Not a lawyer, but my understanding is that it is handled as a capital gains tax. So you buy some bitcoin, it fluctuates wildly over the course of a week, and you convert back to fiat. You then pay taxes on any earnings from that.
So if you bought 1 flubbercoin for 900 USD and sold it a week later for 1200 USD, you are liable for that 300 USD in gained capital.
At that point: Theoretically nothing. At that point the currency is stable and its value adjusts to very small degrees (if any) and it is no different than dave and busters money. You're taxed on your income and all you are doing is adding an extra layer of indirection before spending. And if you were paid in bitcoin, you have the same capital gains to report when you effectively translate it to fiat while buying your new Gameboy. There may be added complications similar to how foreign currencies work, but they should theoretically be negligible.
In terms of making sure you report those gains: What we see right now. Getting involved in the infrastructure to cut down on black money/money laundering.
But don't worry. I am sure The Followers of Satoshi will find a way to keep that currency volatile.
> And if you were paid in bitcoin, you have the same capital gains to report when you effectively translate it to fiat while buying your new Gameboy.
But what if you never have to translate it to a "real currency"?
Granted - bitcoin isn't anon - but let's suppose it was (or there existed a e-currency that was). If every transaction in the entire supply chain was carried out using such a currency, how would any government ever know (without inserting a MITM into the supply chain)?
An alternative thought: If you conducted all aspects of your life cash-only, how would the g-man "get you"? I suppose Al Capone could be brought up as an explanation (whatever was the reasoning there) - but there were other factors involved (they wanted him for other reasons, but tax-evasion was the easiest way - at least, according to what we've been told).
But as long as you conducted your affairs completely off-the-books, and only worked with vetted (or anonymous) others who were doing the same (so you never transacted cash with a government official or someone working for them) - how would they know?
Another thought experiment: If you conducted everything using barter (let's suppose that were possible) - would you then owe the government so many chickens or pigs as "tax"?
CmdrSprinkles is incorrect: at least in the United States, mining and other forms of receiving Bitcoins are no different in principle from receiving large quantities of other non-dollar goods or currencies that have an estimable dollar value.
The Bitcoin wiki article on this is incomplete, but informative[0].
People in the Bitcoin community have a number of weird beliefs with regards to how taxation works generally, then apply these beliefs to Bitcoin, and arrive at results which are internally consistent but not indicative of the world we live in.
The US taxation system is based on taxes on self-reported income. Individuals/businesses are responsible for reporting their income accurately and honestly. Some forms of income are also reported on informational returns, which makes tax evasion regarding them more difficult. Bitcoiners appear to believe that "Bitcoin doesn't structurally generate informational returns so jackpot, no taxes ever" but there are any number of things which don't generate informational returns. You're still responsible for paying taxes; the government's main remedy if you don't is still auditing a very small percentage of returns and coming down hard on people who abusively underreported income.
I think that Bitcoin is like a cash. But instead of images with dead presidents, you have many 0&1 in your "wallet".
Now What happens If you sell/buy something for cash? It depends on laws in your country.
I still don't understand what happens after all the bitcoins have been mined.
It seems to be designed to just fail eventually and be replaced, which I cannot reconcile against the elegance of the rest of the design.
To clarify: bitcoins can go away forever. About 6 years ago and had a wallet with a couple bitcoins in it. I have lost the key to that bitcoin wallet and if I can't find it, and noone else can find it, those bitcoins should be gone forever and irreversibly, right? If it were possible to recover the key to a wallet you dont own and spend coins that are not yours none of it would work.
So, once there are no more new coins, eventually all the coins will be lost. Am I missing something?
While not an expert (and actually something of a critic):
I think the idea is that new bitcoins will be mined at a rate that will outstrip those lost. A LOT of the early coins were lost because they basically had no value. That was when mining was easy. Now, bitcoins have value and people are less likely to lose it. And mining is now harder.
