Crypto Currency Thread

[whatxd]

DrSteveBrule said:

Last post: it's £2.40.

Don't say I didn't tell you.

How do you feel about being called a custard dessert while the price was down?

[anonymous-user]

whatxd said:

DrSteveBrule said:

Last post: it's £2.40.

Don't say I didn't tell you.

How do you feel about being called a custard dessert while the price was down?

Absolutely fine with name calling. The price wasn’t down - it just wasn’t up yet.

[dimots]

Libra going down hard...not a surprise to anyone with even the slightest understanding of what bitcoin was designed to achieve. All these partnerships were exactly the wrong thing. Countdown to the dawning of realisation that btc as protocol is the backbone for everything they want to achieve...

[anonymous-user]

dimots said:

Libra going down hard...not a surprise to anyone with even the slightest understanding of what bitcoin was designed to achieve. All these partnerships were exactly the wrong thing. Countdown to the dawning of realisation that btc as protocol is the backbone for everything they want to achieve...

It was nothing more than a token to track traffic and spending habits dressed up as crypto - marketeers would be able to track you every step of the way from which restaurants you ate at to how you travelled there and what clothes you bought to wear that night. It was a case of Facebook over-reaching and the regulators would have come down on this from a great height at some point.

I feel the companies bailing out could see they were aligning themselves with something that would face intense scrutiny and a possible public backlash, if it gained acceptance in the first place.

It will resurface in a different guise.

[dimots]

DrSteveBrule said:

It was nothing more than a token to track traffic and spending habits dressed up as crypto - marketeers would be able to track you every step of the way from which restaurants you ate at to how you travelled there and what clothes you bought to wear that night. It was a case of Facebook over-reaching and the regulators would have come down on this from a great height at some point.

I feel the companies bailing out could see they were aligning themselves with something that would face intense scrutiny and a possible public backlash, if it gained acceptance in the first place.

It will resurface in a different guise.

Maybe. They can already do that though. I think it was more of a tax dodge myself, but whatever the case, it's fubar'd.

[Condi]

dimots said:

Maybe. They can already do that though. I think it was more of a tax dodge myself, but whatever the case, it's fubar'd.

But can't you see that if the largest and most global companies in the world cannot being something to market due to increased scrutiny it reduces the chance of bitcoin or anything else ever gaining mass market appeal and acceptance. Bitcoin et al will always be something for people who cannot use the normal banking system, and in the developed world most of those people are fraudsters, criminals and tax evaders.

[Behemoth]

Condi said:

But can't you see that if the largest and most global companies in the world cannot being something to market due to increased scrutiny it reduces the chance of bitcoin or anything else ever gaining mass market appeal and acceptance. Bitcoin et al will always be something for people who cannot use the normal banking system, and in the developed world most of those people are fraudsters, criminals and tax evaders.

This is exactly the kind of short sighted commentary that surrounded the web's early days.

Your "bitcoin is only for criminals" platitude is a straw man. Bitcoin is being used in the developed world as a hedge & asymmetric bet.

Libra was destined to be still born simply because there is someone to threaten & sue. The vast majority of people using bitcoin in the developed world are perfectly law abiding speculators.

Any intelligent criminal (an oxymoron for the most part) realises that chain analysis on bitcoin's base layer makes activity transparent and traceable in a way few thought possible a decade ago.

Meanwhile, the entirety of bitcoin's current value is dwarfed just by the penalties that banks have paid for criminal activity over the decade that bitcoin's network has now existed.

[anonymous-user]

Facebook and Zuckerberg aren't thought highly of in the States, and rightly so.

A crypto currency run by a corporation known for harvesting data and selling it on? No thanks.

[dimots]

Yeah they harvest data and sell it on, but more importantly they sell a digital product. Look at the VAT rules on digital products in the EU alone...now extrapolate to the whole world.

A business like Facebook runs into an incredible array of tax and forex problems. I think they wanted to create a ringfenced currency to absolve them of taxation accountability.

I am not even going to respond to Condi any more. He's basically trolling at this point.

[Condi]

dimots said:

Yeah they harvest data and sell it on, but more importantly they sell a digital product. Look at the VAT rules on digital products in the EU alone...now extrapolate to the whole world.

