Some of us think it may be Richard Heart, who for me is the most interesting person in crypto, and I do dabble in his stuff.
I'm aware that he absolutely looks like your average crypto scammer, but the game theory of what he's doing is fascinating, and plausible enough for me to put a decent amount of money in his stuff (obviously, nowhere near enough to actually affect my life negatively, that would be stupid.)
Maybe that guy who was digging up a landfill to find his old HDD finally found it!
Seriously though, what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?
He lost his court battle to force the local government running the dump to allow him to dig the last I heard. So I doubt it, he wasn't even allowed to really try.
One of my students believes Elon Musk and Peter Thiel created Bitcoin. Here's the summary of the 5 page doc he presented:
In 2000, according to Peter Thiel, he met with the E-Gold team in Anguilla.
Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.
In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.
By 2004, there were over a million E‑Gold accounts. Banks weren’t happy about it. Meanwhile, Elon and Peter understood exactly how much potential this new kind of digital currency had.
In 2007, the banks took the founders of E-Gold to court for running an unlicensed money‑transmitting business. That same year, the E-Gold engineers were out of work.
Bitcoin was invented in 2008, the same year Elon was broke and busy trying to save both SpaceX and Tesla from going bankrupt.
His theory is that Elon and Peter hired the smartest engineers from the E-Gold team and asked them to build blockchain so they could create their own version of E-Gold. The team worked on Bitcoin from 2007 to 2010 under the alias of Nakamoto.
Perhaps plausible until you mention that they hired a team to build it.
There's no way, even if it was a single-digit number of people team that they would remain silent. If it was just Elon/Thiel I could perhaps believe it.
Also keep in mind that there were some very desperate years for Elon where his companies were extremely close to bankruptcy, wouldn't he have tapped into that bitcoin if he had access to it?
I do not think that Elon would not claim he is the inventor by now.
The team theory makes this entirely unbelievable. Something like this can only be pulled of by 1-2 person's whith exceptional self-restraint.
> Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.
> In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.
This doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Except PayPal wasn't invented by Elon or Peter. It was Elon's company's plan to build the digital bank but they were failing quite spectacularly at it.
They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc.
Elon lasted four months as CEO of PayPal, trying to convert it from Java to ASP until the Board didn't ask him to resign, but fired him, the morning he left on his honeymoon after getting married.
PayPal is a complete red herring there. Elon had no participation in ideas on digital currency there.
Those people were wasting their money. They could be running those GPUs from now until the end of the universe and still have approximately 0% chance of finding a single used key.
Right. Those were the ones I talked to, just by random chance. It means that there are a lot of them.
This implicates a few things - (1) people win the lottery every day and (2) it's highly unlikely that the best techniques are publicly known.
Perhaps there's something that requires $1,000,000 in investment to yield a 1:100 chance of finding a particular targeted wallet using some clever shortcuts.
No new revolutionary math, no substantial breakthroughs, just some clever people with a lot of resources and a goal.
Either explanation is speculative. I think the "lucky researchers at some University" theory is more likely then the "let's wait 14 years until this $1,000 becomes $1,000,000,000."
Especially because (1) we're not exactly at some high water mark and (2) if this was just a person with a wallet trying to do something like pay for life's uncertainties, you can do basically 100% of that with like 4btc.
However if you successfully snatched the wallet, you're on a clock before someone else gets it. This is exactly the kind of movement you'd be doing
Also if some old bitcoiner comes out and says "hey that was me", we're still up in the air. If I had snatched a billion dollar wallet, the first thing I'd do is payoff an old btc'er to claim its there's to prevent market panic.
This isn’t like lottery odds. The space of keys here is vast. Like unimaginably so. 2^256 is a lot of keys.
If someone had a faster method for breaking elliptic curve keys, fast enough to have a realistic chance on GPUs, the repercussions for that would be waaaaaay larger than merely stealing some bitcoin. This is the same math upon which nearly all digital security in common use today is based. It’d be full-on cryptopocalypse.
They could also do a private party transaction to sell the coins outside of an exchange, in order to hide the sale and also hide the price of the tokens sold.
This is common practice in the stock market, called "dark pools" [0]
> Dark pools came about primarily to facilitate block trading by institutional investors who did not wish to impact the markets with their large orders and obtain adverse prices for their trades.
Outside, as in off the blockchain? That would mean that after the transaction, both sides would know the key to the wallet and there would be a race about who lights up a transaction first.
A large wallet that’s been dormant for years suddenly becoming active will tend to pressure the price lower from the implied increase in liquid supply and fear that the wallet will continue to distribute coins.
It’s not just the printing of transaction price that can affect the market.
While ~$8B is huge news, due to the potential that all ~$188B might be in play, when most investors probably expected it was not prior to this - or at least the probability was low enough to barely factor, it's unlikely to crash BTC.
Further, moving BTC is one thing. Showing signs of liquidation is another.
That much should be able to get liquidated intelligently without moving the market.
Not true at all! Everyone knows there are holes in the crypto algorithms and implementations which agencies use to achieve any objective they may have. On top of that there are also holes across the software and hardware stacks of various implementations. Just because they run all the researchers and fund a lot of it does not mean there are no holes.
Especially now with AI, I wouldn't be surprised if an amateur kicked a bunch of tires and got lucky.
Just because they are not published, does not mean they are not using them, someone else found them and are using them. Or they just have the keys from back in the day.
Can't wait to follow this story as it unfolds. The other risk is Quantum... That is going to be real fun when it starts making leaps above Moores Law.
There needs to be a industry wide effort NOW! That researches and generates keys in unconventional ways, different than the ways they are being generated now. Because Quantum is a beast. Those keys will need to be Quantum proof, which means that even if the agent knows the algorithm that is used to generate the keys they cannot duplicate the keys that were generated the first instance it was run. Or you can start doing Hashing across fingerprint, eye and dna data. That is coming my folks!
