I’ve read so many news stories of people gone missing who had been know to have sole access to bitcoin wallets with large amount of bitcoins in them.
I wonder how people at large crypto exchanges handle that. Perhaps shamir share the access to the pkey password and store parts at secure places like a bank? And make official access protocol akin to dnssec, but simplified?
Large exchanges handle this very simply: If they have the keys, it goes to the inheritor(s) once they get a court order. If they do not, it goes nowhere
It is an interesting fact about Bitcoin in general. There are 21M tokens in total AND some percentage are lost every year. Run this simulation long enough and there will be very few active Bitcoins remaining.
There is zero evidence that deflation has any effect on spending.
At the micro level, the change in price is too small for every day purchases. Would you starve yourself for one day because the pizza will be one cent cheaper tomorrow?
At the macro level, every interest rate will be adjusted based on the base inflation/deflation rate, so the net effect is zero. Banks will offer a higher profit rate for their savings account to entice people to deposit their money in the bank instead of their mattress.
Deflation is a good thing, it rewards delayed gratification.
Those evil Keynesians have convinced the world a little bit of inflation is good. It isn’t. Losing purchasing power on your money is a bug.
Nothing wrong with putting money under a mattress for 100y if the value of money is not evaporating.
For most of human history the money was stable. It’s the disasters of 20th century wars that eroded the value, and 21st century lack of monetary discipline that keeps driving it down now.
Historically, as far as I am aware, there was never a situation when deflation coincided with good things happening. A healthy amount of inflation keeps the economy going.
It's nice when I do it. Not so nice when everyone else does it. If sitting on the money has better returns than running a supermarket, why run a supermarket? Any investment has to beat deflation. Why hire people? In fact maybe I should fire everyone to hold on to more capital and spend as little as possible...
The point of money is not to reward delayed gratification. The point of money is to efficiently tabulate human preferences, and deflation directly counteracts this by introducing potentially unbounded latency at every step. That's why it destroys economies, as it has throughout history.
That only makes sense if money is a durable good destroyed by use. But money is improved by use and lost when put under a mattress. In economics terms, MV=PQ, and your proposal sets V low, which harms Q (goods available for sale)
No, no. The issuer of your money is really, really happy when you don't use the money. Because that means they can issue more money, without causing inflation to spike.
> Deflation is a good thing, it rewards delayed gratification.
"Delayed gratification" is also provided by investments producing returns. An economy with lots of investors will outperform one where people stuff their cash into their mattress, and deflation makes it very hard for potential investments to beat that strategy.
> For most of human history the money was stable.
[citation needed]
The Spanish empire was driven to collapse by hyperinflation. Even in the US, there were financial collapses in the 19th and 18th century. Bank runs have been a thing for as long as banks have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run
Your premise is based on faulty assumptions. The existence of credit itself is what causes monetary instability, and without credit the world would look very different.
During much of the industrial revolution, gold also rose in real price. But people still did business in gold standard countries.
(Hint: the gold might be under a mattress or in a vault, but you can still an almost arbitrary amount of gold denominated debts and loans and deposits.)
I suspect it was a deliberate strategy to create scarcity, allowing the original creators to massively cash out. If you make an inflationary distributed currency, it may work better but it's a bit harder to get rich on it.
It's not silly, it harnesses some of the mechanics behind ponzi schemes to encourage viral spread. Early entrants are incentivized to evangelize it to newer ones
That depends on whether the public key has been exposed.
Bitcoin addresses encode the ripemd160 hash of the public key, so by default when payments are made to new addresses they are not quantum crackable.
But when someone spends from an address they publish the public key to the chain as part of the spend. From then on, any new deposits sent to the same address are at risk of quantum attack
I mean, it's the opposite of that; it's forced illiquidity when people lose access to their keys. There is no way to gain access to those coins and you cannot "force" liquidity on the bitcoin protocol.
I checked their official donation channel is OpenCollective. I think the Bitcoin address is no longer being used and they just forgot to update the footer
yeah I mean it just depends on time horizons, if you bought at 117k you are hurting now if you need the money ASAP.