A business like Facebook runs into an incredible array of tax and forex problems. I think they wanted to create a ringfenced currency to absolve them of taxation accountability.

I am not even going to respond to Condi any more. He's basically trolling at this point.

So asking questions you dont like - and cant answer - about a product that you're spending money on is now trolling?

Please, what nonsense.

Libra was the first attempt by a large company to legitimise any crypto currency. It failed due to the inherent problems of all crypto coins, and that was despite the backing of a number of huge global payment and financial services firms. So, my question is that if an organisation including the likes of Visa, PayPal etc cannot legitimise a crypto coin, why do you think anyone else can?

Using bitcoin to 'speculate on' (Behemoth's words) is not the same as using it as a currency to spend and complete transactions with.

[Condi]

Behemoth said:

This is exactly the kind of short sighted commentary that surrounded the web's early days.

Your "bitcoin is only for criminals" platitude is a straw man. Bitcoin is being used in the developed world as a hedge & asymmetric bet.

The web was developed by academics and the US government to transfer data around the world, the 2 are not at all comparable.

As for it being a hedge; a hedge against what? If you want a hedge against economic conditions buy bonds or government debt. To kid yourself that bitcoin is anything other than a gamble in either direction is a fallacy.

[Behemoth]

Condi said:

The web was developed by academics and the US government to transfer data around the world, the 2 are not at all comparable.

As for it being a hedge; a hedge against what? If you want a hedge against economic conditions buy bonds or government debt. To kid yourself that bitcoin is anything other than a gamble in either direction is a fallacy.

Of course they are comparable. Both have the same ill-informed market response to an emerging technology. Ignorance, confusion & fear, exactly the same. The fact that the web came from govt research is irrelevant.

A cursory look at bitcoin's sharpe ratio and stock to flow co-integration & I think you'd have a hard time explaining to your hnw hedge clients why you haven't allocated a small %.

[Bluedot]

Just wondering if the latest drop in Crypto could have anything to do with Google's 'quantum supremacy' claims ?

Or if it's just Crypto doing its thing

[Bluedot]

Although I've also just seen Zuckerberg on the news up before Congress being grilled over Libra so I'm guessing maybe thats more to do with it.

[anonymous-user]

if they are moving away from moores law, then in the next few years maybe bitcoin becomes worthless...??

[simonrockman]

I'd strongly recommend the BBC podcast on Onecoin.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07nkd84/episodes...

It's gripping stuff. Intriguingly they are supposed to be uploaded every Thursday, but today's has been delayed until Monday.

[Behemoth]

Bluedot said:

Just wondering if the latest drop in Crypto could have anything to do with Google's 'quantum supremacy' claims ?

Or if it's just Crypto doing its thing

Both. Quantum is classic fud. Cryptography has been cat & mouse since Enigma & Turing (and well before). As computing power develops, so does the ability of cryptographers to devise mathematical functions to secure against this power increase.

Much of the world's information security infrastructure (including your bank) relies on the same hash function that bitcoin uses (SHA256 being the most common but there are many similar). Stronger functions will get implemented far, far in advance of any computer being able to crack them.

[simonrockman]

Quantum isn't a threat to cryptography. I went to fabulously techie event on Quantum a few years ago and a chap from Qinetiq said that while Quantum might be 100,000 times faster than Von Newman at some tasks it would only be twice as fast for crypto.

He was talking about code breaking, I don't know how that relates to hashing, and in the world of cryptocurrencies there is such a gulf between fact and the market price it's irrelevant.

[anonymous-user]

Bluedot said:

Just wondering if the latest drop in Crypto could have anything to do with Google's 'quantum supremacy' claims ?

Or if it's just Crypto doing its thing

I think it is largely because it is a made up thing that doesn't exist that is no use for anything. Any value people give to crypto is the hope they can sell it to a greater fool for more money than they paid for it.

[Behemoth]

simonrockman said:

He was talking about code breaking, I don't know how that relates to hashing

They do relate. Essentially, encryption is two way (you decrypt back to the original with a key) whilst hashing is one way (you can verify the original with a hash but can't decrypt).