Can you look me in the eye and state that you understand Bitcoin and the math and the cryptography behind it?
Even if you do, there could in theory still be a way to narrow down the key space or find some other shortcut to a wallet key, even if nobody has figured it out yet.
I really wonder if Satoshi’s fortune is gone forever. Maybe the CIA found his real identity and uncovered his keys. Dumping that much BTC on the market would crash the market and probably even tank other financial markets.
did the rumor that Satoshi was Paul Leroux go anywhere? since he is now in the hands of the intelligence services for a while this could be a good explanation for Satoshi not being able to access its coins.
Whoever got these wallets better sell them and get a good security company on rotation quickly before anyone find out who they are. Seems like wrench attacks been been happening a lot more the last year.
I don't really get these; there's not a ton of difference between using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of Bitcoin vs using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of any other liquid asset that could be used to buy bitcoins.
If I had 8 billion in cash in my bank account and put in a transfer order, they'd block it, call me, make me come into a branch, make sure there weren't any burly guys with wrenches escorting me in, and maybe call the FBI if anything seemed off.
And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen, during which time I could call and cancel.
Recently there was a local case of someone extorting people by leaving threats in the mailboxes to not burn people’s houses down in exchange for $1k in bitcoin.
But who would keep $8B in bitcoin without some protections in place to ensure that it can’t be easily transferred away, given the associated upside/downside? That’s... roughly as foolish as keeping $8B in actual cash/gold/gems (notwithstanding the logistical problems with the size/weight) under your mattress.
> And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen
or you get a better bank to begin with
most banks that call their slow processes "security purposes" are actually just putting up barriers to maintain liquidity. the banks that go bust are the ones that got clientele based on making it convenient to transfer
This is the other edge of that double edged sword of "no regulations". It's a lot easier to steal bitcoin with no consequence because there isn't an entire financial system backed by people with guns to help you if you are wronged.
> there isn't an entire financial system backed by people with guns to help you if you are wronged
It's not the "financial system" that comes and hunts criminals with guns, but police, acting based on what laws they seen has been broken. And stealing $3 billion is as illegal if it was Bitcoins, as if it was Euro or USD.
There are essentially no criminals that are stealing crypto where the police will have jurisdiction. It's main use case outside of speculation is committing international fraud and theft with no consequences.
Not quite that simple, that’s vulnerable to an Eve-Alice-Eve attack. If $1B in BTC moves around in short succession the TXs can be linked easily. You need a mixer that splits up the amount to be paid out, and even then it needs to be done piecemeal.
There are companies (Chainalysis) that track blockchains and ‘grade’ wallets according to who they’ve transacted with. If enough of a wallet’s funds are from a mixer it may be scored a grade lower than the exchange’s KYC rules allow to do business with.
Sure you can. If you do it over a few months, it will get absorbed by market because there are buyers (as of today). Though this is kind of unprecedented, so markets could find this kind of event bearish and front run your sells which tanks the price. But I can't imagine I'd care if I held for 14 years. There is also USDT which is much bigger than USDC.
Also if you approach Coinbase/Kraken/$exchange and tell them you have X million to offload, they'll probably let you do it off-market, so no one (except for the ledger, obviously) would really notice.
Compared to the “Magnificent Seven”, Bitcoin’s volatility has put it in the middle, while it’s performance puts it at or near the top depending on the time window.
If the Bitcoin Sovereign Wealth Fund scam that was announced after Trump's election is launched, there will be a price bottom that is financed by public funds.
I'm not sure what has come of it. Trump is doing well with his own coins:
An old friend of mine died 11 years ago from an overdose, and I am almost certain he used darknet markets to buy other drugs.
It's very likely there is a wallet forever lost with many Bitcoin in it from his passing. No way his family would have known anything about it (Bitcoin/dark markets)or cared much anyway circa 2014. I'll admit I have pondered ways to check this, but it's too far fetched.
I can't help but wonder if the wave of fentanyl that made optiate addict deaths skyrocket, left a huge wake of forever lost Bitcoin. I know there was a lot of overlap between addicts and darknet market users.
Most addicts would likely not hold Bitcoin in wallet, but spend it on getting their next fix as soon as they buy it. It's not like you're thinking long-term, invest in Bitcoin so you can buy more drugs down the line. There would be leftover change but not big amounts.
You'd be surprised how many of these addicts would be buying for multiple other less tech savvy addicts and essentially becoming small time dealers themselves to fund their own habit. If they got locked up or ODd at the right time there could've been a few thousand usd in btc in a wallet at a time when each btc was worth less than 10usd.
Most interesting to me is that people are worried about a $2B transaction moving the market.
How does that compare to the market depth of actual currencies or commodities? BTC, being objectively worthless, must be much more sensitive to people wanting to sell I'd expect.
It's not backed by a government, and while some may say that's a good thing, I think it is not.
Without institutional backing, crypto is just a number in a database that people agree is worth something—for now.
If that collective belief evaporates, there’s no court, no army, no tax base, and no GDP to catch it. Contrast this with fiat currency, which—while not backed by gold—is backed by coercive power and taxation.
Let’s start from something even more fundamental. How do you bootstrap trust? Suppose two pseudonymous entities online want to exchange money for services. Such a system will likely need a reputation system to establish the trustworthiness of entities. That system needs to be tolerant to Sybil attacks (i.e., forging multiple identities), while also ensuring the service provider isn’t exploited by a buyer who refuses to pay after receiving the work.
But this exposes a deeper issue: trust cannot be bootstrapped from scratch. It needs either:
A shared history (which pseudonyms lack),
An external authority (which decentralization avoids), or
A system of credible, enforceable consequences (which requires identity or stake).
