> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
Aside from perhaps gold, bitcoin is the most successful currency in the world not associated with a central bank and state.
It's the most liquid asset that is not issued by a central bank. At any point you can issue a transaction to anyone else in the world, without the possibility of a third party intervention. I've had issues pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked.
I don't really follow bitcoin, but last I checked over 75% of block confirmations came from the top 3-5 mining pools. That seems a hell of a lot more centralized than the traditional finance system.
The traditional finance system is that a single central bank, owned by a cartel of rich banks- chase, jpm, etc-- issue the currency, charge us to use it and get first dibs on the benefits of monetary inflation -- google "cantillon effect".
The now much more diverse mining space is much better than completely centralized in one entity current system.
And bitcoin community has a way of working to fix weaknesses wherever they find it... there is active campaigns to diversify mining, as you pointed out those are pools-- and pools are being made obsolete. behind those pools are thousands or tens of thousands of mining operators, of all sizes, as it's viable at industrial as well as individual scale-- many use it to heat their house for less than the alternative, the earnings don't have to cover the full cost to be beneficial to people.
Googling "Cantillon Effect" gives suprisingly few results. Out of the top five results, two are Bitcoin-related, one is Reddit, and one is the Wikipedia page of Richard Cantillon himself.
The top comment on /r/AskEconomics is:
"The cantillon effect doesn't really exist in any significant capacity. Central banks nowadays announce their actions well ahead of time, that means before the actual expansion of the money supply, people know this expansion will happen, and markets price in that expansion. So there really isn't much benefiting from being "early".
Beyond that there really isn't much empirical evidence on the cantillon effect to exist in any significant capacity."
Since I know little about this topic I'd appreciate HN's view.
OP mixed the "central bank" as an unique one (it doesn’t exists, although MFI could be representative for the west) and the multiple national ones (FED for the US). They arguments doesn’t hold as the national ones creates money and the are much more numerous and diverse in interest around the world than the ~5 bitcoin pools mentioned ahead.
The FED is quite powerful and US strongly influence many other banks but that’s by situation, not by design.
Calling it a currency is a huge stretch. It’s an extremely successful token/“asset” but it’s about as much as a currency as gold is these days if not less (based on what most people use it for).
I wouldn't call it successful as a currency given its state at the moment either.
I would say that much of the reason for that is because of the perception of the currency that is widely held. It's not much good because people think it's not much good. I bought a few things online years ago with Bitcoin and it worked pretty much the way it should, but most of those places that accepted it stopped . Mostly they stopped due to the public perception.
I do wonder if it has a chance to become useful once it is old enough to not be considered interesting, and the idea of holding something while it increases in value dies.
- It can absolutely blocked by third parties (either the exchange you use or the mining cartels can).
- in practice its liquidity is tied to the liquidity of the ”stablecoins” (USDT and the likes) and as such it's not “the most liquid” since the liquidity of those stablecoins is higher.
I don't use an exchange, and the mining pools (which are not cartels) cannot block a transaction, only delay it until a different pool mines a block, typically ten minutes later. I don't think this sort of intervention by a pool has ever been observed.
The stablecoins you mention are arguably more liquid than Bitcoin, but, except for DAI, they're issued by central-bank-like institutions such as Binance and Coinbase. You're right that they're not officially central banks, but that just means you get all the drawbacks of central banks without the advantages.
Without an exchange your bitcoin is not a liquid asset, it's even less liquid than most commodity for which there are digital exchange marketplace. You can sell it over the counter, but that makes it an asset comparable to real estate in terms of liquidity.
The fact that the pools haven't intervene until now doesn't change the fact that they can definitely do it, and would if pressured by governments. Economic sanctions using the US dollar weren't a thing until they were.
And you only need to have leverage against 50% of the mining power to make that happen, which is pretty straightforward given how centralized the power structure of bitcoin is (although less centralized than for most crypto, for which the developer has full control).
This! I was around looking for alternative "currencies" before Bitcoin even existed. But they were flawed,because they (such as Libertycoin) were shady centralized systems. Each of them were shut down by the US government. Bitcoin would have been the answer, but I lost interest before it became a thing (or it was already a thing and I somehow never come across it, because I never saw it as an accepted option.) This would have appealed to my geek nature. But I think I would have still lost interest in it after finding that Bitcoin also wasn't the answer due to difficulty in spending it. I likely would have cashed out at like $5 per coin to buy a bunch of pizzas.
Speculation, get rich quick schemes and scams. They will exist no matter what. At least the barrier to entry to get scammed is higher with crypto than just online payments
I have never figured out "lightning network", their "solution" for payments. (bitcoin payments are so impractical that they have a different, separate system to use for actual payments, that works completely differently.) Seems very convoluted. I need to pay a huge fee just to make a channel so I can receive anything? And there is something about liquidity? I implemented bitcoin stuff and still cannot figure lightning out.
bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart.
> bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart
That’s what my broker and many others do. They buy a pool of crypto and resell to investors. You don’t get a wallet, you can’t transfer your crypto at all. It just sits there until you sell it. The most distilled Hodl practice ever.
You can't get rich with gold. And haven't been able to for a long long time. It usually preserves wealth due to its long term real rate of return of around zero. But as BTC is new enough, the early owners have indeed become very rich.
When Bitcoin started, a banc transaction was still like 3 days, 5 if there was a weekend in between. Also global transaction. Still a lot of countrys have different and strange systems.
Funny thing is, we don't know how many keys are lost. They say it's deflationary, and I say it's deflating to zero through key attrition. And people pay for burning electricity meanwhile. Weird game.
We know it's not a large fraction, or anyway wasn't a large fraction a year ago, because the fraction of all mined Bitcoin that hasn't moved in the last year is only about 25%.
Edit: If I understand correctly around 15% of coins has not moved in even ten years. So more than 20% of all the mined coins up to mid 2015 have not moved since.
Maybe I remembered it wrong, or maybe I was just out of date. Thanks for the correction! Still, that's basically pointing at key attrition being a fairly minor phenomenon.
I don’t think it really does offer that escape, now that there’s so much institutional investment in it. It’s essentially tied to the decisions of 5 or 6 monetary policy committees, in the same way APPL is, because the risk free rate from the Fed or ECB is still the most significant factor in capital flows.
If the goal is to hoard a currency itself instead of use it as the exchange between real investments then this makes perfect sense, but those people shouldn't be upset when we tell them we don't directly accept their "currency".
This sentiment models a correction to a complaint I first heard with people who tell us everything fell apart since we ended the gold standard. They ignore that we raised all boats rapidly when we didn't pin everything to governments ability to fight gold hoarders for small amounts of gold entering the market. Even gold hoarders are better off in terms of what the market has created to exchange for their gold because that exchange ceased to be limiting on market expansion.
One could say the US economy was exponential both before and after the currency change, but as with Moore's Law, it gets harder to remain exponential if as few as one limiting factor is emerging.
> I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be decades from now.
As this story itself demonstrates, you clearly can't, and it already has the potiential to affect markets: "18.04 million bitcoin sits in dormant accounts. Sizable inactive accounts that wake up after years of dormancy draw investor attention because of the potential market impact if those coins are sold."
It's impossible for you to know if the accounts are dormant intentionally or because the owner has died or lost access - and in the latter case the coins are effectively lost or destroyed in every practical sense. So you can't even say how many usable bitcoins exist at this very moment, and it is even more impossible for you to tell exactly how many accounts will be lost in the future.
> I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be decades from now
So what? if you say "scarcity", that by itself has no value. plenty of things are scarce, but are not valuable, no one wants it.
And anyway, bitcoin is not even scarce. there are thousands of other coins now, anyone can create one, these will / are diluting the $$$ going into btc
A fixed supply, digital bearer asset. It’s nobody’s debt. Not that many of those. And US debt, even though it’s still the predominant reserve asset, things are slowly changing. And yeah, btc is still not a proper currency.
exactly this. these people dont understand that their own speculatory practices are what makes this a terrible store of value. its unstable, they even have to rely on literal stable-coins but they still dont see the problem
for the sake of argument, is there any way to introduce monetary policy into crypto currency so as to correct for unwanted inflation/deflation? without compromising on its decentralization promise
> for the sake of argument, is there any way to introduce monetary policy into crypto currency so as to correct for unwanted inflation/deflation
yeah and you don't even need to change bitcoin - just use a stablecoin over-collateralized by BTC built on the bticoin network. In essence these systems work with $1 of the stablecoin backed by $N dollars (N > 1.6) of the the backing asset (BTC). Then they use a smart contract system of price oracles, liquidations & interest rate curves to balance supply, demand and risk parameters. It's pretty much an over-collateralized lending protocol that issues its own asset that is pegged to $1
This has worked well for the past 11 years with MakerDAO on Ethereum and it's stablecoin DAI. I think at its peak the DAI stablecoin had around $7 billion in circulation and was about 5-10% the size of USDT, now it's about half that. However, high treasury interest rates and low interest in decentralized stablecoins have made more "traditional" stablecoins like USDT, USDC vastly more profitable and successful. In recent times even DAI has been trying to become more like USDC and USDT with treasuries held in intermediaries
Explaining bitcoin to someone who has no interest in it is like trying to explain to your mother in law that she should remove windows and switch to linux. From their perspective it just seems unneccesarry and overcomplicated.
Unnecessary and overcomplicated? Compared to what? Have you ever taken out a mortgage? Ever tried to send funds overseas? Ever wondered how entire cities are built by the people who run the money?
Does your mother in law know what fractional reserve banking is? A bank run? Can they explain what happened in the 2008 financial crisis? No? They why would they need to know how Bitcoin works beyond just "trust me, it does"?
Perhaps another way to think of it, is what would it take to be less disillusioned?
What was about it that made you think it might be a good thing? Have those aspects gone now or is the problem that there are new factors that put you off it?
Most importantly, what could be done to get you back onboard with the idea? I'm not really a fan of "Bad thing is bad" and like to think in terms of "This thing has a bad aspect, what could be done to fix it"
To my mind, I was not expecting Bitcoin to increase in value this quickly. Few people probably were. On the other hand if the end point of Bitcoin was to replace money, then I can see how it would have a high value at that endpoint. That presupposes that it reaches that endpoint. The perceived value (barring the mood based fluctuations of speculation) depends on the proportion of people who believe in that outcome and when they think it will occur.
When Bitcoin came out I thought that it was indeed like email for money, and that it would take a similar amount of time for it to be used by people in general. I figured it would be 20 or 30 years before the average person had even heard about it. Turns out I was quite wrong there.
I don't think Bitcoin is particularly impressive as an investment today, the risk when it comes to retaining value is some unknowable but probably quite high. The risk of holding and retaining your balance adds another layer to that. For the value of the mining reward to stay level with an external currency there has to be around a 20% increase per year to keep up with the halving. Exceeding that rate is what lead to the increase in energy expenditure. While it has increased more than that so far, the one rule of exponential growth is that it cannot continue forever.
It might have a few doublings left in it, but it is slowing down and with a risk level where you could probably find a lower risk way to double your money in a similar timeframe. Maybe it hits a million, but when? If it takes long enough you're better off with an index fund.
Bitcoin sits around $100,000 today, that's way higher than its current utility. I feel like the value should represent the aggregate impression of where Bitcoin will be in the long term. I mostly think this is true and bubbles represent the flow and ebb of the faith that has no logical support. I used to think that nobody could sustain the delusion of value when it is not apparent for many years on end. House prices have led me to think that maybe people can pretend that their thing is worth more than it actually is for many years without faltering.
I guess the world is in a funny place now. For even an index fund to be long term stable, some counties have to continue to exist, and people are beginning to have doubts about even that.
> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
I fully agree that Bitcoin did not become what it was originally built for (a currency system for the internet), and as a matter of fact, for very valid reasons:
- custody is really hard, and damn near impossible for most people, including people who like to think of themselves techies and who all end up getting caught with their pants down when exchanges get hacked because they forgot the number one tenet of Bitcoin. Please repeat the mantra after me: Not Your Keys, Not Your coins.
- the 10mn confirm thing is a pain for small, casual transactions
- scalability (it won't and was never designed do what eg VISA can do in terms of TX/second)
- most people are downright horrified when they realize the non-reversibility aspect
- most people don't understand what money actually is and hot it works in the first place, so seeing the advantage of BTC is damn near impossible
- etc...
HOWEVER: that absolutely does not mean that Bitcoin isn't amazing and useful.
Bitcoin has simply become something else entirely, a kind of financial instrument that had no equivalent up until now and which has turned out to be profoundly useful to a very large class of people (go ask USA - one of the country with the worse divorce laws on the planet - men in the middle of divorce proceeding for their opinion on the topic of assets that can't be confiscated).
Oh and yes, I already hear the shouts from the back of the room: skirting the law!drug dealers! criminals! cyber-ransoms! Won't you think of the children!. One single word to counter this argument: there is thing called the USD which is used for the exact same thing as all the above "use cases" (and worse, like toppling foreign governments) and has never been considered evil for some reason.
I do understand and feel for folks who looked forward o Bitcoin as a replacement for the dollar, lubricating internet commerce and why they are disappointed. I was one of them and it took me a long time to understand what Bitcoin actually was.
However, if you fall in the category of the disillusioned, please consider: something else will come around to solve the problem of internet currency. It won't be Bitcoin. It maybe layer two stuff, who knows.
But on the other hand, Bitcoin has become something extremely useful (and even without trying to analyze the why, the price is an inescapably clear proof of that).
Its singular properties as a financial instrument make it something that no other thing in tradfi can boast having:
- demonstrable finite supply, and therefore a rather predictable outcome on a long term timeline.
- first mover advantage (aka network effect). Other cryptos might be better and get better all the time technically, might better for the environment, but at this point, displacing BTC in terms of mindset and allocated capital ... good luck
- demonstrated long term hedge against inflation (it's been 15 years, and if you can afford to ignore volatility at the one year scale, it's undeniable). On that topic, I can't NOT post this link:
- transactions are impossible to censor, be it by corps or sovereign entities (for me personally, the number one attractive trait, a basic unbreakable defensive guarantor of individual freedom). This goes from simply giving you a ton of actual leverage in e.g. a divorce, to being able to work your way around tyrannical governments (see the Canadian truckers who got all their bank accounts frozen for daring to disagree with the thugs in charge).
- operates 24/7 trustlessly and outside any jurisdiction
- quasi-instantaneous transmission of value across borders, geographies, distances, etc ...
- pseudonymity and privacy. While not perfect in this regard, you neighbor could be a freaking multi-billionaire and you wouldn't have the first clue.
- you can physically disappear and travel with *ALL* of your wealth at an instant notice.
- it cannot be confiscated short of physically torturing the relevant information out of you. And even then, you can protect yourself by not knowing the full secret to accessing your BTC. And this assume people know you have them.
- etc ... the list is long
TL;DR: Bitcoin won't replace Paypal, and that's actually a good thing. It has become an entirely different beast, probably as, if not more, useful than what it was designed for originally, specifically when it comes to being a tool that protects individual freedom against the excesses of the group.
You can move $2 billion worth of capital PERMISSIONLESS with a click of a button, the only thing you need is the private key, are you being disingenuous on purpose or what?
I remember getting a slick new GPU card and learned about Bitcoin mining with my idle gpu power to collect these Bitcoin worth cents, like collecting soda cans for recycling type of $ and thought it wad a terrible waste of my idle processing power compared to harnessing my idle gpu for the noble cause folding proteins at foldingathome.org
I downloaded the bitcoin mining client and everything to see how it worked and had some faucets slipping me Bitcoin for free…
Maybe that guy who was digging up a landfill to find his old HDD finally found it!
Seriously though, what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?
Bitcoin is designed with clever incentives to prevent this kind of thing. If you can afford to bruteforce wallets the incentive would be to just mine bictoin which is more probable and it also help secure the network. If you can bruteforce wallets bitcoin is effectively worthless. Or you could even use all of that compute to mine something else for example Monero.
Being seriously serious, if it was even statistically unreasonable to accomplish this once in this amount of time, it would be apocalyptic. A whole lot more than bitcoin would crumble.
I've personally always been a fan of the idea that the only reason it exists in the first place is to be a 2-trillion-pound canary for sha256
He lost his court battle to force the local government running the dump to allow him to dig the last I heard. So I doubt it, he wasn't even allowed to really try.
Good chance those coins are 100% traceable. They were lost in the days before good privacy tools like mixers, and the database of the biggest exchange MtGox was fully leaked so everyone knows the real name, email, bank details, and date of birth of the owner of every old coin.
Very pleased I disposed of all mine long ago, and the Blockchain shows that so nobody tries to kidnap me for the keys.
I went back to the (french) articles making that claim in headlines and it turns out to be false, thanks.
He lost his appeal in his case against the city authority to search the landfill, so he can't ever search for it.
It's a bit buried in his feed in between the announcements about tokenizing part of these legally inaccessible coins.
Yeah - assuming this was not the rightful owner (which it might well be), my gut is that perhaps someone found an implementation flaw/quirk in some old wallet code/keygen/RNG that effectively reduced the keysize down to something more manageable for brute-forcing. In ye olden days Bitcoin was still something of a curio for geeks and nerds and not the industry it is now, so it would not be unreasonable IMO for there to be some slightly-less-than-perfect implementations floating around from hobbyists or open source etc - the stakes were lower then.
