Talk Elections

Some of you may be aware of Bitcoins, a Ponzi scheme pyramid MLM scam alternate currency developed by Internet libertarian Satoshi Nakamoto.  People would "mine" bitcoins by having computers with high-powered video cards solve complex equations, then use them as "currency," supposedly.  In reality, Bitcoins found a nice niche market in money laundering and drug sales, as a drug site named Silk Road used the "anonymity" of Bitcoins to mail drugs right to the P. O. Box of your choice.  A wave of media attention drew speculation to the Bitcoin market, which promptly yo-yoed from $10 USD-1BTC to $37 USD-1BTC...and right back down again, within a week.  This hilarious instability and crash can be chronicled on the ongoing thread:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3413928&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

Over on Something Awful, where the goons have been analyzing the rise and fall of this tremendously stupid project for the past several weeks.

wait so I can't buy drugs anonymously online anymore?

This was all the fault of Bilderberg and the Fed.

Mikado, you fool, rather than alerting all of us to the current low price of Bitcoins, you should have sold everything you posess to invest it in the money our future robo-rulers will use.

I wish we knew of this earlier.  Though this bitcoin stuff sucks, I probably could've bought thousands of dollars of illicit drugs for $5 worth of bitcoins.  My chance to be a kingpin has passed me by.

Hey now, bitcoins sound like a cool idea.

The "fun" starts somewhere around page 50... I forget which, exactly, but it starts on June 10th.

And...Bitcoin loses 93% of its remaining value today.

()

Seems that one well-known internet leftist is feeling pretty bad right now.

http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/29/why-im-putting-all-my-savings-into-bitcoin/

"These past days, I have done a lot of thinking about bitcoin that ended up with me investing all of the money I had saved and all that I can borrow into the currency. Here’s why."

Well, on the bright side, this should make a pretty interesting article in some economics journal in a few months.

Also I'm not really sure how a currency would have negative value.

https://support.mtgox.com/entries/20208066-huge-bitcoin-sell-off-due-to-a-compromised-account-rollback

http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/19/popular-bitcoin-exchange-mt-gox-hacked-prices-drop-to-pennies/

...

Following the most recent hack, Mt. Gox immediately took down its main site and said it will re-launch the exchange after it “rolls back” prices to the levels Bitcoin had before the incident, which was about $17.50 per Bitcoin. Mt. Gox said service would not resume before 10 p.m. EST Sunday and that the re-opening could be “delayed depending on what is found during the investigation.”

...

Thankfully for Bitcoin owners, the crash appears to have just affected the price of Bitcoin on Mt. Gox, rather than the currency in general. Competing Bitcoin exchange TradeHill currently prices the currency at around $13 per Bitcoin. TradeHill has halted trading “for a few hours” because of the possibilty that members had used the same password for TradeHill and Mt. Gox.

...

A libertarian and his money are soon parted.

Bitcoin advertises itself as being a "decentralized" digital currency. Bitcoin deceptively advertises itself as being generated by "anyone" running a "free application." What bullsh-t.

In reality, bitcoin mining requires thousands of dollars in investments in specialized processing centers, and cost-effective mining is only available to those with a large amount of Federal Reserve Notes as well as time and expertise.

In reality, the processing centers are in turn controlled by a few unelected, centralized pool operators who earn money through transactions fees, much like banks. An individual "mining" operating using bitcoin's free software will take decades to even return a single result (50 bitcoins).

In reality, the more successful bitcoin is at replacing legal tender, the more incentive there is for the early mining bosses to hoard their coins. The problem is not the bitcoin concept, it is the design. In the end, the only effective result is to redistribute wealth and power away from institutions that, although centralized, are at least accountable in some way to democratic forces, to private interests wholly unaccountable.

Additionally, even bitcoin FAQ's admit that the currency is vulnerable to a deflationary spiral.

Deja vu, huh

RIP DW Perry's campaign warchest.

