Bitcoin’s price volatility is often attributed to speculative mania. Unmolested prices have been shown to exhibit an expected, natural distribution characterized by Benford’s law. Deviations from this distribution indicate an anomaly, and typically that anomaly is caused by some type of fraud. For bitcoin, the entire period of daily closing prices from July 2010 through May 2020 was analyzed. Analyses for calendar years 2011-2019 was also conducted. We can say with near 100% confidence that bitcoin’s price has been fraudulently manipulated at some point in its lifespan since 2010. We can say with 95% confidence that bitcoin was manipulated in 2013; 95% confidence that bitcoin was manipulated in 2018; and 98% confidence that bitcoin was manipulated in 2019.
There’s lots of evidence bitcoin is not really living up to the hype. When you try to hype it with the same arguments while disregarding all the issues that have cropped up in the last decade, it’s not very convincing honestly. Also considering that its market cap is only ~$500 billion, which ~1% of global wealth, that’s not encouraging for its disruptive potential.
We can say with near 100% confidence that bitcoin’s price has been fraudulently manipulated at some point in its lifespan since 2010
Ok welcome to assets traded on an open market like… Bitcoin is not immune to that nor is housing or currency or oil or anything. The bailouts were market manipulation, the shit pulled to stop Gamestop investors was manipulation, the whole economic system is rigged and full of speculative manipulation.
Bitcoin has problems when it comes to usability, adoption, reputation, granted, I don’t think anybody who is actually knowledgeable about this topic disagrees about that, I certainly don’t. But the system is good, it works well, for 15 years it has faithfully kept to the protocol and worked without being hacked or experiencing any downtime.
You can say it hasn’t been hacked, but many people who have used it have been hacked. It’s not just people who didn’t know how to secure a computer, either. The biggest exchanges have all been hacked at one point or another and lost crypto, some of the most recognizable names in crypto have been hacked. What good is a currency that isn’t safe even in the hands of experts?
Ransomware could not exist without crypto. It cost the world 159 billion in downtime in 2021 alone. This doesn’t account for the amount of ransoms paid and business/personal data lost.
You hand waved away the environmental issues by putting it on the rest of the world to generate cleaner energy, but the whole problem is that there isn’t enough clean energy to meet global needs. If we could stop wasting 127 terrawatts of energy on Bitcoin per year, we would be a little bit closer to that goal. The problem isn’t clean energy, it’s a useless currency that can only exist by a competition of wasting energy, water, and chip manufacturing capacity during a climate crisis.
It has a huge pile of problems and negative externalities and what did it all achieve? Make a bunch of VC and early adopters rich? Enable crimes that didn’t exist before on a mass scale? Enable money laundering? It’s a solution still in search of the problem.
Ransomware could not exist without crypto. It cost the world 159 billion in downtime in 2021 alone. This doesn’t account for the amount of ransoms paid and business/personal data lost.
Actually it very much did, before crypto ransomware authors used pre-paid gift cards and other forms of payment. Scams and theft have existed since humanity had anything worth stealing, and they were all facilitated without crypto. There are scams and grifts in the trillions of dollars all of which have been completed with nothing more than some bad checks or faulty bank wires. Bitcoin is not immune to use and abuse by criminals, just like the regular banking system is not immune or the internet is not immune. When people do crime, you throw them in prison, and that’s about all that can be done about that. You can equally argue that Bitcoin is a boon to criminal investigators due to the transparent nature of blockchain transactions. You could make any of these arguments for or against Bitcoin just like you can PayPal or venmo or cash app or credit cards.
You can say it hasn’t been hacked, but many people who have used it have been hacked
You can safely make the assertion that “the banking system is secure” even though people get their wallets stolen on the train. The banking system isn’t responsible for that.
The biggest exchanges have all been hacked at one point or another and lost crypto, some of the most recognizable names in crypto have been hacked. What good is a currency that isn’t safe even in the hands of experts?
The security of Bitcoin itself has never been hacked. Exchanges get hacked just like regular banks get hacked, it’s not an indictment of the currency underlying those systems. Bitcoin and the ecosystem surround it comes with some features to help mitigate this risk like multi-sig wallets, cold storage, and social key recovery.
that there isn’t enough clean energy to meet global needs
A big part of getting to 100% renewable is needing to design energy generation systems to be over-capacity. Supply and demand must be equalized constantly, on a minute-by-minute basis. The only way you can do this with 100% renewable is to design way over capacity, which is expensive, which makes renewables more expensive. A partial solution to this problem is to use mining and other quick ways of dumping loads of electricity in a way that isn’t a total loss. Otherwise, you just have to send energy literally into the ground or have an under-capacitied grid which uses non-renewable sources to generate more energy during peak loads. As with all environmental problems, there is no one clear answer, it’s “where do you draw the box?”. Sure that shirt is made from recycled cotton but because it couldn’t be made by cheaper, local cotton manufacturers due to the special process it needs for recycling it had to be trucked from 8,000 miles away etc. etc. All I am saying is that Bitcoin can be a part of the solution and part of the problem at the same time. It’s more nuanced than just Bitcoin is a huge energy waste. Again, compare is to the energy usage of just remittance services and all the people and facilities they need to employ to exist.