If there was say a vulnerability in a specific wallet version it would be quite possible to narrow down search space to only the wallets/addresses around that point in time etc as well, making it easier to target your brute-forcing efforts.
It will be interesting to see if any other dormant wallets from around the same era wake up too.
One of my students believes Elon Musk and Peter Thiel created Bitcoin. Here's the summary of the 5 page doc he presented:
In 2000, according to Peter Thiel, he met with the E-Gold team in Anguilla.
Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.
In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.
By 2004, there were over a million E‑Gold accounts. Banks weren’t happy about it. Meanwhile, Elon and Peter understood exactly how much potential this new kind of digital currency had.
In 2007, the banks took the founders of E-Gold to court for running an unlicensed money‑transmitting business. That same year, the E-Gold engineers were out of work.
Bitcoin was invented in 2008, the same year Elon was broke and busy trying to save both SpaceX and Tesla from going bankrupt.
His theory is that Elon and Peter hired the smartest engineers from the E-Gold team and asked them to build blockchain so they could create their own version of E-Gold. The team worked on Bitcoin from 2007 to 2010 under the alias of Nakamoto.
I do not think that Elon would not claim he is the inventor by now.
The team theory makes this entirely unbelievable. Something like this can only be pulled of by 1-2 person's whith exceptional self-restraint.
Peter Thiel said in one of his podcast he believes it was the E-Gold team who created Bitcoin under the alias of Nakamoto. He also confirmed he knew the team. But no one knows the names of the engineers or who financed them.
All we know is that Elon and Peter revolutionised the finance industry with PayPal.
Video where he said he knew the team? In the main video, he just speculates that some people at the conference made bitcoin. Never provided even a claim to having evidence.
"Peter Thiel met with the e-gold team in February 2000 on the Caribbean island of Anguilla to discuss making PayPal interoperable with e-gold. The goal was to challenge central banks by creating a system where PayPal and e-gold could work together. Thiel believed this collaboration could spark a revolution against traditional financial institutions."
Actions speak louder than words.
- Thiel met with digital currency pioneers in 2000.
- Thiel chose not to partner with E-Gold because he needed to stay compliant and bank-friendly.
- A few years later, Bitcoin quietly appears, solving the exact problems E-Gold ran into.
- No names. No funding trail. No way for banks to know who the enemy is. Just Bitcoin wallets full of money.
It doesn't sound like a bunch of idealistic cypherpunks building tech to save the world. It sounds like a few smart, well-connected people who understood how money moves, got frustrated with the banking system and their fees, and built a way to create wealth and move value without paying commissions.
The cypherpunks laid the groundwork for the encryption banks, governments, and corporations now depend on. They were never interested in dodging taxes or avoiding bank fees.
Perhaps plausible until you mention that they hired a team to build it.
There's no way, even if it was a single-digit number of people team that they would remain silent. If it was just Elon/Thiel I could perhaps believe it.
Also keep in mind that there were some very desperate years for Elon where his companies were extremely close to bankruptcy, wouldn't he have tapped into that bitcoin if he had access to it?
> wouldn't he have tapped into that bitcoin if he had access to it?
That's not how business works. You borrow, then borrow some more, and focus on having a long term plan to cover the interest, so you don't upset the banks or end up broke again.
Doesn't Elon sell Bitcoin whenever he needs a few hundred million these days?
The fact that we don't understand how someone could've come up with something like PayPal or Bitcoin might be exactly why Elon and Peter are the richest people on the planet.
> There's no way, even if it was a single-digit number of people team that they would remain silent.
JPMorgan moves $10 trillion a day. Would you sleep at night knowing you publicly admitted being involved in a project whose only mission is to bring them down?
Just applying Occams Razor here, this whole story makes more sense if the E-Gold engineers just bootstrapped this project without Musk/Thiel involvement.
E-Golds most talented 1-2 engineers weren’t poor people, and could definitely afford a 5 year career break.
JPMorgan moves $10 trillion a day, according to Jamie Dimon.
So there's the unwritten rule: you never upset the banks because that's the last thing you'll ever do.
So why would the richest person on earth do that? He's not crazy.
Back in the real world, plenty of people publicly associated with running major cryptocurrencies (and Craig Wright!) are walking around talking about how they invented the cryptocurrency and how it revolutionises banking, and plenty of people inventing infrastructure for promoting Bitcoin are doing deals with banks, whilst Elon is the sort of guy who goes to extreme lengths to piss off both political parties in the country that he and his businesses and his lucrative government contracts are based in, including ranting into the void about the most powerful and most sensitive man in the Western world is in the Epstein files when they had a fallout...
Fun personal fact - the only reason I didn't invest more in Bitcoin (which would have definitely been enough to be FU money) was because I had some E-Gold when it was shut down.
Worse fun personal fact. I was planning to buy 5000 bitcoins on a Friday after work. A coworker convinced me and it made sense. Bitcoin was less than 2 a coin at that point.
Then I go down the elevator in my building and there is a huge crowd of people. It ended up being 50 cent the rapper and a few other famous people.
It was so surreal and unexpected I completely forgot about Bitcoin for a few months. And by then I could stand the fact it had tripled (or something) and I had missed it.
Would have been hundreds of millions. Could have lost the hdd or had sold later but I'd always hold some.
Lol so now I blame 50 cent that I didn't buy Bitcoin
One of the doge creators sold all his early doge for a used car. He'd hit the jackpot, a $5k return on something he rolled out in under a day's work, for fun.
He didn't make the wrong decision. All his coin was worth 5 bucks, then 5900. What would you do?
> Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.
> In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.
This doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Except PayPal wasn't invented by Elon or Peter. It was Elon's company's plan to build the digital bank but they were failing quite spectacularly at it.
They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc.
Elon lasted four months as CEO of PayPal, trying to convert it from Java to ASP until the Board didn't ask him to resign, but fired him, the morning he left on his honeymoon after getting married.
PayPal is a complete red herring there. Elon had no participation in ideas on digital currency there.
I've got a Confinity Paypal tshirt from a job fair I went to in 2000 or 2001 from back when they envisioned people using palm pilots to transfer money. I always think it's hilarious that people give Elon any credit for doing anything at the company.
So you are contradicting what Luke Nosek, the co-founder of PayPal, said?
Luke: "Many people don’t know this, but the initial mission of PayPal was to create a global currency that was independent of interference by these, you know, corrupt cartels of banks and governments that were debasing their currencies.”
Why should we believe you and not the person who created PayPal?
If this at least involved Len Sassaman somehow, I'd find it at least worthy of digging in to this. Pass. Musk and Thiel being true cypherpunks? Come on. Musk hasn't had a single idea on his own, Thiel is way too busy coming up with ways to enslave everyone. No way they had anything to do with creating Bitcoin.
People always forget about the great Wei Dai, who like Nakamoto is already sort of pseudonymous, he also created Bmoney which is allot like Bitcoin. He is also the creator of the Crypto++ cryptography library for C++ (bitcoin is written in C++)
From all the OG Cypherpunks he ticks allot of the boxes.
Except for the secrecy of Colossus, Crypto AG, the 9/11 hijackings, Bill Cosby drugging and raping dozens of women, Peter Thiel funding lawsuits against Gawker, the Manhattan Project, the CIA-funded coup against Mossadegh, Stuxnet, the Five Families, most of what the NSA does, the Stealth Bomber, and so on.
Almost all of those remained secret longer than the 17 years we're talking about here, and due to selection bias, I am forced to omit the much more successfully kept secrets, because I don't know about them yet.
Some dude had the wallets on a usb drive. Maybe he mined in the very early days, never really thought of it, and ended up aged and not cognitively aware, his memory wonky.
Recently, he just passed on.
His offspring cleaned out his garage or whatever, found a usb stick, looked on it for photos, and found this.
Just speculating here, but isn't it quite possible someone wasn't intentionally sitting on it for 14 years and instead just couldn't access it? For example, if they've been sitting in prison this whole time. Something like that seems (statistically anyway) more plausible to me than getting lucky on guessing a key.
Those people were wasting their money. They could be running those GPUs from now until the end of the universe and still have approximately 0% chance of finding a single used key.
Right. Those were the ones I talked to, just by random chance. It means that there are a lot of them.
This implicates a few things - (1) people win the lottery every day and (2) it's highly unlikely that the best techniques are publicly known.
Perhaps there's something that requires $1,000,000 in investment to yield a 1:100 chance of finding a particular targeted wallet using some clever shortcuts.
The other explanation is very implausible: a human sits on wallets without splitting up the funds or derisking exposure, has wallets with a billion dollars sitting it in.
Now I only have a few million, but even I have something like 6 brokerages and 12 banks. Even when I was a btc holder, I didn't keep over $100k in a single wallet.
The snatching theory requires no new revolutionary math, no substantial breakthroughs, just some clever people with a lot of resources and a goal.
Either explanation is speculative. I think the "lucky researchers at some University" theory is more likely then the "let's wait 14 years until this $1,000 becomes $1,000,000,000."
Especially because (1) we're not exactly at some high water mark and (2) if this was just a person with a wallet trying to do something like pay for life's uncertainties, you can do basically 100% of that with like 4btc.
However if you successfully snatched the wallet, you're on a clock before someone else gets it. This is exactly the kind of movement you'd be doing
Also if some old bitcoiner comes out and says "hey that was me", we're still up in the air. If I had snatched a billion dollar wallet, the first thing I'd do is payoff an old btc'er to claim its there's to prevent market panic.
This isn’t like lottery odds. The space of keys here is vast. Like unimaginably so. 2^256 is a lot of keys.
If someone had a faster method for breaking elliptic curve keys, fast enough to have a realistic chance on GPUs, the repercussions for that would be waaaaaay larger than merely stealing some bitcoin. This is the same math upon which nearly all digital security in common use today is based. It’d be full-on cryptopocalypse.
You're looking at it wrong. There doesn't need to be a generalizable, embarrassingly parallel, computationally lower class, key reduction.
Just this specific implementation with these specific wallets maybe using a version of the btc code with a small recently discovered bug that existed say for 3 months in 2011
You can have something extremely localized and get this result. And this is exactly the behavior people have long game theoried would happen under such a scenario.
You're implicitly making the claim that just because you can't find something widely discussed in literature than any optimization of any kind is impossible and nobody would ever dare to keep an advantage in stealing bitcoin wallets secret.
Stuxnet is way less plausible than this yet that happened.
People have been trying to do this for a decade and have in aggregate thrown probably north of $100 million into it through separate efforts. The idea of someone finally succeeding is kind of expected.
Again the only claim I'm making here is that this is not only a non-zero chance, but, in my mind, an over 90%.
It's US$2 billion. I can't imagine a better way of monetizing such an exploit than to convert it into cash by using Bitcoin.
The US govt can't pay you US$2 billion without it showing up as a line item in the federal budget. That's like 20% of the NSA's funding. You'd have to get authorization from the President and hold some emergency session of Congress. Other governments would pay less.
Hacking the normal banking system is also challenging. If you steal US$2 billion someone is going to notice and simply undo the transaction because banking doesn't believe in "code as law".
the most likely weakness is in the ECC implementation. i don't understand the math (who does?) but what the debate over https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ tells me is that very few people know what a "weak curve" is but people agree that they exist. this has always made me sketch on ECC in general, especially since it is also used in Tor. Another possibility is compromising the RNG used for creating the pvt sig? which since these are early addresses they would have been from a very early version of the software, and might have used a shitty RNG. If this is a crack it could definitely be state level actors (who has the US pissed off lately? who have they not?). Whether it is state/private the goal would be to extract as much real money as possible before creating a panic, so will be interesting to see where the money goes.
FYI the “safe curves” charts are garbage self-promotion for his own crypto algorithms. I generally respect DJB, but he didn’t even try to be unbiased with that analysis.
BTC private key space is 256 bit. Let's say a billion wallets, that's 30 bits, so you need to check 226 bits to hit one wallet.
A H100 does about 1000 TFLOPS at the very most, that's 10^15 or 50 bits per second (generously assuming we can check on key per FLOP).
6B days of that will give you an additional 50 bits (6 = 8 = 3 bits, B = 1000^3 = 30 bits, day = 10^5 seconds = 17 bits).
Now we're talking 100 bits. But as discussed above, you need to check 220 bits to hit a key. There's still quite a gap.
For comparison, the entire Bitcoin network (using 1% of world electricity) does about 1000 EH/s at the moment, that's 10^21 or 70 bits per second (so, roughly equivalent to a million of H100, using the rough overestimating sketch above).
They could also do a private party transaction to sell the coins outside of an exchange, in order to hide the sale and also hide the price of the tokens sold.
This is common practice in the stock market, called "dark pools" [0]
> Dark pools came about primarily to facilitate block trading by institutional investors who did not wish to impact the markets with their large orders and obtain adverse prices for their trades.
Outside, as in off the blockchain? That would mean that after the transaction, both sides would know the key to the wallet and there would be a race about who lights up a transaction first.
A large wallet that’s been dormant for years suddenly becoming active will tend to pressure the price lower from the implied increase in liquid supply and fear that the wallet will continue to distribute coins.
It’s not just the printing of transaction price that can affect the market.
While ~$8B is huge news, due to the potential that all ~$188B might be in play, when most investors probably expected it was not prior to this - or at least the probability was low enough to barely factor, it's unlikely to crash BTC.
Further, moving BTC is one thing. Showing signs of liquidation is another.
That much should be able to get liquidated intelligently without moving the market.
Not true at all! Everyone knows there are holes in the crypto algorithms and implementations which agencies use to achieve any objective they may have. On top of that there are also holes across the software and hardware stacks of various implementations. Just because they run all the researchers and fund a lot of it does not mean there are no holes.
Especially now with AI, I wouldn't be surprised if an amateur kicked a bunch of tires and got lucky.
Just because they are not published, does not mean they are not using them, someone else found them and are using them. Or they just have the keys from back in the day.
Can't wait to follow this story as it unfolds. The other risk is Quantum... That is going to be real fun when it starts making leaps above Moores Law.
There needs to be a industry wide effort NOW! That researches and generates keys in unconventional ways, different than the ways they are being generated now. Because Quantum is a beast. Those keys will need to be Quantum proof, which means that even if the agent knows the algorithm that is used to generate the keys they cannot duplicate the keys that were generated the first instance it was run. Or you can start doing Hashing across fingerprint, eye and dna data. That is coming my folks!
Can you look me in the eye and state that you understand Bitcoin and the math and the cryptography behind it?
Even if you do, there could in theory still be a way to narrow down the key space or find some other shortcut to a wallet key, even if nobody has figured it out yet.
I understand the math and crypto behind it to a degree. I don't profess expert knowledge however. But I know enough to know the GP is wrong and I'm happy to point that out. If I thought there was any value in correcting GP claim by claim I would do so. But in reality it will just end up in me wasting my time trying to educate someone who doesn't want to be educated, and if they did they could go and research the math and cryptography for themselves.
As someone once said, I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you.
What? Satoshi's last publicly known email was on April, 2011 to Gavin [0], stating the following:
"I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle. Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them."
Also, let's not forget, it took BTC ~1.5 years to gain any amount of traction at all. Nakamoto was in for a long run and his sudden disappearance is always going to be mysterious
Bitcoin (capital B) is valuable. An individual BTC is not, but that's true of any currency. We can argue until the cows come home about how valuable these things really are. Speculation in these markets makes it too difficult to judge. People will bet on these things not because they are delivering lots of value to us right now or in the future, but just because they think they'll still be around in the future. That gives monopolists like the ones above the advantage, regardless of value delivered.
Most interesting to me is that people are worried about a $2B transaction moving the market.
How does that compare to the market depth of actual currencies or commodities? BTC, being objectively worthless, must be much more sensitive to people wanting to sell I'd expect.
The expected discounted value of all bitcoin's future cash flows is zero. This is because the only cash flow that a bitcoin investor can expect from an investment in bitcoins is the revenue from selling the bitcoins in the market... and the market value of something that has no use case and is held for speculative purposes only (i.e. has no intrinsic value) will tend to zero in the long run.
A fiat currency that is issued by the government has no intrinsic value either, but there's one crucial difference compared to a cryptocurrency: in the case of a government-issued fiat currency the central bank will intervene the market, by making use of its prerogative to conduct monetary policy, to ensure price of the currency doesn't drop to zero.
Generally speaking it has been successful, more so than the gold standard. It's true that sometimes states fail, but that's not something a monetary system can prevent from happening, or insure against.
Your definition of "worthiness" is entirely flawed. It seems to be base on some random economics textbook definition of "value".
I am getting tired of repeating the exact same thing on HN, but TL;DR:
. there is no such thing as intrinsic value, it is a fundamentally flawed concept.
. the only reliable tenet in economics (as in: having always be observed to work) is the law of supply and demand, which "value" derives from: if demand>supply, value appears. End of story.
. why there is demand in the first place is a many-colored and complex affair, which economist recurrently (and predictably) fail to analyze and forecast.
Asset pricing theory is a well established field within economics. Of course it comes down, in the end, to the law of supply and demand, but that doesn't mean that we have to stop here. The law of supply and demand doesn't explain why there's a supply and a demand in the first place.
It's not backed by a government, and while some may say that's a good thing, I think it is not.
Without institutional backing, crypto is just a number in a database that people agree is worth something—for now.
If that collective belief evaporates, there’s no court, no army, no tax base, and no GDP to catch it. Contrast this with fiat currency, which—while not backed by gold—is backed by coercive power and taxation.
