BitCoin

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: BitCoin

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Mar 20, 2021 11:59 am

.

How it started....................................... ..............................How it's going.

Image
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Elvis » Fri Mar 26, 2021 4:05 am

I was reading about gold when I followed these links about bitcoin, etc.; some interesting articles & discussions.


First is by Nouriel Roubini, a new name to me; he's an economist who decidedly does not like bitcoin:

https://archive.is/96dwJ
(Saved from: https://www.project-syndicate.org/comme ... ni-2019-07)

The Great Crypto Heist
Jul 16, 2019 | Nouriel Roubini

Cryptocurrencies have given rise to an entire new criminal industry, comprising unregulated offshore exchanges, paid propagandists, and an army of scammers looking to fleece retail investors. Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence of rampant fraud and abuse, financial regulators and law-enforcement agencies remain asleep at the wheel.

NEW YORK – There is a good reason why every civilized country in the world tightly regulates its financial system. The 2008 global financial crisis, after all, was largely the result of rolling back financial regulation. Crooks, criminals, and grifters are a fact of life, and no financial system can serve its proper purpose unless investors are protected from them.

Hence, there are regulations requiring that securities be registered, that money-servicing activities be licensed, that capital controls include “anti-money-laundering” (AML) and “know your customer” (KYC) provisions (to prevent tax evasion and other illicit financial flows), and that money managers serve their clients’ interests. Because these laws and regulations protect investors and society, the compliance costs associated with them are reasonable and appropriate.

But the current regulatory regime does not capture all financial activity. Cryptocurrencies are routinely launched and traded outside the domain of official financial oversight, where avoidance of compliance costs is advertised as a source of efficiency. The result is that crypto land has become an unregulated casino, where unchecked criminality runs riot.

This is not mere conjecture. Some of the biggest crypto players may be openly involved in systematic illegality. Consider BitMEX, an unregulated trillion-dollar exchange of crypto derivatives that is domiciled in the Seychelles but active globally. Its CEO, Arthur Hayes, boasted openly that the BitMEX business model involves peddling to “degenerate gamblers” (meaning clueless retail investors) crypto derivatives with 100-to-one leverage.

To be clear, with 100-to-one leverage, even a 1% change in the price of the underlying assets could trigger a margin call and wipe out all of one’s investment. Worse, BitMEX applies high fees whenever one buys or sells its toxic instruments, and then it takes another bite of the apple by siphoning customers’ savings into a “liquidation fund” that is likely to be many times larger than what is necessary to avoid counter-party risk. It is little wonder that, according to one independent researcher’s estimates, liquidations at times account for up to half of BitMEX’s revenue.

BitMEX insiders revealed to me that this exchange is also used daily for money laundering on a massive scale by terrorists and other criminals from Russia, Iran, and elsewhere; the exchange does nothing to stop this, as it profits from these transactions.

As if that were not enough, BitMEX also has an internal for-profit trading desk (supposedly for the purpose of market making) that has been accused of front running its own clients. Hayes has denied this, but because BitMEX is totally unregulated, there are no independent audits of its accounts, and thus no way of knowing what happens behind the scenes.

At any rate, we do know that BitMEX skirts AML/KYC regulations. Though it claims not to serve US and UK investors who are subject to such laws, its method of “verifying” their citizenship is to check their IP address, which can easily be masked with a standard VPN application. This lack of due diligence constitutes a brazen violation of securities laws and regulations. Hayes even openly challenged anyone to try to sue him in the unregulated Seychelles, knowing he operates in the shadow of laws and regulations.

Earlier this month, I debated Hayes in Taipei and called out his racket. But, unbeknownst to me, he had secured exclusive rights to the video of the event from the conference organizers, and refused for a week to release it in full. Instead, he published cherry-picked “highlights” to create the impression that he performed well. I suppose this is par for the course among crypto scammers, but it is ironic that someone who claims to represent the “resistance” against censorship has become the father of all censors now that his con has been exposed. Finally, shamed in public by his own supporters, he relented and released the video.

On the same day we debated, the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority proposed an outright ban on retail high-risk crypto investments. Yet, barring a concerted response by policymakers, retail investors who are lured into the crypto domain will continue to be suckered. Price manipulation is rampant across all the crypto exchanges, owing to pump-and-dump schemes, wash trading, spoofing, front running, and other forms of manipulation. According to one study, up to 95% of all transactions in Bitcoin are fake, indicating that fraud is not the exception but the rule.

