Comment by DSingularity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DSingularity | Hacker News Reader

I think the actors in crypto have no shame. I love crypto, love the potential of the tech -- but does anybody doubt that coinbase, bitfinex, kraken, poloniex -- all the exchanges just flat out robbed people? When the narratives aligned they pumped/dumped.

Then they have no shame. Poloniex gets bought up. Coinbase/gdax announce venture capital arm. Its almost like they sucked too much money selling hopes and dreams to consumers, and now that SEC is watching closely they cannot keep pump and dumping the market. Just look at the volume drop.

Honestly, the democratized/decentralized characteristics everyone promotes is a bunch of bull until someone shows me a way democratically bootstrap ownership without total failures like Satoshi owning 20,000,000,000$ worth of BTC or a couple of whales owning 50% of the ETH supply because they bought when it was worth pennies and after BTC went up 10-1000x.

This whole thing seems to just be another means for wealth transfer.

I can agree and discuss the wealth transfer mantra on the crypto scene today. But what does exchanges have to do with that? They, supposedly, don't have any stake at any coin. They make money with trading volume.

I assume, a reasonable one will understand that it is in their best interest to have the market grow instead of spike trading volume on pump/dump events.

My understanding is that a good number of the exchanges currently operating require payment to list new coins, often in the form of a significant stake in the coin itself. At any point has any exchange ever stated that their company and officers do not hold stakes in the coins that are traded? I haven't seen it.

The Satoshi example isn't very interesting until or unless those coins start moving. Short of that, over time he has done the broader Bitcoin community a tremendous service by restricting the maximum potential supply of sellable coins. His position, and that it will likely never be dumped, has acted as an anchor of some stability. It's a vast supply of coins that the market doesn't have to worry about torpedoing the price. Seeing as it appears to be permanently locked up, and the market very clearly believes that, the market is distributing his value to other Bitcoin holders (equivalent to destroying those coins).

If those coins had been fully distributed, the condition of the Bitcoin market would be that much worse presently.

Of course, the condition of the Bitcoin market would have been much better if Satoshi had set a hard limit of 1 bitcoin instead of 21 million.

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