who will accept it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        It's worth something to those who will accept it.

        Yes. But that wort is entirely in PR. The vapor-Coins themselves have no value. As soon as they get over a certain very low purchase volume, these offers universally vanish.

  • And nothing of value was created (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AnonyMouseCowWard ( 2542464 ) on Thursday January 07, 2021 @04:07PM (#60908254)
    We've converted energy (and the resulting pollution, and use of Earth's resources) into bits. It's now "worth" $1T+ in a fiat currency the cryptofans are telling me is really not worth anything because it's not backed by anything.

    I don't know what to make of this. Blockchain can be a useful technology, but the cryptocurrency crap just feels foolish, with more and more fools throwing money and using limited world resources to prop up an illusionary currency. It's saddening.
    • it's just one more way to shuffle around money to keep it in the "right" people's hands. Heck at these levels I'd guess state actors are involved (think CIA, like when they sold drugs to raise money for blackops, yes that's real, no it's not a conspiracy theory, the declassified docs proved it).

    • You nailed the whole thing.

      I traded a few cryptos back in 2015 for fun and [small] profit, but I don't get the bubble. There are several ways that blockchain can be useful and many implementations are much better than bitcoins. Ethereums contracts can be useful, but are not used widely and can probably be done better.

      Aren't most of the miners in China now? Will someone else pick up the expensive mining operations if they decide to outlaw it?

      What if the blockchain gets poisoned or brute forced at 51%? Does F

      • After 2017, if you think that something useful was invented outside Bitcoin with the concept of Blockchain you have likely failed to look at the current situation.

        https://twitter.com/udiWerthei... [twitter.com]
        It’s time for the ETH gang to wake up, smell the ashes, and take some responsibility
        Their 2017 “blockchain everything” narrative failed miserably and cost retail investors BILLIONS, dumped into scams supported by ETH naiveté
        We’re toxic? How dare you? Where’s your post mortem

      • Does FDIC cover the losses?

        In a word, no.

        In slightly more words, the FDIC deals with dollars in US banks. Bitcoin isn't in a US Bank, and it's not dollars. So there is no level of interaction between the two...

      • Most of Bitcoin Cash's miners are in China, I think. BTC itself has a better distribution of miners. It is right to be concerned that a state actor could attempt at 51% attack, which is one of the reasons why the cryptoverse needs to move beyond Proof of Work consensus models.

    • Again... No one cares about whether it's backed. The real question is who accepts it as legal tender for actual goods and services? Newegg does. I get that this is small potatoes, but something is always worth it to someone else. And the previous poster is pretty on point. Our $$ are no longer backed by the gold standard.

      • You wouldn't want to use BTC as legal tender. The txn times are incredibly slow, and as soon as you cash in even the smallest fraction of a BTC to buy something, you may owe cap gains tax on it as if you were selling real estate. It's cumbersome to use as currency.

        What's unfortunate is that some etailers are still trying to use BTC for this purpose, instead of a stablecoin like TUSD or similar. You would liquidate BTC or ETH (or whatever) for TUSD (or USDC or DAI or one of the others), assess your tax at

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kaenneth ( 82978 )

          "The txn times are incredibly slow"

          It takes 6 days to transfer an online submitted payment from my bank checking account to my same bank credit card account, and you think Bitcoin is slow?

          • It sounds like _someone_ is making money on both the float and charging you more interest in the time when your payment _could_ have been made.

          • Blame your bank. Mine doesn't do that.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cas2000 ( 148703 )

            Your bank is fucked and primitive and just wants to divert your money for 6 days. And perhaps all American banks - from everything I've read about them, they're an even worse predatory gouging horrorshow than in this country.

            In any modern country, you can login to your online banking account and transfer money between your accounts instantly, and transferring to any other bank account takes less than 24 hours (all you need is the recipient's bank branch code and account name & account number - this

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by edis ( 266347 )

        Again... No one cares about whether it's backed. The real question is who accepts it as legal tender for actual goods and services? Newegg does. I get that this is small potatoes, but something is always worth it to someone else. And the previous poster is pretty on point. Our $$ are no longer backed by the gold standard.

        The real question is what all that "value growth" reflects, doubling in a month? But a sick head.
        Having 'bout half of Apple valuation, I heard, must be slightly more today. For a reason of? But sick head.
        Your dollars do not head in value at comparable pace anywhere - and know what - this gonna be in the end so much healthier and less useless.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jythie ( 914043 )
        Gold standard was not really 'backed' either. Gold was only valuable because that is what you had to pay taxes in, which means it had the exact same backing USD has.

    • Some researchers did prove in the 80s, that the natural life cycle of such a economy is to blow up. First in terms of size, then in terms of bursting. Because the former by definition means the point where it stops being believable will inevitably come.
      For regular stock markets they calculated that cycle to last about 30 years.
      And if you put a cork onto the volcano, you get more years, and an equally bigger explosion. See 2007. (Now the cork is even bigger!)
      For BTC, I'd say it's ... about 3 years? ;)

      And for

    • OK, to heavily simplify this, if I've understood currencies correctly:

      Money isn't a finite resource, it's a promise to pay, otherwise known as debt. Money is theoretically limitless and scales accordingly as economic activity increases or decreases. Governments control the amount of money in circulation via their central banks issuing new debt (increase) & taxation (decrease).