Also, I gotta say I do not think Bitcoin is a bubble or whatever (IMO a real value there), but really this sort of site makes it seem like it is a bubble with the sort of "blind to history" boosterism.
Go read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, or Market Wizards series, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, or any number of books about financial history and there are endless people saying 'it will never die and all the doubters are just wrong' before any big market crash.
> Also, I gotta say I do not think Bitcoin is a bubble or whatever (IMO a real value there)
It's worth saying something with real value can still have a bubble - both bicycles and the internet were huge market bubbles at one time, but they're also undeniably valuable.
Anything but a log scale would be misleading. When showing long term growth of something that has grown so drastically, it is imperative to use a log scale so that 10% gains look consistent over time. Especially in finance.
to be fair the majority of the statements that site mocks are not about bitcoin being dead but being a ponzi scheme, evil, hard to use by normal people, silly, a risky investment etc.
All are criticism that can be evaluated on their own but it's irrelevant how much bitcoin grew since they were made.
oh i dont think its 'dead' in the way people often describe. More...done. Like, the period of obscene growth is over and its now seemingly settled into a fairly dull investment with mediocre returns.
From western perspective, maybe, but there are many people in the world who don't trust neither their government, nor western ones: Iranians, Russians, some Chinese, etc.
BTC is a nice safe place for money, which can't be touched by neither of state adversaries. Underperforming some other asset classes is totally acceptable, when your expectation for the brokerage account is effectively zero after arrest/freeze/sanctions.
It would be, except when the primary value proposition is capturing the upside of that volatility. In the case of BTC a sustained lack of volatility is going to create significant downward pricing pressure. At some point that will trigger a run and as stakeholders have condensed the rut will get deeper and deeper as the upside of the volatility swings continually lower.
But the volatility hasn’t gone away. Compared to previous periods of broader interest in it (rife with the awful FOMO habits of people) sure it’s not as bad, but it still fluctuates wildly and without warning. In the past 12mo it has gone as high as 120k and as low as 60k, currently around 76k. You cannot reasonably use a currency like that. Your wealth can’t be doubling or halving over months with 10pt swings over a single day being a common occurrence. How much mental energy and planning would have to go into timing any and all purchases and earning?
Better odds than a casino, but still basically a casino.
It's underperformed the S&P500 over the last 5 years, but you know what they say about past performance not predicting future returns. Maybe AI will unlock an untapped reservoir of ever-greater fools.
Ah yes lets ignore the tons of co2 which has direct impact of primarily poor people around the whole globe and the energy stealing which also is happening through bitcoin to make the case for alll of this for a handful of techsavy people in a handful of countries who are apparently now able to get their money through crypto but also have to now find people taking this?
Yeah no.
You know what happened in el salvador? A Lot of people got their initial crypto stolen.
And you know what real people do? They use euros and dollars as hard cash. Like i have seen in Iran.
Well the "non comparability" to gold has to do with the fact you need a functioning network to spend (good luck verifying a key by hand with a calculator). You can spend gold even when you're transacting with the last person on earth.
However the value is as much as people agree to value it and for a typical person both have little utility. Maybe BTC has even more utility because it facilitates remote transfers of value very easily.
So as long as the network exists there is intristic value in BTC. I believe more than one can say about gold.
Still, a good portfolio will contain both gold (in small coins likely as a kind of "war hedge") and BTC as a kind of hyperinflation hedge.
In what country does a bitcoin donation need to go through an "anti money laundering check"? Also, you could pay a lawyer 100k to handle the taxes and accounting and you would still have 700k left over.
In Germany at least if you've held the coin(s) for 7 years before selling you don't need to pay tax on the profit.
Not sure how this applies to donations though, and of course this will almost certainly be changed in the future, .nl is leading the way in taxing _unrealised_ gains; we are sure to follow!
I’ve read so many news stories of people gone missing who had been know to have sole access to bitcoin wallets with large amount of bitcoins in them.
I wonder how people at large crypto exchanges handle that. Perhaps shamir share the access to the pkey password and store parts at secure places like a bank? And make official access protocol akin to dnssec, but simplified?