Without these, any trust system collapses into a prisoner’s dilemma. Each actor is incentivized to defect (cheat) unless:
There’s a future cost to cheating (reputation loss that matters),
There’s a benefit to cooperation over time (e.g. recurring jobs),
Or there's a credible mechanism to enforce fairness (e.g. escrow and arbitration).
But even escrow only works when dispute resolution is possible and trusted. And dispute resolution requires either a neutral arbitrator (who must have their own identity and incentives) or hard-coded, binary rules, which rarely capture the complexity of creative or service work.
More fundamentally, trust-based systems are built on recursive assumptions:
You trust X because X has a good rep.
X has a good rep because others say so.
You trust those others because…?
Eventually, without a root of trust—whether a state, a court, a verified identity, or long-standing social capital—the entire structure becomes circular. There’s no ground truth. Just reputation built on sand.
And so, the real limitation isn’t crypto per se—it’s that trustless systems don’t exist. At best, we shift trust: from institutions to code, from names to keys, from legal consequences to probabilistic deterrents. But the requirement for trust itself never goes away.
In a pseudonymous setting, the cost of betrayal is minimal. A buyer can stiff a seller and vanish. A seller can deliver garbage or nothing. Reputation can be reset at will unless there’s an expensive cost to identity creation or a strongly linked personal history—which violates pseudonymity.
Thus, bootstrapping trust in such environments is not just technically hard—it is philosophically incoherent without compromising at least one of the pillars: privacy, decentralization, or enforceability.
It follows that if you can’t bootstrap trust, you can’t bootstrap anything that depends on it—including money. Money, at its core, is a social contract, a belief system upheld by collective trust. We accept currency in exchange for goods or services because we trust that others will accept it from us in turn. That belief is reinforced by institutional structures: central banks, governments, legal systems, and ultimately, enforcement mechanisms.
But the moment that trust breaks down, the system unravels. If people no longer trust that their money will hold value tomorrow, they will try to offload it as fast as possible, converting it into hard goods, foreign currency, or anything perceived as more stable. This behavior accelerates inflation—sometimes catastrophically.
We’ve seen this repeatedly in history:
In Weimar Germany, the collapse of political and institutional trust after WWI led to hyperinflation, with prices doubling every few days.
In Zimbabwe, trust in government policy collapsed alongside the economy, and the currency became worthless.
In Venezuela, rampant inflation was fueled not just by bad economic policy but by the public’s loss of faith in any institutional ability to right the course.
The underlying mechanism is always the same: money ceases to function as a store of value when the population no longer trusts the system that issues and manages it. Once the shared illusion cracks, even fiat currency—backed by laws, taxes, and armies—can become just colored paper.
Now contrast that with crypto. Cryptocurrencies claim to solve this by removing central authorities and placing trust in mathematics and distributed consensus. But this is not true trustlessness—it's merely replacing institutional trust with collective belief in code and game theory. And the cracks are showing: when confidence drops, as in market crashes or protocol failures, value disappears just as quickly—if not faster—than in fiat regimes.
So the uncomfortable truth is this:
Money only works if you believe it will still work tomorrow.
Without enforceable trust, money becomes unstable. Without shared trust, money becomes meaningless.
And that brings us back to the core issue: you cannot build a functioning economy without some root of trust. Whether that root is institutional, social, or cryptographic, it must be anchored, persistent, and costly to betray. If it’s not, the system becomes inherently fragile.
The reason I used pseudonymous here is exactly because we assumed govs are bad. If govs are good, then crypto degenerates to just a slower system for transactions.
Other currencies get their value because the governments that provide them make people pay taxes. If you want to pay the tax the US government charges you, you're going to need some USD - so there's guaranteed demand, and hence intrinsic worth.
There's also other debt that the US government provides in USD - which provides value as well, in the form of bonds.
BTC has no such driver of wealth. Except perhaps money laundering/transfers without AML provisions.
Yeah bitcoin is (at best[0]) a kind of consensual hallucination, worth something because people believe it is. Fiat is someone with a Navy telling you it's worth money, it's very different.
[0] in practice there's a difference between the idea of a distributed digital currency and the ponzi schemes they give rise to I'm real life. Bitcoin is some greater fool thing, it's not a medium of exchange.
People value a way to store money securely in a place that can’t be physically robbed, that can be sent internationally with low fees quickly.
You don’t need anything else.
For years the haters on here would screech “but it’s volatile” - not really anymore. I wonder what they’ll decide to hate it for now, rather than changing priors.
This doesn't explain why the currencies of different countries behave differently.
In my view, money is a technology. People use a technology if they find it to be useful. I know this sounds circular, but bear with me. A "major" currency is designed to be useful as a medium of exchange, temporary store of value, and tool of government economic policy. For it to serve these purposes, a government has to moderate its own behavior to some extent.
Thus my view is that the value of a major currency is based, not on the expectation of paying taxes in the future, but on more general expectations of the future behavior of the government.
With that said, paying taxes is good use for money that's a short term store of value, because you rarely need to hold onto your tax money for more than a year before paying it.
>Other currencies get their value because the governments that provide them make people pay taxes
That's demonstrably false, because countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela experienced hyperinflation (the complete devaluation of a currency) in spite of the fact that their governments were still forcing people to pay taxes with those currencies. So clearly that alone is not enough to provide intrinsic worth to a currency.
The reason for that devaluation is that trust was eroded. GP's premise is correct, that fiat has value because of governments, but the reasoning here is not fully correct. The value is in the trust that the government and the institutions will continue to function properly.
Same. I mined 32 BTC circa ~2010-2011. Then I did a clean install and forgot I had everything saved on the HDD and nothing written down. I remember them being worth about $1 a pop at the time and thought "fuck it", but I never bothered minting any more.