Similarly, we migrated from people keeping their wallets in a text file (money in a mattress) toward lots of sites like coinbase that basically give this Totally Free And Unregulated currency a system of banks. That further decreases the likelihood of money disappearing, especially if said banks start offering interest in exchange for being allowed to do loans. That resolves issues of people like me having some in a wallet that they are unlikely to ever collect/convert to fiat (not worth the hassle).
So while bitcoin is likely to fail for MANY reasons, I don't think lost currency will be it (unless it is more stuff like that Japanese bitcoin bank that just went dark).
This is incorrect. Bitcoins will eventually all be moved. There is a limit on how many can be mined. At that point, the "miners" will no longer be finding new Bitcoins, but harvesting the transaction fees (which take computational power to verify)
And by the final saturation point the value should be known well enough (and the other infrastructure aspects I mentioned will be in place) that lost coins will be a negligible concern. An expansion of "exchanges" will help a lot as then you no longer have problems with abandoned wallets as the funds themselves can be used elsewhere until the owner decides to withdraw.
> new bitcoins will be mined at a rate that will outstrip those lost
The yearly loss is some small percentage, maybe between 1% and 3%. The yearly bitcoin mining production dips under 1% in another 3 halvings, or roughly in the year 2028.
Bitcoins can be split and divided up to 8 decimal points. You can own 0.00000001 BTC.
Additionally, the software could be forked to allow division of BTC to a more granular amount than 0.00000001, meaning if all but 1 BTC were lost the entire world could still transact with that last singular BTC by dividing it up into smaller units.
I don't think lost bitcoins are a big issue at the moment. I doubt all of them will get lost either. What happens when all are coins are minted isn't a big issue right now either.
The big things that are in our face right now is block size, total blockchain size and control of core development. I think the latter is the biggest issue facing bitcoin today.
Currently miners get new Bitcoin plus a fee from all the transaction in the mined block. Once all Bitcoin is created, miners will still get the transaction fees. As Bitcoin becomes more popular, the transaction fees alone should be enough to incentives miners.
And it is okay of coins are lost forever. If there are fewer Bitcoin available the price goes up. Simple supply and demand. Theoretically Bitcoin can be divided as small as needed to accommodate raising prices.
The currency units are divisible, currently to 8 decimal places. If that becomes insufficient, more decimal places would presumably be added. Currently, if you take being able to count to a precision of the equivalent of 1 US cent, the BTC price would either have to go up 1000-fold or every 999 out of 1000 BTC issued would need to be lost for that to become necessary. Assuming I got my math right.
Why would all bitcoins be lost? Even if only one bitcoin left, you can divide it in billions of pieces. And when you've lost every piece but one, you can further divide it. It won't be lost forever, not until our universe will die, and long before that we probably will be able to break SHA-1 and mine lost bitcoins back.
Mining can only produce new bitcoins. To recover lost ones, you'd need to break elliptic curve signatures (and possibly RIPEMD160/SHA256 to recover a full public key from a non-spent address).
You're missing a cottage industry finding exploitable bug in some bad bitcoin libraries' key generation or signing code that will then be used to recover private key and salvage formerly lost bitcoins that are now worth an absolute fortune through rarity.
A tangentially related question (I am a complete ignoramus when it comes to bitcoin).
Suppose I could harness the power of 1,000 or even 10,000 private computers distributed over the internet and all contributing resources. Could I profitably mine bitcoin?(This is not a theoretical question, I actually do have a way to do this)
.
Same reason a CPU can't compete with a GPU when floating point math is involved. GPUs evolved to do one thing and do it very well, in parallel. CPUs are swiss army knives. It's like comparing a swiss army knife to an electric meat slicer at a deli. Bitcoin miners built their own chips (called ASIC's, application-specific IC's) just to do hashing.
These days: not reasonably (more on that later). The computations are the kinds that traditional computers just don't do great on (intentionally, in both directions).
In the past: Yup. That is why many server admins for the big clusters learned what bitcoin was. Either to do that themselves or to yell at the people who were trying to.
