Bitcoin losses are piling up for companies that added crypto to balance sheet
markets.businessinsider.com
markets.businessinsider.com
I'm not sure how many companies add individual securities to their balance sheets, but the point is that people like to vilify this particular asset as if it is much riskier than traditional alternatives.
Specially here.
Given HN's demographic there's a ton of people that had the opportunity to get into bitcoin in its early stages and make some unthinkable amount of money, private island amount of money, myself included.
Some people cannot come into terms with that and let cognitive dissonance do its work.
Ahh if only I had... better just go back to work.
But I get what you're saying.
I can believe some people might have substantial holdings but I bet they also have substantial liabilities such that their net holdings disqualify them as "whales".
I mean yes, you go back in time 30 years and put all your savings into the right companies and you would be rich. But it's hard to be bitter about it.
It easy to be bitter you saw BTC trading for cents 10 years ago.
Humanity will break free of tyranny. Bitcoin and the honest cryptos are a part of that. Sorry if you cannot see the value in financial instruments that cannot be controlled by corrupt intermediaries. In spite of the dollar pegged to these instruments, we need to exchange absent intermediaries more than ever.
Are we done wasting resources on parasitic intermediaries?
Are we talking about the same system where there's a rug pull every other week? The same one where two major exchanges decided to block withdrawals as rates plummeted? That one? What are those if not corrupt intermediaries?
> Humanity will break free of tyranny
I hope so too. But markets are just another form of tyranny that we have to break free from. Crypto entrenches them more instead of freeing us.
These types of games have been played for ages, the behavior is similar, and the end result seems to be the same: major gains for a few bunch, and losses for the late comers.
We've seen it all: ICOs, DAOs, NFTs, what other scheme will resurface next until there are actual regulations in place to prohibit false advertising and bogus claims.
Of course I'm throwing the baby with the bath water when I say this, but reality is that the barrier of entry for scams and schemes is so low that something must be done.
They just can’t manipulate the fundamental rules. That’s it. Anyone can send any transaction anywhere. The monetary supply is fixed, no one gets to decide arbitrarily when money is created. And to make new money, there are specific conditions which simultaneously contributes value to the network.
It doesn’t fix inequality, it just fixes the rules and makes it so we can at least trust the fidelity of the system.
People take for granted the honesty of the existing systems. But when we bailout big failed banks and big business by printing more money and let the common person crash and burn, it is clearer how dishonest it is. Most people do not have a friend that can get the government to bail them out — but some people do.
That is just scratching the surface on the problem with intermediaries infecting a monetary supply. At least with bitcoin, we all play by the same rules. There is value in that kind of honesty.
Tyranny has many shapes and like communism promised to free us from exploitation by exploiting us, bitcoin promised to free us from intermediaries by intermediating instead.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Yeah, because there are no corrupt middlemen and grifters in the crypto industry, are there? It's all honest and upstanding citizens doing their best to make freedom a reality for us all. If they happen to "lose" a few billion in the process, you have to ask: shouldn't we be willing to take a few risks for freedom? It's really quite selfish of all these freedom-haters to complain when their money vanishes (after the freedom-fighting whales have cashed out, of course).
They don’t seem to get that legacy monetary supply and markets have been compromised at a fundamental level.
Any system that cannot be reasonably audited with limited resources has near certainly been compromised at this point.
And none of these systems take even remotely 50% to corrupt. They take like < 5%. And corrupting them is HIGHLY profitable, which means there is massive incentive to do so. Which means it is certainly the case.
Bitcoin disincentivizes corruption. A 51% attack is not profitable. It is also highly detectable and risk is very limited. It is the only known way to corrupt the fundamental mechanics of bitcoin, and frankly, if humanity allows a single or collaborative entity to acquire 51% of the compute resources, we have bigger problems. And that’s the point. It brings things hidden away into the light.
The promise of crypto is not financial equity, it is financial honesty. It makes the rules of the game equal.
There are also no forces that can arbitrarily create new money in the Bitcoin network, they can only create money according to specific rules agreed upon by all using the network. That can also be proven.
Can you prove these two things with any other monetary system on the planet outside of crypto?
However, the execution is, um, leaving a lot to be desired.
A key big promise of cryptocurrency is as a hedge against inflation. Yet, as anyone can see since April or so, this promise is not merely false, but cryptocurrencies fall far faster than inflation and actually loses value far faster than any fiat currency.
Another big promise was egalitarianism - making financial freedom and banking services available to all. Yet the distribution and control is highly unequal, and getting access requires technology, learning arcane user interfaces, and the security situation is worse than hiding cash in your mattress.
Bitcion will help us "break free of tyranny" - is that a joke? The core is an immutable ledger that can be used to track anyone's transactions back in all time down to the last Satoshi (currently at $0.000208, just over 200 to the US penny). Cash is way more anonymous. The control of all of these is in the hands of a bunch of quasi-associated anons and miners 'voting. Sure, it's more anarchic and we can't point fingers at specific people for specific actions, but that doesn't mean that it grants more freedom to anyone, and arguably less.
Sadly, after a decade and a half of development, the promise remains just that, a promise.
Maybe there is some bunch of honest coders who could make this work as promised.
But, when every effort is made to prove Premise-A, and they all fail, then at some point one must conclude that what has been proved is Premise-NOT-A. We may be at that point.
Not sure how accurate it is, but apparently Texas is 11.22% of America's 37.84% hash rate share, so that works out to about 4% total.
[0]: https://ccaf.io/cbeci/mining_map
[1]: From the site: "We have partnered with several Bitcoin mining pools to collect geolocational mining facility data in a non-obtrusive and privacy-preserving manner. This geolocational data is based on IP addresses of mining facility operators (‘hashers’) that connect to the servers of mining pools."
"Doing the right thing" in response to a societal need is very much _not_ free market ideology. That's not actually his rationale, is it?! Pure magical thinking.
If you have no answer, then GP is right, and the magical thinking is in your post.