I think many others, including me, have also the same experience of mining a few and then either forgetting or deleting them because they thought it'd never turn out to be worth anything.
This is definitely something I remind myself of for any investment I sell and later on explodes. For bitcoin there were way too many highs that I definitely would have sold at.
Personally I think that this can be considered on the "bug" side of Bitcoin's finite number coins: if, over time, they are lost, then there's a smaller quantity† of currency that is useable to actually do stuff with.
This can make the 'rate of deflation' that occurs worse:
I don’t think that’s much of an issue for usage. Since a bitcoin can be divided in to 100,000,000 satoshis. There would only need to be a handful of coins left accessible for the system to be usable.
Being deflationary I agree is a problem, but not the idea that there aren’t enough usable coins left.
> When I listen to Bitcoin discussions, one of the advantages people bring up is that there is a limited number of it and you can’t just “print” more.
Which can limit economic growth. When money was based the amount of gold available, there were long periods of economic stagnation because of liquidity issues:
The stagnation only ended when new sources of shiny rocks were found (California; New World).
I find it a dumb idea what whether or not people can get credit to start/expand businesses would be dependent of solving math problems. Yes, credit creation can be "too easy" and become a problem, but making it "too hard" (or physically/mathematically impossible) is even more dumb.
> I find it a dumb idea what whether or not people can get credit to start/expand businesses would be dependent of solving math problems.
That’s quite a mischaracterization. We can at least agree that Bitcoin’s supply is set up to increase at a pre-set rate over time. The math problems are the means to enforce that rate. Not the controlling factor.
> During the "long depression" GDP was still growing at 3-4% so it was hardly stagnation.
I don't know of many things that are viewed positively that have been given a label with "depression" in it.
> Figures from Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz show net national product increased 3 percent per year from 1869 to 1879 and real national product grew at 6.8 percent per year during that time frame.[32] However, since between 1869 and 1879 the population of the United States increased by over 17.5 percent,[33] per capita NNP growth was lower. Following the end of the episode in 1879, the U.S. economy would remain unstable, experiencing recessions for 114 of the 253 months until January 1901.[34]
> The dramatic shift in prices mauled nominal wages – in the United States, nominal wages declined by one-quarter during the 1870s,[14] and as much as one-half in some places, such as Pennsylvania.[35] Although real wages had enjoyed robust growth in the aftermath of the American Civil War, increasing by nearly a quarter between 1865 and 1873, they stagnated until the 1880s, posting no real growth, before resuming their robust rate of expansion in the later 1880s.[36] The collapse of cotton prices devastated the already war-ravaged economy of the southern United States.[17]
> Thousands of American businesses failed, defaulting on more than a billion dollars of debt.[35] One in four laborers in New York were out of work in the winter of 1873–1874[35] and, nationally, a million became unemployed.[35]
If Congress had not demonetized silver in 1873, the metal’s decreasing value would have curbed the deflation of the time. I believe that this was one of the US Government’s greatest mistakes ever, because the reaction to the economic crisis in the 1870’s had a profound effect on the failure of Reconstruction. Friedman wrote a paper on this, called “The Crime of 1873.”
Which is equivalent to deflation, which parent suggests is harmful to bitcoin's viability. In order to claim that "this is fine" you would need to refute the claim that deflation is bad.
> Which is equivalent to deflation, which parent suggests is harmful to bitcoin's viability.
Deflation is built into Bitcoin by design and is one of its most notable features regarding its coin growth schedule. This pros and cons of that approach have been discussed ad infinitum in the crypto community.
I wonder when did cypherpunks started to discuss this kind of mechanisms for digital currency. Was it obvious from day one or an idea that came later in the design phases.
Cypherpunks were discussing digital gold and Austrian economics in the 1990s. I wouldn't say there was any kind of consensus but the ideas were out there.
The finite nature of btc, low transaction volume, and increasing cost of mining made deflation a given. The original designers simply did not solve this problem. BTC’s dominance in the crypto community suggests that this trait was advantageous for BTCs growth as existing holders are incentivized to add additional use cases/transaction volume.
There were early attempts at inflationary cryptocurrencies too but they didn't catch on; all other things being equal, people prefer to hold currencies that gain value over time, not lose value.
Given the context, "this is fine" is obviously an ironic reference to the cartoon dog sitting on a chair at the dining room table with a mug of coffee in a burning house meme.
Normally I would say you're right, but I read the context opposite to you; I read the "fine" as a straight/literal statement: the author of "this is fine" is disputing the author's parent's statement that "this can be considered [a bug]".
It’s a solid store of value. One can borrow against that held BTC, and as it appreciates over time, the loan-to-value ratio improves, without having to do anything. Also avoids capital gains taxes since you're not spending it.
Bitcoin is the world's number one store of value for converting young, impressionable men's wages into thin air and moving those dollars to other people instead.
It's a compelling rival to multi-level marketing for women in that both prospects entice low-socioeconomic standing peoples into thinking they are building value instead of consuming it.
Deflation is what you want for investment assets. Btc is primarily a value store and commodity like gold, not a currency. Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.
> Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.
And is deflation a good or bad thing for the livelihood and well-being of human beings?
How many people in the US has a mortgage or some kind of debt (student, medical)? Inflation makes the burden of debt easier, deflation makes it worse.
And the Top (0.)1% already has an easy enough time with parking/generating value. Deflation would only help them more (and make things hard for everyone under them).
Saving isn’t economically productive, on a societal level. Spending is. Investing is.
Deflation inherently disincentivizes doing anything with the currency other than sitting on it. Want to buy something? You’d be better off waiting and buying it tomorrow because it will be worth less in your deflationary currency at that point. No one has an incentive to lend their money to others to use it more productively, so no growth occurs. No one buys anything, producers can’t sell anything, and no one can get capital to start any business ventures. The sole, viable way to accumulate wealth is to take the currency and stuff it under the mattress.
