Why Isn't Bitcoin Booming? (nytimes.com) 168
"Bitcoin was seen by many of its libertarian-leaning fans as a kind of doomsday insurance," argues a columnist in the New York Times, "a form of 'digital gold' that would be a source of stability as the world grew more chaotic and unpredictable....
"But Bitcoin hasn't boomed.... Bitcoin prices are down 10 percent in the past month, and Ether, the second most popular crypto coin, is down roughly 15 percent.Day-to-day usage of cryptocurrencies isn't picking up the way you'd expect, either. Bitcoin trading volume rose after Russia invaded Ukraine, but it has remained relatively flat since, suggesting that people aren't rushing to trade their rubles and hryvnia (Ukraine's currency) for digital currencies. Russian oligarchs don't appear to be using crypto to evade sanctions en masse, either, despite initial fears that they might...."
The column ultimately argues that bitcoin isn't playing a central role in the unfolding crisis. "Which raises the obvious question: Why not?" One possibility is that crypto is still too confusing and too difficult for normal people to use, especially during a war. Internet access is spotty in many parts of Ukraine, and reports have suggested that even the country's elites are struggling to convert their assets into crypto.
Another possibility, popular among skeptics of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is that Bitcoin is still too volatile to be useful as a hedge against economic and political instability. "The Bitcoin and crypto communities have been selling a false narrative all these years that Bitcoin is supposed to be a safe haven from the traditional financial markets," said Jimmy Nguyen, the president of the Bitcoin Association, a cryptocurrency trade group. (His group promotes a Bitcoin spinoff, Bitcoin SV, that sees itself as a more useful version of the cryptocurrency.) Bitcoin is doomed, Mr. Nguyen argues, because it can be slow and expensive to process transactions, making it less useful for paying for things. "And so a lot of Bitcoin supporters have had to come up with this argument that it's meant to be a reserve asset," he said.
Kevin Werbach, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, floated a different theory. Bitcoin's earliest and most vocal adopters, he said, tended to be libertarians who saw cryptocurrency as a kind of insurance policy against hyperinflation and government corruption. But the more recent price swings in the crypto markets attracted a surge of speculators who viewed Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies mainly as investments, and cared less about their political implications. "There's a tremendous amount of rhetoric around Bitcoin in particular that suggests that it's predominantly a means of escaping from the government-issued fiat currency system," he said.
"And yet most of the activity, according to basically every rigorous study that's been done, is predominantly people speculating...."
CNN got another reaction from Eswar Prasad, a professor at Cornell's Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of "The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance."
The professor's opinion? While bitcoin "has failed in its stated purpose as a medium of exchange for conducting transactions, it has become a speculative financial asset..." The Russian government cannot count on bitcoin to evade sanctions — after all, payments for international transactions still need to be settled in real money such as dollars or euros. Furthermore, cryptocurrencies cannot in any significant way prevent a country's currency from collapsing in value relative to major reserve currencies since those values are determined in formal financial markets. Cryptocurrencies might in fact hurt Russia if they are seen by the country's citizens as a better option than the plunging domestic currency. Thus, bitcoin might end up precipitating a flight of deposits from Russia's banking system and even as a conduit for capital flight out of the country.
"But Bitcoin hasn't boomed.... Bitcoin prices are down 10 percent in the past month, and Ether, the second most popular crypto coin, is down roughly 15 percent.Day-to-day usage of cryptocurrencies isn't picking up the way you'd expect, either. Bitcoin trading volume rose after Russia invaded Ukraine, but it has remained relatively flat since, suggesting that people aren't rushing to trade their rubles and hryvnia (Ukraine's currency) for digital currencies. Russian oligarchs don't appear to be using crypto to evade sanctions en masse, either, despite initial fears that they might...."
The column ultimately argues that bitcoin isn't playing a central role in the unfolding crisis. "Which raises the obvious question: Why not?" One possibility is that crypto is still too confusing and too difficult for normal people to use, especially during a war. Internet access is spotty in many parts of Ukraine, and reports have suggested that even the country's elites are struggling to convert their assets into crypto.