Let’s start from something even more fundamental. How do you bootstrap trust? Suppose two pseudonymous entities online want to exchange money for services. Such a system will likely need a reputation system to establish the trustworthiness of entities. That system needs to be tolerant to Sybil attacks (i.e., forging multiple identities), while also ensuring the service provider isn’t exploited by a buyer who refuses to pay after receiving the work.
But this exposes a deeper issue: trust cannot be bootstrapped from scratch. It needs either:
A shared history (which pseudonyms lack),
An external authority (which decentralization avoids), or
A system of credible, enforceable consequences (which requires identity or stake).
Without these, any trust system collapses into a prisoner’s dilemma. Each actor is incentivized to defect (cheat) unless:
There’s a future cost to cheating (reputation loss that matters),
There’s a benefit to cooperation over time (e.g. recurring jobs),
Or there's a credible mechanism to enforce fairness (e.g. escrow and arbitration).
But even escrow only works when dispute resolution is possible and trusted. And dispute resolution requires either a neutral arbitrator (who must have their own identity and incentives) or hard-coded, binary rules, which rarely capture the complexity of creative or service work.
More fundamentally, trust-based systems are built on recursive assumptions:
You trust X because X has a good rep.
X has a good rep because others say so.
You trust those others because…?
Eventually, without a root of trust—whether a state, a court, a verified identity, or long-standing social capital—the entire structure becomes circular. There’s no ground truth. Just reputation built on sand.
And so, the real limitation isn’t crypto per se—it’s that trustless systems don’t exist. At best, we shift trust: from institutions to code, from names to keys, from legal consequences to probabilistic deterrents. But the requirement for trust itself never goes away.
In a pseudonymous setting, the cost of betrayal is minimal. A buyer can stiff a seller and vanish. A seller can deliver garbage or nothing. Reputation can be reset at will unless there’s an expensive cost to identity creation or a strongly linked personal history—which violates pseudonymity.
Thus, bootstrapping trust in such environments is not just technically hard—it is philosophically incoherent without compromising at least one of the pillars: privacy, decentralization, or enforceability.
It follows that if you can’t bootstrap trust, you can’t bootstrap anything that depends on it—including money. Money, at its core, is a social contract, a belief system upheld by collective trust. We accept currency in exchange for goods or services because we trust that others will accept it from us in turn. That belief is reinforced by institutional structures: central banks, governments, legal systems, and ultimately, enforcement mechanisms.
But the moment that trust breaks down, the system unravels. If people no longer trust that their money will hold value tomorrow, they will try to offload it as fast as possible, converting it into hard goods, foreign currency, or anything perceived as more stable. This behavior accelerates inflation—sometimes catastrophically.
We’ve seen this repeatedly in history:
In Weimar Germany, the collapse of political and institutional trust after WWI led to hyperinflation, with prices doubling every few days.
In Zimbabwe, trust in government policy collapsed alongside the economy, and the currency became worthless.
In Venezuela, rampant inflation was fueled not just by bad economic policy but by the public’s loss of faith in any institutional ability to right the course.
The underlying mechanism is always the same: money ceases to function as a store of value when the population no longer trusts the system that issues and manages it. Once the shared illusion cracks, even fiat currency—backed by laws, taxes, and armies—can become just colored paper.
Now contrast that with crypto. Cryptocurrencies claim to solve this by removing central authorities and placing trust in mathematics and distributed consensus. But this is not true trustlessness—it's merely replacing institutional trust with collective belief in code and game theory. And the cracks are showing: when confidence drops, as in market crashes or protocol failures, value disappears just as quickly—if not faster—than in fiat regimes.
So the uncomfortable truth is this:
Money only works if you believe it will still work tomorrow.
Without enforceable trust, money becomes unstable. Without shared trust, money becomes meaningless.
And that brings us back to the core issue: you cannot build a functioning economy without some root of trust. Whether that root is institutional, social, or cryptographic, it must be anchored, persistent, and costly to betray. If it’s not, the system becomes inherently fragile.
The reason I used pseudonymous here is exactly because we assumed govs are bad. If govs are good, then crypto degenerates to just a slower system for transactions.
Other currencies get their value because the governments that provide them make people pay taxes. If you want to pay the tax the US government charges you, you're going to need some USD - so there's guaranteed demand, and hence intrinsic worth.
There's also other debt that the US government provides in USD - which provides value as well, in the form of bonds.
BTC has no such driver of wealth. Except perhaps money laundering/transfers without AML provisions.
Yeah bitcoin is (at best[0]) a kind of consensual hallucination, worth something because people believe it is. Fiat is someone with a Navy telling you it's worth money, it's very different.
[0] in practice there's a difference between the idea of a distributed digital currency and the ponzi schemes they give rise to I'm real life. Bitcoin is some greater fool thing, it's not a medium of exchange.
People value a way to store money securely in a place that can’t be physically robbed, that can be sent internationally with low fees quickly.
You don’t need anything else.
For years the haters on here would screech “but it’s volatile” - not really anymore. I wonder what they’ll decide to hate it for now, rather than changing priors.
According to your theory, all the thousands of shitcoins are valuable. But they're not.
There must be further reasons, then, that the price of Bitcoin is so high. And they're purely sentiment, I'd argue. If that changes, there's little to prevent the price from going down very far very fast. Unlike fiat.
This doesn't explain why the currencies of different countries behave differently.
In my view, money is a technology. People use a technology if they find it to be useful. I know this sounds circular, but bear with me. A "major" currency is designed to be useful as a medium of exchange, temporary store of value, and tool of government economic policy. For it to serve these purposes, a government has to moderate its own behavior to some extent.
Thus my view is that the value of a major currency is based, not on the expectation of paying taxes in the future, but on more general expectations of the future behavior of the government.
With that said, paying taxes is good use for money that's a short term store of value, because you rarely need to hold onto your tax money for more than a year before paying it.
>Other currencies get their value because the governments that provide them make people pay taxes
That's demonstrably false, because countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela experienced hyperinflation (the complete devaluation of a currency) in spite of the fact that their governments were still forcing people to pay taxes with those currencies. So clearly that alone is not enough to provide intrinsic worth to a currency.
Countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela printed those currencies in vast quantities to pay bills instead of raising [most of] that money through taxes. Taxes owed in previous quarters were worthless compared with the new trillion dollar notes Zimbabwe's central bank issues to pay government officials, and most private transactions were black market so they weren't seeing them returned in taxes. Zimbabwe and Venezuela are the defining example of how a currency which isn't backed by mountains of debt and taxes is reliant entirely on speculators' confidence...
The reason for that devaluation is that trust was eroded. GP's premise is correct, that fiat has value because of governments, but the reasoning here is not fully correct. The value is in the trust that the government and the institutions will continue to function properly.
Whoever got these wallets better sell them and get a good security company on rotation quickly before anyone find out who they are. Seems like wrench attacks been been happening a lot more the last year.
I don't really get these; there's not a ton of difference between using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of Bitcoin vs using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of any other liquid asset that could be used to buy bitcoins.
If I had 8 billion in cash in my bank account and put in a transfer order, they'd block it, call me, make me come into a branch, make sure there weren't any burly guys with wrenches escorting me in, and maybe call the FBI if anything seemed off.
And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen, during which time I could call and cancel.
Recently there was a local case of someone extorting people by leaving threats in the mailboxes to not burn people’s houses down in exchange for $1k in bitcoin.
But who would keep $8B in bitcoin without some protections in place to ensure that it can’t be easily transferred away, given the associated upside/downside? That’s... roughly as foolish as keeping $8B in actual cash/gold/gems (notwithstanding the logistical problems with the size/weight) under your mattress.
> And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen
or you get a better bank to begin with
most banks that call their slow processes "security purposes" are actually just putting up barriers to maintain liquidity. the banks that go bust are the ones that got clientele based on making it convenient to transfer
This is the other edge of that double edged sword of "no regulations". It's a lot easier to steal bitcoin with no consequence because there isn't an entire financial system backed by people with guns to help you if you are wronged.
> there isn't an entire financial system backed by people with guns to help you if you are wronged
It's not the "financial system" that comes and hunts criminals with guns, but police, acting based on what laws they seen has been broken. And stealing $3 billion is as illegal if it was Bitcoins, as if it was Euro or USD.
There are essentially no criminals that are stealing crypto where the police will have jurisdiction. It's main use case outside of speculation is committing international fraud and theft with no consequences.
Why would you even use a central exchange? It makes no sense. The person holding an absurd amount of coins would not be stupid to throw it all away like that
Not quite that simple, that’s vulnerable to an Eve-Alice-Eve attack. If $1B in BTC moves around in short succession the TXs can be linked easily. You need a mixer that splits up the amount to be paid out, and even then it needs to be done piecemeal.
There are companies (Chainalysis) that track blockchains and ‘grade’ wallets according to who they’ve transacted with. If enough of a wallet’s funds are from a mixer it may be scored a grade lower than the exchange’s KYC rules allow to do business with.
I really wonder if Satoshi’s fortune is gone forever. Maybe the CIA found his real identity and uncovered his keys. Dumping that much BTC on the market would crash the market and probably even tank other financial markets.
Why would they throw a dozen South American coups, import tonnes of crack to the inner cities, conduct illegal human experimentation or attempt the assassination of multiple democratically elected world leaders?
Honestly no idea, they seem a little fash-y for any logical reasoning that i can comprehend.
Maybe they had another insurgency to fund and didn't want it going through the vast ^official^ books?
did the rumor that Satoshi was Paul Leroux go anywhere? since he is now in the hands of the intelligence services for a while this could be a good explanation for Satoshi not being able to access its coins.
Sure you can. If you do it over a few months, it will get absorbed by market because there are buyers (as of today). Though this is kind of unprecedented, so markets could find this kind of event bearish and front run your sells which tanks the price. But I can't imagine I'd care if I held for 14 years. There is also USDT which is much bigger than USDC.
Also if you approach Coinbase/Kraken/$exchange and tell them you have X million to offload, they'll probably let you do it off-market, so no one (except for the ledger, obviously) would really notice.
Compared to the “Magnificent Seven”, Bitcoin’s volatility has put it in the middle, while it’s performance puts it at or near the top depending on the time window.
I find it odd that someone would make a comparison between bitcoin and other financial assets, as if bitcoin was just another financial asset and its theoretical price wasn't zero... which is a pretty big market anomaly. Normally, when you find a market anomaly, you try to explain it. But these analysts, they pretend that there's no anomaly. They just don't talk about it, in the hopes that nobody will notice.
If the Bitcoin Sovereign Wealth Fund scam that was announced after Trump's election is launched, there will be a price bottom that is financed by public funds.
I'm not sure what has come of it. Trump is doing well with his own coins:
Yes. And note that Coinbase for example charges retail around 1.5% or so on average, but only a few basis points to institutional clients last time I ran the numbers. Surprise.
An old friend of mine died 11 years ago from an overdose, and I am almost certain he used darknet markets to buy other drugs.
It's very likely there is a wallet forever lost with many Bitcoin in it from his passing. No way his family would have known anything about it (Bitcoin/dark markets)or cared much anyway circa 2014. I'll admit I have pondered ways to check this, but it's too far fetched.
I can't help but wonder if the wave of fentanyl that made optiate addict deaths skyrocket, left a huge wake of forever lost Bitcoin. I know there was a lot of overlap between addicts and darknet market users.
Most addicts would likely not hold Bitcoin in wallet, but spend it on getting their next fix as soon as they buy it. It's not like you're thinking long-term, invest in Bitcoin so you can buy more drugs down the line. There would be leftover change but not big amounts.
You'd be surprised how many of these addicts would be buying for multiple other less tech savvy addicts and essentially becoming small time dealers themselves to fund their own habit. If they got locked up or ODd at the right time there could've been a few thousand usd in btc in a wallet at a time when each btc was worth less than 10usd.
I think many others, including me, have also the same experience of mining a few and then either forgetting or deleting them because they thought it'd never turn out to be worth anything.
Same. I mined 32 BTC circa ~2010-2011. Then I did a clean install and forgot I had everything saved on the HDD and nothing written down. I remember them being worth about $1 a pop at the time and thought "fuck it", but I never bothered minting any more.
This is definitely something I remind myself of for any investment I sell and later on explodes. For bitcoin there were way too many highs that I definitely would have sold at.
Personally I think that this can be considered on the "bug" side of Bitcoin's finite number coins: if, over time, they are lost, then there's a smaller quantity† of currency that is useable to actually do stuff with.
This can make the 'rate of deflation' that occurs worse:
I don’t think that’s much of an issue for usage. Since a bitcoin can be divided in to 100,000,000 satoshis. There would only need to be a handful of coins left accessible for the system to be usable.
Being deflationary I agree is a problem, but not the idea that there aren’t enough usable coins left.
Everyone always repeats the "deflationary bad" mantra, but I wonder if it really would be. Is the world really going to come crashing down if people only spend on things they need rather than endlessly cycling through shit they don't?
The concern is that capitalism allocates resources to the production of socially valuable goods because corporations can raise money to buy the means of production of those goods before producing them by selling shares in their future profits to investors who are willing to accept some risk of bankruptcy in exchange for those future profits, which result from consumers' rational judgment that the goods are sufficiently valuable to them to be worth buying at a price higher than the cost of goods sold.
None of the links in this chain is perfect, but one of the weaker ones is where investors are willing to accept risk. A guaranteed deflationary currency is a risk-free way to get a return on your investment, so companies have to offer a higher rate of return, narrowing the set of goods that can justify such investment. But the same criticism can be leveled at Treasury bonds and (to many people's minds) real estate, so I'm skeptical of it, and anyway "risk-free" is not a good description of Bitcoin.
It is under-appreciated that inflation actually is desirable in a working economy.
Look at it this way. If your money (in money form) is worth less tomorrow than today, you are incentivised to spend it, thus fueling economic activity of all sorts (from going out and buying a drink to buying a car, traveling, investing). If your money is worth more tomorrow, then you are incentivised to tighten your belt and not spend for as long as you can. At scale, this negatively affects production, economic mobility, and so forth; the rich get richer and hoard the money. I do not believe any of today’s economies can be healthy and competitive (or even functional) with a deflationary currency.
The US currencies were either literal precious metals, or gold-backed and/or silver-backed, throughout the 19th century until the Great Depression, except for a couple of brief suspensions. Consequently the average rate of inflation was zero. That was the period that it went from a fractious group of rebel colonies to the center of world economic development. So, while I'm sympathetic to the idea that a fiat currency with a predictable inflation rate might stimulate the economy, I think you are making an unjustifiably strong case for it.
This argument falls apart when you consider technology though. And even daily essentials. No one would not buy food and water because they can get more in future. They need it now.
The same goes for technology. We all know next year’s iPhone will be better than this year but we still buy them…because we need them now.
I’d argue inflation’s incentives are worse - the constant need to invest/spend so that your money doesn’t lose value. It means money flows into anything and everything like zombie companies, over consumption, property. Those on the poorest end are just trapped because as soon as they get any money it starts depreciating.
> We all know next year’s iPhone will be better than this year but we still buy them
Next year’s iPhone will not only be better, but also (even with the same price tag) cost more, inflation-adjusted. That factors into the decision to buy now.
> I’d argue inflation’s incentives are worse - the constant need to invest/spend so that your money doesn’t lose value.
It is a problem when it is at extreme, like in unstable countries where money can be a liability to unhealthy degree. However, I’d argue it should be a liability to a smaller degree.
What you highlight is the ever-present conflict between personal benefit and societal benefit. Obviously for an individual it is more preferable that the value of their money increases; I would never argue that. However, for society as a whole it is more preferable if the value of money decreases at a stable rate.
Perhaps this is why all major economies settled on the idea that an amount inflation is crucial to have.
The mechanism does not distinguish between “bad economic activity” and “good economic activity”. I.e., the same mechanism applies to positive progress (carbon dioxide sequestration, more expensive technology and techniques reducing environmental impact, etc.), it just requires proper incentive alignment and accounting for bad faith actors via regulation.
A deflationary system with limited supply makes kings and ultimately defeats itself, as your money is decreasingly evidence of your effort and work and increasingly evidence of you having held to it for a while. (It is also a quality of the current system, but less so, and it should be even less so, not more so.)
> When I listen to Bitcoin discussions, one of the advantages people bring up is that there is a limited number of it and you can’t just “print” more.
Which can limit economic growth. When money was based the amount of gold available, there were long periods of economic stagnation because of liquidity issues:
The stagnation only ended when new sources of shiny rocks were found (California; New World).
I find it a dumb idea what whether or not people can get credit to start/expand businesses would be dependent of solving math problems. Yes, credit creation can be "too easy" and become a problem, but making it "too hard" (or physically/mathematically impossible) is even more dumb.
> I find it a dumb idea what whether or not people can get credit to start/expand businesses would be dependent of solving math problems.
That’s quite a mischaracterization. We can at least agree that Bitcoin’s supply is set up to increase at a pre-set rate over time. The math problems are the means to enforce that rate. Not the controlling factor.
> During the "long depression" GDP was still growing at 3-4% so it was hardly stagnation.
I don't know of many things that are viewed positively that have been given a label with "depression" in it.