Saw an ad on tv today for a commemorative "bitcoin" to celebrate the revolutionary new digital currency.  It a physical 24 kt goldplated coin put out by the Franklin mint.  This is genius.  Buy some for your kids today, you'll be glad you did.

If you want to read something really depressing, read this WaPo article about young libertarians duping old farmers into putting their retirement savings into bitcoin: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/bitcoin-is-my-potential-pension-what-is-driving-people-in-kentucky-to-join-the-craze/2018/02/03/aaaea3be-05dc-11e8-b48c-b07fea957bd5_story.html?utm_term=.7626e334f652

For all intents and purposes bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, so at least these people will probably go to jail at some point.

Maybe the farmers can make it back by planting tulip bulbs.

The technology behind the bitcoin is interesting, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't justify the current price of the bitcoin. Blockchain is a huge hype, adding blockchain to your companies' name does the same as adding .com to your companies name in the late 90s/early 00s (and we know how that ended). Meanwhile it also doesn't function as a proper currency. Virtually zero correlation between bitcoin-USD exchange rate and USD-insert any currency exchange rate according to some NBER paper. The same NBER paper from 2014 also outlined a bunch of other problems with the bitcoin that haven't been solved yet. And Paul Krugman beautifully explained how an economy with a bitcoin as main currency inevitably leads to deflation (which is a really bad thing). I'm sorry libertarians, but bitcoin won't conquer the world.

I saw nowhere in the article libertarians or farmers.

When that article was posted ten years ago, 1 Bitcoin was worth $8.30.  He doesn't specify how much his total life savings were, but let's say it was $20,000.  Assuming he never bought or sold any more, his savings would now (at this particular moment) be worth around $120 million.



When you posted this, Bitcoin had just come crashing back down from a peak of just over $19,000 in December 2017, to $8,000.

Three years later, it's now worth $50,000.

Today Bitcoin is worth almost exactly 50 million times what it was worth when you made this post, though it is quite a ways off from recent highs.


hahahaha

No risk, no reward.

Don't invest, stay poor!

This topic aged like fine wine.

This thread rules because it could have plausibly been posted at around 6 or 7 distinct times in the past decade. In another 6-18 months, it will be bumped again and the title will apply again.

Yes, but the snark would have more impact if it didn't keep bouncing back from each crash astronomically bigger than before.

"Ha ha, Bitcoin just went from $2 to 25¢!"

"Ha ha, Bitcoin just went from $8 to $2!"

"Ha Ha, Bitcoin just went from $30 to $8!"

"Ha ha, Bitcoin just went from $50,000 to $40,000."

I will say that at least "investing" in Bitcoin is more rational than investing in GameStop.

The next crash is going to be very brutal and a lot of people will commit suicide over it and/or be financially ruined, which was not true in 2011. Of course, for this reason, snark would be inappropriate - I do not enjoy seeing people suffer only because they are stupid and for no other reason - but this snake oil is still snake oil...

"Tonight on Boise's 6 o'clock news, a local self-admitted socialist on an internet forum expresses giddiness at the thought of his political enemies committing mass suicide in the near future."

::)

I mean the GameStop thing was pretty much just to troll hedge fund managers right

Around the time this thread was made, I regularly had anywhere from 100 to 500 BTC in my wallet. Ultimately sold them all in 2012-13.

RIP ME :'(

You just gave me life long chronic FOMO

()

Regardless of whether it is going up or down, the fact that its value fluctuates so much is a pretty good demonstration of its utter failure to fulfil the role of a currency.

As in, why am I ever going to spend any of the stuff if I think it is going to be worth twice as much two weeks from now? great for a few investors, also a demonstration of the total failure of the ideology behind it.

It's misclassified as a currency. Financially, it operates as a commodity. You can use a commodity as currency as well of course, gold and silver were for most of the existence of recorded history. And oil is now to a point.

That Bitcoin swings wildly shows the effects of a limited number of participants in the commodity market buying and selling as happens in other commodity markets, but the long-term rise also demonstrates what has happened to global fiat-based currency systems, especially from 2008 onwards. Right now since the beginning of the year, I could've had sheets of plywood as my personal currency to buy items with, and would be doing pretty well.

