> Coinbase Global Inc.’s filing to become a publicly-traded company provides a glimpse into the remarkably small circle of mostly men who command the incredibly lucrative digital landscape
Why is the fact they are "mostly men" relevant in any way?
What if they are "mostly jewish"?
Or "mostly white"?
Or "mostly American"?
Is Bitcoin now a matter of "privilege"?
Are there people out there who fall for this sort of insane narrative?
In any case, feel free to keep all your wealth away from Bitcoin. It's not mandatory to use it -- unlike the US Dollar, which is actually managed by a mafia, which we call "the government", and which will use force against you if you don't use its currency.
Because we cannot move forward as a society, together, if we are not willing to confront and make effort to repair the wrongs of our past.
>Shall we treat individuals on the basis of generalizations?
No, but public policy usually requires some generalizations.
>Shall we use identity groups and biased historical lenses in order to justify specific narratives?
No, we should use actual, factual history and follow a correct narrative and we can use identity groups where necessary and justified and in keeping with actual historical fact.
That’s interesting. Yeah, what if they were mostly Jewish? I never really thought about the demonization of men now days in those terms. Took a long time until Jews fought back against the absolute constant throb of ‘Jewish cabal’ that runs the world. Very long time.
This is hacker news and so I'm trying to not just post a low effort reply, but reddit.com/r/menkampf is all about taking that premise and running with it.
Before finding that subreddit, I didn't notice how just how commonplace casually insulting men was accepted.
I do understand the power difference that isn't one to one and why this sort of insulting is accepted, in that men are not a real minority like Jewish people are so culturally insulting men is a considered a punching up situation.
Still, I think the proliferation and casual acceptance of the rhetoric people use in this context is not exactly healthy for society.
"In any case, feel free to keep all your wealth away from Bitcoin. It's not mandatory to use it -- unlike the US Dollar, which is actually managed by a mafia, which we call "the government", and which will use force against you if you don't use its currency."
So instead you create and support a system that zero chance of penalizing-swaying known bad actors via financial penalty by things like the Magnitsky Act: how do you propose we implement such a tool otherwise? No one answers this when I ask it - it just gets ignored.
How about we fix the system, build trust, get quality leaders into positions of power? It takes work, and yes, Western society has been degenerating and is relatively weak at the moment due to many decades of industrial complexes' regulatory capture and the duopoly that's been structured via those policies.
I really hope you'll answer this question too: you say "which will use force against you if you don't use its currency" - have you thought through what a global, decentralized currency - where you gain more money, wealth, the more people that are using it - doesn't create a group of people aligned [the "army of HODLers" as many call themselves] who want all of global society to adopt Bitcoin? It's known that wealth is transferred from weighted from the latest adopters to the earliest adopters; I'd love to know how the answer to preventing regulatory capture from continuing via the VC-finance-Bitcoin industrial complex [because the VC-finance industrial complex has started to heavily align with Bitcoin].
Elon Musk recently said "Bitcoin is almost as much bs as fiat money" - he hasn't elaborated yet, and sure, maybe it's slightly better than fiat money currently is - but Bitcoin et al allows tyrants to use and transfer funds freely, globally, to whomever with no way to stop them: don't you think that is an very bad unavoidable pitfall that we shouldn't design into or allow into our systems?
Along those same lines of thinking I've seen a ton of current events editorial writers claiming space travel is a waste of time and energy only for the "privileged" attacking musk and SpaceX any chance they get.
It is kind of funny that exchanges have become so successful for Bitcoin- since they lose 100% of the stuff that made BTC attractive in the first place. They’re centralised, regulated and transactions don’t even go on the blockchain.
The result is that the number 1 way people get into Bitcoin is through a mechanism that has none of the attributes of Bitcoin.
> The result is that the number 1 way people get into Bitcoin is through a mechanism that has none of the attributes of Bitcoin.
Sure, but 95% of people don't care about that. They just want an asset they will go up. Everything else is just a story people tell themselves so they're not putting 20% of their net worth in trading cards.
Every store of value that has ever existed and will ever exist is just a game of speculation that it will continue to be valued when you're ready to withdraw your money to do things you've saved for.
Gold was the best portable and fungible speculative bet for a very long time.
Bonds are speculation that a country will continue to be productive and well managed enough to pay their debts without resorting to massive inflation.
Stocks are a speculation that a company will continue to be competitive and profitable for long enough to recoup your investment.
Real estate is a speculation that an area will continue to be a desirable place to live or useful for some industry.
Rare art is a speculation that people will still be willing to pay millions for your original Picasso and that we won't be able to produce undetectable copies with better technology.
Bitcoin is a speculation that people want a digital, neutral store of value like gold was that they can park excess money in that they don't have a better use for right now.
I disagree with this: there's a genuine difference between non-productive assets like bitcoin (and gold) and productive ones like companies.
> Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.
> Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?
> ...
> A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.
That's not really a useful comparison. Of course a cube of the world's gold wouldn't really do anything. But a cube of soil and gas stations would be pretty useless too, without some work by humans. If humans worked the gold, it would return to being used for a purpose. That purpose is "trustless" accounting, which is certainly valued by some. Instead of relying on ledgers, and paper, and accountants and bankers, gold provides you some control of the money you have saved.
Farmland is a speculation that we won't completely degrade the topsoil that makes it useful for agriculture.
Exxon Mobile is a speculation that they'll be able to pivot their business out of carbon fuel long term. Even monster companies falter and fail. Exxon in particular is down 50% from its peak in 2014.
Income generating assets are fantastic, but owning them requires work to constantly re-assess the landscape that makes them capable of generating income. Some people like Buffett are really good at that game. Winners like him start to win even more when they have hundreds of billions of wealth to slosh around which gives them the power to create self fulfilling prophecies with their investments that you and I don't have individually.
This is why people have started using passive index funds as savings accounts, which seems to be starting to distort the market and has a lot of people worried that it will lead to a housing bubble like crash, especially with Boomers withdrawing their retirement savings from the market while Millennials and Gen X might not earn enough to outpace the withdrawals. A demographic bomb.
Do we really want a world where doctors feel compelled to waste valuable time and attention playing the stock market game because a savings account doesn't even pretend to protect your money from inflation anymore? People from all walks of life with money to protect are increasingly riddled with anxiety that the wealth they've worked hard to save is getting washed out from under them, and it's making us all a neurotic mess of a society.
> Farmland is a speculation that we won't completely degrade the topsoil that makes it useful for agriculture.
That merely reduces the potential return, it doesn't eliminate the potential for return entirely, which is something Bitcoin suffers from.
>Exxon Mobile is a speculation that they'll be able to pivot their business out of carbon fuel long term. Even monster companies falter and fail. Exxon in particular is down 50% from its peak in 2014.
Or I can just buy their stock with the expectation that they pay dividends or engage in stock buyback programs that return value to investors. Bitcoin has no potential for returns.
>Income generating assets are fantastic, but owning them requires work to constantly re-assess the landscape that makes them capable of generating income.
The inability to generate a return reduces the potential for gains significantly.
>This is why people have started using passive index funds as savings accounts, which seems to be starting to distort the market
There are thousands of index funds using completely different strategies. I don't know how you expect that to distort the market. The reason why small retail investors should just stick with a standard index is that they simply do not have high enough capital and thus returns to justify spending money or time on complex analysis or engage in manual rebalancing of their portfolio which involves taxes and order fees. Index replicating ETF are just a cost saving strategy for small investors. If you believe that small investors are distorting the market then institutional funds would rejoice and take advantage of the greater volatility and deploy more capital because of the almost risk free return that such a "distortion" would bring with itself. Since the return of a managed fund exceeds the return of an algorithmic fund people would switch their strategy until both strategies have an equal return on investment.
>and has a lot of people worried that it will lead to a housing bubble like crash
If a lot of people are worried about a crash then why are they investing in a way that perpetuates a crash? They would have to blame themselves for their risky strategies. Stop getting interest only mortgages. Stop buying GME. Stop buying Bitcoin and so on.
>especially with Boomers withdrawing their retirement savings from the market while Millennials and Gen X might not earn enough to outpace the withdrawals. A demographic bomb.
You mean well deserved inflation and full employment? Who is going to shed a tear because of that? Are Millenials going to complain to Boomers that they gave them too many jobs and too much pay?