Of course, it is no surprise that an unregulated market would become the playground of con artists, criminals, and snake-oil salesmen. Crypto trading has created a multi-billion-dollar industry, comprising not just the exchanges, but also propagandists posing as journalists, opportunists talking up their own financial books to peddle “shitcoin,” and lobbyists seeking regulatory exemptions. Behind it all is an emerging criminal racket that would put the Cosa Nostra to shame.

It is high time that US and other law-enforcement agencies stepped in. So far, regulators have been asleep at the wheel as the crypto cancer has metastasized. According to one study, 80% of “initial coin offerings” in 2017 were scams. At a minimum, Hayes and all the others overseeing similar rackets from offshore safe havens should be investigated, before millions more retail investors get scammed into financial ruin. Even US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin – no fan of financial regulation – agrees that cryptocurrencies must not be allowed to “become the equivalent of secret numbered accounts,” which have long been the preserve of terrorists, gangsters, and other criminals.

Nouriel Roubini, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates, was Senior Economist for International Affairs in the White House's Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton Administration. He has worked for the International Monetary Fund, the US Federal Reserve, and the World Bank.



Next, a piece about some bitcoin exchanges apparently trying to create fake demand? Not sure what's going on here.

https://archive.is/mh6Ir#selection-1749.0-1753.65
(Original: https://www.wsj.com/articles/most-bitco ... 1553259600)

Most Bitcoin Trading Faked by Unregulated Exchanges, Study Finds

Bitwise’s research casts new doubts about fraud in nascent market

A study by Bitwise Asset Management is an attempt to alleviate longstanding concerns that a bitcoin exchange-traded fund would leave investors exposed to market manipulation.

By Paul Vigna
March 22, 2019 9:00 a.m. ET

Nearly 95% of all reported trading in bitcoin is artificially created by unregulated exchanges, a new study concludes, raising fresh doubts about the nascent market following a steep decline in prices over the past year.

Fraudulent trading volume has dogged cryptocurrency trading for years, but the extent of the market manipulation has been difficult to determine. Bitwise Asset Management said its analysis of trading activity at 81 exchanges over four days in March indicates that the actual market for bitcoin is far smaller than previously thought.

The San Francisco-based company submitted its research to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with an application to launch a bitcoin-based exchange-traded fund. The study, made public Thursday, is an attempt to alleviate the agency’s longstanding concerns that a bitcoin ETF would leave investors exposed to fraud and market manipulation.

Bitwise’s fund, if approved, would be based upon the 5% of trading it considers legitimate, said Matthew Hougan, Bitwise’s head of global research. That volume comes from 10 regulated exchanges that can verify that their trading data and customers are real. This slice of the market, he said, is well regulated, transparent and efficient.

“I hope everyone sees there is a real market for bitcoin,” he said.

The study adds to a growing body of research that casts doubt on just how much cryptocurrency is changing hands daily. Last week, research firm Crypto Integrity said it concluded that 88% of all trading in February had been inflated. The TIE, another cryptocurrency researcher, on Monday estimated that 75% of exchanges had some form of suspicious activity occurring on them.

Bitwise created a program to collect and analyze trading data across 81 exchanges, looking for patterns that exemplified both real and artificial trading. It concluded that 71 of the 81—or 95% of reported volume—are questionable, with patterns that indicated the trading on them appears manufactured.

Of the roughly $6 billion in reported daily volume during four days in March, the firm calculated that about $273 million was legitimate.
On regulated exchanges such as Coinbase, Gemini, BitFlyer and Poloniex, trading followed certain patterns, according to the Bitwise report. Trading volume, for example, rose and fell at predictable times coinciding with working and sleeping hours. Smaller trades were more frequent than larger ones, and many were in round numbers. All those patterns reflect how human traders think and act.

By contrast, the dozens of unregulated exchanges that have cropped up over the past year show different trading patterns. Buy and sell orders appear in pairs, with one neutralizing the other. Trades are almost always executed within bid and ask prices, indicating a lack of the more haphazard decision-making one would expect from human traders. There are very few small or round-number trades. Volume is consistent across the trading day.

The unregulated exchanges also show massive volume. Coinbase, the largest of the regulated exchanges, had average daily volume of around $27 million in the first week of March, when Bitwise collected its data. By comparison, CoinBene, a newer exchange that first appeared in October 2017, reported $480 million in daily volume over the same period. Yet CoinBene’s website attracts far less traffic than Coinbase, which is in 55,097th place by Amazon’s Alexa ranking service, compared with 1,500th for Coinbase.

CoinBene didn’t have an immediate comment.