> Figures from Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz show net national product increased 3 percent per year from 1869 to 1879 and real national product grew at 6.8 percent per year during that time frame.[32] However, since between 1869 and 1879 the population of the United States increased by over 17.5 percent,[33] per capita NNP growth was lower. Following the end of the episode in 1879, the U.S. economy would remain unstable, experiencing recessions for 114 of the 253 months until January 1901.[34]
> The dramatic shift in prices mauled nominal wages – in the United States, nominal wages declined by one-quarter during the 1870s,[14] and as much as one-half in some places, such as Pennsylvania.[35] Although real wages had enjoyed robust growth in the aftermath of the American Civil War, increasing by nearly a quarter between 1865 and 1873, they stagnated until the 1880s, posting no real growth, before resuming their robust rate of expansion in the later 1880s.[36] The collapse of cotton prices devastated the already war-ravaged economy of the southern United States.[17]
> Thousands of American businesses failed, defaulting on more than a billion dollars of debt.[35] One in four laborers in New York were out of work in the winter of 1873–1874[35] and, nationally, a million became unemployed.[35]
If Congress had not demonetized silver in 1873, the metal’s decreasing value would have curbed the deflation of the time. I believe that this was one of the US Government’s greatest mistakes ever, because the reaction to the economic crisis in the 1870’s had a profound effect on the failure of Reconstruction. Friedman wrote a paper on this, called “The Crime of 1873.”
Which is equivalent to deflation, which parent suggests is harmful to bitcoin's viability. In order to claim that "this is fine" you would need to refute the claim that deflation is bad.
> Which is equivalent to deflation, which parent suggests is harmful to bitcoin's viability.
Deflation is built into Bitcoin by design and is one of its most notable features regarding its coin growth schedule. This pros and cons of that approach have been discussed ad infinitum in the crypto community.
I wonder when did cypherpunks started to discuss this kind of mechanisms for digital currency. Was it obvious from day one or an idea that came later in the design phases.
Not only were they already discussing it when I joined the list in 01992, cryptocurrency was a major, if implicit, part of Tim May's crypto-anarchist manifesto which I think he presented at Hackers in 01988: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/cryp...
He wasn't specifically calling it out as having a fixed money supply or even fungible tokens, though. And it wasn't until Satoshi figured out how to do without a central issuer like Xanadu, Digicash, or e-gold that we realized it was possible. At the time that Satoshi cut the knot, we were all convinced it was impossible because of Zooko's Triangle.
Chaum founded DigiCash in 01989, incidentally, based on a paper he wrote in 01982 presenting a cryptocurrency design for untraceable payments, but backed with dollars by a central issuer, like Tether.
However, there was always a strong association between cypherpunks and right-libertarian free-market ideology, which is where you find gold bugs and Austrian economists. You may remember that one of the minor plot points in Atlas Shrugged was that Galt's Gulch went back to specie money (tiny pennies stamped from gold) because its value wasn't dependent on government fiat.
Cypherpunks were discussing digital gold and Austrian economics in the 1990s. I wouldn't say there was any kind of consensus but the ideas were out there.
The finite nature of btc, low transaction volume, and increasing cost of mining made deflation a given. The original designers simply did not solve this problem. BTC’s dominance in the crypto community suggests that this trait was advantageous for BTCs growth as existing holders are incentivized to add additional use cases/transaction volume.
There were early attempts at inflationary cryptocurrencies too but they didn't catch on; all other things being equal, people prefer to hold currencies that gain value over time, not lose value.
Given the context, "this is fine" is obviously an ironic reference to the cartoon dog sitting on a chair at the dining room table with a mug of coffee in a burning house meme.
Normally I would say you're right, but I read the context opposite to you; I read the "fine" as a straight/literal statement: the author of "this is fine" is disputing the author's parent's statement that "this can be considered [a bug]".
It’s a solid store of value. One can borrow against that held BTC, and as it appreciates over time, the loan-to-value ratio improves, without having to do anything. Also avoids capital gains taxes since you're not spending it.
Bitcoin is the world's number one store of value for converting young, impressionable men's wages into thin air and moving those dollars to other people instead.
It's a compelling rival to multi-level marketing for women in that both prospects entice low-socioeconomic standing peoples into thinking they are building value instead of consuming it.
Deflation is what you want for investment assets. Btc is primarily a value store and commodity like gold, not a currency. Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.
> Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.
And is deflation a good or bad thing for the livelihood and well-being of human beings?
How many people in the US has a mortgage or some kind of debt (student, medical)? Inflation makes the burden of debt easier, deflation makes it worse.
And the Top (0.)1% already has an easy enough time with parking/generating value. Deflation would only help them more (and make things hard for everyone under them).
Saving isn’t economically productive, on a societal level. Spending is. Investing is.
Deflation inherently disincentivizes doing anything with the currency other than sitting on it. Want to buy something? You’d be better off waiting and buying it tomorrow because it will be worth less in your deflationary currency at that point. No one has an incentive to lend their money to others to use it more productively, so no growth occurs. No one buys anything, producers can’t sell anything, and no one can get capital to start any business ventures. The sole, viable way to accumulate wealth is to take the currency and stuff it under the mattress.
This results in a society much like Europe described in a Jane Austen novel, where wealth is simply inherited and the upper class doesn’t actually serve an economic function. They just exist to perpetuate their wealth and dole out subsistence wages to those who work their estates and have absolutely no chance of improving their station.
It’s an inherently broken system and a perfect example of Chesterton’s fence by tech types assuming they know better than everyone else.
> Inflation punishes savers and rewards debtors, i.e. it disincentivises the more economically productive behaviour.
Quite the opposite.
Deflation encourages hoarding of cash because it just sits there and increases in value. "If you want to retain the purchasing power of your money, it should participate in society via investment." — Nick Maggiulli
Isn't saving (i.e. sitting on assets) less economically productive than spending? Inflation rewards productivity by making productive use of money the only way to avoid loss over time?
I love how people bring up deflationary spiral as a "peril" while the prerequisite for it is the universal and smashing success of Bitcoin.
The only "problem" Bitcoin poses for economies is for governments to fine-tune their local economies via currency production and related controls. In that sense, we should watch how events unfold in Turkey.
* among major "regular" economies, Turkey has the highest % of people holding crypto (≈20%). Second only to special zones UAE and Singapore (31%, 24%).
* Turkish lira is steadily inflated over the last 30-40 years, well over 10% and recently over 50%.
* Turkey does not have mandate for pricing goods in local currency: you can pay in dollars or euros, along the local lira.
* When you enter Istanbul airport, Every. Single. Gate. is marked with BTCTurk ad, inside and outside - the major crypto exchange in the country.
* Istanbul city market is full of traders who use USDT on Tron.
The experiment of social game "Bitcoin" boils down to this: will the people self-organize the functioning economy with monetary freedom, while the gov loses its grip on it; or will the economy collapse without government's regulation and protective management?
> Turkish lira is steadily inflated over the last 30-40 years, well over 10% and recently over 50%.
Because the authoritarian government took over the previously independent central bank and lowered interest rates. Higher inflation was predicted by mainstream economists, and they were right.
This is just a convenient way to access stable western currency. Having been to Russia and Argentina during their worst inflation years before crypto, they solved their issues by asking for US paper dollars. Crypto is just saving them currency exchange fees.
And there's no way Turkiye is behind the value of BTC. It's still driven by speculators.
It's a success today, we haven't gotten to when they stop issuing any more, and mining is funded by transaction fees. I suspect there are going to be some problems then.
> Like what? As far as I can tell, it will solidify its store of value.
Which is the bug:
> No currency should be able to buy the same basket of goods over very long timespans through hoarding. If you want to retain the purchasing power of your money, it should participate in society via investment.
That’s a “hot take” that people take as an axiom. What if it isn’t? What is the precise definition of “participating in society”? What level of earning and spending is considered morally good and who’s to decide that? (Meta questions arise when discussing conflicts of interest of the deciders.)
The day Satoshi finally decides to move some btc around, I wonder how many automatic emails, api calls, etc will be performed because of so many people setting up alerts.
Hm, I can't recall when The Sleeping Beauty was making billions of dark money. This is some perverted fairy tale. The sleeping beauty is our current world, that allow all the scams, launderings, murderings to happen.
On a side note, if quantum algorithms break elliptic curve cryptography, then wouldn’t Satoshi’s wallets and others be flooding the market with coin transfers?
The BTC network will need to require all addresses with large Bitcoin UTXOs to send them to new wallets, that are quantum-resistant, by a certain date, or lose the ability to move that money.
Price is dumping today, i wonder how much of a role this is playing. those coins will be hitting an exchange likely. This has always been the problem with bitcoin.. the implicit assumption is that many coins are lost , but if the early adopters start cashing out, prices will fall fast. Institutional buying and retail is still small relative to the early adopters. There are many people , miners who are quietly siting on huge fortunes.
Easy to kick yourself in retrospect but if we could see the future we'd all be millionaires. AAPL was $0.28 in 2002 (adjusted for splits, something like $12 at the time).
It is still a scam. Its just that critical mass of delusional people bought into it like Gamestop or Tesla stock. Even super obvious scams like Nikola take years to register price wise.
I was also around when bitcoin just started out. Many people wanted it to be a global revolution in finance.
But instead it turned into a game of "hodl" to get rich.
Scams were openly perpetrated in the forums.
I became completely disillusioned. What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
Aside from perhaps gold, bitcoin is the most successful currency in the world not associated with a central bank and state.
It's the most liquid asset that is not issued by a central bank. At any point you can issue a transaction to anyone else in the world, without the possibility of a third party intervention. I've had issues pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked.
I don't really follow bitcoin, but last I checked over 75% of block confirmations came from the top 3-5 mining pools. That seems a hell of a lot more centralized than the traditional finance system.
The traditional finance system is that a single central bank, owned by a cartel of rich banks- chase, jpm, etc-- issue the currency, charge us to use it and get first dibs on the benefits of monetary inflation -- google "cantillon effect".
The now much more diverse mining space is much better than completely centralized in one entity current system.
And bitcoin community has a way of working to fix weaknesses wherever they find it... there is active campaigns to diversify mining, as you pointed out those are pools-- and pools are being made obsolete. behind those pools are thousands or tens of thousands of mining operators, of all sizes, as it's viable at industrial as well as individual scale-- many use it to heat their house for less than the alternative, the earnings don't have to cover the full cost to be beneficial to people.
Googling "Cantillon Effect" gives suprisingly few results. Out of the top five results, two are Bitcoin-related, one is Reddit, and one is the Wikipedia page of Richard Cantillon himself.
The top comment on /r/AskEconomics is:
"The cantillon effect doesn't really exist in any significant capacity. Central banks nowadays announce their actions well ahead of time, that means before the actual expansion of the money supply, people know this expansion will happen, and markets price in that expansion. So there really isn't much benefiting from being "early".
Beyond that there really isn't much empirical evidence on the cantillon effect to exist in any significant capacity."
Since I know little about this topic I'd appreciate HN's view.
Your claim is that European, Canadian, UK, Australian central banks are 'owned by Chase, JPM etc'?
FED is owned by private corporations?..
OP mixed the "central bank" as an unique one (it doesn’t exists, although MFI could be representative for the west) and the multiple national ones (FED for the US). They arguments doesn’t hold as the national ones creates money and the are much more numerous and diverse in interest around the world than the ~5 bitcoin pools mentioned ahead.
The FED is quite powerful and US strongly influence many other banks but that’s by situation, not by design.
> successful currency
Calling it a currency is a huge stretch. It’s an extremely successful token/“asset” but it’s about as much as a currency as gold is these days if not less (based on what most people use it for).
I wouldn't call it successful as a currency given its state at the moment either.
I would say that much of the reason for that is because of the perception of the currency that is widely held. It's not much good because people think it's not much good. I bought a few things online years ago with Bitcoin and it worked pretty much the way it should, but most of those places that accepted it stopped . Mostly they stopped due to the public perception.
I do wonder if it has a chance to become useful once it is old enough to not be considered interesting, and the idea of holding something while it increases in value dies.
Last week I happened to visit a grocery store that accepts Bitcoin payments.
Huh. Were you in El Salvador by any chance?
> currency
Well given that you basically can't spend bitcoin anywhere, it's definitely not a currency.
- It's not a currency.
- It can absolutely blocked by third parties (either the exchange you use or the mining cartels can).
- in practice its liquidity is tied to the liquidity of the ”stablecoins” (USDT and the likes) and as such it's not “the most liquid” since the liquidity of those stablecoins is higher.
I don't use an exchange, and the mining pools (which are not cartels) cannot block a transaction, only delay it until a different pool mines a block, typically ten minutes later. I don't think this sort of intervention by a pool has ever been observed.
The stablecoins you mention are arguably more liquid than Bitcoin, but, except for DAI, they're issued by central-bank-like institutions such as Binance and Coinbase. You're right that they're not officially central banks, but that just means you get all the drawbacks of central banks without the advantages.
Without an exchange your bitcoin is not a liquid asset, it's even less liquid than most commodity for which there are digital exchange marketplace. You can sell it over the counter, but that makes it an asset comparable to real estate in terms of liquidity.
The fact that the pools haven't intervene until now doesn't change the fact that they can definitely do it, and would if pressured by governments. Economic sanctions using the US dollar weren't a thing until they were.
And you only need to have leverage against 50% of the mining power to make that happen, which is pretty straightforward given how centralized the power structure of bitcoin is (although less centralized than for most crypto, for which the developer has full control).
This! I was around looking for alternative "currencies" before Bitcoin even existed. But they were flawed,because they (such as Libertycoin) were shady centralized systems. Each of them were shut down by the US government. Bitcoin would have been the answer, but I lost interest before it became a thing (or it was already a thing and I somehow never come across it, because I never saw it as an accepted option.) This would have appealed to my geek nature. But I think I would have still lost interest in it after finding that Bitcoin also wasn't the answer due to difficulty in spending it. I likely would have cashed out at like $5 per coin to buy a bunch of pizzas.
Speculation, get rich quick schemes and scams. They will exist no matter what. At least the barrier to entry to get scammed is higher with crypto than just online payments
No, scamming people is much easier with crypto. The transactions are irreversible, for one.
As it is with cash.
And crypto scamming is anonymous, low risk and can be automated. Scamming people for cash requires you to get close to each of your victims.
> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
It is a highly reliable, global-scale P2P software system, we can analyse, experiment with and learn from.
.torrent be like: hold my beer
You can get rich by... having it
Sort of like gold I guess.
I have never figured out "lightning network", their "solution" for payments. (bitcoin payments are so impractical that they have a different, separate system to use for actual payments, that works completely differently.) Seems very convoluted. I need to pay a huge fee just to make a channel so I can receive anything? And there is something about liquidity? I implemented bitcoin stuff and still cannot figure lightning out.
bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart.
In the long term everything goes to zero, so an asset that pays no dividends but has significant storage costs isn't much good for investment.
Bitcoin holders as a group are constantly losing money by definition. Some of them cash out at a profit, I suppose.
> bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart
That’s what my broker and many others do. They buy a pool of crypto and resell to investors. You don’t get a wallet, you can’t transfer your crypto at all. It just sits there until you sell it. The most distilled Hodl practice ever.
edit: typo
You can't get rich with gold. And haven't been able to for a long long time. It usually preserves wealth due to its long term real rate of return of around zero. But as BTC is new enough, the early owners have indeed become very rich.
When Bitcoin started, a banc transaction was still like 3 days, 5 if there was a weekend in between. Also global transaction. Still a lot of countrys have different and strange systems.
>What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be decades from now.
Can you do the same for any fiat currency for next week?
It offers stability and a mathematical escape from very fallible humans controlling monetary systems.
Funny thing is, we don't know how many keys are lost. They say it's deflationary, and I say it's deflating to zero through key attrition. And people pay for burning electricity meanwhile. Weird game.
We know it's not a large fraction, or anyway wasn't a large fraction a year ago, because the fraction of all mined Bitcoin that hasn't moved in the last year is only about 25%.
Where did you get this number? All I can find is much higher, showing more than half of the coins have not been moved over a year.
https://en.macromicro.me/charts/32355/bitcoin-supply-last-ac...
https://charts.bitbo.io/dormant-coins/
Edit: If I understand correctly around 15% of coins has not moved in even ten years. So more than 20% of all the mined coins up to mid 2015 have not moved since.
Maybe I remembered it wrong, or maybe I was just out of date. Thanks for the correction! Still, that's basically pointing at key attrition being a fairly minor phenomenon.
I don’t think it really does offer that escape, now that there’s so much institutional investment in it. It’s essentially tied to the decisions of 5 or 6 monetary policy committees, in the same way APPL is, because the risk free rate from the Fed or ECB is still the most significant factor in capital flows.
That's not completely true. If there is consensus among participants (especially exchanges) to change Bitcoin (fork) they can do it.
Can't do that with Gold.
That would be a different (forked) currency then.
> I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be decades from now.
How does that help, when the value it translates to doesn't stay the same? Also the conversion value will be impacted by changes in fiat currency.
But what's the (inherent, or even otherwise) benefit of this?
If the goal is to hoard a currency itself instead of use it as the exchange between real investments then this makes perfect sense, but those people shouldn't be upset when we tell them we don't directly accept their "currency".
This sentiment models a correction to a complaint I first heard with people who tell us everything fell apart since we ended the gold standard. They ignore that we raised all boats rapidly when we didn't pin everything to governments ability to fight gold hoarders for small amounts of gold entering the market. Even gold hoarders are better off in terms of what the market has created to exchange for their gold because that exchange ceased to be limiting on market expansion.