It has a huge pile of problems and negative externalities and what did it all achieve? Make a bunch of VC and early adopters rich? Enable crimes that didn’t exist before on a mass scale? Enable money laundering? It’s a solution still in search of the problem.
Created a secure digital currency that can be used by anyone anywhere with the cost of entry of an internet connected device with 15 years of 99.9% uptime 24/7 365.
Providing banking to the “unbanked” and “underbanked” in ways that the traditional banking system was unable to do. Put the world’s poorest people into the same economic network as the richest and gave them equal access without the barriers of traditional banking systems, particularly those around borders, saving remittance users millions in fees sending money back to their home country. If you have ever done international wire transfers or western union you know they are slow, painful, highway robbery.
It opened up areas of international commerce and trade which couldn’t exist before, involving more people in the market economy therefore increasing efficiency, output, and economic opportunity. One way it did this is it made everybody party to these transactions trustworthy. I might be skeptical using PayPal to do business with somebody in a country with a reputation for fraud. But if I use Bitcoin, the money is either sent to me or it isn’t, there is no middle ground. They’re not going to do a chargeback after I send the item I’m selling, I don’t have to worry that my account is going to get blacklisted because I sent a paypal to or from the wrong place. There are many types of online international transactions that benefit from more surety. A fraudster can’t have money in two places at once whereas they can with slow settlement layers, chargebacks, “pending” transactions, and other nonsense that comes with traditional finance. I can confidently sell an iPhone to somebody in Romania with BTC, I would never even consider doing that with paypal or cash app or anything, yikes!
Enabled low fee, nearly instant international money transfers for anybody who wants to access them, moving millions of dollars of value across the globe securely without a single transactional fault or double-spend on a daily basis with insanely quick settlement times compared to banked options. Enabling the recipient of that money to know for sure they actually have it and move more quickly to the next step in the economic chain. High-friction money is bad for the economy, ask any economist. You want goods and services and settlement to be able to move quickly.
Provided an option for those who didn’t want to see their currency printed and eroded by a government they did or did not elect.___
sure, this might sound good in abstract, but it didn’t work out to be useful. almost no one actually uses it as a currency, they hold onto it as a pseudo-asset which fluctuates wildly in “value”. you can’t do anything with it except buy drugs. you can’t use bitcoin to pay for rent or groceries. some stores experimented with taking it as payment several years ago and they all quit because it was a pain in the ass and transactions took too long to clear.
a big reason why people say crypto is bad is because it has an https://www.pcgamer.com/so-youre-telling-me-that-us-crypto-mining-used-more-power-last-year-than-all-the-computers/ environmental impact and the main thing it’s known for is as a vehicle for normal people to be tricked out of their money and left holding the bag as its “value” evaporates. i don’t think you can really blame this on opportunists taking advantage of a “neutral technology”. i think it would inevitably happen with any so-called “money” or “asset” that has no inherit value and nothing backing it up institutionally.
it becomes a problem when your currency is treated as an asset. if your money will put on gains year-after-year without having to do anything, it’s deflationary and that means no one will want to spend it, causing a retraction of money supply. of course no one wants to lose their money’s value to inflation, but the deflationary aspect of bitcoin ensures that people will hoard it instead of using it to buy things. if the whole economy was like this, you’d be looking at something akin to the conditions of the Great Depression.
sure, this might sound good in abstract, but it didn’t work out to be useful. almost no one actually uses it as a currency, they hold onto it as a pseudo-asset which fluctuates wildly in “value”.
Have you met currency speculators? They do the same thing with fiat, as do speculators on every asset class in existence. This is not a problem that’s unique to bitcoin.
You can’t do anything with it except buy drugs. you can’t use bitcoin to pay for rent or groceries. some stores experimented with taking it as payment several years ago and they all quit because it was a pain in the ass and transactions took too long to clear.