>Do we really want a world where doctors feel compelled to waste valuable time and attention playing the stock market game because a savings account doesn't even pretend to protect your money from inflation anymore? People from all walks of life with money to protect are increasingly riddled with anxiety that the wealth they've worked hard to save is getting washed out from under them, and it's making us all a neurotic mess of a society.
You can send your complaints to your central bank. They are following a pretty stupid strategy that is counterproductive to their own declared goals. It's pretty simple, if the supply side is saturated simply stimulate the demand side (fiscal policy). Supply and demand have to be kept in balance. It's pretty ironic how Bitcoin anti inflation warriors complain how inflation erodes savings yet they are eroding even faster in a low inflation economy.
Still kicking myself for hearing of Bitcoin and not repeating to myself for the next two days: [To succeed] You can be the first or you can be the best. You can be the first or you can be the best. You can be the first or you can be the best.
The problem with Facebook is that it's not exclusive - there are tons of alternatives.
Some even have better features (think Twitter or TikTok or Discord).
Nothing is stopping people from launching Facebook2, Facebook3, etc and having the same technology available - yet Facebook is the major player skyrocketing.
This is an example of the market being irrational longer than expected, in my book.
The value of bitcoin is not in the code, it's in the network. Arguing that the code that runs the network can just be copied is not a very compelling argument.
There is some speculation involved with stocks, but they are fundamentally different from gold, btc, or art because they are productive assets. They aren't just a thing that sits on the ground and does nothing. They represent some small portion of actual factual work done by human beings to produce goods or services. This is why buying the diversified stock market is investing and buying the diversified crypto market is speculating.
There is risk involved in both, but they aren't identical.
According to the USGS, 37% of gold is used in electronics. So gold is also a part of productive assets, and its use in electronics is only increasing.
Bitcoin by contrast isn't a productive asset, has no fundamental property like gold does, that exists outside of its original purpose, and its maintenance requires constant usage of energy just to jog in place. Switch off the BTC network, and value goes to zero, which isn't true for gold.
You are conflating a commodity with a cash producing asset like a farm. Show me the cash flows from your gold nugget and I'll show you the cash flows from a farm that produces a usable product in the market.
They are pretty weak points. By his logic, when you join a company and work you are speculating that you will get paid a salary. At that point everything is speculation and nothing is certain. By writing this comment I am speculating that a HTTP call will be made that results in a database entry. Since humans are not perfect and never have complete information about a system they engage in speculation in every single moment of their life. The comment is effectively value neutral or maybe even net negative and merely criticizes terminology and semantics, not the actual topic itself.
Namely Bitcoin generates no returns but everyone expects it to. Since everything is speculation we are still allowed to rate the speculation by how risky it is. Surviving long enough to finish writing this comment has a 99.9999% chance or more. So this type of speculation isn't risky at all. Meanwhile betting that Bitcoin will go up or down is inherently risky since there is no driving force behind Bitcoin other than human behavior itself.
My ultimate point with the comment above, is that dismissing bitcoin as nothing more that a rampant speculative bubble is not a good argument against it.
Everything we value is a speculative bubble that can eventually pop if conditions that cause us to value it change. The bitcoin bubble can pop (and has many times) but so can the 'trust in the US government' bubble.
Bitcoin is a genius trust system. But if the price gains are based on demand created by financial leverage, it can be both genius and a bubble due to leverage and short term price distortion. If interest rates go up, BTC prices will fall despite the 'inflation protection' argument. Long term, the proponents make good point sans undermining US financial sanctions, the best no war big stick the US has.
You've reduced his argument to ridiculousness. That's kind of low-effort, so in that spirit: It's true, nothing is in fact certain. Telling yourself otherwise is a convention that makes it easier to live and be resilient.
It's a useful commodity resource. It can be use for industry, science, dentistry, jewelry, etc.
But I do think the store of value use case where you arbitrarily hoard this useful commodity in a vault so you can sell it later is starting to die. Nation states and companies that need it for it's actual utility will still hoard it as a strategic reserve, like we do with crude oil, helium, uranium, water, grain, maple syrup, etc. But that's a complex risk assessment decision that depends on a lot of variables from predictions of future supply flow to geopolitics that individuals won't be able to evaluate.
I think bitcoin will replace gold as the long term money battery, where you can arbitrarily store value that you don't know what to do with yet for a long time. It might take decades of continued volatility and growth to get to that steady state.
Fiat can deflate, though rarely. Just look at '08/'09.
The inflation/deflation curve of US fiat has been much more predictable than BTC. You're statement "just another store of value" is almost a tautology, as any tangible or intangible item in the universe can potentially fit that definition. What matters for a useful currency is that it is a stable store of value.
As long as you admit that BTC is a speculative commodity rather than a currency, we're fine. But this isn't how it was marketed to all of us for the past 10 years. "coin" == "item of currency". Now the narrative has changed to "digital gold" because that's what's selling right now.
And you should further admit that for the past 10 years we've been promised a decentralized currency with lower transaction fees than mastercard/visa/escrow/forex-fees and faster transaction times, and none of those things have happened.
Tbh, the market for Bitcoin doesn't care what it "promised" the people before, and doesn't care what the expectations for it are. If people want to put money in, they will. Clearly, enough people don't care about it's instability to store $1tril, and it'll probably get a lot more stable. Labels are one thing, but price and staying power are another.
"It requires no upkeep like buildings and other property."
I suspect the physical footprint required to keep the Bitcoin network running is actually quite significant. Considering estimated power usage of all the "mining" operations.
This brings up an oddity of bitcoin: storing gold costs money, property has upkeep. Endgame (non-inflationary) bitcoin is free to store, at the cost of people actually using it. The other oddity is it's not clear what would happen if no one traded it for n days. At some point, miners shut down, and because of how specialized mining hardware is, the currency might collapse.
> since they lose 100% of the stuff that made BTC attractive in the first place
Not so. They still allow speculation on BTC price volatility and "get rich quick" gambles is what drove most of Bitcoin growth in the past few years. If anything, the big exchanges make Bitcoin even more suitable for speculation than if it was on the blockchain, since you can trade way more if you don't have to wait several blocks for your trade to be confirmed.
Making it easier to speculate should in theory decrease volatility and make market manipulation harder, since having more speculators should mean that the price is driven to its fair value more quickly.
This gets back to the "gambling vs investing" debate we had on the front page yesterday. What is the fair value of bitcoin? It will never provide dividends or other types of future cashflows, so that aspect of its fair value is zero. The remaining part is purely speculative in that it is based on what other people will pay for it. It is not at all clear to me that having more (relatively uninformed) speculators will lead to less volatility for such an instrument.
> What is the fair value of bitcoin? It will never provide dividends or other types of future cashflows, so that aspect of its fair value is zero. The remaining part is purely speculative in that it is based on what other people will pay for it.
Do Swiss Franks pay dividends or other types of cashflows? If I have 50,000 CHF in a box in my cupboard, what value is it beyond a small amount of fuel to burn? At some point I will hope someone (perhaps someone in Switzerland) will exchange something I want for those pieces of paper.
On the other hand the Swiss Government could decide to make the money almost worthless, practically overnight (India did this with Rupees), by removing the main purpose of having the notes.
Actually the ultimate reason why a note has value is that it can be used to settle tax bills and other debts, so you do not have to "hope" that someone out there will take it -- the government behind the money will take it from anyone who owes taxes, which is almost everyone who lives or does business in the country.
Hm, so what happens if a country issues some sort of currency in the form of loans/salaries/whatever but does not collect any tax (let’s say they sell natural resources to foreign countries and use that money to maintain their printing presses). Would the currency be worth nothing?
1. You mentioned loans, and I mentioned debts. Debts matter at least as much as taxes as a source of demand for fiat currency, since the government can "reassign" the ownership of property if debts are not repaid and the government will always determine debt payments in terms of its fiat currency.
2. Suppose the money is only distributed to citizens in the form of salaries. What do they do with it? Why does anyone they do business with -- merchants, landlords, whoever -- want it? One of the reasons why taxes and debt laws work well is that they are immediately relevant to almost everyone in a country (anyone who owns property owes property tax; anyone with a business loan must make their loan payments; etc.).
