I am well aware that most people on Hacker News hate Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies so a lot of these types of studies and articles that are negative end up making their way to the top.
It is strange that this study was from 2017-2018 and yet they only considered data from 2009-2013. Would be nice if there was an explanation as to why.
One thing I wanted to point out is this seems to be presented to shine a negative light on Bitcoin, but I have a feeling that if you were to plot the owners of any equity you would find the exact same patterns. People who get in early will own a majority of the supply.
For example take a look at Morgan Stanley stock. 86% of the shares are owned by institutional investors and of that chunk, five institutions own 58% of them:
I also think these types of patterns with regards to transactions probably exist with other currencies as well, but it is just that the data is not available for the public to analyze.
Bitcoin is not marketed as anything. There is no company and there are no marketing or sales people. That is part of the beauty of it.
The decentralized claim refers to a decentralized network where the miners and nodes connected to the network are decentralized and no single entity controls 51% of the network (if they did it would collapse). Ownership of coins is not the same as hashing power.
Nowhere do people claim that the coins themselves are decentralized.
Of course only small communities have a majority of btc. Too many people - geeks included - spent too many years believing the fud being broadcast about Bitcoin while others were collecting btc. I've seen the blistering scorn from some here on HN over the years.
When I first ran across Bitcoin in 2010, I thought it was a scam but was intrigued by the tech. After studying it for about a month, I realised it wasn't a scam (though scamsters abound in cryptocurrencies, as in all things money) and went around to my friends in the tech community in my city to show it to them. They know me to be literate in networks and cryptography but only one person in the ten or twelve I approached was equally interested. The rest poopooed Bitcoin, some outright laughing me out of their offices.
Institutional thinking is what kept a lot of smart people from even looking at Bitcoin early on. The findings in this study shouldn't be surprising. In five years, should the internet still be functioning, Bitcoin will be more spread out than it is now.
What are you basing this on, your gut feeling? If I look at where I can actually use bitcoins, or crypto currencies in general, the list is dwindling. A few years ago I could buy coffee with crypto, I can’t today. A few years ago I could buy certificates (if I could also pass them) and other Microsoft products with crypto, I can’t today. A few years ago I could rent an vacation home with crypto, I can’t today. Hell these days I can’t even conver crypto into actual money in my country.
Maybe it’s not like that in the US, but the only useful thing I can spend crypto on as a Scandinavian is paying for my domains.
I'm basing it on eight years of experience in Bitcoin.
"Bitcoin for coffee" and the like is a waste of the tech, imo. Buying network services such as you described is a better use as intercountry payments with debit cards isn't always feasible.
Bitcoin's use is better as a transnational currency when traditional payment channels are cumbersome. To be frank, Bitcoin still has some work to do in the payment channel dept but Lightning Network is getting there.
In the US, there are more than a few places where you can trade out btc for gold/silver and sell the metal for fiat. It's preferable to selling on an exchange, imo.
If you can't spend now, hang onto your btc until you can. Saving is always a good idea.
I think Gandi does still accepts bitcoin just fine for their services https://wiki.gandi.net/en/billing/means/bitcoin I was renewing a domain this week,and Bitcoin was listed on the checkout page, and I'm pretty sure it would be for all domain services (such as certificates).
When bitcoin appeared, everybody was saying that "only retarded people would `invest` in such an obvious scam. you would be better to blow your money in Vegas, at least you'll get a free drink". Now the same people say "it's not fair that some got to buy it at such cheap valuations".
No we are still saying the same. Lots of people made money on pyramid schemes, that doesn’t make them a good investment. The longer a pyramid scheme runs, the dumber it is to invest in it.
If you truthfully believe bitcoin will develop into a stable alternative to state run currencies, great, I wish you good luck.
I don’t. To me it is like religion - they can’t all be right and they are mutually exclusive. I don’t trust myself to be able to pick the winner among all the losers.
The notes and coins for the euro were first issued in 2002, and the first bitcoin was mined in 2009. What makes one a pyramid scheme and the other not?
The answer surely can't be "every currency issued by a government is stable forever and every crypto-currency will collapse before 5 years".
What I'm saying is, there are a lot of currencies out there, and some are more stable and have a better track record than others. You may not trust yourself to pick a winner among the losers, but I suspect you do use at least one currency from time to time, so you have picked one by default.
Pardon my ignorance, but how is it possible to track Bitcoin holders? I thought that it was really easy to create multiple Bitcoin addresses, so if a rich miner wanted to hide his holdings he could create a separate address for each transaction and he would in effect be untraceable right?
There is lots of other metadata to collect:
You can monitor which nodes received the transaction first. Edge nodes can get IP address of sender. Who are the transactions with? Amounts, quantity, and time of day/week/month could all provide correlation.