This results in a society much like Europe described in a Jane Austen novel, where wealth is simply inherited and the upper class doesn’t actually serve an economic function. They just exist to perpetuate their wealth and dole out subsistence wages to those who work their estates and have absolutely no chance of improving their station.
It’s an inherently broken system and a perfect example of Chesterton’s fence by tech types assuming they know better than everyone else.
> Inflation punishes savers and rewards debtors, i.e. it disincentivises the more economically productive behaviour.
Quite the opposite.
Deflation encourages hoarding of cash because it just sits there and increases in value. "If you want to retain the purchasing power of your money, it should participate in society via investment." — Nick Maggiulli
Isn't saving (i.e. sitting on assets) less economically productive than spending? Inflation rewards productivity by making productive use of money the only way to avoid loss over time?
I love how people bring up deflationary spiral as a "peril" while the prerequisite for it is the universal and smashing success of Bitcoin.
The only "problem" Bitcoin poses for economies is for governments to fine-tune their local economies via currency production and related controls. In that sense, we should watch how events unfold in Turkey.
* among major "regular" economies, Turkey has the highest % of people holding crypto (≈20%). Second only to special zones UAE and Singapore (31%, 24%).
* Turkish lira is steadily inflated over the last 30-40 years, well over 10% and recently over 50%.
* Turkey does not have mandate for pricing goods in local currency: you can pay in dollars or euros, along the local lira.
* When you enter Istanbul airport, Every. Single. Gate. is marked with BTCTurk ad, inside and outside - the major crypto exchange in the country.
* Istanbul city market is full of traders who use USDT on Tron.
The experiment of social game "Bitcoin" boils down to this: will the people self-organize the functioning economy with monetary freedom, while the gov loses its grip on it; or will the economy collapse without government's regulation and protective management?
This is just a convenient way to access stable western currency. Having been to Russia and Argentina during their worst inflation years before crypto, they solved their issues by asking for US paper dollars. Crypto is just saving them currency exchange fees.
And there's no way Turkiye is behind the value of BTC. It's still driven by speculators.
> Turkish lira is steadily inflated over the last 30-40 years, well over 10% and recently over 50%.
Because the authoritarian government took over the previously independent central bank and lowered interest rates. Higher inflation was predicted by mainstream economists, and they were right.
It's a success today, we haven't gotten to when they stop issuing any more, and mining is funded by transaction fees. I suspect there are going to be some problems then.
> Like what? As far as I can tell, it will solidify its store of value.
Which is the bug:
> No currency should be able to buy the same basket of goods over very long timespans through hoarding. If you want to retain the purchasing power of your money, it should participate in society via investment.
That’s a “hot take” that people take as an axiom. What if it isn’t? What is the precise definition of “participating in society”? What level of earning and spending is considered morally good and who’s to decide that? (Meta questions arise when discussing conflicts of interest of the deciders.)
The day Satoshi finally decides to move some btc around, I wonder how many automatic emails, api calls, etc will be performed because of so many people setting up alerts.
On a side note, if quantum algorithms break elliptic curve cryptography, then wouldn’t Satoshi’s wallets and others be flooding the market with coin transfers?
The BTC network will need to require all addresses with large Bitcoin UTXOs to send them to new wallets, that are quantum-resistant, by a certain date, or lose the ability to move that money.
Price is dumping today, i wonder how much of a role this is playing. those coins will be hitting an exchange likely. This has always been the problem with bitcoin.. the implicit assumption is that many coins are lost , but if the early adopters start cashing out, prices will fall fast. Institutional buying and retail is still small relative to the early adopters. There are many people , miners who are quietly siting on huge fortunes.
Easy to kick yourself in retrospect but if we could see the future we'd all be millionaires. AAPL was $0.28 in 2002 (adjusted for splits, something like $12 at the time).
It is still a scam. Its just that critical mass of delusional people bought into it like Gamestop or Tesla stock. Even super obvious scams like Nikola take years to register price wise.
Some of us think it may be Richard Heart, who for me is the most interesting person in crypto, and I do dabble in his stuff.
I'm aware that he absolutely looks like your average crypto scammer, but the game theory of what he's doing is fascinating, and plausible enough for me to put a decent amount of money in his stuff (obviously, nowhere near enough to actually affect my life negatively, that would be stupid.)
A run down for those who might be interested:
-- Bought the worlds largest diamond
-- Forked ethereum (Pulsechain)
-- recently completely acquitted by the SEC.
Maybe that guy who was digging up a landfill to find his old HDD finally found it!
Seriously though, what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?
For anyone else who's been vaguely following the story as it popped up every few years, the latest news came out a few days ago : he finally gave up.
> he finally gave up
Sounds like something someone who found few billion USD on a thumb drive would say :)
I wouldn't say anything.
Has he opened a bar instead?
That’s definitely also what I would publicize if I actually found the HDD. :)
He lost his court battle to force the local government running the dump to allow him to dig the last I heard. So I doubt it, he wasn't even allowed to really try.
Source?
https://x.com/howelzy
> what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?
Even if that were possible, you could brute force one wallet. Not eight wallets closely related to each other.
Keys created with an RNG that turned out to be a little too predictable?
Or some other flaw found in a wallet’s key generation?
Kinda like what happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195493
(Or exactly that but nobody tried to attack this again with moar power?)
One of my students believes Elon Musk and Peter Thiel created Bitcoin. Here's the summary of the 5 page doc he presented:
In 2000, according to Peter Thiel, he met with the E-Gold team in Anguilla.
Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.
In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.
By 2004, there were over a million E‑Gold accounts. Banks weren’t happy about it. Meanwhile, Elon and Peter understood exactly how much potential this new kind of digital currency had.