3. Suppose a country relies on resource wealth to stimulate demand for its currency. That country will compete in the global market for those resources and the demand for its currency, and thus the value of the currency, will fluctuate according to market forces. The price volatility would be a huge problem for the citizens of the country as they tried to use the currency in their daily lives.
So while in theory, under very particular circumstances, such a thing would be possible, in practice it would probably not last long. Volatility, weird distortions in demand, and other issues would render the currency hard to use and reduce its value in the local market.
I am not sure if taxes were used by GP for any particular reason; I think the key is that the governments actually forces other to use the currency for transactions. So, as long as the govt itself doesn't drastically change the rules, people wanting to sell their time now will take currency. There is no such mechanism for Bitcoin; it's really not that different from baseball cards, original paintings or smth like that in terms of being a store of value; based entirely on others' assumed future faith of its value (compared to any random cryptocurrency I can start tomorrow, or a print of the same painting/card).
In that case you could run into the problem that your citizens mint/adopt a competing currency. That's a big problem that Bitcoin faces. There are lots of competitors so the insistence on Bitcoin being the ultimate store of value is unfounded.
One hopes that you do not regard 50,000 CHF in a box in your cupboard an investment. I've got about $200 in a drawer in the other room for unexpected events---ones that don't involve any infrastructure at all.
My actual investments are in economically productive assets.
No, Swiss Franks do not pay dividends, that's why nobody is betting on the fact that Swiss Franks would be worth more in the future. Somehow owners of Bitcoin insist that it doesn't follow this simple rule and that it should net a return.
>At some point I will hope someone (perhaps someone in Switzerland) will exchange something I want for those pieces of paper.
The amount of businesses accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment is very small. The incentives to do so are almost nonexistent. Everyone is converting it back to a valuable currency, this is why the price of Bitcoin is highly volatile. There is no minimum demand for the currency. There is no economic system that is dependent on Bitcoin being less volatile.
The Swiss government creates minimum demand for the currency through taxation. The people living in Switzerland decide to adopt the currency and thus there is an economic system that needs the Swiss Frank to roughly maintain its value. Heck, small amounts of inflation are necessary because a currency that is generating a return is highly undesirable as a means of payment. Since it's losing value over time you are discouraged from using it as a store of value. The existence of an economy that is constantly exchanging currency for goods is thus ensured.
>On the other hand the Swiss Government could decide to make the money almost worthless, practically overnight (India did this with Rupees), by removing the main purpose of having the notes.
Yes and the beauty is that everyone would consider the currency worthless. With Bitcoin there would be extremists clinging to the belief that it would retain its value.
> No, Swiss Franks do not pay dividends, that's why nobody is betting on the fact that Swiss Franks would be worth more in the future.
They are (foreign currency reserves), hence the swiss banks charging to store swiss franks. Indeed Hedge Funds (darlings of HN) make a killing out of currency speculation -- Black Wednesday and Brexit in the UK for example.
There's 61 currency funds listed here, I'm sure some are betting on swiss franks.
Bitcoin isn't a stock. Most kinds of assets don't provide dividends or other cashflows -- that is certainly not the only determiner of the value of an asset. It would indeed be a bad idea to construct an investment portfolio out of only Bitcoins and no stocks, but that doesn't mean it is without value (for example, as a monetary technology or an inflation hedge)
> It is not at all clear to me that having more (relatively uninformed) speculators will lead to less volatility for such an instrument.
I am not sure how we can judge the informedness of the speculators or what we are comparing them against. But, each additional speculator improves the informedness of the market overall.
Assets similar to bitcoin are somewhat rare on the ground. Art, antiquities, maybe a few other things. (Precious metals are typically useful for other things.) Few people regard those assets as useful investments, in anything other than a diversification sense. No one regards them as economically productive.
I completely agree with these statements, except I think the intrinsic value of precious metals is exaggerated and Bitcoin also has functional value as a monetary technology (not generally in an important way for most first-worlders though).
Gold derives its store of value property from being an elemental shelling point. It's the best element to be used as a store of value. That property will not disappear in the future since it's based on the laws of physics. However, the exact price is obviously not guaranteed. Merely the ability to keep exchanging it in the future.
Agreed, I only mean to say that the intrinsic value (i.e. for jewellery or electronics) is exaggerated. Gold has obvious usefulness as a store of value and an inflation hedge, although I think Bitcoin or a similar technology has the potential to be even better/more guaranteed/more convenient.
> each additional speculator improves the informedness of the market overall
I don't think that can be true. Leaving bitcoin aside for a moment, if a new speculator comes into the stock market who truly believes (perhaps due to misleading marketing) that "stocks only go up". This is clearly not the case from an objective standpoint. How would the entrance of such a speculator improve the informedness of the market as a whole?
If one were to assume that Bitcoin is a currency and its supply is fixed then the correction assumption is that the value of Bitcoin doesn't change. The expectation is that the dollar is losing value and thus you can exchange your Bitcoin for more dollars. However, this is missing that the maximum return would merely track inflation and thus Bitcoin is massively over performing which indicates immaturity of the asset or a bubble. Bitcoin has had so many bubbles it would be surprising if what we are currently experiencing is not a bubble.
One of the values of bitcoin is the price miners get for it. If they lose money on selling their newly minted bitcoins they won't sell. So it's related to power prices, the difficulty of mining a new coin.
That sounds like a restatement of the "labor theory of value" which makes no real sense, as it assumes that "someone" is always willing to buy. Why should anyone be motivated to buy Bitcoin, beyond the classic "great fool theory" trap?
That's assuming that 1) there is a fair value for bitcoin 2) the market is able to assess and direct bitcoin to that fair value (through the actions of its participants). I tend to believe that this economical " theory" is much more a belief/mantra than anything proved scientifically...
That might make sense if bitcoin were a commodity, but it's not. Speculation helps in markets where there are cross-market arbitrages available -- the stat-arb speculators can front-run the true arbitrageurs and keep markets in line with one another -- but that's not really the case with bitcoin.
According to what theory? This sounds like the law of large numbers, which depends on the assumption that the averaged random variables are independent and identically distributed. The history of speculative bubbles contradicts the idea that speculators act independently.
From centralized exchanges the decentralized exchanges evolved since they share your criticism.
The way I look at it: people create things, these things have certain effects. That's all there's to it. I don't mind that it's almost 100% against the idealism of Bitcoin, the fact that centralized exchanges were created and used is interesting in itself. Moreover, it's not necessarily incompatible with decentralization since trading Bitcoin on an exchange (centralized) is something else than exchanging Bitcoin via the blockchain (decentralized).
as it's been pointed out by many people in many circumstances, the whole cryptocurrency story so far has been a progressive reinvention of the modern financial system, including many of the intermediary steps.
I wouldn't go as far as calling it a reinvention of the modern financial system, but I would call it a reinvention of the Dutch tulip mania[1], with the notable exception that tulips do have some tangible value.
Real Bitcoin, on the blockchain, yes. Many "transactions" however are just on exchanges, never touch the blockchain, and are little more than database entries. Look at places like Robinhood - you can't even withdraw the Bitcoin.
Only if you're a business, right? Does offering to buy 500 euros off your friend because he have some left over from his european vacation make you a MSB?
Your friend would be the money transmitter in this case and at that scale no one would care, but if he did it with 1000 “friends” then, well yeah. People have gotten arrested and charged for operating on localbitcoins without proper licensing.
That isn't quite true. Money business laws only apply to people doing it as business, so your friend is in the clear de-jure as well as de-facto. One of the things a prosecutor would have to prove as part of the case is that this was in fact a business. Typically this would be done by showing that he had been listing both buy and sell on localbitcoins.com and/or by setting up a test purchase that showed he was dealing with anyone who showed up.
There is a difference from selling a few cars to strangers, and setting up a car-selling business which would then be subject to a bajillion rules and regulations.
The same for selling bitcoins. You can do it a few times but if you make it a business you become a MSB.
So basically the consumer tech hasn't yet caught up with the technology, is what you're saying?
Once there are enough people buying and selling for cash, you'll just need to find an old payphone, or some other known meeting place, if popular technical means are legislated away.