Large exchanges handle this very simply: If they have the keys, it goes to the inheritor(s) once they get a court order. If they do not, it goes nowhere
but what sort of people keep their bitcoins on the exchange ? the whole point is about not being seizable by dirty governments...
Traders; low information investors; people who are not 100% confident in their personal infosec and not willing to lose their bitcoins on their own.
"Not being seizable" hasn't really worked out for bitcoiners who've been arrested. Or for that matter robbed at gunpoint.
People who want to be scammed.
Hype vibe investors, probably.
I hope they still have the private key.
It is an interesting fact about Bitcoin in general. There are 21M tokens in total AND some percentage are lost every year. Run this simulation long enough and there will be very few active Bitcoins remaining.
Well, they are infinitely divisible in principle, so it doesn't matter too much.
(At the moment, there's a smallest fraction you can send on the network, but they can change that.)
No they are not. There are only 8 decimal places, not infinite.
Seems pretty silly to build in deflation into a currency. It incentivises putting your money in a mattress for 100 years.
There is zero evidence that deflation has any effect on spending.
At the micro level, the change in price is too small for every day purchases. Would you starve yourself for one day because the pizza will be one cent cheaper tomorrow?
At the macro level, every interest rate will be adjusted based on the base inflation/deflation rate, so the net effect is zero. Banks will offer a higher profit rate for their savings account to entice people to deposit their money in the bank instead of their mattress.
Deflation is a good thing, it rewards delayed gratification. Those evil Keynesians have convinced the world a little bit of inflation is good. It isn’t. Losing purchasing power on your money is a bug.
Nothing wrong with putting money under a mattress for 100y if the value of money is not evaporating.
For most of human history the money was stable. It’s the disasters of 20th century wars that eroded the value, and 21st century lack of monetary discipline that keeps driving it down now.
Historically, as far as I am aware, there was never a situation when deflation coincided with good things happening. A healthy amount of inflation keeps the economy going.
It's nice when I do it. Not so nice when everyone else does it. If sitting on the money has better returns than running a supermarket, why run a supermarket? Any investment has to beat deflation. Why hire people? In fact maybe I should fire everyone to hold on to more capital and spend as little as possible...
The point of money is not to reward delayed gratification. The point of money is to efficiently tabulate human preferences, and deflation directly counteracts this by introducing potentially unbounded latency at every step. That's why it destroys economies, as it has throughout history.
Can you provide an example of deflation destroying an economy in history? There are many more examples of inflation destroying economies.
Japan in living memory, I believe? I'm not a history buff. Google should have many examples.
That only makes sense if money is a durable good destroyed by use. But money is improved by use and lost when put under a mattress. In economics terms, MV=PQ, and your proposal sets V low, which harms Q (goods available for sale)
No, no. The issuer of your money is really, really happy when you don't use the money. Because that means they can issue more money, without causing inflation to spike.
> Deflation is a good thing, it rewards delayed gratification.
"Delayed gratification" is also provided by investments producing returns. An economy with lots of investors will outperform one where people stuff their cash into their mattress, and deflation makes it very hard for potential investments to beat that strategy.
> For most of human history the money was stable.
[citation needed]
The Spanish empire was driven to collapse by hyperinflation. Even in the US, there were financial collapses in the 19th and 18th century. Bank runs have been a thing for as long as banks have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run
Your premise is based on faulty assumptions. The existence of credit itself is what causes monetary instability, and without credit the world would look very different.
During much of the industrial revolution, gold also rose in real price. But people still did business in gold standard countries.
(Hint: the gold might be under a mattress or in a vault, but you can still an almost arbitrary amount of gold denominated debts and loans and deposits.)
I suspect it was a deliberate strategy to create scarcity, allowing the original creators to massively cash out. If you make an inflationary distributed currency, it may work better but it's a bit harder to get rich on it.
I like the alternative even less, as it incentivises spending more than you would and taking on debt you don't really need.
Well, countries have experienced moderate inflation and moderate deflation, ask the ones who lived through both which one they preferred.
Moderate deflation is fine, it's good even. But only as long as nominal GDP stays stable.
See the so called 'Long Depression' in the 19th century. Which was only a depression of the price level, everything else did well.