One could say the US economy was exponential both before and after the currency change, but as with Moore's Law, it gets harder to remain exponential if as few as one limiting factor is emerging.
> I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be decades from now.
As this story itself demonstrates, you clearly can't, and it already has the potiential to affect markets: "18.04 million bitcoin sits in dormant accounts. Sizable inactive accounts that wake up after years of dormancy draw investor attention because of the potential market impact if those coins are sold."
It's impossible for you to know if the accounts are dormant intentionally or because the owner has died or lost access - and in the latter case the coins are effectively lost or destroyed in every practical sense. So you can't even say how many usable bitcoins exist at this very moment, and it is even more impossible for you to tell exactly how many accounts will be lost in the future.
> I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be decades from now
So what? if you say "scarcity", that by itself has no value. plenty of things are scarce, but are not valuable, no one wants it.
And anyway, bitcoin is not even scarce. there are thousands of other coins now, anyone can create one, these will / are diluting the $$$ going into btc
Not to mention this will effectively be an overestimate given loss of bitcoin to wallets whose owners lost the key.
> It offers stability
Hahaha what? Bitcoin has insane volatility.
I wouldn't describe bitcoin as stable.
they laugh at the guy who spent 10 bitcoin to buy pizza back in the early days, but you can't directly buy pizza today with bitcoin.
10 bitcoin? It was 10,000 bitcoin.
10000 bitcoin
A fixed supply, digital bearer asset. It’s nobody’s debt. Not that many of those. And US debt, even though it’s still the predominant reserve asset, things are slowly changing. And yeah, btc is still not a proper currency.
A hyper deflationary asset cannot ever be a proper currency.
exactly this. these people dont understand that their own speculatory practices are what makes this a terrible store of value. its unstable, they even have to rely on literal stable-coins but they still dont see the problem
for the sake of argument, is there any way to introduce monetary policy into crypto currency so as to correct for unwanted inflation/deflation? without compromising on its decentralization promise
> for the sake of argument, is there any way to introduce monetary policy into crypto currency so as to correct for unwanted inflation/deflation
yeah and you don't even need to change bitcoin - just use a stablecoin over-collateralized by BTC built on the bticoin network. In essence these systems work with $1 of the stablecoin backed by $N dollars (N > 1.6) of the the backing asset (BTC). Then they use a smart contract system of price oracles, liquidations & interest rate curves to balance supply, demand and risk parameters. It's pretty much an over-collateralized lending protocol that issues its own asset that is pegged to $1
This has worked well for the past 11 years with MakerDAO on Ethereum and it's stablecoin DAI. I think at its peak the DAI stablecoin had around $7 billion in circulation and was about 5-10% the size of USDT, now it's about half that. However, high treasury interest rates and low interest in decentralized stablecoins have made more "traditional" stablecoins like USDT, USDC vastly more profitable and successful. In recent times even DAI has been trying to become more like USDC and USDT with treasuries held in intermediaries
it's not made in rust
Explaining bitcoin to someone who has no interest in it is like trying to explain to your mother in law that she should remove windows and switch to linux. From their perspective it just seems unneccesarry and overcomplicated.
Unnecessary and overcomplicated? Compared to what? Have you ever taken out a mortgage? Ever tried to send funds overseas? Ever wondered how entire cities are built by the people who run the money?
Does your mother in law know what fractional reserve banking is? A bank run? Can they explain what happened in the 2008 financial crisis? No? They why would they need to know how Bitcoin works beyond just "trust me, it does"?
It's not the how but the why. If you know you need bitcoin you know. If everything seems fine without it why would you bother?
Perhaps another way to think of it, is what would it take to be less disillusioned?
What was about it that made you think it might be a good thing? Have those aspects gone now or is the problem that there are new factors that put you off it?
Most importantly, what could be done to get you back onboard with the idea? I'm not really a fan of "Bad thing is bad" and like to think in terms of "This thing has a bad aspect, what could be done to fix it"
To my mind, I was not expecting Bitcoin to increase in value this quickly. Few people probably were. On the other hand if the end point of Bitcoin was to replace money, then I can see how it would have a high value at that endpoint. That presupposes that it reaches that endpoint. The perceived value (barring the mood based fluctuations of speculation) depends on the proportion of people who believe in that outcome and when they think it will occur.
When Bitcoin came out I thought that it was indeed like email for money, and that it would take a similar amount of time for it to be used by people in general. I figured it would be 20 or 30 years before the average person had even heard about it. Turns out I was quite wrong there.
I don't think Bitcoin is particularly impressive as an investment today, the risk when it comes to retaining value is some unknowable but probably quite high. The risk of holding and retaining your balance adds another layer to that. For the value of the mining reward to stay level with an external currency there has to be around a 20% increase per year to keep up with the halving. Exceeding that rate is what lead to the increase in energy expenditure. While it has increased more than that so far, the one rule of exponential growth is that it cannot continue forever.
It might have a few doublings left in it, but it is slowing down and with a risk level where you could probably find a lower risk way to double your money in a similar timeframe. Maybe it hits a million, but when? If it takes long enough you're better off with an index fund.
Bitcoin sits around $100,000 today, that's way higher than its current utility. I feel like the value should represent the aggregate impression of where Bitcoin will be in the long term. I mostly think this is true and bubbles represent the flow and ebb of the faith that has no logical support. I used to think that nobody could sustain the delusion of value when it is not apparent for many years on end. House prices have led me to think that maybe people can pretend that their thing is worth more than it actually is for many years without faltering.
I guess the world is in a funny place now. For even an index fund to be long term stable, some counties have to continue to exist, and people are beginning to have doubts about even that.
> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
I fully agree that Bitcoin did not become what it was originally built for (a currency system for the internet), and as a matter of fact, for very valid reasons:
HOWEVER: that absolutely does not mean that Bitcoin isn't amazing and useful.Bitcoin has simply become something else entirely, a kind of financial instrument that had no equivalent up until now and which has turned out to be profoundly useful to a very large class of people (go ask USA - one of the country with the worse divorce laws on the planet - men in the middle of divorce proceeding for their opinion on the topic of assets that can't be confiscated).
Oh and yes, I already hear the shouts from the back of the room: skirting the law!drug dealers! criminals! cyber-ransoms! Won't you think of the children!. One single word to counter this argument: there is thing called the USD which is used for the exact same thing as all the above "use cases" (and worse, like toppling foreign governments) and has never been considered evil for some reason.
I do understand and feel for folks who looked forward o Bitcoin as a replacement for the dollar, lubricating internet commerce and why they are disappointed. I was one of them and it took me a long time to understand what Bitcoin actually was.
However, if you fall in the category of the disillusioned, please consider: something else will come around to solve the problem of internet currency. It won't be Bitcoin. It maybe layer two stuff, who knows.
But on the other hand, Bitcoin has become something extremely useful (and even without trying to analyze the why, the price is an inescapably clear proof of that).
Its singular properties as a financial instrument make it something that no other thing in tradfi can boast having:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg TL;DR: Bitcoin won't replace Paypal, and that's actually a good thing. It has become an entirely different beast, probably as, if not more, useful than what it was designed for originally, specifically when it comes to being a tool that protects individual freedom against the excesses of the group.[dead]
You can move $2 billion worth of capital PERMISSIONLESS with a click of a button, the only thing you need is the private key, are you being disingenuous on purpose or what?
Yeah that is awesome, it's great technology but it's still not anywhere close to a revolution.
I remember getting a slick new GPU card and learned about Bitcoin mining with my idle gpu power to collect these Bitcoin worth cents, like collecting soda cans for recycling type of $ and thought it wad a terrible waste of my idle processing power compared to harnessing my idle gpu for the noble cause folding proteins at foldingathome.org
I downloaded the bitcoin mining client and everything to see how it worked and had some faucets slipping me Bitcoin for free…
Maybe that guy who was digging up a landfill to find his old HDD finally found it!
Seriously though, what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?
Bitcoin is designed with clever incentives to prevent this kind of thing. If you can afford to bruteforce wallets the incentive would be to just mine bictoin which is more probable and it also help secure the network. If you can bruteforce wallets bitcoin is effectively worthless. Or you could even use all of that compute to mine something else for example Monero.
Being seriously serious, if it was even statistically unreasonable to accomplish this once in this amount of time, it would be apocalyptic. A whole lot more than bitcoin would crumble.
I've personally always been a fan of the idea that the only reason it exists in the first place is to be a 2-trillion-pound canary for sha256
For anyone else who's been vaguely following the story as it popped up every few years, the latest news came out a few days ago : he finally gave up.
> he finally gave up
Sounds like something someone who found few billion USD on a thumb drive would say :)
I wouldn't say anything.
Has he opened a bar instead?
He named it Puzzles.
That’s definitely also what I would publicize if I actually found the HDD. :)
He lost his court battle to force the local government running the dump to allow him to dig the last I heard. So I doubt it, he wasn't even allowed to really try.
Good chance those coins are 100% traceable. They were lost in the days before good privacy tools like mixers, and the database of the biggest exchange MtGox was fully leaked so everyone knows the real name, email, bank details, and date of birth of the owner of every old coin.
Very pleased I disposed of all mine long ago, and the Blockchain shows that so nobody tries to kidnap me for the keys.
That’s what someone who hasn’t disposed all of the coins would say.
In the early days, a pentium 486 in your garage could have made these coins in a few months.
And you don't need an exchange to transfer coins.
No one knows who owns these wallets... yet. That's why they are mysterious.
Source?
https://x.com/howelzy
I went back to the (french) articles making that claim in headlines and it turns out to be false, thanks.
He lost his appeal in his case against the city authority to search the landfill, so he can't ever search for it. It's a bit buried in his feed in between the announcements about tokenizing part of these legally inaccessible coins.
> what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?
Even if that were possible, you could brute force one wallet. Not eight wallets closely related to each other.
Keys created with an RNG that turned out to be a little too predictable?
Or some other flaw found in a wallet’s key generation?
Kinda like what happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195493
(Or exactly that but nobody tried to attack this again with moar power?)
Yeah - assuming this was not the rightful owner (which it might well be), my gut is that perhaps someone found an implementation flaw/quirk in some old wallet code/keygen/RNG that effectively reduced the keysize down to something more manageable for brute-forcing. In ye olden days Bitcoin was still something of a curio for geeks and nerds and not the industry it is now, so it would not be unreasonable IMO for there to be some slightly-less-than-perfect implementations floating around from hobbyists or open source etc - the stakes were lower then.
If there was say a vulnerability in a specific wallet version it would be quite possible to narrow down search space to only the wallets/addresses around that point in time etc as well, making it easier to target your brute-forcing efforts.
It will be interesting to see if any other dormant wallets from around the same era wake up too.
One of my students believes Elon Musk and Peter Thiel created Bitcoin. Here's the summary of the 5 page doc he presented:
In 2000, according to Peter Thiel, he met with the E-Gold team in Anguilla.
Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.
In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.
By 2004, there were over a million E‑Gold accounts. Banks weren’t happy about it. Meanwhile, Elon and Peter understood exactly how much potential this new kind of digital currency had.
In 2007, the banks took the founders of E-Gold to court for running an unlicensed money‑transmitting business. That same year, the E-Gold engineers were out of work.
Bitcoin was invented in 2008, the same year Elon was broke and busy trying to save both SpaceX and Tesla from going bankrupt.
His theory is that Elon and Peter hired the smartest engineers from the E-Gold team and asked them to build blockchain so they could create their own version of E-Gold. The team worked on Bitcoin from 2007 to 2010 under the alias of Nakamoto.
I do not think that Elon would not claim he is the inventor by now. The team theory makes this entirely unbelievable. Something like this can only be pulled of by 1-2 person's whith exceptional self-restraint.
Peter Thiel said in one of his podcast he believes it was the E-Gold team who created Bitcoin under the alias of Nakamoto. He also confirmed he knew the team. But no one knows the names of the engineers or who financed them.
All we know is that Elon and Peter revolutionised the finance industry with PayPal.
Video where he said he knew the team? In the main video, he just speculates that some people at the conference made bitcoin. Never provided even a claim to having evidence.
You've just created an account to ask that question? Wow :D
https://kqmarkets.co.uk/article/did-peter-thiel-meet-satoshi...
https://protos.com/is-peter-thiel-inner-circle-behind-the-sa...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-21/peter-thi...
"Peter Thiel met with the e-gold team in February 2000 on the Caribbean island of Anguilla to discuss making PayPal interoperable with e-gold. The goal was to challenge central banks by creating a system where PayPal and e-gold could work together. Thiel believed this collaboration could spark a revolution against traditional financial institutions."
Actions speak louder than words.
- Thiel met with digital currency pioneers in 2000.
- Thiel chose not to partner with E-Gold because he needed to stay compliant and bank-friendly.
- A few years later, Bitcoin quietly appears, solving the exact problems E-Gold ran into.
- No names. No funding trail. No way for banks to know who the enemy is. Just Bitcoin wallets full of money.
It doesn't sound like a bunch of idealistic cypherpunks building tech to save the world. It sounds like a few smart, well-connected people who understood how money moves, got frustrated with the banking system and their fees, and built a way to create wealth and move value without paying commissions.
The cypherpunks laid the groundwork for the encryption banks, governments, and corporations now depend on. They were never interested in dodging taxes or avoiding bank fees.
Perhaps plausible until you mention that they hired a team to build it.
There's no way, even if it was a single-digit number of people team that they would remain silent. If it was just Elon/Thiel I could perhaps believe it.
Also keep in mind that there were some very desperate years for Elon where his companies were extremely close to bankruptcy, wouldn't he have tapped into that bitcoin if he had access to it?
> wouldn't he have tapped into that bitcoin if he had access to it?
That's not how business works. You borrow, then borrow some more, and focus on having a long term plan to cover the interest, so you don't upset the banks or end up broke again.
Doesn't Elon sell Bitcoin whenever he needs a few hundred million these days?
The fact that we don't understand how someone could've come up with something like PayPal or Bitcoin might be exactly why Elon and Peter are the richest people on the planet.
> There's no way, even if it was a single-digit number of people team that they would remain silent.
JPMorgan moves $10 trillion a day. Would you sleep at night knowing you publicly admitted being involved in a project whose only mission is to bring them down?
Because Elon is so humble…
Seems fairly humble to me in that he's always thanking the team and giving them most of the credit.
The definition of humility is not "doing the bare minimum."
Just applying Occams Razor here, this whole story makes more sense if the E-Gold engineers just bootstrapped this project without Musk/Thiel involvement.
E-Golds most talented 1-2 engineers weren’t poor people, and could definitely afford a 5 year career break.
My counterpoint is that if Elon were involved in any way at all, he would have taken credit for it publicly by now.
JPMorgan moves $10 trillion a day, according to Jamie Dimon. So there's the unwritten rule: you never upset the banks because that's the last thing you'll ever do.
So why would the richest person on earth do that? He's not crazy.
Back in the real world, plenty of people publicly associated with running major cryptocurrencies (and Craig Wright!) are walking around talking about how they invented the cryptocurrency and how it revolutionises banking, and plenty of people inventing infrastructure for promoting Bitcoin are doing deals with banks, whilst Elon is the sort of guy who goes to extreme lengths to piss off both political parties in the country that he and his businesses and his lucrative government contracts are based in, including ranting into the void about the most powerful and most sensitive man in the Western world is in the Epstein files when they had a fallout...
Fun personal fact - the only reason I didn't invest more in Bitcoin (which would have definitely been enough to be FU money) was because I had some E-Gold when it was shut down.
Worse fun personal fact. I was planning to buy 5000 bitcoins on a Friday after work. A coworker convinced me and it made sense. Bitcoin was less than 2 a coin at that point.
Then I go down the elevator in my building and there is a huge crowd of people. It ended up being 50 cent the rapper and a few other famous people.
It was so surreal and unexpected I completely forgot about Bitcoin for a few months. And by then I could stand the fact it had tripled (or something) and I had missed it.
Would have been hundreds of millions. Could have lost the hdd or had sold later but I'd always hold some.
Lol so now I blame 50 cent that I didn't buy Bitcoin
You would’ve sold it way before it became FU money
Indeed. That's what so many miss.
One of the doge creators sold all his early doge for a used car. He'd hit the jackpot, a $5k return on something he rolled out in under a day's work, for fun.
He didn't make the wrong decision. All his coin was worth 5 bucks, then 5900. What would you do?
> Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.
> In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.
This doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Except PayPal wasn't invented by Elon or Peter. It was Elon's company's plan to build the digital bank but they were failing quite spectacularly at it.
They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc.
Elon lasted four months as CEO of PayPal, trying to convert it from Java to ASP until the Board didn't ask him to resign, but fired him, the morning he left on his honeymoon after getting married.
PayPal is a complete red herring there. Elon had no participation in ideas on digital currency there.
> They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc.
Interesting, need to read about it. So similar story as with Tesla? Existing opinion nicely confirmed.
I've got a Confinity Paypal tshirt from a job fair I went to in 2000 or 2001 from back when they envisioned people using palm pilots to transfer money. I always think it's hilarious that people give Elon any credit for doing anything at the company.
The people who give him credit are the same people who sold PayPal for $1.5 billion in July 2002:
Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Luke Nosek, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Ken Howery, Jeremy Stoppelman, Russel Simmons.