As more goods get made relative to bitcoin, and more people come to exist, the prices of goods & services must come down relative to bitcoin in order to avoid liquidity crises - especially since the number of bitcoin is set to be capped (while population and goods aren't). Bitcoin instead was designed to handle this problem via trading in fractions such as satoshi's.
The "it" in the phrase "it is not so" relates to the phrase "spending bitcoin is economically irrational". It is economically rational to spend bitcoins because a person wants to enjoy some of her wealth before she dies. That is the only reason I have sold part of coins I mined in 2011.
Lots of Bitcoin simply get lost and people are betting on this loss too. You are also forgetting the ultimate irony behind long term deflation. At some point your Bitcoin will be worth millions in dollars but will the dollar actually buy you that much product or service if there aren't enough young people to take care of everything?
Not unless all economic growth stops, too. More people in the world + fixed number of bitcoins = deflation. More cars/computers/thingys made + fixed number of bitcoins = deflation.
What are you talking about? When you purchase coins on Coinbase, they go into a wallet that you can easily deposit to through another means or withdraw to another wallet. This is the same with Binance, Kraken, CashApp, and so on. Exceptions would be Paypal or Rob-in-'hood where they have total custody, which has advantages if the user doesn't care about actually owning the coins themselves.
Don't like the centralization of Coinbase? Then just don't use it. There's plenty of other options for purchasing bitcoins. Buying them P2P is easy as hell. Local Coin Swap and Local Bitcoins allow you to buy crypto directly from individuals with an escrow system.
By the way, not everyone is interested in the same advantages of Bitcoin. One of the reasons Bitcoin has been on he rise the last year is that it has far greater potential than a savings account to grow in value and, unlike gold or silver, doesn't take up physical space. Not everyone cares about decentralization or is averse to risk.
> One of the reasons Bitcoin has been on he rise the last year is that it has far greater potential than a savings account to grow in value and, unlike gold or silver, doesn't take up physical space.
Its potential may be offset by its environmental impact and lack of any fundamental value.
I'm not here to debate that, but my point is that not everyone is obsessed with decentraliztion... they just want their money to grow fast, just as most people don't buy stocks with the primary intention to own a piece of a business; they buy stocks because they want to make money.
The decentralized exchanges are on Ethereum. Uniswap alone has over $100 billion in cumulative volume so far.
But if you want to interact with legacy banking systems then of course you need an exchange that's hooked into all that. I don't see why that should surprise anyone.
Exchanges reduce risk and make things easy for casual users. By casual, I mean people who just want to invest and don't care much about the mechanics of bitcoin which was always going to be ~99% of users.
What are the other options? Using an exchange is risky (or at least seems risky to me, a person with almost zero crypto experience). Bitcoin ATMs? I know they exist, I've never personally seen one. Handing cash to a stranger? Definitely risky.
That's the way people "get into it", as you need to be able to purchase bitcoin somehow, and atm, the easiest way is through a centralized exchange. There needs to be a level of trust when you are moving from a centralized system to a decentralized system.
But once you have your cyrpto, you can move it to your own wallet, or anywhere else you'd like. I can't do that with fiat currency.
I suppose you mean it's not possible without some sense of the value in relation to existing value networks? And this is the bootstrapping that fiat exchanges provide?
I won't say much about the article as it's a topic that has been discussed plenty of times before (The merits and faults of Bitcoin) with often inflammatory results, but I will definitively say it's pretty easy and rather intellectually dishonest to attack it only whenever there's a dramatic price swing. Where were all these articles during all those price lull periods?
Also, if we're pointing fingers, the influence Coinbase has on Bitcoin is insignificant compared to the Chinese mining conglomerates. The US is not the rest of the world.
Some of us have maintained a strong anti-Bitcoin position at all times.
[edit] David Gerard comes to mind - author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain and Libra Shrugged - and HN user (dgerard I think) (https://davidgerard.co.uk/)
One thing I really appreciate about them is unlike literally every other crypto sub, they’re not an echo chamber. Nobody as far as I can tell is ever banned for being pro-crypto, or posting pro-crypto content. If they’re hard-core shills or brigading they get downvoted or get slapped with a playful flair (“warning, I have the brain worms” is my favorite haha).
As such it gets a lot of pro-crypto folks participating to get a different perspective. It’s not high brow HN level discourse but to your point a lot of serious stuff ends up there.
> Where were all these articles during all those price lull periods?
People are motivated to talk and report based on a myriad of things, but lately this perception of "power" has been center stage. If you ask these people I imagine they would tell you that when Bitcoin hits a high it makes those people, and Bitcoin, very powerful while when it's $8 they're just nobodies wasting time in a dark room and coming up with memes like HODL.
Before 2017 the price of Bitcoin was stable as it wasn't worth anything.
From 2017 to 2021 the price of bitcoin has changed every year by: 1,300%, 71%, 75%, 328%
Compared to the DJIA, which over the same years changed every year by: 25%, 8%, 21%, 11%
In the last four years, two of those years have had price changes in the hundreds of percent, and the other two years the change was still 300% the greatest change in the DJIA across any of those four years.
Pre 2017 was crazy volatile and unstable. It's still crazy, especially compared to regulated, national markets, but it does seem to be gradually smoothing out from the wildness of it's youth. https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/volatility-index/
Remember when BTC used to be fun and exciting? Stupid projects being created, tipping widespread all over the internet. It was created to be a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" (quoting from the whitepaper title)... oh how far it has strayed.
>Remember when BTC used to be fun and exciting? Stupid projects being created, tipping widespread all over the internet.
All of this moved over to Ethereum long ago but those outside of the crypto space might not know that. Thousands of hackers have created little neat experiments and projects for others to use and build on and more are released everyday.
Right, and it's not just neat little experiments. There already is big money on Ethereum's DeFi: billions lended, transacted between assets, leverage longs/shorts taken.
Add to that experimental unpegged stablecoin projects[1], and you realize the dream of a "P2P electronic cash system" is alive and well. It's just being worked on by different groups than originally (because if you own a big bitcoin stash now, it's hard to resist the temptation of pushing the SoV/ponzi narrative).
https://mia.bet/ is one i like, a home made site where you bet on a marble run race with the randomness generated by their pet hamster. makes me smile.
i'll also add in https://clr.fund/ as its relevant to the bigger question of "how do we fund open source public goods" that might be relevant to hackernews readers.
I loved Mia.bet's pet hamster marble race concept but their website notes:
> The continuously high Ethereum gas fees cause betting fees and operation costs to skyrocket. Hence, we decided to postpone the next race until further notice. We're currently working on a 2nd-layer scaling solution.
A shame that Ethereum gas fees are limiting enough to stop such a fun project.
Yes I remember when you could send Bitcoins and your transaction was practically guaranteed to get into the next block. I had fun solving puzzles created using Bitcoin scripts. If you could solve the puzzle you could win some Bitcoins. Transaction fees were so low as to be irrelevant and you could send small tips to anyone you wanted, buy beers, gift it to strangers to try out...
But even then you could see that Bitcoin wouldn't scale. Most people couldn't run full nodes, block sizes were getting bigger and bigger. Bitcoin worked great when you had a few hundred thousand people using it but with 10s of millions it doesn't work well.
Running a fully verifying node doesn't require that much space, since you can prune away older blocks once verified (if you're fine with not being able to seed other nodes).
It does take a fair amount of time to download so many GB of history.
This is not true in any sense. After 11 years of use, a $10 vps can download the entire chain in under an hour and a half. A fast cable modem connection can do it in under three hours.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is 231 GB, the bitcoin chain is 381 GB.
Call of Duty + Red Dead Redemption 2 = bitcoin's entire chain.
This is about $6 USD of hard drive space. The throughput of bitcoin is about 1.5 -kilobytes- per second. At that speed reddit.com would take 36 minutes to load.
You need to verify the history as well and continually update the UTXO set. That takes a lot more time, especially with a spinning hard disk, since the UTXO updates are not particularly sequential.
Also no it doesn't. It takes a fraction of a second on a single core for each block. It's 900KB for a full block. The only reason it would take a long time is a particular client using CPUs extremely inefficiently and leaving them idle most of the time.
A $30 SBC such as RPi 3 with a $50 SSD is more than enough to run a full Bitcoin node with full history. You can share with a blockchain explorer or Lightning node without performance being a problem. Many people with little technical knowledge do this.