Another possibility, popular among skeptics of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is that Bitcoin is still too volatile to be useful as a hedge against economic and political instability. "The Bitcoin and crypto communities have been selling a false narrative all these years that Bitcoin is supposed to be a safe haven from the traditional financial markets," said Jimmy Nguyen, the president of the Bitcoin Association, a cryptocurrency trade group. (His group promotes a Bitcoin spinoff, Bitcoin SV, that sees itself as a more useful version of the cryptocurrency.) Bitcoin is doomed, Mr. Nguyen argues, because it can be slow and expensive to process transactions, making it less useful for paying for things. "And so a lot of Bitcoin supporters have had to come up with this argument that it's meant to be a reserve asset," he said.
Kevin Werbach, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, floated a different theory. Bitcoin's earliest and most vocal adopters, he said, tended to be libertarians who saw cryptocurrency as a kind of insurance policy against hyperinflation and government corruption. But the more recent price swings in the crypto markets attracted a surge of speculators who viewed Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies mainly as investments, and cared less about their political implications. "There's a tremendous amount of rhetoric around Bitcoin in particular that suggests that it's predominantly a means of escaping from the government-issued fiat currency system," he said.
"And yet most of the activity, according to basically every rigorous study that's been done, is predominantly people speculating...."
CNN got another reaction from Eswar Prasad, a professor at Cornell's Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of "The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance."
The professor's opinion? While bitcoin "has failed in its stated purpose as a medium of exchange for conducting transactions, it has become a speculative financial asset..." The Russian government cannot count on bitcoin to evade sanctions — after all, payments for international transactions still need to be settled in real money such as dollars or euros. Furthermore, cryptocurrencies cannot in any significant way prevent a country's currency from collapsing in value relative to major reserve currencies since those values are determined in formal financial markets. Cryptocurrencies might in fact hurt Russia if they are seen by the country's citizens as a better option than the plunging domestic currency. Thus, bitcoin might end up precipitating a flight of deposits from Russia's banking system and even as a conduit for capital flight out of the country.
Digital value asset vs risky tech investment? (Score:2)
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This. Bitcoin is not being used as a currency.
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A Ponzi scheme requires the investment fund to pay back other investors with new investors money. Bitcoin is decentralized, so it's basically impossible for it to even work that way. Calling it a pyramid scheme doesn't work either, because pyramid schemes are also ultimately centralized. In fact, if you think Ponzi schemes and pyramid schemes are at all similar, then you really don't understand either one of them. In order to trade bitcoin for anything else, neither you nor the person you're trading them to
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Every cryptocurrency functions as a pyramid. The initial "premine" is level 1 - the maker and their friends. The "Initial coin offering" is level 2. After that, it's just level on level of suckers being tricked into buying in at higher prices so that the early set can cash out.
Re: Digital value asset vs risky tech investment? (Score:2)
Yes, and corporations make things while Bitcoin bakes things.
Re: Digital value asset vs risky tech investment? (Score:2)
No a company cant just issue more stock to raise money. To do so lowers the stock price and thus value. Lower it to far and you delist yourself. Your atock value is the value of your company. You devaule it by issuing more stock. Even is you go bankrupt your stock still had value as your physical assets are aold off to pay debts. (It is why a business seldom owns the property they are in.)the owners own the property through a different company and thus pay rent to themselves.
Now ceypto has no physical
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No a company cant just issue more stock to raise money. To do so lowers the stock price and thus value.
Oh yes they can, and they do. It's called dilution, and it's legal.
https://www.investopedia.com/a... [investopedia.com]
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Bitcoin has a hard cap of 21 million.
The code is open source and if 51% of the miners decide more coins = more profit, there goes your "hard cap".
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And it's already happened several times [investopedia.com] to keep the pyramid scam going.
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A fork is not the same as raising the cap. That's where somebody literally creates their own new coin, and does so by copying the entire blockchain. It has no impact at all on the cryptocurrency that it was copied from, and every future transaction from either the source or the destination blockchains does not affect the other. Their values are in no way connected.
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Yeah, each bitcoin is divisible in units of 100 million. They call those units satoshis. Think of it like how each dollar is divisible into 100 cents.
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It comes to the same thing. If you are holding bitcoin, you depend on a greater fool to buy them one day in order to cash out. Ponzi might not be exactly the right term since some of the elements are missing, including somebody to jail when it all goes wrong, but there are similarities.