In 2007, the banks took the founders of E-Gold to court for running an unlicensed money‑transmitting business. That same year, the E-Gold engineers were out of work.
Bitcoin was invented in 2008, the same year Elon was broke and busy trying to save both SpaceX and Tesla from going bankrupt.
His theory is that Elon and Peter hired the smartest engineers from the E-Gold team and asked them to build blockchain so they could create their own version of E-Gold. The team worked on Bitcoin from 2007 to 2010 under the alias of Nakamoto.
Perhaps plausible until you mention that they hired a team to build it.
There's no way, even if it was a single-digit number of people team that they would remain silent. If it was just Elon/Thiel I could perhaps believe it.
Also keep in mind that there were some very desperate years for Elon where his companies were extremely close to bankruptcy, wouldn't he have tapped into that bitcoin if he had access to it?
I do not think that Elon would not claim he is the inventor by now. The team theory makes this entirely unbelievable. Something like this can only be pulled of by 1-2 person's whith exceptional self-restraint.
My counterpoint is that if Elon were involved in any way at all, he would have taken credit for it publicly by now.
It was jack.
> Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.
> In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.
This doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Except PayPal wasn't invented by Elon or Peter. It was Elon's company's plan to build the digital bank but they were failing quite spectacularly at it.
They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc.
Elon lasted four months as CEO of PayPal, trying to convert it from Java to ASP until the Board didn't ask him to resign, but fired him, the morning he left on his honeymoon after getting married.
PayPal is a complete red herring there. Elon had no participation in ideas on digital currency there.
nope
> closely related to each other.
Like, sequential? Because if you were brute forcing...
I would say the odds are zero because that's the likelihood of being able to brute-force anything in the key space.
It's not zero. https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies
It's close enough.
There are 200 million+ BTC wallets.
They've found 54 out of 200 million+ or about 0.00002% of wallets - in how many years?
People are actively doing it. Mostly using clore.ai on their 4090x bundles.
I used to work in the gpu rental space up to about a month ago.
I talked to multiple people dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars on looking for those keys.
I'd put house odds at say 20:1 that someone cracked it over someone holding for 14 years and deciding now is strike time.
Also if it's a true crack, then Bitcoin price could collapse swiftly if someone just snatched a wallet for 200k of compute or whatever.
That's always been the real existential risk. I talked about it as the DES problem over a decade ago. Let's see if this is it
Those people were wasting their money. They could be running those GPUs from now until the end of the universe and still have approximately 0% chance of finding a single used key.
Right. Those were the ones I talked to, just by random chance. It means that there are a lot of them.
This implicates a few things - (1) people win the lottery every day and (2) it's highly unlikely that the best techniques are publicly known.
Perhaps there's something that requires $1,000,000 in investment to yield a 1:100 chance of finding a particular targeted wallet using some clever shortcuts.
No new revolutionary math, no substantial breakthroughs, just some clever people with a lot of resources and a goal.
Either explanation is speculative. I think the "lucky researchers at some University" theory is more likely then the "let's wait 14 years until this $1,000 becomes $1,000,000,000."
Especially because (1) we're not exactly at some high water mark and (2) if this was just a person with a wallet trying to do something like pay for life's uncertainties, you can do basically 100% of that with like 4btc.
However if you successfully snatched the wallet, you're on a clock before someone else gets it. This is exactly the kind of movement you'd be doing
Also if some old bitcoiner comes out and says "hey that was me", we're still up in the air. If I had snatched a billion dollar wallet, the first thing I'd do is payoff an old btc'er to claim its there's to prevent market panic.
This isn’t like lottery odds. The space of keys here is vast. Like unimaginably so. 2^256 is a lot of keys.
If someone had a faster method for breaking elliptic curve keys, fast enough to have a realistic chance on GPUs, the repercussions for that would be waaaaaay larger than merely stealing some bitcoin. This is the same math upon which nearly all digital security in common use today is based. It’d be full-on cryptopocalypse.
How does the equation change with $100m of cloud or GPU compute as GP speculated? These are all hobbyists.
It would take approximately 6B H100 GPU days to crack every active BTC wallet.
So if you had 10,000 H100s running, it'd only take ~1500 years.
You'd have a high probability to find key in under ~1000 years, though.
Even if I'm off by 3 orders of magnitude, it would take a decade and cost billions, and not make financial sense.
*at most ... years.
People always forget those numbers are worst case scenarios. I mean, you can get luck on the very first guess too.
If that’s the plan you can guess a number for free, no outlay needed.
If your guess is generated by a QRNG and many worlds is true, than one version of you is very happy although the expected value is 1.03×10−66 USD.
Active addresses have less entropy too
It changes that if you attempt to liquidate that much BTC, BTC crashes and you've got 90% less money than you hoped for.
Do you really think they have no notion of liquidity? Why would they attempt to liquidate it all at once?
Because maybe this isn't satoshi waking up, but finally those kidnappers hit that poor guy in the latest "we found satoshi" documentary
They could also do a private party transaction to sell the coins outside of an exchange, in order to hide the sale and also hide the price of the tokens sold.
This is common practice in the stock market, called "dark pools" [0]
> Dark pools came about primarily to facilitate block trading by institutional investors who did not wish to impact the markets with their large orders and obtain adverse prices for their trades.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/050614/introdu...
Outside, as in off the blockchain? That would mean that after the transaction, both sides would know the key to the wallet and there would be a race about who lights up a transaction first.
After the transaction, you can still send the bitcoin to the purchaser's wallet.
But since the purchase itself happens off exchange, there's no record of how much the coins were sold for, so no impact on market price.
A large wallet that’s been dormant for years suddenly becoming active will tend to pressure the price lower from the implied increase in liquid supply and fear that the wallet will continue to distribute coins.
It’s not just the printing of transaction price that can affect the market.