Even a leftover smartphone from yesteryear should be capable of running a full node, as long as you scale storage appropriately.
I synced a full BTC node from scratch on budget hardware last week, took about 2 days total.
Meanwhile, a full tracing archive ETH node took >4 months on a dedicated 8c16t CPU, 64GiB DDR4 RAM and tiered NVMe + SATA SSD for the 8TiB.
Maybe I should say didn't rather than couldn't. Everyone can rent a server for a few dollars a month to run a node. Most people home laptops are not suited to running a full node as they either have to be always on or are spending a lot of time validating blocks every time you power them on to catch up.
That's a fundamental problem with any decentralized system no matter what source of consensus you use. Blockchains retain their history forever, it's only natural that it's going to use an excessive amount of storage.
Regulation killed it - since SEC is watching more closely you either need a legal team, or you need to be very adventurous to build stuff like bitcoin tip bot on reddit :/
"Mafia" seems a strange and prejudicial word to use here.
"Less than 2% of the anonymous ownership accounts that can be tracked on Bitcoin’s blockchain control 95% of the digital asset" - at first I thought this was really astonishing. Now, I'm not so sure. My first interpretation was that 2% of bitcoiners have 95% of the bitcoin - but now I wonder how many addresses a typical person has. e.g. If I create an address every time someone buys illegal drugs from me over the 5 years I sell them on the darknet, and later coalesce all my earnings into some address, does that mean that my X empty addresses are counted in the 98% of have-nots and my one coalesced address in the 2% of haves?
Depending on how many addresses people typically use, and given the multi-year history of bitcoin, it actually seems somewhere between not surprising and incomprehensible to me. Like, I guess that's a percentage it could be, but I don't know how to interpret it. I think a better news article would provide context on stats like this so the reader could understand rather than just leaving the reader to figure out the meaning for themselves.
> My first interpretation was that 2% of bitcoiners have 95% of the bitcoin
Consider how much was probably lost in the early days, from dead hard drives and such. For one specific example, bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto appears to have ~1 million bitcoin sitting untouched [0] - that alone seems to be ~5% of all existing bitcoin [1] owned by one person, with an estimated 11-16% more just "lost" [also 1].
I think it’s mostly from using temporary accounts to hide transactions. When you can “open” an account digitally without limits, this seems like the inevitable. They should look at actively traded accounts. Fast search shows ~1M active out of 460M total.
I'm not sure about this, but does every person using an exchange get their own address?
My impression was that they don't and that a lot of transactions are actually settled within the exchange using good ol' relational databases and not the blockchain.
If that's the case, then all of these people will get lumped into just a few exchange controlled adresses, which will give an exaggerated impression of concentration.
> I'm not sure about this, but does every person using an exchange get their own address?
Definitely not. Exchanges that aren't stupid keep the vast majority of their funds in cold storage, which is held in a small number of addresses.
Most people store their bitcoin on exchanges, even though that's a pretty bad idea. Not your keys not your coins.
The article is massively misleading. It should say "95% of bitcoin is controlled by a small number of entities, most of which are exchanges". That's still not good, but at least it's not deceptive.
> Exchanges that aren't stupid keep the vast majority of their funds in cold storage
That sounds dumb on their part, as that money isn't doing work that it could. Perhaps they should invest it in the meanwhile. But since it's users' money, maybe set up a provision that only a part of the funds is invested, and the rest stay put, to give them back to the users on demand. Most people don't regularly take out all their coins at once, so the exchange won't need to have them all on hand, most of the time.
Say what you will about the technology, but the Bitcoin community attracts the most unsavory, scandalous people imaginable. It truly is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Everything even tangentially related to it instantly becomes a source of scams, illegal activity, and just general shadiness. It's what has always turned me off of blockchain technology in general. I'm sure these same people exist in the fiat financial world as well, but it just has a lawless, wild west, dog eat dog atmosphere that is so off putting.
> I'm sure these same people exist in the fiat financial world as well, but it just has a lawless, wild west, dog eat dog atmosphere that is so off putting.
Actually, it's far worse in the fiat financial world.
Perhaps the idea of "pure decentralization" doesn't exist; only partial realizations of it.
If you look at Bitcoin and Ethereum you find concentrations of power, information, and etc at many levels; centralization. Even at the technical level the solution to controlling change is often to have minority steering groups whose membership necessarily suggests a concentration of power enabling them to exert influence.
Taking that a bit further many startups have raised a traditional round before an ICO. Since ICO's are so popular I think one could argue that they don't need to do this. Are they loyal to the VC's or the token holders?
“It’s a money network,” Winklevoss said. “What happens when you put an economic incentive around that network? That’s possibly the most effective network in the world.”
How in the world can you call Bitcoin a "money network"? Unless I'm missing something obvious there's no more network effect to it than to any other popular currency or security.
You're correct on Bitcoin's network effect being currently less than that of existing popular fiat currencies. The currency market, is of course, the most actively traded market in the world. The FOREX trades over $7 trillion per day, and the market is worth over $2.4 quadrillion.
But yes, Bitcoin has already eclipsed all but a handful of stocks with a market cap clocking in at $800B-$1T, a daily volume of $50B+ and its more liquid than any stock since it trades 24/7 and can be remitted without intermediaries.
Fiat money works because government has a strong say in its creation and valuation, and govt. is elected by the people. Lobbying and other private interests aside, by and large, the system is still beholden to the opinions of the citizenry.
Decentralized finance, while originally designed to give more power directly to the people (Nakamoto’s “one CPU one vote”), is now clearly shown to be beholden to an oligopoly of private interests. It’s important to point out the reality behind the fallacious narrative of “the people are in control,” so that people wake up and realize that DeFi without govt. intervention is a bad thing.
An individual has zero say in Bitcoin prices. At least with fiat currency, if they don’t like what’s happening, they can change the govt. to one that is more aligned with their collective fiscal view.
The notion that citizens have a say over their country's fiscal policy seems pretty unsupportable to me. In the US, the Federal Reserve is specifically designed to avoid political pressure, and the European banking institutions are even more insulated from the consequences of elections. Your vote's impact on currency policy is very small, indirect, and highly delayed in time, so much so that it is for all practical purposes equal to zero.
Pretty unsupportable? Complete and utter nonsense. The Fed just handed out cheques to all Americans because Congress asked it to. It was unprecedented in US history, and the strongest indication that the system still works for the average person. Under what circumstances would that be possible with Bitcoin? Do the big whales in crypto care that you've lost your job? Congress does because it's their job to care. That's how government works. It's not perfect but it's far better than the alternative people seem to be proposing.
Anarchy only works for the person on top, and they know it, that's why in every real anarchy, the ones on top spend most of their resources trying to stay on top. For everyone else, it's a universally miserable experience.
> The Fed just handed out cheques to all Americans because Congress asked it to.
Uh, no, the Fed didn't.
The US Treasury did because Congress directed (not asked) it to. Congress can make non-binding requests, but neither round of stimulus checks was a product of such a nonbinding request, and neither was executed by the Fed.
> It was unprecedented in US history
The size was bigger, but broad individual stimulus checks based on past tax filings are not unprecedented in US history. They were done in 2001, for instance.
> Under what circumstances would that be possible with Bitcoin?
Fiscal stimulus would be just as possible with a Bitcoin monetary system as a fiat one; the difference is that the divide between fiscal and monetary policy, which MMT correctly points out is artificial in a fiat system, would be a hard divide in a Bitcoin system, which would mean that where in fiat securing financing such as by selling debt is not strictly required for deficit spending, though traditionally done because of the strength of the belief in the fiscal metaphor, in a Bitcoin system there would be hard constraints which would require financing of deficit spending. This would probably drive up the cost of borrowing, since while lenders don't want borrowers to monetize debt, the fact that they ultimately can reduces default risk since it is impossible for a debtor whose debts are denominated in its own fiat to be forced to default through insolvency.
I want to believe you but keep in mind that at the same time the government also propped up the private sector (special interests) and it did spend way more than on the citizenry. Industries that were too big to fail were bailed out while a big chunk of the population were left unable to support themselves and I'm sorry but a check or two of a few thousands is not gonna do a damn thing for them when they are forced to foreclose their mortgages.
