The Bitcoin Saga

I still don’t get why Bitcoin is still hovering around $10k per coin. Or why this Litecoin I bought for fun shot up to almost $300 then dropped back down to $180. The whole thing is just a complete mystery.

Crypto trading is essentially a group of people passing money around. Not that different than buying and trading old Spider Man comics. Sure they’re worth something, and the value might go up. So? The ‘trust’ and ‘blockchain’ concepts are worth little or nothing. The only real problem cryptocurrencies solve is counterfeit currency. But when was the last time counterfeit currency had a big negative effect on my life? Right, never.

So, passing money around, some will get rich, others will make money, others will lose a bit, others will lose a lot.

I choose not to be in the group. If the ‘sphere’ shrunk to 2012 levels, and there was blood in the streets, fortunes lost, and everyone said it just felt way too oversold, and it was finally time to start buying again? I still wouldn’t spend a dollar on it.

Please feel free to correct me, as I do enjoy reading about it!

In another thread (the GPU one?) @Jason_Becker posted an amazing and quite long article on bitcoin:

One of the big take-away points I had was that the “cost” of to produce a bitcoin is currently sitting at about $2000 of investment/money. Large mining groups are going to burn hundreds of MW of electricity until the bitcoin price falls close to that limit.

Ever since I watched, I keep thinking
HODLGANG
HODLGANG
HODLGANG

And I think no, that’s not right, it should be:
craefulgang
craefulgang
craefulgang

Everyones really excited about moving financial settlements to blockchain but City gossip says the hardware is years behind (m8 of a m8 works in a joint venture between global megabanks). So if the market and their resources can’t do it I’m not holding out for anyone else.

I keep saying this: I’d like to understand why governments would ultimately allow crypto currencies to exist if they can’t control it. The idea of blockchain is a good one but this is something that governments have already begun to apply on their own.

In the US the SEC is definitely on the case, but I don’t think it’s big enough to come to the attention of Congress. I think crypto currencies will end up getting regulated like a security in the next 12-24 months in most Western countries. But lots of other countries need ways to launder money so they’ll let it slide, and so everyone will just move their operations to those safe havens.

My thoughts are that the initial advantages of crypto currencies, fast, anonymous and out of government control, will all be sacrificed for acceptance. The only thing left will be the security of blockchain. As a payment system I’m just a little concerned that the time required to verify a transaction is just going to become untenable.

One bullish and one bearish story today. On the upside, Coinbase has secured banking services from Barclays in the UK, not to mention an e-money licence from the regulator. On the downside, Google is banning crypto-currency, ICO and CFD/binary option trading adverts.

I am shocked, SHOCKED, to discover child porn in this establishment!

Of course it is.

snark This isn’t a big problem, all you need to be able to do is identify who supplied the illegal data and remove it. /snark

Does that mean you can store arbitrary data out there in all those mining centers? Who needs to pay for cloud services, just start dumping data into the ledger.

And to think it was only (scrolls up in the thread) 11 days ago that Paul Ford was marveling at the blockchain because you could store anything in it, anything at all!

Does the blockchain keep track of who added what to the blockchain? Would it be possible to ID the perps?

With caveats, yes. But it would be staggeringly expensive to do it in any volume (like, even a few megabytes).

As this article points out, the big issue here isn’t that people will use it to distribute child porn per se, but rather that if anyone does, then every single bitcoin miner becomes a criminal instantly.

So that means the police departments can instantly use asset seizure to grab the PC of anyone mining bitcoin… and now the government controls bitcoin!

Can I buy some of those seized GPUs at police auction?!?!?!?!

I don’t recall the source, but I recall seeing a post that calculated something on the order of $5000 per megabyte on ETH, and higher for BTC. The post was actually discussing this very problem (network sabotage via putting illegal data on it).

Words cannot express how hilarious I find this.