Bitcoin

catalog

Well-known member
does this mean we should buy some bitcoin? spoke to my mate who rubs shoulders with rich people and he said theyre all buying gold bars... 1920s germany hyperinflation situation round the corner?
 
ive not read the article but i suppose bitcoin could be likened to gold in this situation?

Yes, bitcoin is on the threshold of having a stock to flow of about 56. Gold is 58.

Next halving after, bitcoin will have an s2f nearly twice gold. Come to your own conclusions about that. But if something is more divisible, easier to transport, store and spend than gold but infinitely more scarce than gold...
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yes I know that's the way it's designed... just surprised to see you guys going through the consequences again as though you didn't.
 
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catalog

Well-known member
Yes, bitcoin is on the threshold of having a stock to flow of about 56. Gold is 58.

Next halving after, bitcoin will have an s2f nearly twice gold. Come to your own conclusions about that. But if something is more divisible, easier to transport, store and spend than gold but infinitely more scarce than gold...

i bet nick land is rubbing his hands with glee
 

Leo

Well-known member
catching up on very old back issues of magazines lying around the house, thought I'd share this long but interesting tale of intrigue from vanity fair...

PONZI SCHEMES, PRIVATE YACHTS, AND A MISSING $250 MILLION IN CRYPTO: THE STRANGE TALE OF QUADRIGA

When Canadian blockchain whiz Gerald Cotten died unexpectedly last year, hundreds of millions of dollars in investor funds vanished into the crypto ether. But when the banks, the law, and the forces of Reddit tried to track down the cash, it turned out the young mogul may not have been who he purported to be.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I'm reading this, I remember when it was in the news but never knew the details. The adverts make it a strange read though.... the bit where it says

The most effective and thorough investigation to date, however, has been conducted by anonymous accounts posting on Twitter, Reddit, Pastebin, and Telegram. Their findings, though baroquely technical, could be distilled to a two-word conclusion:

CONDE NAST - it starts here
was completely baffling for a second.
 

Leo

Well-known member
since I'm a cynical old geezer, I've always wondered how legit this whole cryptocurrency thing really is. much smarter people than me (like HMGovt) understand the ins and outs, but there's no denying there are shady characters like those in the article involved.

also makes me think back to when I was in my late-20s, just starting to earn a little money and somehow got contacted by a scammer. it was one of the oldest tricks in the book, literally: investing in Florida real estate! I never sent them any money but realized only in retrospect that I was being played. the woman who called was totally believable, the definition of a conman who stung me along for three or four phone calls and even sent me some documents in the mail. not exactly sure why I got cold feet, probably because I'm just a cheap bastard but the picture she painted of an amazing investment opportunity totally lured me in. i think she just gave up and moved on to the next mark when I didn't fork over any money after a month or so.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah very disappointing to hear that the guy running this exchange was - regardless of whether in the end he faked his own death and nicked loads of money, or just spunked it on stupid trades - basically a tawdry two-bit conman. I guess that bitcoin scene is filled with idealists which is something that tends to leave people vulnerable, regardless of how technically smart they are. Leaving aside whether or not bitcoin is a totally viable monetary system offering freedom from governments and so on, there will always be con men where there is money. Surprising that this guy with a background in ponzi schemes and a partner who was a convicted conman could end up running such a large exchange - and not keeping basic records - for years though. Seems like a regulatory failure, not just within Bitcoin but in Canada.
 

version

Well-known member
The mining aspect's the bit I'm really curious about. You just leave your PC doing something and it mines (?) Bitcoins out of thin air/the internet?
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
1 PC alone isn't enough anymore. You have massive factories rammed with servers out there now, burning through electricity with crazy cooling systems. They might yield 1 or 2 per month. This is due to the increased difficulty which was all part of the plan.

This is one of the major downsides to BTC, its not energy efficient at all. Transactions are slow, too. To get verified, they have to go through every pc and server node on the entire global network 6 times. Newer coins have dealt with some of this.
 

version

Well-known member
What's the actual process of mining though? What are the servers doing?
 
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pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
They're crunching the numbers of every transaction. There's a finite amount of BTC. The system needs to know where it all is and that it always adds up to the total amount at all times. Every transaction leaves breadcrumbs. Think about it, you have 21 million BTC but by now a huge amount of them are broken into tiny fragments, spread across millions of wallets around the world. The servers keep tabs on version sending .012 BTC from his wallet on his favourite exchange at 6:32am in the UK to balaclavaboi69 on the deepweb for a bag of weed or whatever. All the info of that transaction and all the others happening at the same time then get sent around the network to be verified and recorded 6 times. That's millions of computers and servers at this point. It's anonymous but it isn't. What this all means is you can't lie on the blockchain. You'd have to own 51% of all computers on the network to mess with the books. Some of the earliest industrial size server farms in China actually threatened to do this at one point because they were so big but in the end others opened and it was balanced out again.

One major drawback aside from the energy consumption is the Whale issue. The early adopters who were able to mine huge amounts of BTC a day on a simple home PC. This was because the 'mining difficulty' was so low because of the relatively small amount of data needed to be kept in check. They own thousands, maybe tens of thousands of BTC and basically can control the market by pumping and dumping however they see fit. Wall St. also managed to P&D it up to 20k USD at one point. Am wondering how much those guys still hold. I think it still holds the record for highest investment yield in shortest time or something like that. The point of this though, is that in the end, its still kind of centralised because its not evenly distributed as Satoshi wanted. There's still a core of powerful people who control the supply of the majority of the coins. Or at least there were when I was still really into all that shit a few years ago. Have been out of the scene for a while now. Actually owned 9BTC at once point. Sold way before the massive pump though :rolleyes:
 
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