Big industry means lots of jobs. They were right to bail them out. Are we supposed to let the car industry die on principle if it causes a massive amount of destruction? China wouldn't let it happen.
Help both and if that takes too much a slice from the industry let them suffer a bit, how else can they learn their lesson? So far the Feds bailed them out and the cancer in these corporations that was supposed to naturally recycle will be even more entrenched, so this will continue to weaken the country while the unfortunate who got laid off during the pandemic would have to figure it out without a job, with the possibility of losing it all and becoming homeless.
That’s strange because I see it essentially in reverse of that:
To change the Bitcoin price, vote with your dollars, going long or shorting. You will materially impact the order book and resulting price. Other ways exist: starting a company like the ones mentioned in the article.
In contrast, in federal elections you have a vanishingly small chance of casting a deciding vote between two participants in an actual oligopoly (more specifically, a duopoly), who are themselves primarily allied with powerful interests which include the banking sector. Does anyone really believe their reps are responsive to them on issues like monetary policy?
And if you don't have dollars? No dollars, no votes? And the corollary: More dollars, more votes? Sounds like a plutocracy, don't you think?
Be careful what you wish for. Unless you're secretly Bezos or another of the billionaires' club, in a plutocracy you and I and countless others are just peons. At least in democracy you have a voice, regardless of your bank balance. Democracy may suck as a system, but it's definitely better than the alternatives :) I'll venture further and say those who say otherwise have either never actually lived in the alternative, or secretly harbour delusions of grandeur.
Without dollars there is: advocacy, open source contributions, and sweat equity - as many ways to participate as there are social and creative avenues. Incidentally, some but not all of these are vaunted as the noble ways to participate in politics, including the voice you so celebrate.
Is democracy better? Why did our founders have such a negative opinion of it? The history of unrestrained Democracy is one of failure, e.g. voting oneself into poverty via socialism, or a French-style democratic revolution in which heads roll. So yeah, maybe take your notion of democracy down a notch, it's not so noble.
> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.
You can get around Bloomberg's free article limit by clearing their cookies (or using a browser extension like uMatrix that automatically blocks them).
Their articles are also readable if you submit them to an archive site. For example, someone posted this link in another comment: https://archive.is/AqtRg
I agree, there needs to be a ruling about paywalled articles already. At the very least, tagging them properly (so people may ignore them at their leisure) or also putting an archive link in the comments.
Literally only one line in this article lines up with the headline:
"Less than 2% of the anonymous ownership accounts that can be tracked on Bitcoin’s blockchain control 95% of the digital asset, according to researcher Flipside Crypto."
Then its a story about bitcoin beginnings and the lead up to coinbase. Does the article imply that the Coinbase owners own 95% of the digital asset? Who knows, article never says. Who is the "Coinbase Mafia"? Who knows, i guess its just every person who was named in the article. Who holds sway over bitcoin? Find another article cuz this one wont tell you.
If tether is such a scam, how is it still trading close to par? Is anyone willing to buy a non-trivial amount of tether at par (other than tether co. and Bitfinex)?
I don't get why people's thinking swings to these wild extremes. Why does it have to be either a societal disruptor that changes everything or a doomed ponzi scheme? Can't it be something like "oh we tried to have cool internet money, turned out that it's not that great, some people are still into it I guess".
there are a lot of people in the "not that great" and "still into it I guess" camps. Those just don't make headlines. Also, some morons can only read headlines. Don't worry, the world is not as idiotic as the headline writers and readers.
It becomes a Ponzi scheme the moment you realize that the idea is intrinsically broken, but still you keep shilling it and making grow the value exponentially, (value that somebody has to pay). BTW, flagged, really mods??
This is a really, truly weird way to defend Bitcoin, whose claim to fame is that its only value comes from its uptake. The argument goes, "governments can fiat money, so why can't we?"
There is no unique creation of value anywhere in the Bitcoin life cycle. Any liquidity or anonymity externality that doesn't equally apply to USD is probably accruable only by criminals and traffickers.
The transactions are slow and costly, and there's no guarantee that some governmental research agency hasn't already broken the cryptographic underpinnings.
Actually some of us are really interested in cryptocurrencies as tool to liberate people from a corrupt system, and we leaved our mum's basement a long time ago.
is bitcoin truly decentralized? in the sense that there’s a centralized ledger that anyone can access and see transactions? i know the ledger is copied and decentralized to all nodes but for instance if i go on the street corner and buy something with cash, no one in the world knows other than the participants. with bitcoin everyone in the world knows and it’s recorded for all time
This article is an example of the pure propaganda that 'mainstream financial media' participates in on-the-regular. Why that is I don't know. Symbiotic business interests I guess.
It's not that the information is incorrect. It probably is and it does tell us something about some of the big players around Coinbase.
But the whole bitcoin 'ecosystem' is essentially a collective criminal organization, with some players being closer to the dirty parts than others. (I'm leaving out everyday holders of bitcoin, just talking about insider types.) These big Coinbase players might not 'touch the poo' directly, but their hands still get stinky.
The price action in bitcoin is determined across a network of exchanges, most of which do not use real dollars (or other govt currency). They use crypto only for trading, including the fake 'stable-coin' tether.
Tether (the company who issues the currency tether) has been shown definitively to be running a scam and are completely dishonest.) They have issued $35Billion worth of their fake dollars. Until recently they were issuing on the order of $1B per week!
Tether is a sister company to the exchange Bitfinex with the same owners and management. So essentially the same company. They just signed an agreement with the New York Attorney General where they paid a fine of $18.5M (notice difference in scale). The agreement spells out exactly how they have been scamming people. This is based on information coming from the company itself. This is not FUD, just FACT. (interestingly since they signed this agreement ~10 days ago, they stopped issuing tether.)
One of the central players in this ongoing criminal operation who has been taken out is Crypto Capital Corp. They ran a shadow banking system for many of the big exchanges, including Bitfinex and Binance. The Feds seized $850M from CCC for money laundering, which precipitated a crisis for these entities and intensified the criminal activity of the many industry insiders connected through this shadow bank.
My guess is that Tether issued $35B in fake USDT (tether) almost exclusively without dollar collateral backing. (the original premise of tether was each would only be issued on receipt of a true USD by tether, and therefor each USDT was pegged to a USD, the peg holds for now but the dollar backing is not there, that's another story.)
Most of this $35B was issued over the last year when we have seen a huge rise in bitcoin price. The tether currency only has one purpose, to buy cryptocurrency. So this is a huge amount of liquidity introduced into the market. (Compare to the hype around Tesla's $1.5B bitcoin purchase.)
It is the price appreciation that drives this whole market, including the business of Coinbase, even though they do not deal with tether.
The OP article mentions none of this! Sure, it reveals some insiders, perhaps on the more legit side, but ignores the real engine of this speculative bubble/fraud.
It has the effect of 'white-washing' this dirty game.
> (interestingly since they signed this agreement ~10 days ago, they stopped issuing tether.)
I noticed this too and am very curious if they will ever do so again. If the Tether theory is true, the transparency terms of the settlement would seemingly make it legally risky for Tether to issue new tokens unless they were truly backed by US dollars.
am i the only one that gets a warm euphoric feeling going on the crypto subreddits on days like these and drinking their salty tears as it crashes to hell?
"Past performance is not indicative of future results"
EDIT: it might be a lawyerspeak, but it is still a good advice: there's a reason why Bitcoin has been down $14k this week and that reason is the settlement with NYAG in the Tether lawsuit. Situation has changed, there's one fewer scam company there to artificially inflate Bitcoin price, so expect downward trend for at least the next few months.
I fail to see the relevance of the cliche you've posted here. BTC has 'crashed to hell' all the way down to where it was 07 Feb 2021 after doubling a few times and the parent post is spitefully spiking the football by 'drinking salty tears'. Has nothing to do with predicting the future.
These says, if you write "men" instead of "mostly men", you get attacked my SJWs. My favorite form is when they write "men (and they are almost entirely men)."
But as is becoming clear to many, you cant please everyone all of the time, and, especially these days, there are some people you cant please any of the time.
What phrasing would you prefer? "Humans" or just "men"?
If someone cannot think about a topic without classifying the genitals of the discussed people irrespective of what they are talking about, you'd probably not be wrong to take notice of that.