Unlike investments, bitcoin has no intrinsic value real or imagined that you would expect from commodities nor does it have the potential to do anything of value like you might hope a retailer, manufacturer, or service corpor
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Capital stock, that is shares of what a corporation, for instance, considers capital and therefore an asset, have no intrinsic value, unless you consider corporate assets such as real estate, equipment, and inventory, to be the tangible assets that would never be worth zero. But... real estate can reach an effective asset value of zero if the market for it collapses, usually temporarily. Equipment can become so obsolete it has only scrap value. Inventory can reach near-zero value, all together leaving you i
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You must admit though that while it is unlikely the world will decide to go naked and so render clothes valueless or decide it's done with eating and so food goes to zero value, bitcoin fills no need or preference to any significant degree. There's a lot less to prop it up.
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An investment in Bitcoin is an investment in trust. Immutable, programmable trust.
Unlike say an investment in Theranos.
A lot of people that don't fully participate in the economy will never understand how large a part trust plays in the world we live in so will undervalue Bitcoin.
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I agree it doesn't actually *work* like a Ponzi scheme, in that there isn't a central operator who pays existing investors from new investor revenue. But if you look at it as a black box, it certainly has similarities. People buy it as an investment, but it has no real value than people in the future buying it as an investment.
One notable difference is that Bitcoin appears much more resilient than a Ponzi scheme. When a Ponzi scheme crashes, the operator is exposed and it stays crashed. Bitcoin has recov
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People buy it as an investment, but it has no real value than people in the future buying it as an investment.
That's a lot more than a Ponze scheme has. It doesn't even have that. And that is why the comparison is completely wrong.
And for that matter, the real value of just about everything being used for investments has the same problem. There may be a small intrinsic value, often theoretical (like owning a stock; in theory it's part of a company, but good luck liquefying that), but ultimately the value depends on what someone else is willing to pay for it, and nothing else.
The only real difference with Bitcoin is
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The same is true of virtual goods that people buy in video games with money. And yet, they pay money for them.
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Bitcoin solves the problem of unlimited money printing that's been making the dollar worthless.
There is no such problem. The dollar has not become worthless despite "unlimited" money printing (which is limited by destruction of money, shitloads of money are printed every year) and if you need proof you can simply compare it to other world currencies, which is how currencies work by the way. If I can exchange my dollars for useful amounts of other currencies (as defined as being able to buy stuff) then they clearly are not worthless by any reasonable measurement.
Further, Bitcoin does not solve this pr
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"Bitcoin is decentralized"
No it's not, most mining is done by a hand full of minig pools. Most Bitcoin is in the hands of a few people.
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That's because it's a ponzi scheme at core.
Saying "at core" means that something was designed for that purpose. Most accounts of Bitcoin's origin suggest otherwise. Because if Bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme at the start (early 2009), then it was a very slow-moving Ponzi scheme. This is the setting for the famous Bitcoin pizza delivery story (2010). It took thousands of (whole) Bitcoins to get the pizza delivery.
Most bitcoins at the start were mined in PCs by hobbyists, and there were even bitcoin fountains that gave away satoshis simply for visiting t
Designed to not be stable (Score:2)
I don't know if Bitcoin was originally designed as a pyramid scheme, but it was designed to NOT be "a source of stability as the world grew more chaotic".
Stability requires that the supply increases in response to increases in demand. Bitcoin is specifically designed to NOT allow supply to match demand. Meaning it's mathematically impossible for the value to be stable at any value much greater than zero.
Re: Digital value asset vs risky tech investment? (Score:2)
Everything is just 1s and 0s in a computer. Incl your comment. Or Facebook/Meta. Waste of energy - yes. Dont have any intrinsic value - yes.
Is the intrinsic value of a potato more at a Michelin star restaurant than if I boil it ?
What about a Zara dress ?
Why is USD preferred when any currency in sufficient amount would provide the same value ? Do you trust it will be more stable or something ? Accepted everywhere ?
It's the same with bitcoin. Some people like it and put their money in it. Others dont.
Just lik
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Bitcoin is doomed. (Score:3)
Soon all available bitcoins will be mined. Once they are all mined that's it: it's set up to only have a finite number of Bitcoins in existence and that number is already known. So, there will be zero reason to keep mining.
When the miners pull out the whole thing will tank.
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Each transaction has the option to include a transaction fee. The miner that solves the block gets to keep all the transaction fees. That provides the incentive to keep mining. If less people are mining the difficulty decreases so its cheaper to mine. Essentially self-regulating.