If you google “where to spend Bitcoin” you’ll find plenty of places to do so. There are many restaurants, online vendor, hell, some US states even let you pay your taxes with it. Walk into any grocery store in the US with a coinstar and you can convert USD to and from Bitcoin. Is it as popular as the US dollar? No. But it’s much more popular than many other smaller national currencies, especially in the countries with those less reliable smaller national currencies. Why? Because even though Bitcoin’s price isn’t as stable as the US dollar, it’s easier to access and better than their local currency, they can trust it. All they need to use it is a cell phone and a cell network, which many places have even if they don’t have functional banking infrastructure.
a big reason why people say crypto is bad is because it has an enormous environmental impact
Problem 1: we get too much of the world’s power from unsustainable sources, that’s not Bitcoin’s fault. Bitcoin relies on the cost of energy usage to provide security. Energy has a relatively constant cost relative to the entire economy, relative to physics even, that is important.
Problem 2: What is the environmental impact of banking? Even smaller, what is the environmental impact of the top three remittance companies (Western Union et al) whose core functionality Bitcoin has been better at since day one? Bitcoin has lower fees, faster transfers, simpler cross-border movement of money, etc. What about all the Western Union kiosks and offices and whatever. That adds up. If we assume Bitcoin is to replace the global currency system, SWIFT, etc then we are really looking at a massive amount of energy that system uses. How much energy is spent driving cash from one place to another?. This is not even getting into non-proof-of-work cryptocurrencies which have their own pros and cons.
Problem 3: Bitcoin can actually be really, really good for the environment and can help subsidize the change to green energy due to its ability to dampen demand curves. I’ll leave this here for that
and the main thing it’s known for is as a vehicle for normal people to be tricked out of their money and left holding the bag as its “value” evaporates.
Crypto as a whole? Sure. Bitcoin? No. The crypto world is full of grifts, scams, and rugpulls and it’s incredibly unfortunate. Then again, many of these are very obvious on the surface get rich quick schemes. But it is how it is. These scammers don’t need crypto to scam, there was a healthy scam market long before crypto. Other highly volatile asset classes have similar problems. It’s a bad thing, and I agree with you that it’s left people with a bad association with crypto, and that is unfortunate.
i think it would inevitably happen with any so-called “money” or “asset” that has no inherit value and nothing backing it up institutionally.
Traditional currency relies on faith, a collective mass delusion that the currency is worth something. It’s a network effect. The currency is useful because other people believe the currency is useful. Does having an established, trustworthy government behind the currency help? Of course! You can also just impose the currency on people against their will, as many conquerors have done in the past. But that’s it. There’s nothing inherently valuable about a piece of paper that has Benjamin Franklin’s face on it. It ultimately comes down to trust and faith. People have faith that the US will continue to have sound economic policy and stable currency exchange raters, or at least that it will be sounder and more stable than the other national currencies. But any day that faith could end up being misplaced. Faith in bitcoin is faith in the mathematics underlying the system, faith in the most widely read and audited source code in the world. You don’t have to place faith in a person or institution, that is the key difference.
it becomes a problem when your currency is treated as an asset. if your money will put on gains year-after-year without having to do anything, it’s deflationary and that means no one will want to spend it, causing a retraction of money supply. of course no one wants to lose their money’s value to inflation, but the deflationary aspect of bitcoin ensures that people will hoard it instead of using it to buy things. if the whole economy was like this, you’d be looking at something akin to the conditions of the Great Depression.
You are making good points here, and most economists would agree with you that a little inflation is healthy precisely because it incentivizes people to spend money instead of hoarding it. Your statement presumes we would enter in a deflationary spiral because Bitcoin’s price would continue to increase forever, but I don’t think that’s a sound assumption, especially if it were to actually contain a majority of the wealth of the global economy. But even going on that assumption, I wonder how the world might look if somebody had to really convince you to part with your money. Perhaps our products would be of higher quality? Look to any country with hyper-inflation, people will spend their money on anything they can get their hands on because the money will be worthless tomorrow. It’s a broken market environment. In the same way that capitalism to function correctly must have the risk of failure, how might corporations and banks act more responsibly if they didn’t think the next bailout was right around the corner? These are interesting questions.
Satoshi gave us the ability to create our own financial systems and experiment with them, which many people are doing, and those experiments can be done without wrapping up an entire national economy in them. For the first time in human history since fiat currency became dominant, we have the ability to choose which economy to participate in, and it’s much more accessible and useful than for example trading foreign currency ever was. For example, want a universal basic income? Use a coin based around that concept. You can have a protocol that automatically distributes 1% of the total transaction fees of the entire network back to all the participants. And that 1% can be decided by a network-wide vote. You don’t have to convince a national government to run that experiment with the entire economy, you can grow a system for it sustainably by starting small. With blockchain technology, we have the opportunity to create economic systems which are ruled and governed by their participants, not their creators, not by whomever currently rules everything else. It represents a new type of democracy. That is a beautiful and exciting thing, and a gift that will bring all sorts of new things both good and bad. And we have Satoshi to thank for opening that door for us.