Estonia-based Bibox, another exchange Bitwise alleges manufactures trades, said it has about 100,000 daily users on its site. “Every transaction on Bibox is accessible to anyone interested,” said Bibox’s director of operations, Meilun Li.

In the study, Bitwise suggests that the unregulated exchanges are inflating trading volume to get a higher ranking on data services like CoinMarketCap and leverage that ranking to attract listing fees. CoinBene lists nearly 200 tokens. Bibox has about 180.



Next, Nouriel Roubini again, this time debating with Arthur Hayes of BitMEX, an offshore crypto exchange. A most lively discussion!:

The Tangle in Taipei with Arthur Hayes and Nouriel Roubini

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlZukhN_C6c

The Tangle in Taipei at the Asia Blockchain Summit 2019 held on July 3rd - The Full Debate

On stage:
Arthur Hayes, CEO and Co-Founder of BitMEX
Nouriel Roubini, American Economist and NYU Professor
Andrew Neil, Scottish journalist, Broadcaster and the Referee of this debate



Finally, the peppery Roubini again, with a larger panel, including crypto advocates and (in the more neutral corner) an economist from the U.S. Treasury. This was only slightly above my head, I found it very listenable:

Alex Mashinsky vs Nouriel Roubini at the Milken Institute

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeP7FGO4j5Q

Celsius Network
37.6K subscribers
Watch as Alex Mashinsky lays the smack down on the FUD machine Nouriel Roubini

(I haven't watched the whole hour yet.)


Where do I stand on all this? Despite some impressive credentials of Roubini's chief opponent here (some of which Roubini shares), I tend to agree with Roubini on most points. But I'm learning a good deal from these. One thing of note for me: Mashinsky insists that his and others' aim is not to replace the US dollar, but to use bitcoin (etc.) as an auxiliary payment method; this is at variance with most bitcoin advocates I see, who can't wait for the dollar to "fail" so bitcoin can "take over." Also, the pro-crypto panelists seem to place any "hyperbitcoinization" well into the future, i.e. 30+ years or more.

If nothing else, developments promise to be interesting.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7413
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri Mar 26, 2021 11:42 am

.

My cynical take -- and I type the following as a Bitcoin investor, in full disclosure: I started relatively late, in mid-2017, curious at the time about its possibilities, and haven't touched it since (subject to change) -- is that whatever the long-term outcome of digital currency and/or blockchain tech (and whatever its origins: benevolent, or malevolent), it will be utilized for objectives that will benefit/enrich the very few at the expense of the majority (as we've seen historically with any/all monetary systems).

The machinations put in place since early 2020 have only solidified this position, in my view.

They are looking to push forward a cashless society. While the notion of cashless society may be appealing to some -- and they will certainly market it as a net benefit to the consumer -- it will largely add to control mechanisms already underway, and will further subjugate the majority to the benefit of the very few.

The same goes for all the other looming action items in the coming years ahead: health/vaccine "passports" -- via supposed blockchain tech -- and UBI, a notion that may appeal to the idealist sensibilities of the standard socialist but will only further expand fore-referenced control mechanisms and strip away individual agency/civil liberties.

Nothing being proposed by control entities will be to the overall benefit of the majority, especially any proposed changes to monetary systems (which, currently, largely benefit the wealthy at the expense of the non-wealthy).

Are there individuals, communities, and entities out there that may well -- and have -- utilize(d) the above-referenced systems for altruistic purposes? Sure, but true sustainable altruism will be (and has been) increasingly difficult to achieve without compromise or outright infiltration by non-altruistic actors.

This will be the ongoing challenge in the years ahead by anyone attempting to proceed with good intentions.
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Elvis » Sat Mar 27, 2021 3:09 am

Topic sidebar re: cash & anonymity—this is interesting, how investigators connected the Watergate burglars to the Nixon campaign by tracing their cash:

https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2019/12/t ... notes.html

I recently stumbled on a more recent example of cash de-anonymization. Most people know the gist of the Watergate scandal, but to recap five burglars were caught breaking into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate building on June 17, 1972.

Who were they and what were they doing there? At first, no one had a clue. But the police did find around $3,600 in cash on them, much of it in sequentially-numbered $100 banknotes.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7413
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Elvis » Fri Apr 30, 2021 9:17 pm

Features or bugs? Who do you call?

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/turki ... illion-usd
Crypto Exchange Founder Disappears with $2 Billion

By Anton Shilov 6 days ago

Gimme all your Dogecoins


The founder of a popular crypto exchange in Turkey has disappeared, with media reports indicating that he has fled the country with $2 billion as roughly 300,000 frustrated users have suddenly lost access to their accounts.