Bitcoin wallets generally generate multiple addresses so most users have many. The wallet software does the work of displaying all addresses combined as a single balance. This is different than Ethereum where generally most users have 3 or less accounts. The effect of this is that Bitcoin appears less concentrated than it actually is in comparison.
Any entity that controls more than 51% of network capability (i.e. owns and operates a lot of expensive hardware) can, in theory, begin making fradulent transactions called "double spends".
Any common user of the network that is unfortunate enough to get caught up in this scheme would lose their money. And the long term value of the network would most likely plummet, but in 2013 it didn't for some odd reason :)
Unless I am missing something, this paper is referring to connections between addresses when it mentions the “Bitcoin network”. Not actual mining nodes. It does not have anything to do with a 51% attack.
When I think of political control and Bitcoin I think of people who have the power to build a consensus for a hard fork. It wouldn't really make sense for someone controlling 51% of the network to hack the network. Then all their bitcoins would be useless because everyone else would abandon the network.
My suspicion is that a few users have a ridiculous amount of bitcoin across many many wallets and that they use these wallets to prob up the value of bitcoin. This slowly drains their bitcoin assets, but keeping the value of BTC high relative to hard currencies like US dollars means that they still make lots of money. There's enough wealth concentrated in enough individuals that they could probably go for years propping up the value of bitcoin until they run out of enough bitcoin to keep the value propped up or until BTC actually becomes useful as a reserve currency for the real world. If the latter happens first, then they get rich from making something useful. If the former happens first, everything comes crashing down like a house of cards, but they still get rich.
Is this online "epdf" viewer by Springer running sluggish on purpose? Or is that just because of my dated notebook? Whenever graphs are rendered my CPU usage just spikes.
Readit News
It is strange that this study was from 2017-2018 and yet they only considered data from 2009-2013. Would be nice if there was an explanation as to why.
One thing I wanted to point out is this seems to be presented to shine a negative light on Bitcoin, but I have a feeling that if you were to plot the owners of any equity you would find the exact same patterns. People who get in early will own a majority of the supply.
For example take a look at Morgan Stanley stock. 86% of the shares are owned by institutional investors and of that chunk, five institutions own 58% of them:
https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/ms/ownership-summary
I also think these types of patterns with regards to transactions probably exist with other currencies as well, but it is just that the data is not available for the public to analyze.
It's not hatred of Bitcoin to think that it's more worthwhile as a white paper than as an investment vehicle.
The decentralized claim refers to a decentralized network where the miners and nodes connected to the network are decentralized and no single entity controls 51% of the network (if they did it would collapse). Ownership of coins is not the same as hashing power.
Nowhere do people claim that the coins themselves are decentralized.
https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/ssl_certif...
When I first ran across Bitcoin in 2010, I thought it was a scam but was intrigued by the tech. After studying it for about a month, I realised it wasn't a scam (though scamsters abound in cryptocurrencies, as in all things money) and went around to my friends in the tech community in my city to show it to them. They know me to be literate in networks and cryptography but only one person in the ten or twelve I approached was equally interested. The rest poopooed Bitcoin, some outright laughing me out of their offices.
Institutional thinking is what kept a lot of smart people from even looking at Bitcoin early on. The findings in this study shouldn't be surprising. In five years, should the internet still be functioning, Bitcoin will be more spread out than it is now.
Maybe it’s not like that in the US, but the only useful thing I can spend crypto on as a Scandinavian is paying for my domains.
"Bitcoin for coffee" and the like is a waste of the tech, imo. Buying network services such as you described is a better use as intercountry payments with debit cards isn't always feasible.
Bitcoin's use is better as a transnational currency when traditional payment channels are cumbersome. To be frank, Bitcoin still has some work to do in the payment channel dept but Lightning Network is getting there.
In the US, there are more than a few places where you can trade out btc for gold/silver and sell the metal for fiat. It's preferable to selling on an exchange, imo.
If you can't spend now, hang onto your btc until you can. Saving is always a good idea.
If you truthfully believe bitcoin will develop into a stable alternative to state run currencies, great, I wish you good luck.
I don’t. To me it is like religion - they can’t all be right and they are mutually exclusive. I don’t trust myself to be able to pick the winner among all the losers.
The answer surely can't be "every currency issued by a government is stable forever and every crypto-currency will collapse before 5 years".
What I'm saying is, there are a lot of currencies out there, and some are more stable and have a better track record than others. You may not trust yourself to pick a winner among the losers, but I suspect you do use at least one currency from time to time, so you have picked one by default.
If possible to figure out who the addresses belonged to, then the biggest coin holders could be known.
Any common user of the network that is unfortunate enough to get caught up in this scheme would lose their money. And the long term value of the network would most likely plummet, but in 2013 it didn't for some odd reason :)
Seems much more benign, but is far more insidious, IMO.