But this is (arguably) a problem as certain geopolitical regions have a LOT of miners and resources which give them a significant advantage with respect to mining new coins. Think of it as increased probability rather than a guaranteed return. But, more importantly, it arguably gives them too much control over the system. Do some research on the subject, but I am sure that if I gave you two guesses you would get it.
Do these machines have top of the line GPUs that you can use? If not you are basically screwed. Using even a modern fast CPU you are literally looking at, at most, a penny a year if you run all core flat out 24/7. Even 'normal' $200-300 GPUs you won't do much better.
Mining bitcoin is basically the process of spamming a loop of incrementing a nonce and calculating SHA-256, until you hit a hash that's lower than a certain threshold.
In the beginning, people used general-purpose CPUs for this, but it's the sort of embarrassingly parallel problem that GPUs are great at, so GPU mining rapidly outstripped anything that a CPU could do. These days, even GPUs are outclassed by ASICs designed specifically for mining. The amount of bitcoin you'd get by mining with a CPU would be minute and, worse still, would actually be a net negative, once you factor in the power bill to keep that CPU running. The ASICs are just too power-efficient for anything else to compete.
As others have said ASICs have made it impossible to mine Bitcoin on normal hardware at any sort of profit. However, there are many ASIC-resistant cryptocurrencies out there that may be worth looking into. The most well-known is Ethereum, but there are others with different strategies. Which would be best probably depends on your specific hardware (some are probably more CPU-friendly while others are better for GPUs).
No such thing. If it relies on a Proof of Work hash, it can be put into a chip, and specialist hardware for a simple function will always be more efficient (hashes per watt) than general hardware. The main barrier is not capability, but bothering to.
Proof of Stake would be different, but all examples are presently experimental.
There is such a thing as ASIC-resistant cryptocurrencies as evidenced by the fact that there are many cryptos in existence today that have been around for longer a year and have no ASIC mining yet. OP can mine on this today and not have to compete against ASICs.
FYI, this has happened about 2 years ago. Bot networks have been used to mine bitcoins, and IT managers have gotten in trouble for using their company/school computer networks to mine bitcoins.
An endorsement from John McAfee‽ I knew he was a fan but there's some folks who we probably should have second thoughts about using to promote bitcoin.
Bitcoin will never be a mainstream medium for exchanging goods just by the fact that its harder to explain casual/newbies that 1 USD gets you 0.001XXX BTC or less and those the reason why the "point system" used by virtual money in videogames is more appealing than explaining their money value in nano cents units. IMHO bitcoin is a proof on how far people can go just to buy illegal drugs.
Do you think it's possible anonymous markets themselves may not be the best sources of information about actual volume of transactions occurring on them? Certainly they have some incentive to fake volume, and no real accountability since .. they're anonymous.
So we have at least 144k BTC seized by the US government to silk road only (http://www.coindesk.com/us-government-to-sell-44000-btc-in-f...) and yet you still claim that all this could be fake? BTC market its still alive thanks to darknets, nobody is going to purchase legal goods in BTC (except maybe ppl from countries banned in the USA) just by the fact they are usually more expensive than purchasing it directly (at least 1.5x).
Is it possible that some not so wise folks left large amounts of btc on excahanges that had risen in value 100x from when they'ed been transferred to the silk road wallet?
Also, what do you know of the offline blackmarket volume of cocaine, heroine, meth? How does it compare to the (self reported) volume on darknet markets? Is it even notable in comparison? Why do you think cartels don't run their own dark markets? Because they're idiots?
dude you have to be a complete idiot to answer facts with stupid allegations and pointless ramblings on digital currency markets vs real markets and illegal markets. My point is... Bitcoin is solely used for purchasing illegal goods on the internet yours is a weak argument on "all that data is fake, bitcoin darknets massive amount of money is a dream made by journalist, everybody is using bitcoin for legit goods, i mention cartels on my comment to made a stupid and pointless mention on who runs darknets".
This comment breaks the HN guidelines by being uncivil. Personal attacks are especially not allowed here. We ban accounts that comment like this on HN, so please don't do that.