(Disclaimer: I do not invest in Bitcoin or any other e-coin.)

Bitcoin isn't really investing, it is more like glorified gambling

But it is a commodity of what? At least gold and silver are physical objects that have established uses. Bitcoin doesn't.

When you trade gold or silver you are at least buying (in theory) something physical. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies aren't like that.

Not even one month

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https://www.businessinsider.com/crypto-investing-wells-fargo-to-add-fund-to-platform-bitcoin-2021-5

This thread is going to keep being bumped every so often (by people on either side of the issue) with "gotcha!" isn't it?

I suspect E-currency of all kinds is going to be more prominent in the future, but Bitcoin won’t be prominent in the future unless it updates its source code to work out the kinks that it has preventing it from being commercially viable.

Bitcoin is not, never has been, and never can be a currency.  It's model prevents it from ever handling the volume of transactions necessary to function as a currency.

Another classic case of speculation gone wrong.

Cryptocurrencies are commodities (currently) but there’s been some talk and initial development of actual e-currencies lately.

Yes the limiting factor of Bitcoin in particular of having a set limit of units in circulation is one aspect hindering its growth, but if the source code is updated that could change, as unlikely as it is. With other cryptocurrencies though it could be possible, especially if a group finds a way to not yield most of its value in being so closely tied or needing to be exchanged with a current recognized currency, or a cryptocurrency or e-currency being said recognized currency.

Considering that fractional Bitcoins can be traded, the limit on the number of Bitcoins isn't a problem. Bitcoin's problem is that it cannot handle a high enuf transaction rate to be a currency.

Well yea, that’s why one option is to update the source code.

If not Bitcoin, it will be another cryptocurrency or a nationally recognized e-currency (https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/federal-reserve-chair-jerome-powell-says-us-government-looking-into-own-digital-currency/ar-AAKdQlj?ocid=BingNewsSearch)

Updating the source code won't affect the speed issues of the distributed database systems that are at the core of blockchain "cryptocurrencies" that prevent any of them from ever replacing currencies. CDBCs are more an official alternative to fintech payment systems such as Alipay or Venmo than to crypto.

Let me introduce you to the lightning network, a layer 2 solution already being used.

https://twitter.com/PeterMcCormack/status/1404472405549060100

It is truly concerning to see lefties seething at the bottom 70% of El Salvador's population getting access to transferring and receiving money, as they don't have bank accounts.

At the absolute worst, this allows that bottom 70% to receive payments from the diaspora via Bitcoin, which is instantly converted at the time of sending to USD (the Govt is opening a clearing house for that purpose), thus losing no money to volatility, while not paying 20-30% fees to banks/transfer services, as they are doing right now.

As it is, rural populations need to make hard and long journeys to pick up any money being sent from the diaspora, and this allows them to simply receive any payment with their phones instantly.

As for CDBC, yeah, I'm not really comfortable with Big Brother having the ability to see literally every single transaction and purchase I make. Plus, authoritarian Big Brothers (like China) have so much control precisely because of that reason.

It's very easy to control the populace when you have the ability to literally freeze and seize 100% of someone's net worth within minutes. The only thing they can't seize (barring keylogging or extracting the private key), are cryptocurrencies.

So the prices are rising again due to Musk working on providing less energy-intensive transactions. Why this was not done or thought about previously, and why he made a quick and careless decision in the first place wiping off millions of speculation is a testament to his poor management style.

Functioning blockchains using proof of stake rather than proof of work date back all the way to 2012; none of this is new information.

I was referring to Musk approving Bitcoin transactions then abruptly cancelling them.

So the solution to the problems of the blockchain is to move transactions off the blockchain itself? Sort of defeats the raison d'être for the blockchain.

This is pretty disappointing but not surprising as the cryptocurrency industry has not been the most stable nor credible. Since China has been cracking down on crypto, it's unlikely that it will maintain its traction. The comments by Janet Yellen saying to steer clear of this don't help either.