      The value that money has is mostly based on who promises to pay that debt, e.g. governments of OECD countries are generally more

    • Blockchain can be a useful technology

      Can it? I get that people hate the credit card companies and their fees; but my transactions with a card are secure. The transaction time is a matter of seconds, and I'm given to understand that blockchain transactions are still too slow for POS. You can track and unwind most fraud with a credit card. The only time I've had a problem with a card is when it suddenly stopped working. Reason? The credit union had detected fraud and blocked my account. There was no

  • Discount $40B (Score:5, Insightful)

    by enriquevagu ( 1026480 ) on Thursday January 07, 2021 @04:22PM (#60908322)

    What would happen to Bitcoin's valuation if there was one movement from Satoshi's wallet? Just a single one.

    Those bitcoins are locked forever, because using them would destroy their valuation.

    • At this point, his BTC would get rapidly absorbed by the demand. Perhaps a valley could be formed if all got dropped on the market at the same time, but it would likely recover within a few days.

  • Huh? (Score:2)

    by PCM2 ( 4486 )

    By what definition of "worth"? Is it possible that a cryptocurrency can be valued at any amount if the only thing you can trade it for is other cryptocurrencies? Sounds like moving beans from one pile to another to me.

    • You can sell it for USD or any other fiat currency on the planet. Did you not know this? No different from owning shares on the stock market. These you can also not trade directly for a cup of coffee in most places. But if you sell them for fiat first, then you can get your coffee. I guess you just didn't know.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mouldy ( 1322581 )
      The same definition of worth anything else uses. It's worth as much as someone will pay for it.

      Right now, people are paying fiat to get crypto and that's what the $1t market can TFA quotes

  • the previous one ("Bitcoin Soars To $40,000, Doubling in Less Than a Month") is about the same subject and is only 3 stories down on the front page.

    Stop pumping this crap.

  • 2 Bitcoin stories
    2 Musk about to be and is the richest man stories.
    2 Julian Extrange extradition blocked stories

    SLASHDOT EDITORS, DO YOUR JOB OR ADMIT YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

  • It is not worth one single damn dime at my supermarket! Nor at my business. And it never will be.

    Sure, you could theoretically use it to rip off the morons of the world by $1 trillion. If they had the money to afford it.

    But clearly, humans and Ferengi got very different definitions of actual "worth".

  • They actually are worth 0$

  • I just talked with a coworker today who invested about $5K in BC back when it first peaked in 2017. He didn't know how to let it go and got burned when it tanked. Now he's even more excited with this second bubble. I imagine there's plenty more investors like him that are just riding this runaway stagecoach as it heads right for the cliff.

    But on the other hand, I wish all these people would understand, their investments in BC and its second surge are directly funding the North Korean regime, who has lots

    • I requested tears from the BTC denialists, and you deliver. "They are funding Kim Jong-un in North Korea".

      That's a good tear, well done.

      More!

    • It's funding anyone holding BTC. One of the potential negatives of a decentralized monetary system is that you don't get to control who holds money. And even when you DO control money, it isn't always easy. Despite our various banking controls, anyone holding USD can still buy/sell/trade using it through money laundering and other techniques, even if they are international drug cartels (or similar).

  • I would love to see a comparison between the value of the currency in circulation and the combined cost of the energy, components, etc required to mine it. Is it net zero? Is it net positive? Net negative? I would love someone to do this analysis.

    Will

    • It surely must be positive. I question the judgment of those who are heavily invested in cryptocurrency, but I doubt they'd be mining if they were losing money on every coin produced.

      That logic might not hold up if a large percentage of coins are mined on subsidized power or by sanctions-busters who are willing to take a loss, but I expect that the recent 100% increase in the price of BTC would make up for it.

  • The wonders of last-trade accounting (Score:3)

    by OpenSourced ( 323149 ) on Thursday January 07, 2021 @06:05PM (#60908824) Journal

    Elon Musk is not the richest man in the world, because if he tried to sell all his stock in Tesla to like, buy things or services, he wouldn't be able to do it at the price of today.

    You can calculate the "capitalization" of a company by multiplying the number of shares by the price of the last transaction, but that's a meaningless number, useful only to compose headlines.

    Even more meaningless is multiplying the number of bitcoins by the price of the last transaction, because, well, bitcoins have nothing of use inside. So, that money does not exist. If tomorrow one bitcoin is sold at double the price of today, no sudden billions have materialized from think air.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      Elon Musk is not the richest man in the world, because if he tried to sell all his stock in Tesla to like, buy things or services, he wouldn't be able to do it at the price of today.

      ??? Tesla has 950M outstanding shares, of which Musk owns 20% or 190M (but I also see it said that he owns 240M shares). The average volume in Tesla is 50M shares change hands every day. Therefore Musk could sell an appreciable fraction of his shares without dragging the markets down. The complicating factor is that Musk would have to file a Form 4 within two days of a stock transaction, making it public knowledge what he had done.

      Scenario: (1) he makes a deal with a major investor of some sort to sell say

  • Has more value to me, go figure.

  • Tether is a moneymarket fund (with questionable investments) which happens to be traded on a cryptocurrency backend.

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