In Turkey, the national currency lira has been in a secular decline for nine consecutive years, urging people to take some risks in a bid to protect their savings and maybe even earn something. As a result, the recent rise of cryptocurrencies predictably attracted many investors who hoped to protect their money and possibly gain some more. But things did not go well for them as Thodex, one of the country's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, went bust.

Governments cannot control cryptocurrencies. As a result, they can quickly rise to an all-time high (or rapidly drop), making them a particularly attractive investment instrument — especially for those willing to take a risk. In Turkey, anyone can establish a crypto exchange with just 50,000 liras (about $6,000 USD) in capital, reports Bloomberg. Consequently, crypto exchanges are often run by people without proper financial education that serve unqualified investors who do not understand all of the risks.

Thodex was one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in Turkey with 700,000 users, many lured in by an introductory offer of 'millions' of free Dogecoins. Apparently, most of those Dogecoins were never distributed.

To make matters worse, media reports say that as many as 391,000 users have now suddenly lost access to their accounts. Following the reports, Thodex "temporarily" closed the platform to address an "abnormal fluctuation in the company accounts."

Meanwhile, Faruk Fatih Ozer, the founder of Thodex, has flown to Albania, taking $2 billion of investors' money with him, reports CNBC (citing local Turkish media). As you would expect, the Turkish Justice Ministry is seeking a so-called "red notice" with Interpol to arrest Ozer.

Thodex denies all the allegations and says that the problem impacts 'only' 30,000 of its clients. The company further states that the inaccurate media reporting has ruined its reputation, making it impossible to continue operations.

"The allegations that [accounts of] 391,000 people disappeared after a loss of approximately $2 billion, which was [reported] to the public on 22.04.2021, are unfounded," a statement by Thodex reads. "It is necessary to make this statement in order to respond urgently to these claims that go beyond the limits of honesty and conscience."

The founder of Thodex vows to return investors' money but hasn't revealed how and when he plans to do it. Meanwhile, a lawyer representing the investors said the money had become "irretrievable," according to Bloomberg.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7413
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri Apr 30, 2021 9:42 pm

.

It goes without saying the above scenario has occurred many times with FIAT currency, of course. At least with cryptocurrency there is the prospect of tracing every movement along the blockchain. It's immutable.

While cash can potentially be traced, it can be far more easily laundered as well.
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Elvis » Fri Apr 30, 2021 9:46 pm

(Paste errors fixed.)

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-ca ... its-price/

Bitcoin's price is skyrocketing — so is its carbon footprint

As the price of bitcoin soars past $56,000, the cryptocurrency's negative environmental impact is becoming harder to ignore. Energy-hogging crypto miners have been blamed for power outages in Iran, while China — a crypto mining hotbed — is cracking down on the practice as it takes a heavier hand with polluting industries.

More such crackdowns may be needed to keep crypto's carbon emissions under control. According to research released this week, bitcoin's record-high prices have created a crypto mining backlog such that, even if the price falls, emissions from mining the virtual currency are likely to stay high for the near future.

The research was published in Joule magazine by cryptocurrency economist Alex De Vries, who noted that bitcoin's energy use this year will rival that of all data centers globally.

"It's the crazy inefficiency of the system that's jarring," De Vries said.

Bitcoin's niche appeal is at odds with its massive energy demands, De Vries explained. With bitcoin's usage limited to a tiny number of concurrent transactions, "it's not really capable of servicing a big group of people," he said. "Despite that, it still consumes as much [power] as all data centers in the world — we're talking about all the data centers that are powering the internet, powering big tech clouds, serving a majority of the world's population. It's extremely disproportional."

While there are only about 1 million bitcoin miners in the world, according to an industry estimate, the amount of electricity that mining consumes in one year is equal to that used to power Malaysia, Sweden or Ukraine, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index.

BTC energy use.jpg


London-scale pollution

While it's hard to say exactly how carbon-intensive cryptocurrency mining is — most miners' locations and energy sources are a closely guarded secret — scientists are worried. De Vries estimates that bitcoin's yearly carbon emissions are on track to match the city of London's, which is estimated to be 98.9 megatons, according to citycarbonfootprints.info.

One group of researchers at the University of New Mexico has put a price on that pollution, estimating in a paper that every dollar of bitcoin value mined accounts for 49 cents' worth of health and climate damage in the U.S.