Not that it matters, but, expecting the whole world to share the same perversion is a bit too much..
"Hey guys, want to get coffee" - is a historically common (and yes, now bad way) of asking if a group of folks, of any gender, want to get coffee.
The insistence that someone is focusing on genital's and have a pervasion when asking this really does seem like a projection on the part of the folks making that claim, and I have noticed the genitals things come up over and over now in this context - it seriously is WEIRD! Please read up on projection.
Many of us are married, with kids, and focusing on the genitals of work colleagues is the LAST thing on our minds.
I've broadened it in the past, hey guys and girls or hey guys and women - all less than ideal in my view, girls doesn't have same connotations as guys, and women or ladies feels awkward. Hey people works well in my view. But when a women says to me, hey guys, want to get coffee - I don't freak out on them with this type of focus on genitals / perversion language. I just say, sounds great - 5 minutes? And away we go very happily to chat about whatever issue has come up.
Are you telling us that you’ve never heard a woman say to her group of female friends “Hey guys, wanna xyz?”
It’s 2021. “Guys” has been gender neutral since basically forever and a day. It was so in my schools in the 70s/80s, and by my mother’s recollection, the same back in her school days.
And it pretty much has to be so: we lack a good alternative second person plural.
Actually - where I am guys is considered negative because it derives from male as the default gender / ie, patriarchal is the argument I've heard.
But absolutely NO ONE considers it a perversion or focus on genitals except for a few folks. This line, why are you focusing on my genitals or why are you focusing on their genitals comes up repeatedly in this context so it has to be a commonly used argument in some more activist circles.
That and focusing on "perversions" - which I find even weirder, most of the offenders are just normal people who didn't even realize "guys" was offensive or might be offensive to some.
Some of the activists who start yelling about perversions and genitals seem a bit more off their rocker at times then the folks they are accusing. The only thing that caught my eye was the perversions / genitals thing, because I'd just been reading someone else who used this same argument in a similar context.
You should stop assuming that idiots stirring up shit over a non-gendered term that has been in use for well over sixty years have any sort of legitimate opinion. “Where I am guys is considered negative“ is puerile bullshit and you have been suckered. Quit lending them your support.
I am not talking about everyday conversation 'guys' / 'gals' / 'babe' / 'baby'.. you can say whatever is appropriate in your social circle...
I'm just trying to show that any gender based argument is pretty broad and sort of ridiculous (hence use of the word genitals, to show how absurd the argument is..)
Haha. Doesn't work where I am as southern accents are seen as racist in a way - and also I'm not southern so would be weird on that level - but I like it if you were in the south!
btw "gaz" is a perfectly harmless way to address a mixed crowd - the men hear "guys" and the women hear "gals" and not even the worst griefer would pick on a speech impediment
> How does the author know the gender breakdown of a currency where we can't even figure out who the person behind the bitcoin address is...
A large number of whales holding BTC is known / very public and vocal - as the article itself discusses. You can also do a survey of Bitcoin related conferences. You can look at large datasets like the public list of MtGox debts. At this point you'd need some good supporting data to claim BTC holders and traders are not a male-dominated group.
> I don't think anyone can actually prove these numbers..
Nobody is making a court case out of it, except for you.
Everybody else is just using their common perception, that it is indeed mostly men holding bitcoins because it’s mostly men talking about it and it’s commonly known that mostly men are into computer technology.
Let me know if you can’t justify a correlation between those things and I’ll help you “read the room” better.
Anyway, the article says that “Coinbase Global Inc.” is mostly men, not holders of Bitcoin. Without even looking I can tell you that’s most likely 100% accurate.
Where exactly in the bitcoin purchase or process the gender of a person relevant or disclosed? Why do people try to drag gender into things where it has zero relevance.
I'm not trying to be a lawyer, the point is, that this argument has as much logic as "Aquarians are better swimmers." You can't prove or disprove it.. either way, it's irrelevant..
If someone said "The remarkably small circle of mostly hair stylists who control bitcoin" would you have responded so many times? No, there's something about gender here that's got you incensed. I'm not trying to sound flippant, but I think there's more to this than genitals and the amount of relevance that genitals or gender has to the story.
First though, I think you're confusing what was said. The starting sentence of the article is:
> Coinbase Global Inc.’s filing to become a publicly-traded company provides a glimpse into the remarkably small circle of mostly men who command the incredibly lucrative digital landscape.
That's not a statement about "men own most bitcoins" it's saying that Coinbase Global is run mostly by men. This is easily proven. You can look right here - 5 out of 7 of their executive team are men and 7 out of 9 on their board are also men - https://www.coinbase.com/about
So someone responded about that first sentence saying 'Any article that uses the sentence "mostly men" in the first paragraph is highly likely not worth reading'. You agreed with that sentiment, pointing out why - you think mentioning gender is irrelevant and furthermore it is a "perversion" for someone to do so. (Would it be a perversion if they said "hair stylists"?)
Here's why I think you're wrong on that point though. You're strictly equating "gender" and "genitals" as if they're synonyms. They're not. If you think that's true, try an experiment: Ask random people the first thing that comes to their mind when you say the word "men" or the word "women" to them. I'll bet you money that the vast, vast majority of people will not just say "penises" or "vaginas". They'll say so many other things because those words convey so much more than just genitalia.
In the news they constantly mention the gender of people, especially if the group of people they're discussing are all or even mostly one gender. That's because it helps listeners picture what's happening in their mind. Moreover, reversed gender roles are absolutely interesting to people. For instance - most criminals are men [0], so if a group of women robbed a bank you can rest assured that the news would absolutely say "A group of women robbed a bank" and also that it would be so interesting to people that they'd make a movie about it. Even if men robbed the bank, they would say "a group of men" because if they said "a group of people robbed a bank" people would want to know - so if it's a mixed group the news will say "two men and a woman robbed a bank today."
Why are most men criminals though? It's probably because men are just generally more aggressive than women. That fact is just one of the many that will occur to people when they hear about a group of people doing something. Genitalia is the furthest thing from their mind.
In the end, I don't know exactly why Matthew Leising, the author of this article, even mentioned that it's mostly men that run Coinbase Global. I know for a fact that most people would not be bothered at all by this tidbit of information being mentioned though. I'm not. I don't even care about bitcoin and I'm not even sure why I bothered to read these comments. One thing I am concerned about though is how people are squaring up to fight over these types of things. Why do you have such a strong reaction to someone mentioning the possible/probable gender ratio of a group of people? Perhaps the subject of societies treatment and recognition of gender in general is something close to your heart? I don't know - but I don't want the world fighting over this too so I'd like to help if I can.
Well described. There are folks going absolutely nuclear over these things - genatalia, perversions.
It's often tied to what appear to be intentional misreading's or overbroad readings of relatively innocuous statements.
"small circle of mostly men" turns into some sort of absolutist statement about bitcoin ownership, genatalia and perversions.
One reason to mention gender is that gender, and broader access by women in particular to tech is a current topic. So here you have a VERY male dominated space worth billions. While a women caring for a child at home get's paid nothing. I actually see some major issues in the way society rewards people, and the gender concentration mentioned in this story is interesting in that context.
A field is dominated by x - y is not getting paid anything. What is the involvement of x in the life of y? if you get rid of x - would y suddenly change and start doing things that x did..?
Americans workers are paid $x per hour to work. Bangladeshis are paid less than $1 a day. It is the fault of the Americans?
Some people have ample food, others are dying of hunger. Who takes responsibility of the dying people? all the people that have food?
I can see you are pointing out a difference in life outcomes of different people, but how are you tying this with gender? this is my question.. are you suggesting a woman can't take care of her child and be successful at the same time? are you saying women don't have enough agency to make their own life decisions till a savior comes along and makes the right decisions for them? What if it appeals to this woman that she care for her child as a higher priority than trying to go out and increasing some number on a banks database - Are you trying to say the value systems of each individual should be aligned to money alone? that, the ones that have money are successful and the ones that don't have it have failed somehow?
If I make the argument, person x is religious, see how god blessed him with a good life. Look at person y, he's poor and misrable, its because he doesn't follow this religion. Its not a very sound argument because I am just confidently asserting a co-relation where none may exist..
I am not incensed at all. Say, gender equals to genetalia 99.x% or 9x% of the time.. for arguments sake we can substitute one for another..