The vast majority of BTC transactions are done this way. Anything of any size is traded via OTC desks or other more private avenues.
Just the fear of future liquidation would eventually severely crash BTC.
Like it's crashing now on this news?
There's ~$188B in Satoshi era wallets.
While ~$8B is huge news, due to the potential that all ~$188B might be in play, when most investors probably expected it was not prior to this - or at least the probability was low enough to barely factor, it's unlikely to crash BTC.
Further, moving BTC is one thing. Showing signs of liquidation is another.
That much should be able to get liquidated intelligently without moving the market.
It depends how it's sold. Market orders would have more impact than OTC .
yeah, people think it's the selling that makes the price fall. it is the anticipation . markets are forward looking
if someone could brute force a key, they would target small inactive wallets , rather than big wallets and drawing attention to it
Not true at all! Everyone knows there are holes in the crypto algorithms and implementations which agencies use to achieve any objective they may have. On top of that there are also holes across the software and hardware stacks of various implementations. Just because they run all the researchers and fund a lot of it does not mean there are no holes.
Especially now with AI, I wouldn't be surprised if an amateur kicked a bunch of tires and got lucky.
Just because they are not published, does not mean they are not using them, someone else found them and are using them. Or they just have the keys from back in the day.
Can't wait to follow this story as it unfolds. The other risk is Quantum... That is going to be real fun when it starts making leaps above Moores Law.
There needs to be a industry wide effort NOW! That researches and generates keys in unconventional ways, different than the ways they are being generated now. Because Quantum is a beast. Those keys will need to be Quantum proof, which means that even if the agent knows the algorithm that is used to generate the keys they cannot duplicate the keys that were generated the first instance it was run. Or you can start doing Hashing across fingerprint, eye and dna data. That is coming my folks!
You dont understand bitcoin or the math or the cryptography ehind it.
Can you look me in the eye and state that you understand Bitcoin and the math and the cryptography behind it?
Even if you do, there could in theory still be a way to narrow down the key space or find some other shortcut to a wallet key, even if nobody has figured it out yet.
He had only 7500. The recent move involves 60,000 according to some Reddit threads
this would be highly improbable. the odds of only remembering enough of the key to brute force it, is slim.
guessing a whale's key? zero
Trivia: there are only five publicly-traded companies with marketcaps larger than bitcoin's:
nVidia Microsoft Apple Amazon Google
BTC's marketcap is also larger than all the silver in the world...
Just a hair under google, it crossed earlier this week I think. This list is fun to look at https://8marketcap.com
[flagged]
Wait til you see the market cap of the shitcoin I just released!
> Satoshi-era
Not true in the slightest. Satoshi was already gone by 2010, and in 2011 there were ~8000 transactions per day from folks outside of Satoshi's circle.
I really wonder if Satoshi’s fortune is gone forever. Maybe the CIA found his real identity and uncovered his keys. Dumping that much BTC on the market would crash the market and probably even tank other financial markets.
My theory was always that Satoshi burned the coins from the beginning. There never was any fortune.
Why would the cia want to crash the market?
the CIA actively relies on many means, including BTC, to organize their activities.
did the rumor that Satoshi was Paul Leroux go anywhere? since he is now in the hands of the intelligence services for a while this could be a good explanation for Satoshi not being able to access its coins.
Reports on the Muskman's site are saying it's more than $14Bn worth of wallets right now.
Whoever got these wallets better sell them and get a good security company on rotation quickly before anyone find out who they are. Seems like wrench attacks been been happening a lot more the last year.
I don't really get these; there's not a ton of difference between using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of Bitcoin vs using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of any other liquid asset that could be used to buy bitcoins.
If I had 8 billion in cash in my bank account and put in a transfer order, they'd block it, call me, make me come into a branch, make sure there weren't any burly guys with wrenches escorting me in, and maybe call the FBI if anything seemed off.
And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen, during which time I could call and cancel.
Also, for the rest of your life, you'd be able to get the people arrested who stole the money.
So they'd either to kill you after, and it would be obvious why, and there'd be an easy lead on who.
Your odds of getting away with stealing that kind of money conventionally are essentially zero.
Alright, so I can see it as a matter of scale.
Recently there was a local case of someone extorting people by leaving threats in the mailboxes to not burn people’s houses down in exchange for $1k in bitcoin.
But who would keep $8B in bitcoin without some protections in place to ensure that it can’t be easily transferred away, given the associated upside/downside? That’s... roughly as foolish as keeping $8B in actual cash/gold/gems (notwithstanding the logistical problems with the size/weight) under your mattress.
But the criminal's stolen BTC are tainted. Exchanges will not accept them. procession of them is a crime
Mixers will though.
> And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen
or you get a better bank to begin with
most banks that call their slow processes "security purposes" are actually just putting up barriers to maintain liquidity. the banks that go bust are the ones that got clientele based on making it convenient to transfer
This is the other edge of that double edged sword of "no regulations". It's a lot easier to steal bitcoin with no consequence because there isn't an entire financial system backed by people with guns to help you if you are wronged.
> there isn't an entire financial system backed by people with guns to help you if you are wronged
It's not the "financial system" that comes and hunts criminals with guns, but police, acting based on what laws they seen has been broken. And stealing $3 billion is as illegal if it was Bitcoins, as if it was Euro or USD.
There are essentially no criminals that are stealing crypto where the police will have jurisdiction. It's main use case outside of speculation is committing international fraud and theft with no consequences.
You are confused. The people with guns will come for you if you steal bitcoin and they know who you are.
> Bitcoin thief sentenced to 5 years in prison for stealing $1 billion in crypto and laundering it with his social-media rapper wife ‘Razzlekhan’
https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/11/15/bitcoin-thief-sentence...
No, he was changed with laundering.
Bitcoin doesn’t ask questions when you unexpectedly want to make a very large transfer to a new payee. Your banker will.