Interesting to see an article like this show up on the HN frontpage at a time when Bitcoin supporters are pumping and dumping other crypto-currencies on the major crypto exchanges. Seems like a co-ordinated effort to make a quick buck.
1. You can hand over stupendous amounts of personal identification to an all-but-unregulated exchange. This is best analogised to keeping your money in a sock under someone else's mattress. Occasionally exchange owners disappear with everyone's socks, or get "hacked". This is very rare, and only happens once or twice a month. Our FAQ strongly recommends Cryptsy, they're a good one mate.
2. You can exchange cash directly with someone on LocalBitcoins for bitcoins, because business deals in parking lots are famous for working out well.
3. You can mine them yourself! Note that barriers to entry include designing your own ASICs and super-cheap or subsidised electricity (possibly buying your own hydroelectric plant).
* How do I buy and sell stuff with Bitcoins?
Much simpler than just using your dollars!
1. Change your dollars into Bitcoins.
2. Find a vendor who advertises that they take Bitcoins.
3. See if they can find the staff member who still remembers how they take Bitcoins.
4. Buy your thing.
5. Wait six hours for your transaction to confirm.
6. When it's dropped on the floor, send it again with a larger fee. Make sure you didn't accidentally reverse the amount and fee fields, irreversible remember!
* Example of a Bitcoin transaction
Your mother calls you that her computer has been locked with ransomware demanding bitcoins within 48 hours. Proceed according to the first step.
* Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a fractal scam at every level. When phrases along the lines of "a whole new form of money" and "the old rules don’t apply any more" start going around, people get gullible and the ethically-challenged get creative.
* Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a disastrous waste of resources and effort at every level – “proof of work” in particular is literally wasted to secure a distributed thing that should not be distributed, and which naturally recentralises anyway. (4 miners do 50% and 7 miners do 75% of Bitcoin, and 75% of hashing power is about to be in a single building.)
* Cryptocurrency advocates are frequently both strident and delusional about technology, economics, human nature and computer science itself.
* Bitcoin ideology is based on John Birch Society and Eustace Mullins conspiracy theories about central bankers, based on economic ideas which are most generously described as "not even wrong".
* Bitcoin advocates want a dot-com payday, where you get rich for free, only without even the step where you build an enterprise that does something that's useful to someone.
* Bitcoin advocates are almost universally either scammers, suckers or (best of all) suckers who think they're the scammer. Sorry, "early adopter". Pretty much everyone who got in after about 2012 is playing the role of "sucker" in the pump'n'dump. A "trustless" currency seems to attract people who absolutely cannot be trusted.
* Blockchains only approximately solve the problems they claim to (coordinating information amongst actors who distrust each other), and the approximation breaks down as they recentralise.
* Blockchains have no use cases outside cryptocurrencies, insofar as those count as a use case.
* Everything about cryptocurrencies is, in practice, a bad idea for pretty much anyone to be involved in, and warning people off it is a public service.
* I feel like it.
I've answered you. Now it's your turn to go back to my comment up there and point out which bits are factually inaccurate.
When HN starts posting Pro-bitcoin news, it means it's a good time to sell.
I bought in when HN perpetuated the market debasement the last two times, when it "crashed" at $450 and $600 CAD. Both times, there was substantial fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding bitcoin in the HN comments (look them up yourself if you doubt me!). I adopted the position that I should be doing the exact opposite of what HN was recommending.
I'm still sticking to that position. I'll probably diversify greatly at this point with other altcoins, so I avoid the drop, then I'll buy in at the lower price. in around 30 days, I'll post back to see if I was wrong or not.
78 comments
[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 41.5 ms ] threadNot a lawyer, but my understanding is that it is handled as a capital gains tax. So you buy some bitcoin, it fluctuates wildly over the course of a week, and you convert back to fiat. You then pay taxes on any earnings from that.
So if you bought 1 flubbercoin for 900 USD and sold it a week later for 1200 USD, you are liable for that 300 USD in gained capital.