"With each cryptocurrency, the rising electricity requirements to produce a single coin can lead to an almost inevitable cliff of negative net social benefit," the paper states.

[VIDEO at link]

Other studies have found that the environmental damage caused by crypto mining is on par with mineral mining. In an article published in Nature Climate Change, scientists warned that if it were to become as widely adopted as other new technologies, bitcoin alone could push the Earth's temperature 2 degrees above historical levels.

"Bitcoin is inefficient by design. This inefficiency is the price we pay for security," said Anton Dek, crypto asset and blockchain lead at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (and one of the researchers on the bitcoin energy tracker).

The process of mining a bitcoin involves multitudes of computers competing to solve a complex math problem, in which the first to reach a solution is rewarded with a bitcoin. The complexity of these transactions makes it difficult, for instance, to hack the bitcoin blockchain.

It also means that how much bitcoin you can mine depends on how much computing power you can throw at the problem. That has effectively set off an arms race in which miners invest in even more computing equipment that they keep running 24 hours a day. And the more expensive bitcoin gets, the more people want a shot at the action.

bitcoin-mining.jpg


"If it's more profitable, it encourages more people to enter this competition — it encourages more miners to come," Dek said.

Dek is less concerned than others about bitcoin's potential environmental impact, pointing out that crypto mining uses as much electricity as Americans waste by plugging in electrical appliances that are not running. Most miners use some renewable energy, according to Cambridge research, although more than 60% of crypto mining is powered by fossil fuels.

"We are trying to make the point here that it is not that bad," Dek said. "We also don't want to say it's not an issue at all."


As good as gold?

"We see the use case of bitcoin more and more as gold. It's something to preserve value, not for everyday transactions," Dek said.

That sort of comparison, however, may be driving bitcoin into a speculative frenzy that could "lock in" high emissions for years to come.

Bitcoin's price surge has caused a run on bitcoin mining computers, with Bitmain, a major maker of so-called mining rigs, sold out through August, while competitor Canaan is working through a backlog of 100,000 orders. These purchases aren't refundable, De Vries noted, which means that once miners receive their equipment they are likely to use them — even if a digital coin's price has fallen in the meantime.

"All you care about once you get the machine is, how much do I pay for electricity to run this machine? The sunk cost doesn't matter anymore," he said.

So even if bitcoin's price were to drop by half, the planet is likely locked into high emissions from crypto mining for the near term — unless more miners can find cleaner sources of power to meet their computing demands, or more regions follow China's lead to restrict or eliminate bitcoin mining altogether.

"You have all these miners using electricity — you can boot them off the grid if you want to. That's an option you have as a regulator," De Vries said.

BTC energy Diehl Tweet.jpg


Despite comparisons of bitcoin to gold, many continue to question whether the virtual currency is worth anything. Commentators have compared it to a bubble, noting that the currency can't be exchanged for most goods or services.

"Unlike other economic activities, the bitcoin scheme produces absolutely nothing for all this waste," said Stephen Diehl, a software engineer who frequently writes about cryptocurrency. "It is a pure speculative activity of people gambling on the random movements of prices and the only output is simply shuffling numbers around in a computer at insane cost."

First published on March 12, 2021 / 7:02 AM
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7413
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Elvis » Fri Apr 30, 2021 10:04 pm

This is long—haven't read it all, but looks really interesting:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/w ... isappeared

The Last Days of Satoshi: What Happened When Bitcoin’s Creator Disappeared

10 years ago today, Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto's disappeared. Pete Rizzo tells the story.

Pete Rizzo
Apr 26, 2021
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7413
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu May 06, 2021 11:58 pm

.

Some of the below scenario may play out, though my current forecast (subject to change) is that a 'reject' of the System will only be achievable by doing away with all modern means of tech and commerce. Fully off-grid, in other words. A variation of the Amish (Agrarian, Barter system with perhaps aspects of existing currency exchanges).

Never mind The Great Reset. Here comes The Great Reject.
...

When I listen to people who are in complete denial about crypto, I realize that there is a common thread in their objections (what made me think about all this today was listening to Michael Pento’s criticisms of Bitcoin on George Gammon’s Rebel Capitalist. Pento’s 2012 book on the inevitable bursting of the bond bubble is a must read. That book helped me form the basis on what I think is the funds flow that is actually putting a floor under crypto. I don’t begrudge Pento for not seeing it, because as I’ll explain, he’s looking at it through the wrong lens)

We could go on for hours about how most of these people haven’t really delved into the technology or what it means, how their criticisms at the defects around Bitcoin apply even more accurately to US dollars (“backed by nothing”, “infinite supply”, “uses too much energy”, et al). But what they all have in common is that they all posit that whether Bitcoin and cryptos succeed or fail is premised on whether the existing establishment will permit it.