Elon was removed as CEO in 2000, but he remained the largest individual shareholder when PayPal went public.
I saw people using PalmPilots to transfer money on PayPal in 02001.
Some of the history between the two companies is covered in a book, "Paypal Wars.[0]
Among other things it happens to spotlight Musk's fascination with having "X" as the company name, especially for a bank.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_PayPal_Wars
So you are contradicting what Luke Nosek, the co-founder of PayPal, said?
Luke: "Many people don’t know this, but the initial mission of PayPal was to create a global currency that was independent of interference by these, you know, corrupt cartels of banks and governments that were debasing their currencies.”
Why should we believe you and not the person who created PayPal?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/paypal-originally-aimed-creat...
If this at least involved Len Sassaman somehow, I'd find it at least worthy of digging in to this. Pass. Musk and Thiel being true cypherpunks? Come on. Musk hasn't had a single idea on his own, Thiel is way too busy coming up with ways to enslave everyone. No way they had anything to do with creating Bitcoin.
Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, Peter Todd, and Adam Back were definitely part of the team after the paper was published. But Len Sassaman? I don't think so.
> Musk and Thiel being true cypherpunks?
Even cypherpunks had bills to pay.
And who was hiring in 2007? The same people who disrupted the banking and oil industry with PayPal and Tesla.
People always forget about the great Wei Dai, who like Nakamoto is already sort of pseudonymous, he also created Bmoney which is allot like Bitcoin. He is also the creator of the Crypto++ cryptography library for C++ (bitcoin is written in C++) From all the OG Cypherpunks he ticks allot of the boxes.
Len went on for years about what a stupid idea Bitcoin was.
It was jack.
Any team involved would have long ago spilled the beans.
Conspiracies are impossible to maintain, once more than one or two people are involved.
Except for the secrecy of Colossus, Crypto AG, the 9/11 hijackings, Bill Cosby drugging and raping dozens of women, Peter Thiel funding lawsuits against Gawker, the Manhattan Project, the CIA-funded coup against Mossadegh, Stuxnet, the Five Families, most of what the NSA does, the Stealth Bomber, and so on.
Almost all of those remained secret longer than the 17 years we're talking about here, and due to selection bias, I am forced to omit the much more successfully kept secrets, because I don't know about them yet.
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It’s quantum computer.
Better odds: old man theory.
Some dude had the wallets on a usb drive. Maybe he mined in the very early days, never really thought of it, and ended up aged and not cognitively aware, his memory wonky.
Recently, he just passed on.
His offspring cleaned out his garage or whatever, found a usb stick, looked on it for photos, and found this.
> closely related to each other.
Like, sequential? Because if you were brute forcing...
Martin Shkreli has been spending the past month or so on Discord streaming himself doing literally exactly that.
> what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?
I've been wondering the same. But in this case it's multiple wallets, so it's very unlikely.
Or maybe someone just got out of prison!
Ross Ulbricht?
I would say the odds are zero because that's the likelihood of being able to brute-force anything in the key space.
It's not zero. https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies
It's close enough.
There are 200 million+ BTC wallets.
They've found 54 out of 200 million+ or about 0.00002% of wallets - in how many years?
People are actively doing it. Mostly using clore.ai on their 4090x bundles.
I used to work in the gpu rental space up to about a month ago.
I talked to multiple people dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars on looking for those keys.
I'd put house odds at say 20:1 that someone cracked it over someone holding for 14 years and deciding now is strike time.
Also if it's a true crack, then Bitcoin price could collapse swiftly if someone just snatched a wallet for 200k of compute or whatever.
That's always been the real existential risk. I talked about it as the DES problem over a decade ago. Let's see if this is it
Just speculating here, but isn't it quite possible someone wasn't intentionally sitting on it for 14 years and instead just couldn't access it? For example, if they've been sitting in prison this whole time. Something like that seems (statistically anyway) more plausible to me than getting lucky on guessing a key.
Those people were wasting their money. They could be running those GPUs from now until the end of the universe and still have approximately 0% chance of finding a single used key.
Right. Those were the ones I talked to, just by random chance. It means that there are a lot of them.
This implicates a few things - (1) people win the lottery every day and (2) it's highly unlikely that the best techniques are publicly known.
Perhaps there's something that requires $1,000,000 in investment to yield a 1:100 chance of finding a particular targeted wallet using some clever shortcuts.
The other explanation is very implausible: a human sits on wallets without splitting up the funds or derisking exposure, has wallets with a billion dollars sitting it in.
Now I only have a few million, but even I have something like 6 brokerages and 12 banks. Even when I was a btc holder, I didn't keep over $100k in a single wallet.
The snatching theory requires no new revolutionary math, no substantial breakthroughs, just some clever people with a lot of resources and a goal.
Either explanation is speculative. I think the "lucky researchers at some University" theory is more likely then the "let's wait 14 years until this $1,000 becomes $1,000,000,000."
Especially because (1) we're not exactly at some high water mark and (2) if this was just a person with a wallet trying to do something like pay for life's uncertainties, you can do basically 100% of that with like 4btc.
However if you successfully snatched the wallet, you're on a clock before someone else gets it. This is exactly the kind of movement you'd be doing
Also if some old bitcoiner comes out and says "hey that was me", we're still up in the air. If I had snatched a billion dollar wallet, the first thing I'd do is payoff an old btc'er to claim its there's to prevent market panic.
This isn’t like lottery odds. The space of keys here is vast. Like unimaginably so. 2^256 is a lot of keys.
If someone had a faster method for breaking elliptic curve keys, fast enough to have a realistic chance on GPUs, the repercussions for that would be waaaaaay larger than merely stealing some bitcoin. This is the same math upon which nearly all digital security in common use today is based. It’d be full-on cryptopocalypse.
You're looking at it wrong. There doesn't need to be a generalizable, embarrassingly parallel, computationally lower class, key reduction.
Just this specific implementation with these specific wallets maybe using a version of the btc code with a small recently discovered bug that existed say for 3 months in 2011
You can have something extremely localized and get this result. And this is exactly the behavior people have long game theoried would happen under such a scenario.
You're implicitly making the claim that just because you can't find something widely discussed in literature than any optimization of any kind is impossible and nobody would ever dare to keep an advantage in stealing bitcoin wallets secret.
Stuxnet is way less plausible than this yet that happened.
People have been trying to do this for a decade and have in aggregate thrown probably north of $100 million into it through separate efforts. The idea of someone finally succeeding is kind of expected.
Again the only claim I'm making here is that this is not only a non-zero chance, but, in my mind, an over 90%.
"larger than merely stealing some Bitcoin"
It's US$2 billion. I can't imagine a better way of monetizing such an exploit than to convert it into cash by using Bitcoin.
The US govt can't pay you US$2 billion without it showing up as a line item in the federal budget. That's like 20% of the NSA's funding. You'd have to get authorization from the President and hold some emergency session of Congress. Other governments would pay less.
Hacking the normal banking system is also challenging. If you steal US$2 billion someone is going to notice and simply undo the transaction because banking doesn't believe in "code as law".
the most likely weakness is in the ECC implementation. i don't understand the math (who does?) but what the debate over https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ tells me is that very few people know what a "weak curve" is but people agree that they exist. this has always made me sketch on ECC in general, especially since it is also used in Tor. Another possibility is compromising the RNG used for creating the pvt sig? which since these are early addresses they would have been from a very early version of the software, and might have used a shitty RNG. If this is a crack it could definitely be state level actors (who has the US pissed off lately? who have they not?). Whether it is state/private the goal would be to extract as much real money as possible before creating a panic, so will be interesting to see where the money goes.
FYI the “safe curves” charts are garbage self-promotion for his own crypto algorithms. I generally respect DJB, but he didn’t even try to be unbiased with that analysis.
It’s the quantum computer.
How does the equation change with $100m of cloud or GPU compute as GP speculated? These are all hobbyists.
It would take approximately 6B H100 GPU days to crack every active BTC wallet.
So if you had 10,000 H100s running, it'd only take ~1500 years.
You'd have a high probability to find key in under ~1000 years, though.
Even if I'm off by 3 orders of magnitude, it would take a decade and cost billions, and not make financial sense.
How do you get that?
BTC private key space is 256 bit. Let's say a billion wallets, that's 30 bits, so you need to check 226 bits to hit one wallet.
A H100 does about 1000 TFLOPS at the very most, that's 10^15 or 50 bits per second (generously assuming we can check on key per FLOP).
6B days of that will give you an additional 50 bits (6 = 8 = 3 bits, B = 1000^3 = 30 bits, day = 10^5 seconds = 17 bits).
Now we're talking 100 bits. But as discussed above, you need to check 220 bits to hit a key. There's still quite a gap.
For comparison, the entire Bitcoin network (using 1% of world electricity) does about 1000 EH/s at the moment, that's 10^21 or 70 bits per second (so, roughly equivalent to a million of H100, using the rough overestimating sketch above).
Per year, that's 70+25 = 95 bits. Still far.
*at most ... years.
People always forget those numbers are worst case scenarios. I mean, you can get luck on the very first guess too.
If that’s the plan you can guess a number for free, no outlay needed.
If your guess is generated by a QRNG and many worlds is true, than one version of you is very happy although the expected value is 1.03×10−66 USD.
Active addresses have less entropy too
It changes that if you attempt to liquidate that much BTC, BTC crashes and you've got 90% less money than you hoped for.
Do you really think they have no notion of liquidity? Why would they attempt to liquidate it all at once?
They could also do a private party transaction to sell the coins outside of an exchange, in order to hide the sale and also hide the price of the tokens sold.
This is common practice in the stock market, called "dark pools" [0]
> Dark pools came about primarily to facilitate block trading by institutional investors who did not wish to impact the markets with their large orders and obtain adverse prices for their trades.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/050614/introdu...
Outside, as in off the blockchain? That would mean that after the transaction, both sides would know the key to the wallet and there would be a race about who lights up a transaction first.
After the transaction, you can still send the bitcoin to the purchaser's wallet.
But since the purchase itself happens off exchange, there's no record of how much the coins were sold for, so no impact on market price.
A large wallet that’s been dormant for years suddenly becoming active will tend to pressure the price lower from the implied increase in liquid supply and fear that the wallet will continue to distribute coins.
It’s not just the printing of transaction price that can affect the market.
The vast majority of BTC transactions are done this way. Anything of any size is traded via OTC desks or other more private avenues.
Just the fear of future liquidation would eventually severely crash BTC.
Like it's crashing now on this news?
There's ~$188B in Satoshi era wallets.
While ~$8B is huge news, due to the potential that all ~$188B might be in play, when most investors probably expected it was not prior to this - or at least the probability was low enough to barely factor, it's unlikely to crash BTC.
Further, moving BTC is one thing. Showing signs of liquidation is another.
That much should be able to get liquidated intelligently without moving the market.
It depends how it's sold. Market orders would have more impact than OTC .
yeah, people think it's the selling that makes the price fall. it is the anticipation . markets are forward looking
Because maybe this isn't satoshi waking up, but finally those kidnappers hit that poor guy in the latest "we found satoshi" documentary
if someone could brute force a key, they would target small inactive wallets , rather than big wallets and drawing attention to it
Not true at all! Everyone knows there are holes in the crypto algorithms and implementations which agencies use to achieve any objective they may have. On top of that there are also holes across the software and hardware stacks of various implementations. Just because they run all the researchers and fund a lot of it does not mean there are no holes.
Especially now with AI, I wouldn't be surprised if an amateur kicked a bunch of tires and got lucky.
Just because they are not published, does not mean they are not using them, someone else found them and are using them. Or they just have the keys from back in the day.
Can't wait to follow this story as it unfolds. The other risk is Quantum... That is going to be real fun when it starts making leaps above Moores Law.
There needs to be a industry wide effort NOW! That researches and generates keys in unconventional ways, different than the ways they are being generated now. Because Quantum is a beast. Those keys will need to be Quantum proof, which means that even if the agent knows the algorithm that is used to generate the keys they cannot duplicate the keys that were generated the first instance it was run. Or you can start doing Hashing across fingerprint, eye and dna data. That is coming my folks!
You dont understand bitcoin or the math or the cryptography ehind it.
Can you look me in the eye and state that you understand Bitcoin and the math and the cryptography behind it?
Even if you do, there could in theory still be a way to narrow down the key space or find some other shortcut to a wallet key, even if nobody has figured it out yet.
I understand the math and crypto behind it to a degree. I don't profess expert knowledge however. But I know enough to know the GP is wrong and I'm happy to point that out. If I thought there was any value in correcting GP claim by claim I would do so. But in reality it will just end up in me wasting my time trying to educate someone who doesn't want to be educated, and if they did they could go and research the math and cryptography for themselves.
As someone once said, I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you.
He had only 7500. The recent move involves 60,000 according to some Reddit threads
At that scale self-hosted compute probably offers a decent roi.
this would be highly improbable. the odds of only remembering enough of the key to brute force it, is slim.
guessing a whale's key? zero
> Satoshi-era
Not true in the slightest. Satoshi was already gone by 2010, and in 2011 there were ~8000 transactions per day from folks outside of Satoshi's circle.
What? Satoshi's last publicly known email was on April, 2011 to Gavin [0], stating the following:
"I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle. Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them."
Also, let's not forget, it took BTC ~1.5 years to gain any amount of traction at all. Nakamoto was in for a long run and his sudden disappearance is always going to be mysterious
[0] - https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/gavin-andrese...
Trivia: there are only five publicly-traded companies with marketcaps larger than bitcoin's:
nVidia Microsoft Apple Amazon Google
BTC's marketcap is also larger than all the silver in the world...
Though their market cap is somewhat meaningful, and reflective of some value created (flawed as that measure may be). Unlike Bitcoin.
Bitcoin (capital B) is valuable. An individual BTC is not, but that's true of any currency. We can argue until the cows come home about how valuable these things really are. Speculation in these markets makes it too difficult to judge. People will bet on these things not because they are delivering lots of value to us right now or in the future, but just because they think they'll still be around in the future. That gives monopolists like the ones above the advantage, regardless of value delivered.
Just a hair under google, it crossed earlier this week I think. This list is fun to look at https://8marketcap.com
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Wait til you see the market cap of the shitcoin I just released!
Most interesting to me is that people are worried about a $2B transaction moving the market.
How does that compare to the market depth of actual currencies or commodities? BTC, being objectively worthless, must be much more sensitive to people wanting to sell I'd expect.
How is BTC objectively worthless (I'm guessing you mean "intrinsicly worthlesss"?) as opposed to USD or other major currencies?
The expected discounted value of all bitcoin's future cash flows is zero. This is because the only cash flow that a bitcoin investor can expect from an investment in bitcoins is the revenue from selling the bitcoins in the market... and the market value of something that has no use case and is held for speculative purposes only (i.e. has no intrinsic value) will tend to zero in the long run.
A fiat currency that is issued by the government has no intrinsic value either, but there's one crucial difference compared to a cryptocurrency: in the case of a government-issued fiat currency the central bank will intervene the market, by making use of its prerogative to conduct monetary policy, to ensure price of the currency doesn't drop to zero.
And this has proven successful in many countries such as Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Argentina
Generally speaking it has been successful, more so than the gold standard. It's true that sometimes states fail, but that's not something a monetary system can prevent from happening, or insure against.
And the Bitcoin blockchain is just another state, with just another monetary system, which you can diversify into or not, and it can fail or not.
A blockchain is not a state. A state is a political entity that rules a territory through the monopoly of violence.
Your definition of "worthiness" is entirely flawed. It seems to be base on some random economics textbook definition of "value".
I am getting tired of repeating the exact same thing on HN, but TL;DR:
Asset pricing theory is a well established field within economics. Of course it comes down, in the end, to the law of supply and demand, but that doesn't mean that we have to stop here. The law of supply and demand doesn't explain why there's a supply and a demand in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_pricing
It's not backed by a government, and while some may say that's a good thing, I think it is not.
Without institutional backing, crypto is just a number in a database that people agree is worth something—for now.
If that collective belief evaporates, there’s no court, no army, no tax base, and no GDP to catch it. Contrast this with fiat currency, which—while not backed by gold—is backed by coercive power and taxation.
Let’s start from something even more fundamental. How do you bootstrap trust? Suppose two pseudonymous entities online want to exchange money for services. Such a system will likely need a reputation system to establish the trustworthiness of entities. That system needs to be tolerant to Sybil attacks (i.e., forging multiple identities), while also ensuring the service provider isn’t exploited by a buyer who refuses to pay after receiving the work.
But this exposes a deeper issue: trust cannot be bootstrapped from scratch. It needs either:
Without these, any trust system collapses into a prisoner’s dilemma. Each actor is incentivized to defect (cheat) unless: But even escrow only works when dispute resolution is possible and trusted. And dispute resolution requires either a neutral arbitrator (who must have their own identity and incentives) or hard-coded, binary rules, which rarely capture the complexity of creative or service work.More fundamentally, trust-based systems are built on recursive assumptions:
Eventually, without a root of trust—whether a state, a court, a verified identity, or long-standing social capital—the entire structure becomes circular. There’s no ground truth. Just reputation built on sand.And so, the real limitation isn’t crypto per se—it’s that trustless systems don’t exist. At best, we shift trust: from institutions to code, from names to keys, from legal consequences to probabilistic deterrents. But the requirement for trust itself never goes away.