Here is a marginally more technical description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax
In terms of making sure you report those gains: What we see right now. Getting involved in the infrastructure to cut down on black money/money laundering.
But don't worry. I am sure The Followers of Satoshi will find a way to keep that currency volatile.
But what if you never have to translate it to a "real currency"?
Granted - bitcoin isn't anon - but let's suppose it was (or there existed a e-currency that was). If every transaction in the entire supply chain was carried out using such a currency, how would any government ever know (without inserting a MITM into the supply chain)?
An alternative thought: If you conducted all aspects of your life cash-only, how would the g-man "get you"? I suppose Al Capone could be brought up as an explanation (whatever was the reasoning there) - but there were other factors involved (they wanted him for other reasons, but tax-evasion was the easiest way - at least, according to what we've been told).
But as long as you conducted your affairs completely off-the-books, and only worked with vetted (or anonymous) others who were doing the same (so you never transacted cash with a government official or someone working for them) - how would they know?
Another thought experiment: If you conducted everything using barter (let's suppose that were possible) - would you then owe the government so many chickens or pigs as "tax"?
As for how to avoid The Man: Take a look at India. They lived that dream and likely will again in a month or two.
The Bitcoin wiki article on this is incomplete, but informative[0].
[0]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tax_compliance#Are_bitcoins_taxab...
The US taxation system is based on taxes on self-reported income. Individuals/businesses are responsible for reporting their income accurately and honestly. Some forms of income are also reported on informational returns, which makes tax evasion regarding them more difficult. Bitcoiners appear to believe that "Bitcoin doesn't structurally generate informational returns so jackpot, no taxes ever" but there are any number of things which don't generate informational returns. You're still responsible for paying taxes; the government's main remedy if you don't is still auditing a very small percentage of returns and coming down hard on people who abusively underreported income.
Here's a detailed testimonial on what a good exchange Cryptsy is. Sorry, was: http://www.coindesk.com/cryptsy-ceo-millions-digital-currenc...
It seems to be designed to just fail eventually and be replaced, which I cannot reconcile against the elegance of the rest of the design.
To clarify: bitcoins can go away forever. About 6 years ago and had a wallet with a couple bitcoins in it. I have lost the key to that bitcoin wallet and if I can't find it, and noone else can find it, those bitcoins should be gone forever and irreversibly, right? If it were possible to recover the key to a wallet you dont own and spend coins that are not yours none of it would work.
So, once there are no more new coins, eventually all the coins will be lost. Am I missing something?
I think the idea is that new bitcoins will be mined at a rate that will outstrip those lost. A LOT of the early coins were lost because they basically had no value. That was when mining was easy. Now, bitcoins have value and people are less likely to lose it. And mining is now harder.
Similarly, we migrated from people keeping their wallets in a text file (money in a mattress) toward lots of sites like coinbase that basically give this Totally Free And Unregulated currency a system of banks. That further decreases the likelihood of money disappearing, especially if said banks start offering interest in exchange for being allowed to do loans. That resolves issues of people like me having some in a wallet that they are unlikely to ever collect/convert to fiat (not worth the hassle).
So while bitcoin is likely to fail for MANY reasons, I don't think lost currency will be it (unless it is more stuff like that Japanese bitcoin bank that just went dark).
The yearly loss is some small percentage, maybe between 1% and 3%. The yearly bitcoin mining production dips under 1% in another 3 halvings, or roughly in the year 2028.
Additionally, the software could be forked to allow division of BTC to a more granular amount than 0.00000001, meaning if all but 1 BTC were lost the entire world could still transact with that last singular BTC by dividing it up into smaller units.
A little bit like how a 'Calorie' is actually a kilo-calorie.
It could be that all those lost bitcoins are just sitting in someone's harddrive, waiting for moment to crash the market
The system for trading ownership of bitcoins does not care for the value of that ownership.
The value we, outside of the system used for logistics of trade, place on the bitcoins is then affected by their scarcity.