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And just like that, you describe Bitcoin also as a decentralized banking system... Clever by half.
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Somehow it all started as a ponzi scheme...
No, it started as an experiment, and some years down the line turned into a Ponzi scheme.
is only used for money laundering
That certainly isn't the only use case. There's also dark net markets, and a cornucopia of scams both legal and illegal. But yes, it works wonderfully for money laundering too.
Bitcoin == NFTs
Other than categorizing them both as "blockchain technology", which they are, I've never seen anyone on Slashdot confuse the two. Maybe you can provide some evidence for that. Or, if there was some different point you were intending to make here,
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I've read it. I've also analyzed what it is.
You know how corporations will come out and spin up some folksy "hey this old farmer whipped up this recipe in his barn" advertising backstory for a new sauce, when in fact they developed it in a corporate kitchen? That's the same as that bullshit level "whitepaper" and fake claims made by the pushers trying to disguise what cryptocurrencies actually are.
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Interesting. Tell us what your read and analyzed
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I don't know what the developer's intent was, and don't take anyone at their word so I don't care what they said it was either.
What we do know is that the paper was authored by a presumably pseudonymous individual whose identity is still not known, who holds a substantial number of tokens. And the other thing we know is that we have no reason to trust anything they say about their motivations.
Are you new?
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So far, Bitcoin has shown itself to be more of a risky tech investment than one for storing value safe from inflation and other financial shocks.
That depends on how often you trade it, which is actually a lot like stocks. If you bought bitcoins for pennies when it first began circulating, then whatever you first put into it has grown a few hundred thousand percent. And for that reason alone, I don't really think it's accurate to say that it isn't booming. It seems to have done pretty well, though not necessarily as a currency.
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In related news, the first level of any Ponzi/pyramid style scheme makes out like bandits. That's how the scam is designed to work. They're fleecing the suckers who buy in later.
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Ponzi schemes don't have "levels". Typically there is only one person making money, sometimes it's a group, and when it's a group you're either in it or you're not. There's nothing in between. Madoff's scheme defrauded a huge number of people (over 40,000 worldwide,) and there were only 6 accomplices. A Ponzi scheme is very closed off, with the person or people running it doing a lot of accounting tricks to both hide their activities from the IRS and hide it from the investors. Sometimes the ringleader(s) h
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Ponzi schemes don't have "levels". Typically there is only one person making money
Incorrect. Ponzi schemes thrive on paying out money to successive levels of investors and using them to spread word of mouth of their "wonderful returns" so that more get brought in.
In the same way, a pyramid scam relies on each level recruiting bigger suckers to fill the next level.
And as the ruble recently showed, eventually all fiat currencies will reach a point where people suddenly don't think they're worth all th
Re: Digital value asset vs risky tech investment? (Score:2)
The current downturn indicates that the recent pump&dump has been caused by Russian oligarchs that now are cut off from doing transactions.
So everyone using bitcoin has been sponsoring Russia.
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Bitcoin is ultimately worthless. A speculative asset is not a productive asset.
The reason savings accounts have worthless interest rates is again, because they would rather you invest in (speculative) assets than the bank have to pay you. Yet they lend out your money at high interest rates that you see nothing from.
Like the answer to "why don't millenials/zoomers buying homes" is literately because there is no way to save money to do so. So you get things like NFT's and Bitcoin as volatile, high-risk, specu
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Love how you contradict yourself in one paragraph. Gold has no intrinsic value.... 10% of it is used for practical use. lol
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Well its all about "time"
The value of gold does fluctuate quite a bit but if you look at its buying power over a span centuries its done pretty well. Roughly the same amount of gold will exchange for a room heated to comfortable temperature and a full belly - even if the methods of delivery have evolved as would have been needed in 1922, 1822, 1722, or 722..
A lot gold is held by very wealthy people (an institutions) as a long term wealth preservation mechanism. It is also as you mentioned used in industrial
Because it dies when regulation hits (Score:3)
With China and India banning it and Biden and the UK looking to regulate it, party's almost over. Somebody called the cops, and the only question is who's gonna still be around to get arrested.