What will the Fed do? What if the government bans it? Won’t the World Bank just create their own CBDC?

This is completely inverted. They have it backwards. It’s not up to the existing system, because the existing system is over. That’s the part they don’t get.

Nation state establishments within the twilight of a declining system should be thinking deeply about their place in the new reality of network states, not pontificating how they will lord over this new landscape. The coming system will be multipolar in not just the geopolitical dimension, but across cyberspace and the network dimensions as well.

Instead, the incumbent system is busy banning menthol cigarettes, gearing up for negative interest rates and undergoing mass conversion to a peculiar new religion called Wokeness.

It won’t work, and it brings to mind a particularly vivid example I once heard about a balloon disaster that still makes me cringe when I think of it:

A group of people were embarking on a balloon ride and as they were just a foot or two off the ground, the burner erupted into flames. The balloon pilot realized the situation immediately and he leapt from the gondola which was still only a few feet off the ground.

One or two of the passengers were quick witted enough to realize what this meant and followed him. This set off a feedback loop: as the fire expanded, its hot air forcing the balloon higher, combined with the weight reductions as the first few people bailed out, the situation very quickly escalated past a point of no return.

The balloon had accelerated very rapidly to heights from which it was no longer possible to leap safely. The unfortunates who had hesitated and were trapped in a gondola being propelled higher by a fireball, to their inevitable doom.


That’s what our entire situation feels like today. The balloon is still hanging a foot or so above the ground, the canopy is on fire, and the people who have figured out what this means are bailing out while they can and in doing so they are accelerating the ultimate burn-then-crash of the entire system.

In [Ayn] Rand’s book they went to a hidden valley called “Galt’s Gulch” and used their skills and their resources to restore new communities while the old systems imploded. If this scenario plays out we’d be looking for people creating a decentralized network of gulches. Seeking each other out who are pursuing the same goals, creating open protocols to to rebuild civil societies and autonomous communities built on the ageless principles of free markets, liberty and prosperity.



https://bombthrower.com/articles/the-ja ... -shrugged/
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Agent Orange Cooper » Fri May 07, 2021 7:43 pm

Michael Saylor at his best in this interview (2 parts).



User avatar
Agent Orange Cooper
 
Posts: 610
Joined: Tue Oct 06, 2015 2:44 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed May 12, 2021 7:33 pm

Image

In related news, Musk is a charlatan.
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5215
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby DrEvil » Thu May 13, 2021 4:12 pm

The financial system of human civilization uses more energy than Bitcoin?! I'm shocked!

Why is Musk a charlatan btw? Because he poo-pooed Bitcoin and made your net worth drop? The fact that his recent comments made the value of Bitcoin drop that much is just another argument against Bitcoin. It's too volatile and backed by nothing but libertarian fever dreams. Just remember to pay your taxes when you panic and cash out.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
User avatar
DrEvil
 
Posts: 3972
Joined: Mon Mar 22, 2010 1:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby Agent Orange Cooper » Thu May 13, 2021 10:29 pm

DrEvil » Thu May 13, 2021 4:12 pm wrote:The financial system of human civilization uses more energy than Bitcoin?! I'm shocked!

Why is Musk a charlatan btw? Because he poo-pooed Bitcoin and made your net worth drop? The fact that his recent comments made the value of Bitcoin drop that much is just another argument against Bitcoin. It's too volatile and backed by nothing but libertarian fever dreams. Just remember to pay your taxes when you panic and cash out.


I don't know why I'm responding to you, but here's why, for anyone reading this who isn't a moron: he's a charlatan because he's claiming to be pro-Bitcoin while regurgitating debunked CNN talking points about its energy usage, using his considerable social influence to spread FUD in coordination with all the usual mainstream media outlets, probably so the authorities can come in to try to regulate the space, all the while his company is strip mining the earth for rare materials for the batteries to power their shitty government-subsidized cars (which only about 12 people on earth were dumb enough to give up their Bitcoin to purchase). Don't forget the fossil fuel consumption involved in SpaceX's rocket program.

This all after he lately walked back his comments about the C-19 vaccine on twitter and pathetically showed up on SNL to clown around and let all the libs know he changed his mind about masks being stupid. He's a charlatan, a coward and hypocrite (if he isn't just a state actor/frontman for intelligence agencies).

