
Bitcoin has risen more than eightfold in past year - zoomzoom
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-15/bitcoin-is-literally-soaring-into-space-after-rocket-like-surge
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twinkletwinkle
That is figuratively the worst title I've ever read.

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jandrese
They are launching a satellite, the headline is accurate.

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jethro_tell
No, if they were launching a rocket full of Hard Drives with bitcoin wallets
on them it would be literal. They aren't adding anything that my partents
aren't gettin out in rural USA with their current satalite internet. (remindes
me, need to pay my dial up bill before I go out there next week)

~~~
jandrese
As long as a copy of the Blockchain is on the satellite (which seems likely
given the mission) then the headline is accurate.

It could just be a bent pipe comm satellite, which would make the headline
mostly inaccurate, but it seems like having a copy of the blockchain on the
bird would be a big win. A lot of the queries could be completed without
having to bounce back to the ground if a copy of the blockchain was available
on the satellite.

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kobeya
There is no copy of the blockchain on the satellite. These things are just
repeaters for the signal sent up from a teleport station, presumably owned by
Blockstream.

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bandrami
Can somebody ELI5 how cryptocurrencies don't run afoul of Ponzi scheme laws?
The only way the price can be going up is if new money is coming in
constantly, right?

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jerf
Well, in a nutshell, it's not a Ponzi scheme, which is not just a random slur
you can fire at anything that vaguely seems like fraud, but a specific scheme
that works in a specific way.

In particular, it isn't clear to me how you can have a "decentralized" Ponzi
scheme without making it something fundamentally different from a Ponzi
scheme.

To the extent that BitCoin may be fraudulent or people may be engaging in
illegal behavior, it's going to be other things. Perhaps somewhere someone's
even running an actual Ponzi scheme _using_ BitCoin. But BitCoin itself is not
a Ponzi scheme.

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bandrami
Current bitcoin holders can only see gain if new "investment" (I find that
term funny since it's a "security" with no fundamentals) comes in. That's
pretty much the definition of a Ponzi scheme.

 _Perhaps somewhere someone 's even running an actual Ponzi scheme using
BitCoin._

Sure, but that's a different question. I'm talking about new investment in a
security being the only source of increased value in that security. Which is
what a Ponzi scheme is.

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ianferrel
>Current bitcoin holders can only see gain if new "investment" (I find that
term funny since it's a "security" with no fundamentals) comes in. That's
pretty much the definition of a Ponzi scheme.

Equally true of most other commodities and currencies, right?

If you have a gold bar, or a stack of 10 Euro notes, the only way you make
money off of it is if enough more people want to buy gold/Euros that the price
goes up. Neither asset does anything on its own.

A critical ingredient of a Ponzi scheme is fraud.

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pbh101
The price of a traded item can go up, even with _no_ investment: people do not
have to trade for the price to increase or decrease. Sometimes price movements
coincide with lots of actual trades occurring, and sometimes they coincide
with very few/no trades occurring. The latter happens once in awhile.

Taken to the extreme to illustrate: if _everyone_ together today instantly
decided each bitcoin was worth $1b, then in that first instant, nobody would
sell and no trades would occur, but the price would be very different.

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muti
If the price is determined by how much someone is willing to buy or sell for,
how do you determine the price when there are no trades being made?

How does simply deciding 1 bitcoin is worth $1b effect the value of bitcoin if
no one is willing to buy at that price?

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pbh101
1\. There is more than one way to measure 'price,' and

2\. 'willing to buy' and trades executed are two different things.

If you are measuring the price of bitcoin by looking at the price of the last
trade that occurred, then you are right: trades need to happen for you to get
price information.

But there is also the order book. In [1], thousands of 'intents to
trade'/outstanding orders are displayed but no trades are listed.

When I looked at the page, the highest anyone was willing to buy (in this
specific order book at this time) was $4076, and the lowest anyone would sell
was $4086.

This is a good indicator of the current consensus on Bitcoin price but isn't
actually trade data.

Now, let's say the market gets just a little more bullish on Bitcoin and