Regulation is when it zooms (Score:2)
Once a financial instrument is regulated, that's when institutional money pours in. This hasn't happened yet with Bitcoin because it's not yet well-regulated. Institutional money is what drives most markets. Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street combined have $20T AUM. None of that money is in BTC at all. Once the SEC and IRS clarify rules, the big money can come in, which will both widen the market and add some stability to the price.
And it's looking that the Biden administration is looking to take a const [euronews.com]
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I think that is wishful thinking. There is a lot of institutional money in cryptocurrency already, trying to front-run regulation as much as anything. I don't have the interest to dig too deeply, but I have a feeling that some of that money has been pulled out over the past year.
Bitcoin goes up on publicity and speculation, and goes down the rest of the time. Reading the headlines of WSJ on Bitcoin gives you plenty of indication that the last Institutional fools are trying to get out.
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Bitcoin goes up on publicity and speculation, and goes down the rest of the time.
Well yeah. It's a ponzi scheme in the late stages. To get new suckers to buy in, they have to get advertising and word of mouth. A few well placed "whales" usually do the trick.
Look what happened the last few passes. Elon Musk quietly buys up some bitcoin. Announces Tesla will start taking orders in Bitcoin, spurring a bunch of news stories... bitcoin goes up. Elon quietly sells off, pockets his "profit" from the gullible
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By all means kindly explain what crypto is used for besides money laundering and speculation.
There was that guy that bought that pizza that one time.
Bitcoin dies if society falls apart (Score:2)
Its only value might be for getting around regulations preventing you from moving money (which, as you note goes away i
I don't think that's the real question here (Score:2)
The unstated reason why everyone was expecting crypto to shoot up in value is we were all expecting a massive increase in money laundering as oligarchs hid their cash using crypto.
If you were paying attention it was stupidly ob
Well duh... (Score:4, Informative)
You're talking about something that's a ponzi scheme in its late stages [ft.com]. The price is driven up [youtube.com] primarily by pump-and-dump behavior. [cnet.com] Every ponzi scheme eventually collapses under its own weight, once it runs out of enough suckers to fill the next level down so that the previous level(s) can cash out.
The primary purposes for Bitcoin's existence are (a) to run as a ponzi scheme and sell "nothing" to the suckers, (b) to let criminal gangs (such as ransomware gangs) have a vehicle for money laundering, and (c) as it's now late-stage, to function as a tool for pump-and-dump scammers [time.com] who used to do the same exact thing with penny stocks. [investopedia.com]
Compare Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) to the warning signs of a ponzi: [investor.gov]
- Advertised as high return with little risk: "just HODL man!"
- Unregistered investments. (well duh).
- Unlicensed sellers. Again, seriously warning sign.
- Secretive, complex strategies.
- Issues with paperwork, Difficulty receiving payments. - Well how about that, the "transfer" and "purchase process" times are basically rolling dice to figure out how many hours or days it will be, before your request is processed... if your attempt to sell/buy isn't just rejected by whatever dark-market processor you're using.
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PR and false narrative (Score:2)
First, there has been so much hype about Bitcoin et. al. that no one bought it as a 'safe' investment, they all bought it as high risk investment. So when the market crashes, they sell it.
Second, the idea of it being a hedge against bad economies is foolish. Precious metals, land, 'investment guns', etc. are hedges because people always need them. If we end up bombed into the second stone age, owning gold, land, guns etc. will still be useful, even without an expert telling us how much they are worth.
B
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Gold isn't a safe investment either. Nor is it stable. It's not as bad as bitcoin, but it ain't stable.
I don't think bitcoin is much good for evading sanctions or evacuating your money either. Suppose you're in Russia and you decide it's time to get out. Buy some bitcoin yeah? With what? Your rubles? Who's going to accept that?
Okay, so you're Russian and you've *got* bitcoin and you want to buy some sweet foreign products, but there are sanctions so you can't. Just use your bitcoin, right? To buy anything y
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Sure. If you already had bitcoin you've got a nice shiny number in your wallet. You can't look at it because your Internet is down, and you're getting awfully hungry, but, you know, a really nice number. Probably.
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I'm not a crypto fan by any means, but for classic Bitcoin you don't need to sneak a drive anywhere: if you can record -- or remember -- the 12 words of your key seed, you can get at your wallet.
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You do realize just how much space currency takes up, don't you? Same goes for gold and most other physical assets.
Hiding ~US$50k is not too bad, but once you start talking about big money it gets quite hard. Say you want to buy a house or condo in another country... smuggling cash is quite hard.