In a pseudonymous setting, the cost of betrayal is minimal. A buyer can stiff a seller and vanish. A seller can deliver garbage or nothing. Reputation can be reset at will unless there’s an expensive cost to identity creation or a strongly linked personal history—which violates pseudonymity.
Thus, bootstrapping trust in such environments is not just technically hard—it is philosophically incoherent without compromising at least one of the pillars: privacy, decentralization, or enforceability.
It follows that if you can’t bootstrap trust, you can’t bootstrap anything that depends on it—including money. Money, at its core, is a social contract, a belief system upheld by collective trust. We accept currency in exchange for goods or services because we trust that others will accept it from us in turn. That belief is reinforced by institutional structures: central banks, governments, legal systems, and ultimately, enforcement mechanisms.
But the moment that trust breaks down, the system unravels. If people no longer trust that their money will hold value tomorrow, they will try to offload it as fast as possible, converting it into hard goods, foreign currency, or anything perceived as more stable. This behavior accelerates inflation—sometimes catastrophically.
We’ve seen this repeatedly in history:
The underlying mechanism is always the same: money ceases to function as a store of value when the population no longer trusts the system that issues and manages it. Once the shared illusion cracks, even fiat currency—backed by laws, taxes, and armies—can become just colored paper.Now contrast that with crypto. Cryptocurrencies claim to solve this by removing central authorities and placing trust in mathematics and distributed consensus. But this is not true trustlessness—it's merely replacing institutional trust with collective belief in code and game theory. And the cracks are showing: when confidence drops, as in market crashes or protocol failures, value disappears just as quickly—if not faster—than in fiat regimes.
So the uncomfortable truth is this:
Without enforceable trust, money becomes unstable. Without shared trust, money becomes meaningless.And that brings us back to the core issue: you cannot build a functioning economy without some root of trust. Whether that root is institutional, social, or cryptographic, it must be anchored, persistent, and costly to betray. If it’s not, the system becomes inherently fragile.
The reason I used pseudonymous here is exactly because we assumed govs are bad. If govs are good, then crypto degenerates to just a slower system for transactions.
Other currencies get their value because the governments that provide them make people pay taxes. If you want to pay the tax the US government charges you, you're going to need some USD - so there's guaranteed demand, and hence intrinsic worth.
There's also other debt that the US government provides in USD - which provides value as well, in the form of bonds.
BTC has no such driver of wealth. Except perhaps money laundering/transfers without AML provisions.
Yeah bitcoin is (at best[0]) a kind of consensual hallucination, worth something because people believe it is. Fiat is someone with a Navy telling you it's worth money, it's very different.
[0] in practice there's a difference between the idea of a distributed digital currency and the ponzi schemes they give rise to I'm real life. Bitcoin is some greater fool thing, it's not a medium of exchange.
People value a way to store money securely in a place that can’t be physically robbed, that can be sent internationally with low fees quickly.
You don’t need anything else.
For years the haters on here would screech “but it’s volatile” - not really anymore. I wonder what they’ll decide to hate it for now, rather than changing priors.
According to your theory, all the thousands of shitcoins are valuable. But they're not.
There must be further reasons, then, that the price of Bitcoin is so high. And they're purely sentiment, I'd argue. If that changes, there's little to prevent the price from going down very far very fast. Unlike fiat.
This doesn't explain why the currencies of different countries behave differently.
In my view, money is a technology. People use a technology if they find it to be useful. I know this sounds circular, but bear with me. A "major" currency is designed to be useful as a medium of exchange, temporary store of value, and tool of government economic policy. For it to serve these purposes, a government has to moderate its own behavior to some extent.
Thus my view is that the value of a major currency is based, not on the expectation of paying taxes in the future, but on more general expectations of the future behavior of the government.
With that said, paying taxes is good use for money that's a short term store of value, because you rarely need to hold onto your tax money for more than a year before paying it.
>Other currencies get their value because the governments that provide them make people pay taxes
That's demonstrably false, because countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela experienced hyperinflation (the complete devaluation of a currency) in spite of the fact that their governments were still forcing people to pay taxes with those currencies. So clearly that alone is not enough to provide intrinsic worth to a currency.
Countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela printed those currencies in vast quantities to pay bills instead of raising [most of] that money through taxes. Taxes owed in previous quarters were worthless compared with the new trillion dollar notes Zimbabwe's central bank issues to pay government officials, and most private transactions were black market so they weren't seeing them returned in taxes. Zimbabwe and Venezuela are the defining example of how a currency which isn't backed by mountains of debt and taxes is reliant entirely on speculators' confidence...
The reason for that devaluation is that trust was eroded. GP's premise is correct, that fiat has value because of governments, but the reasoning here is not fully correct. The value is in the trust that the government and the institutions will continue to function properly.
It's only 0.09% of what's been mined so far. There's ~2.4T USD in circulation? So pretty similar
> being objectively worthless
Since we're on the topic of being objective, how is, objectively, something that trades at close to 110k USD per token, "worthless"?
I believe the word "objective" does not, objectively, have the same objective meaning for everyone.
Whoever got these wallets better sell them and get a good security company on rotation quickly before anyone find out who they are. Seems like wrench attacks been been happening a lot more the last year.
I don't really get these; there's not a ton of difference between using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of Bitcoin vs using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of any other liquid asset that could be used to buy bitcoins.
If I had 8 billion in cash in my bank account and put in a transfer order, they'd block it, call me, make me come into a branch, make sure there weren't any burly guys with wrenches escorting me in, and maybe call the FBI if anything seemed off.
And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen, during which time I could call and cancel.
Also, for the rest of your life, you'd be able to get the people arrested who stole the money.
So they'd either to kill you after, and it would be obvious why, and there'd be an easy lead on who.
Your odds of getting away with stealing that kind of money conventionally are essentially zero.
Alright, so I can see it as a matter of scale.
Recently there was a local case of someone extorting people by leaving threats in the mailboxes to not burn people’s houses down in exchange for $1k in bitcoin.
But who would keep $8B in bitcoin without some protections in place to ensure that it can’t be easily transferred away, given the associated upside/downside? That’s... roughly as foolish as keeping $8B in actual cash/gold/gems (notwithstanding the logistical problems with the size/weight) under your mattress.
But the criminal's stolen BTC are tainted. Exchanges will not accept them. procession of them is a crime
Mixers will though.
How fortunate that exchanges are centralized institutions that can be held accountable by law.
> And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen
or you get a better bank to begin with
most banks that call their slow processes "security purposes" are actually just putting up barriers to maintain liquidity. the banks that go bust are the ones that got clientele based on making it convenient to transfer
This is the other edge of that double edged sword of "no regulations". It's a lot easier to steal bitcoin with no consequence because there isn't an entire financial system backed by people with guns to help you if you are wronged.
> there isn't an entire financial system backed by people with guns to help you if you are wronged
It's not the "financial system" that comes and hunts criminals with guns, but police, acting based on what laws they seen has been broken. And stealing $3 billion is as illegal if it was Bitcoins, as if it was Euro or USD.
There are essentially no criminals that are stealing crypto where the police will have jurisdiction. It's main use case outside of speculation is committing international fraud and theft with no consequences.
You are confused. The people with guns will come for you if you steal bitcoin and they know who you are.
> Bitcoin thief sentenced to 5 years in prison for stealing $1 billion in crypto and laundering it with his social-media rapper wife ‘Razzlekhan’
https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/11/15/bitcoin-thief-sentence...
No, he was changed with laundering.
Bitcoin doesn’t ask questions when you unexpectedly want to make a very large transfer to a new payee. Your banker will.
But exchanges will if you deposit that much, and will freeze your $ if they don't like your response.
Why would you even use a central exchange? It makes no sense. The person holding an absurd amount of coins would not be stupid to throw it all away like that
What does Micheal Saylor do?
You just need to swap them for monero and then monero for litecoin or bitcoin again. Now you have anonymous, untraceable coins.
Someone actually did that, a few months ago. 320M in BTC was converted to monero and the price of monero increased by 50% [0]
[0] - https://slashdot.org/story/25/04/28/198238/monero-likely-pum...
Not quite that simple, that’s vulnerable to an Eve-Alice-Eve attack. If $1B in BTC moves around in short succession the TXs can be linked easily. You need a mixer that splits up the amount to be paid out, and even then it needs to be done piecemeal.
Do all outputs from exchange are automatically trusted? Seems like any should be tainted forever. Or is it impossible to tell whats from mixer?
There are companies (Chainalysis) that track blockchains and ‘grade’ wallets according to who they’ve transacted with. If enough of a wallet’s funds are from a mixer it may be scored a grade lower than the exchange’s KYC rules allow to do business with.
I doubt there's enough liquidity to swap that kind of money...
Monero daily volume is like $50m lol
looking at the address types this just looks more like a security rotation to a stronger hashing method
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I really wonder if Satoshi’s fortune is gone forever. Maybe the CIA found his real identity and uncovered his keys. Dumping that much BTC on the market would crash the market and probably even tank other financial markets.
My theory was always that Satoshi burned the coins from the beginning. There never was any fortune.
I see it as the ultimate honeypot. If those coins haven’t moved yet the network is secure.
I think you mean canary. Honeypots are decoys by definition
He may have burned the keys, not the coins. The process of burning the coins is by sending them to an address such as: 1111111111111111111114oLvT2
Why would the cia want to crash the market?
Why would they throw a dozen South American coups, import tonnes of crack to the inner cities, conduct illegal human experimentation or attempt the assassination of multiple democratically elected world leaders?
Honestly no idea, they seem a little fash-y for any logical reasoning that i can comprehend.
Maybe they had another insurgency to fund and didn't want it going through the vast ^official^ books?
the CIA actively relies on many means, including BTC, to organize their activities.
Satoshi disappeared right after Gavin announced that he was going to give a talk about bitcoin at CIA, just one of the many conspiracy theories
did the rumor that Satoshi was Paul Leroux go anywhere? since he is now in the hands of the intelligence services for a while this could be a good explanation for Satoshi not being able to access its coins.
If you have $8B in BTC, is there any reasonable way to turn that into any fiat currency? USD, EUR, anything? Can you even buy that much USDC?
Sure you can. If you do it over a few months, it will get absorbed by market because there are buyers (as of today). Though this is kind of unprecedented, so markets could find this kind of event bearish and front run your sells which tanks the price. But I can't imagine I'd care if I held for 14 years. There is also USDT which is much bigger than USDC.
Also if you approach Coinbase/Kraken/$exchange and tell them you have X million to offload, they'll probably let you do it off-market, so no one (except for the ledger, obviously) would really notice.
Why are you asking about $8B when the article is about $2B?
Loans using the BTC as collateral.
Buy good / commodities with BTC and resell them.
Sell the BTC.
Probably not all $8 gigadollars at once, but is there any reason you would immediately need that much?
> but is there any reason you would immediately need that much?
Because you worry that BTC will crash and want it in something more stable?
BTC is volatile but it isn't going to crash tomorrow or any time soon at least not by the amount that would make sense to sell with a wallet this old.
Compared to the “Magnificent Seven”, Bitcoin’s volatility has put it in the middle, while it’s performance puts it at or near the top depending on the time window.
https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/research-and-insights/...
https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/06/bitcoin-has-been-a...
I find it odd that someone would make a comparison between bitcoin and other financial assets, as if bitcoin was just another financial asset and its theoretical price wasn't zero... which is a pretty big market anomaly. Normally, when you find a market anomaly, you try to explain it. But these analysts, they pretend that there's no anomaly. They just don't talk about it, in the hopes that nobody will notice.
Well, one way to lower the price would be to put eight billion on the market all at once.
If the Bitcoin Sovereign Wealth Fund scam that was announced after Trump's election is launched, there will be a price bottom that is financed by public funds.
I'm not sure what has come of it. Trump is doing well with his own coins:
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/uae-fund-buys-100-m...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-07-02/donald-tr...
Seems like a "buy borrow die" type of scenario to me.
Start an ETF?
If you don't want to bother, you can auction it and some hedge fund which wants to buy will take it from your hand.
yes, that’s why the exchanges are nearly $100bn companies
between multiple corporations buying $1bn per week, retail, and nation states, there is a large appetite for this amount with a few phone calls
nah, they are worth that much because of inflated valuations
Yes. And note that Coinbase for example charges retail around 1.5% or so on average, but only a few basis points to institutional clients last time I ran the numbers. Surprise.
Someone just got out of jail.
An old friend of mine died 11 years ago from an overdose, and I am almost certain he used darknet markets to buy other drugs.
It's very likely there is a wallet forever lost with many Bitcoin in it from his passing. No way his family would have known anything about it (Bitcoin/dark markets)or cared much anyway circa 2014. I'll admit I have pondered ways to check this, but it's too far fetched.
I can't help but wonder if the wave of fentanyl that made optiate addict deaths skyrocket, left a huge wake of forever lost Bitcoin. I know there was a lot of overlap between addicts and darknet market users.
Most addicts would likely not hold Bitcoin in wallet, but spend it on getting their next fix as soon as they buy it. It's not like you're thinking long-term, invest in Bitcoin so you can buy more drugs down the line. There would be leftover change but not big amounts.
You'd be surprised how many of these addicts would be buying for multiple other less tech savvy addicts and essentially becoming small time dealers themselves to fund their own habit. If they got locked up or ODd at the right time there could've been a few thousand usd in btc in a wallet at a time when each btc was worth less than 10usd.
Ross Ulbricht got out a few months ago. Could be his.
he only had $40 million . if he had $1 billion the feds would have known about it
> he only had $40 million
How could you possibly know?
Or anyone else for that matter, including the thugs who sent him to jail?
lol. Did you read the whole wired piece on how the feds couldn't find anything under their nose on that case?
Is this why Martin Shkreli quit streaming? Did he actually crack them?
Quantum shorts got to him first.
Perhaps also see the linked page "Top Dormant for 5 years Bitcoin Addresses":
* https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-dormant_5y-bitcoin-address...
tfw when you spent many Bitcoin on Silk Road back when it was only $8 a coin
I wish I had access to my old wallet. I mined around 1.5BTC with my laptop and I deleted the wallet after a while because it was worthless.
I think many others, including me, have also the same experience of mining a few and then either forgetting or deleting them because they thought it'd never turn out to be worth anything.
Same. I mined 32 BTC circa ~2010-2011. Then I did a clean install and forgot I had everything saved on the HDD and nothing written down. I remember them being worth about $1 a pop at the time and thought "fuck it", but I never bothered minting any more.
Has it ever been worthless (post pizza guy). There’s always been someone who will give you some fiat for them.
you probably would have sold it at $100 or something anyway
Yep. I used to pay my Dish Network bill with BTC. Youth is wasted on the young and hindsight is 20/20
This is definitely something I remind myself of for any investment I sell and later on explodes. For bitcoin there were way too many highs that I definitely would have sold at.
I know, that's why I'd like to have the wallet now :)
Even if BTC hits 1 million in the future, 150k now would be life changing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466896
Might be the Pizza guy! The other thing they may have a small fortune in forked coins too. Like Bitcoin Cash.
Personally I think that this can be considered on the "bug" side of Bitcoin's finite number coins: if, over time, they are lost, then there's a smaller quantity† of currency that is useable to actually do stuff with.
This can make the 'rate of deflation' that occurs worse:
* https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral
* https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2014/06/the-perils-of-bitcoi...
* https://crypto.bi/deflationary/
† I am aware of satoshis.
I don’t think that’s much of an issue for usage. Since a bitcoin can be divided in to 100,000,000 satoshis. There would only need to be a handful of coins left accessible for the system to be usable.
Being deflationary I agree is a problem, but not the idea that there aren’t enough usable coins left.
Everyone always repeats the "deflationary bad" mantra, but I wonder if it really would be. Is the world really going to come crashing down if people only spend on things they need rather than endlessly cycling through shit they don't?
The concern is that capitalism allocates resources to the production of socially valuable goods because corporations can raise money to buy the means of production of those goods before producing them by selling shares in their future profits to investors who are willing to accept some risk of bankruptcy in exchange for those future profits, which result from consumers' rational judgment that the goods are sufficiently valuable to them to be worth buying at a price higher than the cost of goods sold.
None of the links in this chain is perfect, but one of the weaker ones is where investors are willing to accept risk. A guaranteed deflationary currency is a risk-free way to get a return on your investment, so companies have to offer a higher rate of return, narrowing the set of goods that can justify such investment. But the same criticism can be leveled at Treasury bonds and (to many people's minds) real estate, so I'm skeptical of it, and anyway "risk-free" is not a good description of Bitcoin.
When I listen to Bitcoin discussions, one of the advantages people bring up is that there is a limited number of it and you can’t just “print” more.
Considering this, while it is true that all this makes deflation worse, I’d assume most bitcoin hodlers would not mind this.
It is under-appreciated that inflation actually is desirable in a working economy.
Look at it this way. If your money (in money form) is worth less tomorrow than today, you are incentivised to spend it, thus fueling economic activity of all sorts (from going out and buying a drink to buying a car, traveling, investing). If your money is worth more tomorrow, then you are incentivised to tighten your belt and not spend for as long as you can. At scale, this negatively affects production, economic mobility, and so forth; the rich get richer and hoard the money. I do not believe any of today’s economies can be healthy and competitive (or even functional) with a deflationary currency.