The reason for using that word is to show the absurdity of any gender based argument, feel free to substitute it with "people who can grow beards" if you like. As specific data points they may have relevance as tools, but, making sweeping claims about 50% of humanity makes for bad reasoning..
I think if you can be nuanced about gender vs biology then I'm sure you can see what I'm talking about.
"Why are most men criminals though? It's probably because men are just generally more aggressive than women."
You probably meant to say, why are most criminals men.. That is the danger when we start dealing in sweeping arguments.. it's easy to jump from the specific to the general and not notice..
I just think it's pointless to bring in gender into things where it's not relevant.. 4 out of 5 top defence companies are led by women.. it's a data point sure, but live through the life of that person who got to the top, did she get there because of being a man or woman, no, there is a bunch of hardwork and time they put in to get where they got to.. can you replace that woman with just any other woman, both are women right? Ofcourse not, because she is there because of what she can do, not because of her biology.
The individual has more power over their lives than just being robots dictated by biology. Making biology central to reasoning about larger things is denying the power of the individual.
> I just think it's pointless to bring in gender into things where it's not relevant...
And yet, when confronted with reasons why that's completely wrong, all of those reasons remain unaddressed.
People are obviously interested in knowing the gender of a story's subject. That's why it's constantly mentioned in the news and also why there's a huge thread of people constantly talking about it...everywhere.
> The individual has more power over their lives than just being robots dictated by biology.
So, we by stripping them of their gender when talking about them we make the individual more human? That's completely illogical.
Also - simply mentioning someone's gender in a news story is causing some individual's entire life to be dictated by their genitals? I don't buy it. If someone I knew felt that they're being turned into a robot because an article mentioned the gender of a person, I'd be concerned for their mental health.
First, I'd just stop arguing with them though because it sounds like it would be a fruitless endeavor.
According to Financial Times it's a good thing crypto is mostly men, since it's such an obvious scam:
> Most women aren’t as into crypto as men and that’s OK. It’s actually good! Cryptocurrencies consume huge amounts of energy, enable criminality, often lack security, and generally just don't work very well.
> But let's not encourage other women to throw their money away on nonsense. And let's not think that just because a lot of men are doing something, we should do be doing it too.
No. Your attempt to project hyperbole into what I 'feel' is not rhetoric.
If it's a small group of heretofore unknown people with a major stake in a new, exotic and opaque, 1 Trillion dollar asset pool, then describing them as 'all men' is perfectly reasonable if they are. Just as if they were all American. It's relevant because they are obvious characteristics of the group and not a random outcome.
If there was some women in the group then it wouldn't have been notable.
It seems to me that if a fact is informative then the opposite of that fact would be too. For example, the article says that verified users jumped 34%. That fact tells us coinbase is growing and at what pace. If the opposite were true, and users were declining, that would tell us coinbase and maybe bitcoin were in trouble.
I don't see what the most common gender among the leadership team tells us. What does it matter if they are mostly, partly, or entirely men or women? This article is written in Bloomberg, the four founders of Bloomberg plus their chairmen are all men[1] - does that matter? If I were to put on my "just journalism" hat, maybe I'd think it says something when organizations led entirely by men criticize organizations partly led by women for their social justice bona fides... Or, maybe I'd think that most executives are men, most people in tech are men, most people in crypto are men, so it's really not that surprising or informative that most of coinbase's leadership are men. Or, maybe it does matter for some reason, but the journalist should explain that reason rather than just drop the fact and imply it means something without explanation.
I agree. It goes without saying that most of the capital is owned by men. In which industry is that not the case?
The social commentary angle can't justify that line either: Bitcoin is a pseudonynous digital currency, that started trading at $0.10, and required nothing more than having a basic windows machine, and downloading the node software, to hold from the start. Very early on, downloading the standard wallet software was also all it took to mine bitcoin. If mostly men own it, it's because mostly men were interested in the concept early on.
In any case, despite containing that line, this was a good article and worth reading.
I think the point is that the article feels a need to highly this, as though it is relevant. Primarily because they are trying to narrativize it in a certain way.
What's crazy about that? There are strong technical arguments against Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is an environmental disaster that uses as much energy as a large country to process a tiny number of transactions. The security of Bitcoin is backwards, requiring honest parties to do more work than attackers. Ultimately Bitcoin was not even designed to solve any specific technical problems, just a vague, open-ended goal of "decentralization;" it was more of a political statement than anything else...
And with the main goal being decentralization, almost the entire blockchain is controlled by a few groups of miners and hoarders. It’s as or more centralized than ordinary currency
Except that "decentralization" is not a specific goal; it is vague and open-ended. Bitcoin has always relied on central authorities of some sort -- for a long time the peer-to-peer bootstrapping strategy was highly centralized (in an IRC channel), and everyone takes for granted the role of IANA and RIRs in making all Internet applications possible. So why should we complain about miners, hoarders, and exchanges? When you never specifically define your goals, it is easy to ignore inconvenient "problems."
Cryptocurrency promotion implies to some extent that central control of money is a bad thing. So it is somewhat political.
I think most HN folks are against it for political reasons to a certain extent. Even if they say they aren't, they are getting their information from and socializing in a bubble with a political bias.
There are some news topics on HN that i will never read the comments of because of how motivated and biased the reasoning is behind them. Bitcoin comments I will still read though, since it's fun to see everyone's tone and reasoning evolve as Bitcoin slowly gets more traction and rises in price over time.
There's nothing political in the simple fact that Bitcoin (and blockchains in general) is a bad technology for any of the uses that it's advertised for: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c... (and the second part, linked directly from that article)
I agreed with the part of the first paragraph that says that most uses of blockchain are deadends or solutions looking for problems. I'm coming from "Bitcoin blockchain + POW is a store of value," and "LN is the fast, convenient transaction mechanism" that sits on top.
Dabbling in other cryptocurrencies with comparable POW's and blockchains to Bitcoin is basically speculation and gambling. I don't think they have very compelling use cases that Bitcoin+LN doesn't solve already. I assume non-BTC cryptocurrencies will survive in the long run, but who knows which ones, and eventually the LN will make swapping and conversion of currencies trivial and/or automatic.
It may be because cryptocurrencies in their present state represent little other than a electricity-hungry 'store of value' rather than its considerably loftier original goals.
Sure, but we are not commenting on a story about crypto-related applications. The story is about a centralized exchange going public. Coinbase doesn't care what dApps will be created on Ethereum or whatever, in the same that my broker doesn't care about how my GME purchase will strike a blow for the little guy. They're both just there to pick up their cut.
Just a few days ago, I saw their promotions on their page offering a bit of new coins to learn more about their specific utility and technology behind them.
We can't even begin to imagine all the new tech that will use blockchain (related) tech yet. The money making is just the "nasty" part of it now.
A recent development is that of NFT's for example. And the smart contracts thing is just understandable for us tech nerds, but if all our customers and entrepeneurs get wind of it.. brace yourself.
> We can't even begin to imagine all the new tech that will use blockchain (related) tech yet.
Perhaps because it doesn't, and can't produce any "new tech"?
> And the smart contracts thing is just understandable for us tech nerds, but if all our customers and entrepeneurs get wind of it.. brace yourself.
No one will brace themselves. Smart contracts have innumerable problems that cannot be solved, and are inherent in the fact that it's just a piece of technology, and technology by itself can't do anything.
1. They are digital only. And can only govern things that can be programatically checked. So, anything that can't be checked (for example, delivery of physical goods) is out of the question. If you say "but yes, those things can be provided by people", you're back to being no better than regular contracts (which also have a bunch of laws and regulations around them protecting all the parties in the contract).
2. They require all involved parties to understand, vet and audit programs written in any number of esotheric programming languages. Yeah, good luck with getting customers and entrepreneurs getting wind of it.
Why is the fact they are "mostly men" relevant in any way?
What if they are "mostly jewish"? Or "mostly white"? Or "mostly American"?
Is Bitcoin now a matter of "privilege"?
Are there people out there who fall for this sort of insane narrative?
In any case, feel free to keep all your wealth away from Bitcoin. It's not mandatory to use it -- unlike the US Dollar, which is actually managed by a mafia, which we call "the government", and which will use force against you if you don't use its currency.