Satoshi gave a gift to the world. He didn’t stick around to get rich off of it
Isn’t Satoshi the largest holder of bitcoin? If bitcoin was used as a global currency, would he not start off as the richest and most powerful individual?
Satoshi hasn’t moved any coins in many many years. Many speculate Satoshi is dead. Moving any of those coins would probably crash Bitcoin’s value relative to USD, but Bitcoin would survive and keep true to its promise via protocol: anybody who owned Bitcoin would still own that bitcoin and could faithfully transfer it around the network with no issues. And not even Satoshi could print more into existence.
Even if Satoshi could somehow sell all their coins at current market rates, there are still plenty of people whose wealth measures in the trillions who would be way richer and who really did nothing for their wealth aside from be born into it.
For context: Jeff Bezos owns 10% of Amazon. Zuck owns 14% of Facebook (down from 28% at IPO). Elon has 17% of Tesla. Satoshi’s share is relatively small compared to other founders, and all of those companies are worth more than Bitcoin’s total market cap. Those are just some people who got rich off a single company, there are people whose wealth is measured in countries not companies. People with lineage who measure their accounts in trillions, not billions. Satoshi would barely even rank on the list of richest people.
I wish I believed you. I believe the technology or some form of it has the potential for good, but I can’t realistically see it used that way in my lifetime. The only ones who have been flocking to it so far are grifters.
I was trying look up an article on that and honestly couldn’t find any. Probably just using the wrong keywords, can you point me in the right direction
Hey nerds, read this one. They are making the case that Paypal’s stablecoin is safer than their regular deposits, because at least the stablecoin is regulated under the NYS bitlicence, while Paypal’s normal deposits are far less well regulated. (Not as much an endorsement of PayPal’s stablecoin as an indictment of how shitty the rest of their services are…)
I remember the discussion Over There where people were upset over the bitlicense. And now it turns out we think the BitLicense is awesome, only because the alternatives are so much worse. At least the NYS DFS presumes that crypto has some purpose, and isn’t trying to kill it like the SEC is.
A bad actor from Myalgo (ran on the algorand blockchain) was crackin heads just 6 months back. If you used their tool to generate an online wallet then it was compromised on the backend of the website. Plenty of people were told to rekey and did not listen. They took everything from everybody. They are still probably draining accounts that were not rekeyed. If anybody has heard about this and knows if anyone was ever caught, it would be cool to know.
Great that we’re getting better at SHA hashes I guess, would be great if some that energy were put towards more useful computation. Gridcoin has been doing that since 2013 by having people process data for scientific research projects instead of hashes.
Aah yes just what we need another proof-of-storage currency. Glaring spelling mistake on main page. Quality crypto right here bois! If you’re going to go the proof-of-storage route, at least look into some of the proof-of-useful-storage coins that are out there. Proof-of-storage had its day in the sun but it really doesn’t offer anything PoW and PoS don’t. Oh, and also, for this coin, even though it’s clearly proof-of-storage, you need a GPU to start mining? Why? lol.
I see your point. Yes, it feels a bit wasteful that the data is just junk and not something actually useful. But they are building a L1 crypto, which means smart contracts. AFAIK there are no proof-of-storage cryptos that support smart contracts yet.
As far as I understand, the GPU is required to deter setting up huge data centers with terabytes of data dedicated to Spacemesh, this network is optimised for small miners. And also they wanted to make sure that it’s cheaper to store the data than to regenerate it every time. In any case the GPU is only needed once, to generate the data the first time.
Differently from the other proof-of-storage, in Spacemesh the disk is idle 96% of the time, it’s only spin up once every two weeks. Less energy wasted.
It’s a different model, quite fascinating in my humble opinion 🙂
The only safe way I know of to get passive income from Bitcoin is to use github.com/…/joinmarket-clientserver though that may lead to your bitcoin becoming “tainted”
There is also thorswap.finance but using it probably carries a risk of total or partial loss of money
The most discreet method of earning non-passive income is probably through something like haveno.exchange
For less private ways to get income, I’d use something spoken highly of at kycnot.me that allows peer to peer trading and reputation building
I do not see any reason to talk about my joinmarket experience. Saying I have used it profitably is the same as admitting I have made money by laundering money, and that would obviously be against my interests. I would much rather you believed I had no prior knowledge of how to use cryptocurrency.
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