With crypto currency all you really need is the password/key for an encrypted wallet stored in the cloud.
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When a post opens with an outright error, you know you can safely ignore the author
Eth is owned by JP. Who owns bitcoin? (Score:2)
Crypto is a scam being run by the big financial institutions as there little to no regulation in that market, and they can rip people off with no one to stop them.
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Crypto is a scam being run by the big financial institutions as there little to no regulation in that market
As far as I can tell, all free markets rely on regulation, to define the rules of the game we are all playing. In the absence of regulation, you tend to get piracy. There is a great deal of difference between a hard fought game of football, and outright warfare.
I am pretty sure crypto is a scam, of the Ponzi variety. Quite a lot of high finance appears to operate like this, on a pass-the-parcel basis. Everybody makes money, until the music stops. Then guess what, it is the hardworking tax payers that pick u
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The BTC infrastructure is distributed, nobody owns it. Who controls bitcoin in the general sense? Those who control the exchanges, because BTC are generally worthless without them.
Gresham's Law (Score:2)
People always spend their less valuable money first.
But the premise of TFS is flawed. Inflation is a monetary phenomena; price rises are a natural consequence.
Go look at the Bitcoin 'price' while the Fed was printing half of all USD ever created during the lockdowns and giving it to Wall St.
It'll go 'up' again when the debt monetization goes asymptotic after this little war unseats the petrodollar.
As for a nuclear war hedge - that's the ideal situation for gold and silver's value proposition. They've done
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Go look at the Bitcoin 'price' while the Fed was printing half of all USD ever created during the lockdowns and giving it to Wall St.
Hush now, only tears [medium.com]
I use Batcoin (Score:2)
It's value is secured by Bruce Wayne's fortune and Batman's fists.
financialization! (Score:2)
Doomsday Insurance? Yeah, right (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if Bitcoin weren't a Ponzi scheme at heart... if the world started to fall apart, who in their right mind would give up tangible goods for a bunch of bits? Assuming one could even successfully transact said bits at that point?
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Exactly this. Good luck trying to pay with your virtual currency when the world goes to sh... and there's no electricity to power your transactions.
Exposes the obvious flaw in Libertarianism... (Score:2)
Nations are not created or maintained by a bunch of comfortably well off but maladapted young men sitting around computer monitors typing screed after screed about how personal self-interest is the ultimate morality. They're created when a bunch of regular workers hear that assholes just bombed a local maternity ward, and despite them having absolutely zero economic interest in the operation of said ward, decide to lay down their lives if need be to kill the people who did it.
Like the original vision of com
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If everything has collapsed and is not expected to reform then currency is dead pending a strong government forming, so you're right there. If a collapse looks temporary then currency will still retain some value, but rounds of ammunition and cans of food will be the real mediums of exchange.
Everyone was expecting Russia (Score:2)
Investor-sponsored article? (Score:2)
To me it looks like someone paid for this article. Someone looking for answers why their made-up investment doesn't go according to the plan.
/. is owned by pushers (Score:3)
which is why half the stories are about crypto bullshit. [bizx.com]
from wikipedia:
In July 2015, Dice announced that it planned to sell Slashdot and SourceForge; in particular, the company stated in a filing that it was unable to "successfully [leverage] the Slashdot user base to further Dice's digital recruitment business".[49]
On January 27, 2016, the two sites were sold to the San Diego-based BizX, LLC for an undisclosed amount.[9][49][50]
Here are the tag lines from their Twitter:
News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters. #tech #news #software #engineering #linux #crypto #NFT #bitcoin
Fucking sad, ain't it?
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So your theory is someone has a lot of bitcoin, and they paid for an article to be written that was anti-bitcoin, presumably which could only lower the value of their investment?
Once a scam, always a scam. Only for lawbreakers. (Score:4, Informative)
Crypto started as a scam. It is still a scam. It will always be a scam. The fact that it's always discussed in terms of dollar value shows that clearly.
The only, only, only actual value of crypto is that it avoids normal payment networks and allows a person to make a cash transaction online. In other words, the only actual value of crypto is in paying for something illegal. And on that note, either you waste a bunch of power and mine it yourself, which is stupid and wasteful, or you pay somebody to do it, which is stupid and wasteful. All for what? Buy some drugs. Buy some guns. Buy some kiddie porn. Donate to a piracy website.