To be clear, the mild volatility this has caused really only matters to highly leveraged crypto-traders. Bitcoin itself doesn't give a fuck about Elon Musk's tweets. It will continue to exist and produce a new block every 10 minutes no matter what Cantillionaire shills like Musk or Gates or Charlie Munger say, as it continues its path to becoming the world reserve currency.
User avatar
Agent Orange Cooper
 
Posts: 610
Joined: Tue Oct 06, 2015 2:44 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby DrEvil » Fri May 14, 2021 9:03 am

He's a rich asshole who exploited the gold-rush mentality of crypto-zealots.

1. Buy Bitcoin very publicly.
2. Drive the price up as people fawn and pile on.
3. Profit!
4. Distance yourself to reduce bad PR while laughing all the way to the bank.
5. Watch aforementioned people go into meltdown as the invisible hand smacks them across the face.

And what's so bad about government subsidized EVs anyway (as opposed to government subsidized oil and coal)? Tesla practically forced everyone to take EVs seriously overnight. Pretty good return on investment if you ask me.

Edit:

Synchronicity! After posting this I headed over to Charlie Stross' blog, and behold:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-s ... bored.html
Because I am bored ...

By Charlie Stross

While Bitcoin was originally proposed as a currency, it has most of the attributes of a commodity bubble, including a huge halo of swindlers and scam artists working to exploit it. It's also horribly energy-inefficient and contributes to the current global semiconductor shortage, neither of which are desirable. Even worse: attempts at fixing Bitcoin mostly revolve around tweaking the "proof of work" required to add a transaction to the blockchain. Currently, BtC and relatives are computation-intensive. Other paradigms exist, including the new fad for Chiacoin, currently big in China, which is storage intensive — this is what happens when the designer of Bittorrent brings his own personal obsessions to bear on the problem of manufacturing scarcity, and if you want to upgrade your SSD or hard drive in the near future you'd better get right to it before this catches on.

(And about NFTs, the less said the better. Grift, 100% grift, and exploitation of artists as well. Oh, and it appears to be mostly used for money laundering. So fuck off and die if you own any, and especially if you thought pirating some of my work and turning it into NFTs would be a good way to milk the gullible.)

However, these aren't the only options.

It occurs to me that if you want a blockchain secured by scarcity and diminishing returns, you might consider other options that don't totally fuck our lived environment and that can't be gamed trivially by, say, running Chiacoin (the storage-space coin protocol) as part of the burn-in for new consumer grade drives your employer has you shoving in racks at Amazon S3 or maybe Arsebook. (Who totally have a first-mover advantage on that brain-damaged currency in the "phone my customer account manager at Western Digital, tell him I want another ten million terabytes of non-shingled platters" stakes.)

For example, to Elon Musk, a modest proposal:

Hork up a bunch of space probes going somewhere of interest to JPL or NASA or ESA, as both a tax write-off and an apology to the international astronomical community whose night skies you just vandalized with Starlink. Order, say, a dozen. For energy where they're going and for what's coming next they're definitely going to need RTGs, but you're not as fussy about maximum launch weight as the US government (you have Falcon Heavy and, soon, Starship to launch them with) so you can order up something running on, say, Strontium-90: it'll be heavier, but who cares. You're also going to use some of the power from it to run ion rockets for positioning and slow long-term acceleration (hint: Starlink uses ion propulsion for station keeping/reboost: presumably SpaceX have got quite a bit of experience with this tech by now).

So, you kindly donated a couple of dozen probes to Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, Eris, Makemake, Haumea, and the rest of the gang (and the dwarf planet wonks are ecstatic).

But you're not going to be using much bandwidth for sending back data, most of the time. So what to do with those radio transmitters you just kicked out at something above solar escape velocity?

Code signing, that's what you do.

Each probe has a dedicated crypto processor and a very VERY private key. It receives a constant uplink from the ground, and replies by signing and echoing back to Earth the blockchain transactions it receives. The further away from Earth it gets, the longer the delay. Also, the higher demand for the currency rises, the longer the delay to get your transaction into the queue for uplink and signing via the big dishes. You might be able to make an end run around the queue by bribing someone, but gambits based on building hardware are going to run into the wee problem that Deep Space Tracking Networks aren't off-the-shelf commodities and even if they were, you couldn't force the receding space probe to listen to your transmitter and reply (presumably the uplink is secured by the coin owner's own PKI system).