For a more sectoral example, see how computer hardware used to get cheaper and cheaper all the time, but total spending on hardware went up.
It's not silly, it harnesses some of the mechanics behind ponzi schemes to encourage viral spread. Early entrants are incentivized to evangelize it to newer ones
Tail emissions and infinite divisibility are proposals to address this.
Eventually with quantum computing we will be able to recover those wallets right? (Technically)
That depends on whether the public key has been exposed.
Bitcoin addresses encode the ripemd160 hash of the public key, so by default when payments are made to new addresses they are not quantum crackable.
But when someone spends from an address they publish the public key to the chain as part of the spend. From then on, any new deposits sent to the same address are at risk of quantum attack
at this point bitcoin will be worthless
Really hope so too. Would be devastating
The project no longer uses that Bitcoin wallet for bounties.
What does that mean for that donation, and why is the wallet still listed on the website?
I think that a large part of the priced in "value" of Bitcoin is just lots and lots of Bitcoin that nobody can access anymore.
Bitcoin's supposed to be "liquid" but I'm wondering what happens when there's a forced liquidity event.
I mean, it's the opposite of that; it's forced illiquidity when people lose access to their keys. There is no way to gain access to those coins and you cannot "force" liquidity on the bitcoin protocol.
I checked their official donation channel is OpenCollective. I think the Bitcoin address is no longer being used and they just forgot to update the footer
Yeah, someone probably deposited an amount a long time ago and it's sat there earning interest.
Bitcoin doesn’t pay interest. And that’s a good thing.
hodl
They've hodled from the original ~$200,000 donation to $1.2 million, now down to $800,000.
If they haven't accidentally done this, they've definitely got some balls
I know you're joking but keeping bitcoin now really does feel like a poor investment given it's showing no signs of ever being revived.
https://bitcoindeaths.com/
what is dead may never die
yeah I mean it just depends on time horizons, if you bought at 117k you are hurting now if you need the money ASAP.
Also, I gotta say I do not think Bitcoin is a bubble or whatever (IMO a real value there), but really this sort of site makes it seem like it is a bubble with the sort of "blind to history" boosterism.
Go read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, or Market Wizards series, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, or any number of books about financial history and there are endless people saying 'it will never die and all the doubters are just wrong' before any big market crash.
> Also, I gotta say I do not think Bitcoin is a bubble or whatever (IMO a real value there)
It's worth saying something with real value can still have a bubble - both bicycles and the internet were huge market bubbles at one time, but they're also undeniably valuable.
The log scale is awfully misleading, especially since money doesn't really work like that.
Anything but a log scale would be misleading. When showing long term growth of something that has grown so drastically, it is imperative to use a log scale so that 10% gains look consistent over time. Especially in finance.
you can press the "linear" button if you'd like.
but i think the primary point of the comment was to highlight the "Bitcoin has been declared dead 478 times" part
to be fair the majority of the statements that site mocks are not about bitcoin being dead but being a ponzi scheme, evil, hard to use by normal people, silly, a risky investment etc.
All are criticism that can be evaluated on their own but it's irrelevant how much bitcoin grew since they were made.
Bitcoin died *again*? hehe :P
oh i dont think its 'dead' in the way people often describe. More...done. Like, the period of obscene growth is over and its now seemingly settled into a fairly dull investment with mediocre returns.
Depends on the actor.
From western perspective, maybe, but there are many people in the world who don't trust neither their government, nor western ones: Iranians, Russians, some Chinese, etc.
BTC is a nice safe place for money, which can't be touched by neither of state adversaries. Underperforming some other asset classes is totally acceptable, when your expectation for the brokerage account is effectively zero after arrest/freeze/sanctions.
People found a new way to turn electricity into money at the expense of the atmosphere: AI.
Isn't that a good thing? The main argument I've heard against using bitcoin as currency is that it's too volatile.
It would be, except when the primary value proposition is capturing the upside of that volatility. In the case of BTC a sustained lack of volatility is going to create significant downward pricing pressure. At some point that will trigger a run and as stakeholders have condensed the rut will get deeper and deeper as the upside of the volatility swings continually lower.