To the system, it doesn't matter if the scarcity is caused by loss or by hoarding. But this can affect our valuations.
The big things that are in our face right now is block size, total blockchain size and control of core development. I think the latter is the biggest issue facing bitcoin today.
And it is okay of coins are lost forever. If there are fewer Bitcoin available the price goes up. Simple supply and demand. Theoretically Bitcoin can be divided as small as needed to accommodate raising prices.
OTOH the designer was enamoured of a deflationary currency so perhaps he liked the idea of not only a cap but a slowly dwindling supply.
Mining can only produce new bitcoins. To recover lost ones, you'd need to break elliptic curve signatures (and possibly RIPEMD160/SHA256 to recover a full public key from a non-spent address).
[0] - https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook
Yeah, I feel so confident about the rest of the links now.
Article is new, but it seems the content is based on old info.
Suppose I could harness the power of 1,000 or even 10,000 private computers distributed over the internet and all contributing resources. Could I profitably mine bitcoin?(This is not a theoretical question, I actually do have a way to do this) .
Explain please?
In the past: Yup. That is why many server admins for the big clusters learned what bitcoin was. Either to do that themselves or to yell at the people who were trying to.
But this is (arguably) a problem as certain geopolitical regions have a LOT of miners and resources which give them a significant advantage with respect to mining new coins. Think of it as increased probability rather than a guaranteed return. But, more importantly, it arguably gives them too much control over the system. Do some research on the subject, but I am sure that if I gave you two guesses you would get it.
In the beginning, people used general-purpose CPUs for this, but it's the sort of embarrassingly parallel problem that GPUs are great at, so GPU mining rapidly outstripped anything that a CPU could do. These days, even GPUs are outclassed by ASICs designed specifically for mining. The amount of bitcoin you'd get by mining with a CPU would be minute and, worse still, would actually be a net negative, once you factor in the power bill to keep that CPU running. The ASICs are just too power-efficient for anything else to compete.
No such thing. If it relies on a Proof of Work hash, it can be put into a chip, and specialist hardware for a simple function will always be more efficient (hashes per watt) than general hardware. The main barrier is not capability, but bothering to.
Proof of Stake would be different, but all examples are presently experimental.
That's not the only relevant measure, since specialist hardware must be designed and produced.
For a memory-latency bound PoW requiring hundreds of MB, it's far from certain that custom designed RAM can compete with commodity RAM.
For instance, SRAM is one order of magnitude faster than DRAM, but two orders of magnitude more expensive, making it much less suitable for mining.
There is such a thing as ASIC-resistant cryptocurrencies as evidenced by the fact that there are many cryptos in existence today that have been around for longer a year and have no ASIC mining yet. OP can mine on this today and not have to compete against ASICs.
What a crock of shit!
It's also really well written, and the cartoons are super cute. Love love love.
https://www.nostarch.com/bitcoinforthebefuddled
2. I provided a citation against your claim.
3. You assert there's evidence ... somewhere.
Do you have anything to back your claim?
Back up this claim, because it sure looks like it was.
Also, what do you know of the offline blackmarket volume of cocaine, heroine, meth? How does it compare to the (self reported) volume on darknet markets? Is it even notable in comparison? Why do you think cartels don't run their own dark markets? Because they're idiots?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
I really want to use bitcoin for my purchases.
1. You can hand over stupendous amounts of personal identification to an all-but-unregulated exchange. This is best analogised to keeping your money in a sock under someone else's mattress. Occasionally exchange owners disappear with everyone's socks, or get "hacked". This is very rare, and only happens once or twice a month. Our FAQ strongly recommends Cryptsy, they're a good one mate.
2. You can exchange cash directly with someone on LocalBitcoins for bitcoins, because business deals in parking lots are famous for working out well.
3. You can mine them yourself! Note that barriers to entry include designing your own ASICs and super-cheap or subsidised electricity (possibly buying your own hydroelectric plant).
* How do I buy and sell stuff with Bitcoins?
Much simpler than just using your dollars!
