• 0 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle





  • We all know how this is going to end, right?

    He’ll get his fans to buy his shitty token, and maybe even keep custody on his platform. Then if he loses the election, he’s gonna flee to Russia via Venezuela, while pulling the rug out from under all those “investors” and taking it all. Then he will publically state that Harris must have directed the NSA to hack his site. He can live out his remaining time in Russia as a wanna-be oligarch, and Putin will treat him like a leader-in-exile.



  • I honestly think that if the price of Crypto weren’t so darn high, a better ecosystem would have developed around it and it would at least still be useful for payments. But since it is so high, anyone who has any crypto would be nuts to spend it.

    Some people hold up the pizzas bought with 10000 BTC as some sort of cautionary tale, because if the guy had held on to the BTC he would have hundreds of millions of dollars right now. But not only was 10000 BTC only worth the price of two pizzas then, nobody back then really knew where the project was going. Certainly no one thought one BTC would ever be worth even $1000 unless BTC transaction adoption really took off. But here we are.

    (Plus, I doubt the guy spent his only Bitcoin on pizza for someone else. Someone who had 10K BTC to spare in 2010 likely had a lot more, too. He is probably not eating instant ramen unless he wants to.)


  • I was originally interested in crypto because I wanted to know how it managed to make truly decentralized, permissionless, peer-to-peer transactions possible. After I learned about how it did all that, I also learned three things:

    • decentralized transactions are useless when so much of our economy leverages centralized transactions built around existing payment systems.

    • permissionless transactions are useless when governments are ultimately in control of payments, and have the right to restrict certain payments regardless of how they are made.

    • peer-to-peer transactions are useless when the currency is in so much investment demand that the price spikes, and nobody wants to spend it because it’s a StOrE oF vAlUe (and because of the tax implications)

    So the crypto movement demonstrated it is possible to make a platform to transact on that is free of any reliance on any intermediary, but in practice so much of our existing commerce relies on intermediaries that removing all of them causes more problems.





  • If whoever invented Bitcoin is still on this earth, they have a bit of a conundrum. Since we can track all transactions, and we know roughly how long Satoshi was mining the first bitcoins before other people got involved, those early accounts are sitting on over 1 million BTC. Even after today’s dump, that’s still over $50 billion. And for reference, the Koch family is 25th on Forbe’s infamous list, estimated to be worth about $56B. So that person is one of the richest people on the planet.

    However, those coins continue to remain unspent. And once they are moved in any transaction, the entire world will know. That leads to an inherent assumption that those 1M coins (out of 21M that can ever exist) must be irretrievably lost (due to their private keys being deleted), so most have taken that out of the active supply when estimating BTC value. Once they are moved, the price will probably crash – at least 5%, but more likely much more than that. He is among the richest people in the world on paper, but if he moves any of it his wealth will collapse.

    However, one doesn’t have to move coins to prove they own them. Anyone with the private keys could cryptographically sign a message saying “I am Satoshi” with one of the early keys and immediately have 100% credibility. The fact that this hasn’t happened means that those keys likely not longer exist. (I, personally, think Hal Finney took those keys to the grave with him, and Craig Wright is a big fat liar.)







  • No, noise ordinances are the entire point, because the excessive noise is the only thing that can be causing these problems in the community. There are thousands of data centers all over the world, with fans running 24/7, and staff on hand 24/7 to tend to them. They don’t cause these problems in the community, but they also have actual walls. And I bet their employers mandate good hearing protection so their staff doesn’t have these problems.

    There is no statute local police can use to shut it down, because Texans love their freedom so much, and elect freedom-loving politicians who abhor any regulations at all. Maybe if they paint the trailers black, the cops will think they are a threat and shoot them or something.


  • But this has nothing to do with bitcoin, other than the pop-up datacenter’s purpose is to mine it. They could have popped up a datacenter for any other purpose, and it would have the same issues.

    OTOH, the State can solve this today, either by instituting regulations or allowing the county to. Heck, just putting walls and a ceiling around the thing will help. But the mining outfit, like any good Capitalist, will not spend a dime unless it is forced to, and this state thinks regulations are a tool of the devil herself.