The US currencies were either literal precious metals, or gold-backed and/or silver-backed, throughout the 19th century until the Great Depression, except for a couple of brief suspensions. Consequently the average rate of inflation was zero. That was the period that it went from a fractious group of rebel colonies to the center of world economic development. So, while I'm sympathetic to the idea that a fiat currency with a predictable inflation rate might stimulate the economy, I think you are making an unjustifiably strong case for it.
This argument falls apart when you consider technology though. And even daily essentials. No one would not buy food and water because they can get more in future. They need it now.
The same goes for technology. We all know next year’s iPhone will be better than this year but we still buy them…because we need them now.
I’d argue inflation’s incentives are worse - the constant need to invest/spend so that your money doesn’t lose value. It means money flows into anything and everything like zombie companies, over consumption, property. Those on the poorest end are just trapped because as soon as they get any money it starts depreciating.
> We all know next year’s iPhone will be better than this year but we still buy them
Next year’s iPhone will not only be better, but also (even with the same price tag) cost more, inflation-adjusted. That factors into the decision to buy now.
> I’d argue inflation’s incentives are worse - the constant need to invest/spend so that your money doesn’t lose value.
It is a problem when it is at extreme, like in unstable countries where money can be a liability to unhealthy degree. However, I’d argue it should be a liability to a smaller degree.
What you highlight is the ever-present conflict between personal benefit and societal benefit. Obviously for an individual it is more preferable that the value of their money increases; I would never argue that. However, for society as a whole it is more preferable if the value of money decreases at a stable rate.
Perhaps this is why all major economies settled on the idea that an amount inflation is crucial to have.
More and more people claim this system of stimulated growth is actually wrong and the root cause for global warming.
Sources who claims this, and details as to how?
I disagree that it is the cause.
The mechanism does not distinguish between “bad economic activity” and “good economic activity”. I.e., the same mechanism applies to positive progress (carbon dioxide sequestration, more expensive technology and techniques reducing environmental impact, etc.), it just requires proper incentive alignment and accounting for bad faith actors via regulation.
A deflationary system with limited supply makes kings and ultimately defeats itself, as your money is decreasingly evidence of your effort and work and increasingly evidence of you having held to it for a while. (It is also a quality of the current system, but less so, and it should be even less so, not more so.)
> When I listen to Bitcoin discussions, one of the advantages people bring up is that there is a limited number of it and you can’t just “print” more.
Which can limit economic growth. When money was based the amount of gold available, there were long periods of economic stagnation because of liquidity issues:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine
The stagnation only ended when new sources of shiny rocks were found (California; New World).
I find it a dumb idea what whether or not people can get credit to start/expand businesses would be dependent of solving math problems. Yes, credit creation can be "too easy" and become a problem, but making it "too hard" (or physically/mathematically impossible) is even more dumb.
> I find it a dumb idea what whether or not people can get credit to start/expand businesses would be dependent of solving math problems.
That’s quite a mischaracterization. We can at least agree that Bitcoin’s supply is set up to increase at a pre-set rate over time. The math problems are the means to enforce that rate. Not the controlling factor.
In US in 19th century stocks of banks that went bankrupt were used as a sort of paper money to solve the problem of money availability.
So the finite amount of base money would just mean that derivative products would be used as practical money.
>there were long periods of economic stagnation
During the "long depression" GDP was still growing at 3-4% so it was hardly stagnation.
> During the "long depression" GDP was still growing at 3-4% so it was hardly stagnation.
I don't know of many things that are viewed positively that have been given a label with "depression" in it.
> Figures from Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz show net national product increased 3 percent per year from 1869 to 1879 and real national product grew at 6.8 percent per year during that time frame.[32] However, since between 1869 and 1879 the population of the United States increased by over 17.5 percent,[33] per capita NNP growth was lower. Following the end of the episode in 1879, the U.S. economy would remain unstable, experiencing recessions for 114 of the 253 months until January 1901.[34]
> The dramatic shift in prices mauled nominal wages – in the United States, nominal wages declined by one-quarter during the 1870s,[14] and as much as one-half in some places, such as Pennsylvania.[35] Although real wages had enjoyed robust growth in the aftermath of the American Civil War, increasing by nearly a quarter between 1865 and 1873, they stagnated until the 1880s, posting no real growth, before resuming their robust rate of expansion in the later 1880s.[36] The collapse of cotton prices devastated the already war-ravaged economy of the southern United States.[17]
> Thousands of American businesses failed, defaulting on more than a billion dollars of debt.[35] One in four laborers in New York were out of work in the winter of 1873–1874[35] and, nationally, a million became unemployed.[35]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression#United_States
Seems like a grand-ol time.
If Congress had not demonetized silver in 1873, the metal’s decreasing value would have curbed the deflation of the time. I believe that this was one of the US Government’s greatest mistakes ever, because the reaction to the economic crisis in the 1870’s had a profound effect on the failure of Reconstruction. Friedman wrote a paper on this, called “The Crime of 1873.”
What happens when all bitcoin is mined, societal collapse?
It will go from the near totality of people acquiring their bitcoins through purchase to actual totality.
We have other coins too.
Losing some bitcoin is effectively equivalent (over the long term) to distributing it to all other holders (proportionally). So this is fine.
Which is equivalent to deflation, which parent suggests is harmful to bitcoin's viability. In order to claim that "this is fine" you would need to refute the claim that deflation is bad.
> Which is equivalent to deflation, which parent suggests is harmful to bitcoin's viability.
Deflation is built into Bitcoin by design and is one of its most notable features regarding its coin growth schedule. This pros and cons of that approach have been discussed ad infinitum in the crypto community.
I wonder when did cypherpunks started to discuss this kind of mechanisms for digital currency. Was it obvious from day one or an idea that came later in the design phases.
Not only were they already discussing it when I joined the list in 01992, cryptocurrency was a major, if implicit, part of Tim May's crypto-anarchist manifesto which I think he presented at Hackers in 01988: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/cryp...
He wasn't specifically calling it out as having a fixed money supply or even fungible tokens, though. And it wasn't until Satoshi figured out how to do without a central issuer like Xanadu, Digicash, or e-gold that we realized it was possible. At the time that Satoshi cut the knot, we were all convinced it was impossible because of Zooko's Triangle.
Chaum founded DigiCash in 01989, incidentally, based on a paper he wrote in 01982 presenting a cryptocurrency design for untraceable payments, but backed with dollars by a central issuer, like Tether.
However, there was always a strong association between cypherpunks and right-libertarian free-market ideology, which is where you find gold bugs and Austrian economists. You may remember that one of the minor plot points in Atlas Shrugged was that Galt's Gulch went back to specie money (tiny pennies stamped from gold) because its value wasn't dependent on government fiat.
> Was it obvious from day one or an idea that came later in the design phases.
The Bitcoin paper came out in 2009, and the deflationary criticism was already recorded in 2010:
* https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Deflationary_spiral&...
2014 article:
* https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2014/06/the-perils-of-bitcoi...
Cypherpunks were discussing digital gold and Austrian economics in the 1990s. I wouldn't say there was any kind of consensus but the ideas were out there.
The finite nature of btc, low transaction volume, and increasing cost of mining made deflation a given. The original designers simply did not solve this problem. BTC’s dominance in the crypto community suggests that this trait was advantageous for BTCs growth as existing holders are incentivized to add additional use cases/transaction volume.
There were early attempts at inflationary cryptocurrencies too but they didn't catch on; all other things being equal, people prefer to hold currencies that gain value over time, not lose value.
And the word currency, or current, implies movement, no?
So I think it's the issue of thinking people will use it as a currency, not that it is not a valuable asset
Given the context, "this is fine" is obviously an ironic reference to the cartoon dog sitting on a chair at the dining room table with a mug of coffee in a burning house meme.
Normally I would say you're right, but I read the context opposite to you; I read the "fine" as a straight/literal statement: the author of "this is fine" is disputing the author's parent's statement that "this can be considered [a bug]".
> Losing some bitcoin is effectively equivalent (over the long term) to distributing it to all other holders (proportionally). So this is fine.
To those that have, more will be given. What about those that do not have?
Slavery.
You can't actually know if they are truly lost or not, though. Any dormant wallet could reactivate at any time, just like the wallets in this story.
This is one reason why Bitcoin isn't a good currency. Deflationary trends give holders a lot of incentive to keep holding and never spend.
You can buy a lot of pizzas with it now
You can't buy a single pizza with it now. Only by exchanging it for an actual, better currency
You can buy a pizza from me with Bitcoin now.
I’m not a vendor or even a chef. But, anything is negotiable.
It’s a solid store of value. One can borrow against that held BTC, and as it appreciates over time, the loan-to-value ratio improves, without having to do anything. Also avoids capital gains taxes since you're not spending it.
Bitcoin is the world's number one store of value for converting young, impressionable men's wages into thin air and moving those dollars to other people instead.
It's a compelling rival to multi-level marketing for women in that both prospects entice low-socioeconomic standing peoples into thinking they are building value instead of consuming it.
Fair point. It seems largely that bitcoin is a store of value rather than a currency that you do stuff with at this point.
Deflation is what you want for investment assets. Btc is primarily a value store and commodity like gold, not a currency. Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.
The original bitcoin whitepaper was titled: “a peer to peer electronic cash system”
The initial intention does not change the practical reality.
>> Btc is primarily a value store and commodity like gold, not a currency. Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.
> The original bitcoin whitepaper was titled: “a peer to peer electronic cash system”
The goalposts, they move.
> Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.
And is deflation a good or bad thing for the livelihood and well-being of human beings?
How many people in the US has a mortgage or some kind of debt (student, medical)? Inflation makes the burden of debt easier, deflation makes it worse.
And the Top (0.)1% already has an easy enough time with parking/generating value. Deflation would only help them more (and make things hard for everyone under them).
Inflation punishes savers and rewards debtors, i.e. it disincentivises the more economically productive behaviour.
Saving isn’t economically productive, on a societal level. Spending is. Investing is.
Deflation inherently disincentivizes doing anything with the currency other than sitting on it. Want to buy something? You’d be better off waiting and buying it tomorrow because it will be worth less in your deflationary currency at that point. No one has an incentive to lend their money to others to use it more productively, so no growth occurs. No one buys anything, producers can’t sell anything, and no one can get capital to start any business ventures. The sole, viable way to accumulate wealth is to take the currency and stuff it under the mattress.
This results in a society much like Europe described in a Jane Austen novel, where wealth is simply inherited and the upper class doesn’t actually serve an economic function. They just exist to perpetuate their wealth and dole out subsistence wages to those who work their estates and have absolutely no chance of improving their station.
It’s an inherently broken system and a perfect example of Chesterton’s fence by tech types assuming they know better than everyone else.
> Inflation punishes savers and rewards debtors, i.e. it disincentivises the more economically productive behaviour.
Quite the opposite.
Deflation encourages hoarding of cash because it just sits there and increases in value. "If you want to retain the purchasing power of your money, it should participate in society via investment." — Nick Maggiulli
Isn't saving (i.e. sitting on assets) less economically productive than spending? Inflation rewards productivity by making productive use of money the only way to avoid loss over time?
I love how people bring up deflationary spiral as a "peril" while the prerequisite for it is the universal and smashing success of Bitcoin.
The only "problem" Bitcoin poses for economies is for governments to fine-tune their local economies via currency production and related controls. In that sense, we should watch how events unfold in Turkey.
* among major "regular" economies, Turkey has the highest % of people holding crypto (≈20%). Second only to special zones UAE and Singapore (31%, 24%).
* Turkish lira is steadily inflated over the last 30-40 years, well over 10% and recently over 50%.
* Turkey does not have mandate for pricing goods in local currency: you can pay in dollars or euros, along the local lira.
* When you enter Istanbul airport, Every. Single. Gate. is marked with BTCTurk ad, inside and outside - the major crypto exchange in the country.
* Istanbul city market is full of traders who use USDT on Tron.
The experiment of social game "Bitcoin" boils down to this: will the people self-organize the functioning economy with monetary freedom, while the gov loses its grip on it; or will the economy collapse without government's regulation and protective management?
> Turkish lira is steadily inflated over the last 30-40 years, well over 10% and recently over 50%.
Because the authoritarian government took over the previously independent central bank and lowered interest rates. Higher inflation was predicted by mainstream economists, and they were right.
* https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/20/turkeys-erdogan-sac...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_interventions_under_E...
Thank God that would never happen in the US.
This is just a convenient way to access stable western currency. Having been to Russia and Argentina during their worst inflation years before crypto, they solved their issues by asking for US paper dollars. Crypto is just saving them currency exchange fees.
And there's no way Turkiye is behind the value of BTC. It's still driven by speculators.
> and smashing success of Bitcoin.
It's a success today, we haven't gotten to when they stop issuing any more, and mining is funded by transaction fees. I suspect there are going to be some problems then.
Like what? As far as I can tell, it will solidify its store of value.
> Like what? As far as I can tell, it will solidify its store of value.
Which is the bug:
> No currency should be able to buy the same basket of goods over very long timespans through hoarding. If you want to retain the purchasing power of your money, it should participate in society via investment.
* https://twitter.com/dollarsanddata/status/159265180975079833...
That’s a “hot take” that people take as an axiom. What if it isn’t? What is the precise definition of “participating in society”? What level of earning and spending is considered morally good and who’s to decide that? (Meta questions arise when discussing conflicts of interest of the deciders.)
> useable to actually do stuff with
You mean actually buy stuff? Come on, everybody knows that BTC is used mostly for speculation ...
Discussion landed in another thread (74 points, 32 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466896
I find it amazing how much these type of tech articles exert themselves to systematically avoid posting any materially useful information.
Do you see a BTC address in there? A link to blockchair? Did I somehow miss it?
In fact, I've noticed that this is a systematic trend, not just with cryptos.
Most tech. journalists systematically talk about stuff without ever posting relevant links to the actual event.
I have been saying for a decade
Satoshi isnt gonna move wallets 1 through 10
But he probably had wallet 55, 182 and 281-290 and has been spending this whole time. Any founder of a crypto project can do that.
The day Satoshi finally decides to move some btc around, I wonder how many automatic emails, api calls, etc will be performed because of so many people setting up alerts.
Hm, I can't recall when The Sleeping Beauty was making billions of dark money. This is some perverted fairy tale. The sleeping beauty is our current world, that allow all the scams, launderings, murderings to happen.
Chinese quantum computer just broke Bitcoin address.
What makes you think that?
Imagine you have one of these addresses precomputed and you see it in a flashed alert
Do you sweep to a new address or what?
EDIT: Hypothetically, not running on Majorana-2
Probably North Korea.
Ah yes, the dreaded Chinese Quantum Stealth attack.
why did i not mine bitcoin in 2010? fuck
Because it's a stupid waste of resources, and you had better things to do.
On a side note, if quantum algorithms break elliptic curve cryptography, then wouldn’t Satoshi’s wallets and others be flooding the market with coin transfers?
The BTC network will need to require all addresses with large Bitcoin UTXOs to send them to new wallets, that are quantum-resistant, by a certain date, or lose the ability to move that money.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no proof that a general solution to elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem can't be found.
It's reasonable to assume that a solution hasn't been found yet though, otherwise that would be the world's best kept secret.
That's downstream of P vs NP.
Can they be spending sidechain coins quietly or is that visible too?
You can visibly send BTC to the Liquid federated side-chain, where amounts in txs are hidden.
April 2011 is not Satoshi era. Satoshi had dropped out of public Bitcoin forums by late 2010.
F word is what caught my eye first
The guy found his hd at the dump?
Price is dumping today, i wonder how much of a role this is playing. those coins will be hitting an exchange likely. This has always been the problem with bitcoin.. the implicit assumption is that many coins are lost , but if the early adopters start cashing out, prices will fall fast. Institutional buying and retail is still small relative to the early adopters. There are many people , miners who are quietly siting on huge fortunes.
And it’s a major US holiday, whatever that indicates.
It pains me because I learnt about bitcoin way back in 2010 and
Why pain? Bitcoin is still there for you.
I learned about it here, but everyone said it was a scam and not to buy
I learned about it from my friend, but couldn't bother with downloading a wallet client and mining etc
A superposition of wrong and right if there ever was one.
Easy to kick yourself in retrospect but if we could see the future we'd all be millionaires. AAPL was $0.28 in 2002 (adjusted for splits, something like $12 at the time).
It is still a scam. Its just that critical mass of delusional people bought into it like Gamestop or Tesla stock. Even super obvious scams like Nikola take years to register price wise.
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You probably would have sold or lost them anyway. Probably a tiny percentage of people from 2011 still held
As someone who has been into crypto since 2012 and isn't rich, yep
... and? What is happening with people's attention span?
You're supposed to be able to fill in the second half of the sentence based on context. They consider it to be obvious from the first half.
They must be an expert in number theory. I have a marvelous continuation of this sentence which
Where did they transfer them? I see fck in a few lol.
Imagine finding a file on an old laptop from when you were just futzing around 15 years ago. And it was worth $9 billion.
It's not that. These are addresses with 10k BTC each. That's very intentional storage even for 2011.
Wasn’t 10k bitcoin the price of a pizza or something back then?
10K BTC for two Papa John's large pies. see https://marketrealist.com/what-is-the-bitcoin-pizza-transact...
That's about US$500M per pie these days ( 1BTC ~= US$100K )
BTC ranged between $0.30 and $27 back in 2011 so not quite
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Why is Heart not in jail? Is he in Belarus?