1. Change your dollars into Bitcoins.
2. Find a vendor who advertises that they take Bitcoins.
3. See if they can find the staff member who still remembers how they take Bitcoins.
4. Buy your thing.
5. Wait six hours for your transaction to confirm.
6. When it's dropped on the floor, send it again with a larger fee. Make sure you didn't accidentally reverse the amount and fee fields, irreversible remember!
* Example of a Bitcoin transaction
Your mother calls you that her computer has been locked with ransomware demanding bitcoins within 48 hours. Proceed according to the first step.
* What do I need to know to protect my Bitcoins?
Fortunately, we have this super-simple guide to Bitcoin security! https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet Your mother will be completely up to speed next time.
* What are the disadvantages of Bitcoin?
It is most useful for speculation (95% of usage), drugs and ransomware in that order.
* Scams to watch out for
Fucking everything. The uses that aren't scams are buying drugs.
* Testimonials
Tyler Winklevoss, co-creator of Facebook, summed it up when he said:
"what was I thinking when I bought all these coins, will I get this ETF up before the bitcoin network collapses. DAMN YOU STOLFIIIIIIIII"
Rick Falkvinge, Founder of the Swedish Pirate party, predicted that:
"The Target Value For Bitcoin Is Not Some $50 Or $100. It Is $100,000 To $1,000,000."
Of course, that was a few months before the bubble popped, but never mind that!
According to John McAfee, Founder of McAfee,
"THEY PUT A RADIO IN MY HEAD YOU KNOW"
* Where do I go from here?
To a shop for armored knee pads, so the next time someone says "Bitcoin" or "Blockchain" to you you can kick them in the nuts and run.
it clearly challenges your beliefs/ideologies to a point that you spent the time to comment and try to frame bitcoin in a negative light.
Is it bitcoin (the software) scamming people? or is it humans?
and most importantly, what are your reasons for wanting bitcoin to fail?
No, here you go, actual reasons:
* Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a fractal scam at every level. When phrases along the lines of "a whole new form of money" and "the old rules don’t apply any more" start going around, people get gullible and the ethically-challenged get creative.
* Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a disastrous waste of resources and effort at every level – “proof of work” in particular is literally wasted to secure a distributed thing that should not be distributed, and which naturally recentralises anyway. (4 miners do 50% and 7 miners do 75% of Bitcoin, and 75% of hashing power is about to be in a single building.)
* Cryptocurrency advocates are frequently both strident and delusional about technology, economics, human nature and computer science itself.
* Bitcoin ideology is based on John Birch Society and Eustace Mullins conspiracy theories about central bankers, based on economic ideas which are most generously described as "not even wrong".
* Bitcoin advocates want a dot-com payday, where you get rich for free, only without even the step where you build an enterprise that does something that's useful to someone.
* Bitcoin advocates are almost universally either scammers, suckers or (best of all) suckers who think they're the scammer. Sorry, "early adopter". Pretty much everyone who got in after about 2012 is playing the role of "sucker" in the pump'n'dump. A "trustless" currency seems to attract people who absolutely cannot be trusted.
* Blockchains only approximately solve the problems they claim to (coordinating information amongst actors who distrust each other), and the approximation breaks down as they recentralise.
* Blockchains have no use cases outside cryptocurrencies, insofar as those count as a use case.
* Everything about cryptocurrencies is, in practice, a bad idea for pretty much anyone to be involved in, and warning people off it is a public service.
* I feel like it.
I've answered you. Now it's your turn to go back to my comment up there and point out which bits are factually inaccurate.
I bought in when HN perpetuated the market debasement the last two times, when it "crashed" at $450 and $600 CAD. Both times, there was substantial fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding bitcoin in the HN comments (look them up yourself if you doubt me!). I adopted the position that I should be doing the exact opposite of what HN was recommending.
I'm still sticking to that position. I'll probably diversify greatly at this point with other altcoins, so I avoid the drop, then I'll buy in at the lower price. in around 30 days, I'll post back to see if I was wrong or not.