Upshot: it's a cryptocoin system with a big up-front setup cost (as in, billions), which is good (it deters low-end me-too systems), guaranteed scarcity of signing resources, and absolutely no advantage accruing to anyone buying up earthly power or material resources. So it shouldn't drive scarcity in hard disks/GPUs or unreasonable power demands. Flip side: there's a centralized chokepoint (the deep space network) that can be throttled by governments. But some might see this as an advantage ...

PS: my preferred solution to the problems created by cryptocurrencies is to treat them all like child pornography: totally illegal, possession a strict liability offense, choke off interoperability with real currencies at the credit agency/bank interchange level, and make them useless for non-criminals, at which point only criminals will bother with them. And India is going down this route. Let's hope other governments follow suit rapidly and we can say goodbye to this Trump-grade lunatical grift before it degrades our lived environment any more.

PPS: I despise libertarianism. Just in case you were wondering ...
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
User avatar
DrEvil
 
Posts: 3972
Joined: Mon Mar 22, 2010 1:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: BitCoin

Postby DrEvil » Wed May 19, 2021 5:24 pm

'Mild volatility' indeed.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202 ... 0-billion/
Bitcoin bubble bursts overnight, dragging down stocks

After stunning run-up over the past year, cryptocurrencies are tanking.

Tim De Chant - 5/19/2021, 5:24 PM

Overnight, a broad selloff of prominent cryptocurrencies has vaporized billions of dollars in value. Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency affected, is off more than 18 percent in the last 24 hours. Currently, it's worth just over half what it was in mid-April. Over the past week, more than $600 billion has been wiped out of a wide range of more than 7,000 cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, ether, and meme coins like dogecoin, according to CoinGecko.

The causes for the selloff are myriad. The first shot across the bow came last week when Tesla CEO Elon Musk declared that his company would no longer be accepting bitcoin for car purchases. The change happened less than two months after he said that Tesla would accept bitcoin, and the about-face came as Musk said he is concerned about the environmental damages being wrought by the energy-intensive cryptocurrency. (His thinking on the matter may have been influenced by an Ars article about a private equity firm that revived a zombie power plant just to mine bitcoin.)

The next jolt to crypto markets came this past Sunday when Musk suggested that Tesla either had sold or would be selling its bitcoin holdings, which amounted to $1.5 billion when they were disclosed back in early February. Musk's market-moving tweet was a cryptic “Indeed” posted in reply to @CryptoWhale, who had said, “Bitcoiners are going to slap themselves next quarter when they find out Tesla dumped the rest of their #Bitcoin holdings.” That single word sent bitcoin tumbling. On Monday, Musk clarified that “Tesla has not sold any Bitcoin.” After that, the cryptocurrency regained some of its value.

The rally was short-lived, though. On Tuesday, China issued a warning that financial institutions in the country shouldn’t process or participate in crypto-transactions or offer related services. “Prices of cryptocurrency have skyrocketed and plummeted recently, and speculative trading has bounced back. This seriously harms the safety of people's property and disturbs normal economic and financial orders,” the regulators said in a statement.

China has tried to tamp down speculation on cryptocurrencies before. In 2017, the country shuttered local cryptocurrency exchanges, and in 2019, the Chinese central bank said it would ban domestic and foreign exchanges and websites with initial coin offerings. At the time, some 90 percent of all transactions occurred in China. Earlier this year, the regional government in China’s Inner Mongolia province announced a ban on cryptocurrency mining by the end of April. Before the ban, 8 percent of all bitcoin mining was estimated to occur in the province, which has cheap power due to massive amounts of coal production.

Despite China’s frosty stance toward bitcoin, around three-quarters of all mining occurs in China. The coin’s massive electricity use—estimated to be about as much as the entire country of Egypt—is not helping China meet its goals for reducing greenhouse gases. A recent study said that without intervention, bitcoin mining in the country would contribute 130.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide at its expected peak in 2024.

Cryptocurrencies have come under increasing scrutiny by regulators and law enforcement in the US, too. In the wake of the Colonial Pipeline malware attack, news leaked that crypto-exchange Binance was under investigation by the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The crypto bubble began inflating in early 2020 and took off late last year as the market for derivatives took hold and institutional investors began to devise bitcoin strategies. Large firms like Fidelity Investments began offering custodial services to select clients. At the peak, around $2.5 trillion were invested in cryptocurrencies of various flavors, with a significant portion in bitcoin.

Today’s bitcoin plunge is spreading to equities markets as well. Major bitcoin holders, including Tesla, are down in early trading.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
User avatar
DrEvil
 
Posts: 3972
Joined: Mon Mar 22, 2010 1:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 44 guests