Sorry, but I don't want the first (and can do it in cash anyway), can and have done the second legally, don't want the third and all kinds of porn are available online for free anyway, and don't give enough of a fuck about the fourth to bother.
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Crypto started as a scam
No it didn't and, frankly makes you look like you have no idea what you're talking about if you get the basic facts wrong. It started as an experiment and little else. The first transaction outside the network was 10,000 bitcoins for a pizza. I'm curious as to how you think that was a scam given it was just some people mucking around with a piece of new tech for a few tens of dollars.
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It's a non-productive asset and the amount of money it adds to an economic system is a net-negative when consumables are considered. You making money off of it ultimately comes from a group of people in the future losing more money than what you earned. You coming out a head doesn't mean it's not a
because Bitcoin's price has two sources (Score:2)
I expect this is because the price of Bitcoin has two major inputs: the market's perceived fundamental value and the speculative bubble. The perceived fundamental value is what is expected to rise over time and currently sits around $35k or so. But when the wider market sees a crash, the speculative bubble gets hit. And because the speculative bubble is so large (compared to other asset classes), it tends to dampen the "hard money" rise due to conflict.
I wouldn't be surprised if Bitcoin takes over its an
Is there an operating exchange in Russia? (Score:3)
It's a sham (Score:3)
Looks like the world has run out of bigger fools.
Internet? (Score:3)
Maybe, just maybe, people discovered bitcoin and itâ(TM)s ilk are kinda useless when you donâ(TM)t have a functioning internet service.
Because it doesn't work (Score:2)
You can't buy anything with it that you would need day-to-day, like bread. And if doomsday comes literally none of the infrastructure needed to mine, exchange, or spend bitcoins would exist.
Even gold would be better in a doomsday scenario and it's pretty useless when everyone's hungry.
Fertile land is what you need for a real doomsday scenario. Unless you can digest gold and silver.
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Tax season. (Score:2)
Just like every other year around this time. Go look at the graph.
Among the arguments for crypto... (Score:2)
I admit to be bearish in general, but the argument about it being a hedge against catastrophe is a particularly silly one. It is so dependent upon working connected technology infrastructure, that it would be untenable in an utter crisis that would take down the major recognized currencies.
Fiat failed multiple times (Score:2)
Why are you confused about this now? (Score:2)
The war in Ukraine is not the first example of a situation which would in theory have been an ideal use case for what bitcoin proponents promote about crypto currency.
In the past 5 years we've seen:
- Mass protests in Hong Kong where residents have taken to using their metro cards to transfer currency (you can use the metro card to pay for goods in HK) instead of bitcoin.
- Military Coup in Burma with bitcoin basically not in use.
- Several currencies have massively tanked, recently being the Rubel but also th
Stocks! (Score:2)
Same for stocks. They're not booming these days. :(
The actual story is different (Score:2)
The actual story here is "How are crypto currencies still a thing".
It's no longer decentralized as the bulk of mining is done by a few mining pools.
A few people hold most of crypto currencies.
It's essentially now just an object of speculation as you can see by its volatility.
It's completely useless as a means of transferring money as you have transaction fees in the tens of Euros.
While in the past you could actually buy stuff, the only thing you can buy now are NFTs which have absolutely no value outside of
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You'll see those kinds of posts around. Especially from new accounts, compromised accounts, etc. But that's not what this is. No, this guy genuinely believes he's found his "vigorously" stable "Freedom Hedge".
I mean, have you seen his other posts? (Most of them have nothing to do with BTC either.) He's legitimately scared that the bank will seize his money when they discover his Slashdot account is full of freezepeach.
Why wouldn't a guy who chooses a vigorously stable scam artist as his leader, not also giv
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You're trying to convince others that you are "hodling" to get them to buy. I'm willing to bet you're lying about your behavior here.
broadcasting your financial ignorance is never attractive nor smart.
I'm far from financially ignorant. I'm quite aware, and that's how I know that bitcoin is an amoral fucking ponzi scam.
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Well it's not hard (Score:2)
Well since crypto currencies are no longer decentralized it would be easy.
1. Just disallow large mining operations (easy to find just look for power usage).
2. Attack the companies that exchange "real" money into "crypto" money, by making that illegal.