> The main argument I've heard against using bitcoin as currency is that it's too volatile.
Also the transaction cost. Is it any better?
But the volatility hasn’t gone away. Compared to previous periods of broader interest in it (rife with the awful FOMO habits of people) sure it’s not as bad, but it still fluctuates wildly and without warning. In the past 12mo it has gone as high as 120k and as low as 60k, currently around 76k. You cannot reasonably use a currency like that. Your wealth can’t be doubling or halving over months with 10pt swings over a single day being a common occurrence. How much mental energy and planning would have to go into timing any and all purchases and earning?
Better odds than a casino, but still basically a casino.
Well, that’s what people have said all the way to $70k+ price.
It's underperformed the S&P500 over the last 5 years, but you know what they say about past performance not predicting future returns. Maybe AI will unlock an untapped reservoir of ever-greater fools.
Buy signal
This could become the premise of a near-cyberpunk heist movie..
Bitcoin really isn't money.
They should send it to a dead wallet instead.
You should lead by example. Could you please purchase $800k of bitcoin and then send to a dead wallet for all of us to see?
True and its also not compareable to gold.
But as long as others giving you real money for this garbage, it would be better to use it for a project like neovim :)
To never have experienced a usefulness of cryptocurrency is a privileged position to be in.
Ah yes lets ignore the tons of co2 which has direct impact of primarily poor people around the whole globe and the energy stealing which also is happening through bitcoin to make the case for alll of this for a handful of techsavy people in a handful of countries who are apparently now able to get their money through crypto but also have to now find people taking this?
Yeah no.
You know what happened in el salvador? A Lot of people got their initial crypto stolen.
And you know what real people do? They use euros and dollars as hard cash. Like i have seen in Iran.
Well the "non comparability" to gold has to do with the fact you need a functioning network to spend (good luck verifying a key by hand with a calculator). You can spend gold even when you're transacting with the last person on earth.
However the value is as much as people agree to value it and for a typical person both have little utility. Maybe BTC has even more utility because it facilitates remote transfers of value very easily.
So as long as the network exists there is intristic value in BTC. I believe more than one can say about gold.
Still, a good portfolio will contain both gold (in small coins likely as a kind of "war hedge") and BTC as a kind of hyperinflation hedge.
A dead wallet has better use for Bitcoin though.
We don't know where the Bitcoin has come from, so it needs to go through extensive anti money laundering checks.
Save the hassle of all of that taxes, accountancy and just send everything to a dead wallet.
In what country does a bitcoin donation need to go through an "anti money laundering check"? Also, you could pay a lawyer 100k to handle the taxes and accounting and you would still have 700k left over.
Any country which bans Monero and their mixers being sent to exchanges which are then flagged by OFAC on tainted cryptocurrencies.
Nah, you would have a lot more to pay in taxes.
Might as well send it to a dead wallet, it's not real money anyway in many countries as legal tender.
Exactly this! It was rendered money by some minds.
Unlike that paper money. That paper money was created by the Gods!
It is even more useless than fiat.
I imagine they might wait, to make sure it’s legally obtained Bitcoin.
In which country would waiting help?
In Germany at least if you've held the coin(s) for 7 years before selling you don't need to pay tax on the profit.
Not sure how this applies to donations though, and of course this will almost certainly be changed in the future, .nl is leading the way in taxing _unrealised_ gains; we are sure to follow!
It's one year, unless something changed recently.
1 year
One year yes, and politics wants to change it..
Something that takes 5 seconds with bitcoin, faster than any other property type, is something you rationalize as taking 7 years
Why does HN collectively tolerate this level of understanding when it comes to crypto
> Something that takes 5 seconds with bitcoin, faster than any other property type, is something you rationalize as taking 7 years
> Why does HN collectively tolerate this level of understanding when it comes to crypto
Well that's really funny. Because the 7 years are about tax liabilities not the speed of bitcoin transactions.
So maybe you made a statement about crypto advocates here...
Legally obtained bitcoin is what the person I responded to said, suggesting anti money laundering concerns which are the concerns I responded to
And the tax liability sister comments all disagree with each other
Notably, the parent commenter hasn’t replied at all yet