someone places an order to buy at $4080. Has the price of Bitcoin changed? One
could argue yes if you judge price from the order book: from ~$4081 to ~$4083
or so. But no trades have occurred.

So back to the original question: in the absence of trade data, the price of
bitcoin can be seen from what everyone decides it is, via an order book.

[1]
[https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/](https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/)

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sktrdie
Aren't there better ways to broadcast the data? Say using SMS services which
seem already quite used by farmers in remote places [1].

Also it's unclear how people in these remote places will acquire their first
bitcoins.

What I like about Bitcoin is the way that the tokens are distributed (via PoW
currently).

If there was a way to distribute a new cryptocurrency, somewhat fairly, within
these remote places that have no internet, and let them bootstrap their own
economy, now that would be cool.

For these places what is needed is a sort of an "offline cryptocurrency". They
don't care about sending 5 btc to the person across town instantly... they
care about sending 5 btc to the person in front of them at the market.

1\. [https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-
professionals...](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-
professionals-network/2012/nov/27/farmers-mobile-phones-sms-agriculture)

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zanny
Bitcoin is only so valuable _because_ its a pyramid scheme. All the
participation and engagement by miners and anyone looking to get rich off it
is predicated on how most bitcoins were already made so any market growth
translates into increased prices and scarcity for the bitcoin that exists.

This is the fundamental problem with making a cryptocurrency that can actually
serve its users well. To get popular, you need to be a get rich quick scheme,
but to actually be useful, you need to not deflate out of control forever.

But bitcoin is doing what it was meant to do. It wasn't meant to promote a
healthy monetary policy or be a pervasive useful currency to replace the fiats
we have now - it would have had a much different coin issuance algorithm /
monetary growth policy otherwise. It demonstrated the capabilities of proof of
work distributed consensus and made its early adopters ludicrously rich.

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TD-Linux
Better links are the Blockstream press release:
[https://blockstream.com/2017/08/15/announcing-blockstream-
sa...](https://blockstream.com/2017/08/15/announcing-blockstream-
satellite.html)

And the website:
[https://blockstream.com/satellite/](https://blockstream.com/satellite/)

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vlokshin
The news is so behind actual crypto performance. Shocking, as it's all readily
available.

This is like the 10th time the news catches up to a surge only after there's
actually been a quick drop (like today. BTC, ETH, LTC all down 5-6% over 24h).

The volatility itself (in crypto) creates amazing short turn-around
opportunity for those willing to take some risks and set up basic limit
buy/sells (gdax makes this very easy).

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nicky0
"Literally soaring into space"

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jethro_tell
blue origin or spacex is going to send a rocket up there and comeback with a
pile of literal bitcoins, in a treasure chest. Then we will fly to Mars and
live there with the money we make from collecting bitcoins from space.

Everything about this is hype. Everytime I hear someone talking about bitcoin,
I squint my eyes and think, I don't think you know what you are saying. This
is another case of that for sure.

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kobeya
Hype? You can use it today, for free. It is operating and 100% open source.

[https://github.com/Blockstream/satellite](https://github.com/Blockstream/satellite)

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kharms
Has anyone done the math to see the effect of ransomware on the bitcoin price?
How much demand is from folks buying their data back?

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ojr
not much considering $300 million usd worth of bitcoin was traded with South
Korean Won in the past 24 hours compared to wannacry ransom that raised around
$50k, exchanges have more influence than ransoms
[https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/bithumb/](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/bithumb/)

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joeyspn
> the entire cost of all equipment needed to connect your computer to the
> Blockstream Satellite network is only about $100 USD

So you need to buy a SDR transceiver in order to operate...

[https://blockstream.com/satellite/blockstream-
satellite/](https://blockstream.com/satellite/blockstream-satellite/)

~~~
kobeya
Not sure why you are being downvoted for one of the few on topic posts in this
thread.