But exchanges will if you deposit that much, and will freeze your $ if they don't like your response.
What does Micheal Saylor do?
You just need to swap them for monero and then monero for litecoin or bitcoin again. Now you have anonymous, untraceable coins.
Not quite that simple, that’s vulnerable to an Eve-Alice-Eve attack. If $1B in BTC moves around in short succession the TXs can be linked easily. You need a mixer that splits up the amount to be paid out, and even then it needs to be done piecemeal.
Do all outputs from exchange are automatically trusted? Seems like any should be tainted forever. Or is it impossible to tell whats from mixer?
There are companies (Chainalysis) that track blockchains and ‘grade’ wallets according to who they’ve transacted with. If enough of a wallet’s funds are from a mixer it may be scored a grade lower than the exchange’s KYC rules allow to do business with.
I doubt there's enough liquidity to swap that kind of money...
Monero daily volume is like $50m lol
looking at the address types this just looks more like a security rotation to a stronger hashing method
[dead]
Is this why Martin Shkreli quit streaming? Did he actually crack them?
Quantum shorts got to him first.
Might be the Pizza guy! The other thing they may have a small fortune in forked coins too. Like Bitcoin Cash.
If you have $8B in BTC, is there any reasonable way to turn that into any fiat currency? USD, EUR, anything? Can you even buy that much USDC?
Sure you can. If you do it over a few months, it will get absorbed by market because there are buyers (as of today). Though this is kind of unprecedented, so markets could find this kind of event bearish and front run your sells which tanks the price. But I can't imagine I'd care if I held for 14 years. There is also USDT which is much bigger than USDC.
Also if you approach Coinbase/Kraken/$exchange and tell them you have X million to offload, they'll probably let you do it off-market, so no one (except for the ledger, obviously) would really notice.
Loans using the BTC as collateral.
Buy good / commodities with BTC and resell them.
Sell the BTC.
Probably not all $8 gigadollars at once, but is there any reason you would immediately need that much?
> but is there any reason you would immediately need that much?
Because you worry that BTC will crash and want it in something more stable?
BTC is volatile but it isn't going to crash tomorrow or any time soon at least not by the amount that would make sense to sell with a wallet this old.
Compared to the “Magnificent Seven”, Bitcoin’s volatility has put it in the middle, while it’s performance puts it at or near the top depending on the time window.
https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/research-and-insights/...
https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/06/bitcoin-has-been-a...
Well, one way to lower the price would be to put eight billion on the market all at once.
Start an ETF?
If the Bitcoin Sovereign Wealth Fund scam that was announced after Trump's election is launched, there will be a price bottom that is financed by public funds.
I'm not sure what has come of it. Trump is doing well with his own coins:
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/uae-fund-buys-100-m...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-07-02/donald-tr...
If you don't want to bother, you can auction it and some hedge fund which wants to buy will take it from your hand.
yes, that’s why the exchanges are nearly $100bn companies
between multiple corporations buying $1bn per week, retail, and nation states, there is a large appetite for this amount with a few phone calls
nah, they are worth that much because of inflated valuations
Someone just got out of jail.
An old friend of mine died 11 years ago from an overdose, and I am almost certain he used darknet markets to buy other drugs.
It's very likely there is a wallet forever lost with many Bitcoin in it from his passing. No way his family would have known anything about it (Bitcoin/dark markets)or cared much anyway circa 2014. I'll admit I have pondered ways to check this, but it's too far fetched.
I can't help but wonder if the wave of fentanyl that made optiate addict deaths skyrocket, left a huge wake of forever lost Bitcoin. I know there was a lot of overlap between addicts and darknet market users.
Most addicts would likely not hold Bitcoin in wallet, but spend it on getting their next fix as soon as they buy it. It's not like you're thinking long-term, invest in Bitcoin so you can buy more drugs down the line. There would be leftover change but not big amounts.
You'd be surprised how many of these addicts would be buying for multiple other less tech savvy addicts and essentially becoming small time dealers themselves to fund their own habit. If they got locked up or ODd at the right time there could've been a few thousand usd in btc in a wallet at a time when each btc was worth less than 10usd.
Ross Ulbricht got out a few months ago. Could be his.
he only had $40 million . if he had $1 billion the feds would have known about it
lol. Did you read the whole wired piece on how the feds couldn't find anything under their nose on that case?
Most interesting to me is that people are worried about a $2B transaction moving the market.
How does that compare to the market depth of actual currencies or commodities? BTC, being objectively worthless, must be much more sensitive to people wanting to sell I'd expect.
How is BTC objectively worthless (I'm guessing you mean "intrinsicly worthlesss"?) as opposed to USD or other major currencies?
It's not backed by a government, and while some may say that's a good thing, I think it is not.
Without institutional backing, crypto is just a number in a database that people agree is worth something—for now.
If that collective belief evaporates, there’s no court, no army, no tax base, and no GDP to catch it. Contrast this with fiat currency, which—while not backed by gold—is backed by coercive power and taxation.
Let’s start from something even more fundamental. How do you bootstrap trust? Suppose two pseudonymous entities online want to exchange money for services. Such a system will likely need a reputation system to establish the trustworthiness of entities. That system needs to be tolerant to Sybil attacks (i.e., forging multiple identities), while also ensuring the service provider isn’t exploited by a buyer who refuses to pay after receiving the work.
But this exposes a deeper issue: trust cannot be bootstrapped from scratch. It needs either:
Without these, any trust system collapses into a prisoner’s dilemma. Each actor is incentivized to defect (cheat) unless: But even escrow only works when dispute resolution is possible and trusted. And dispute resolution requires either a neutral arbitrator (who must have their own identity and incentives) or hard-coded, binary rules, which rarely capture the complexity of creative or service work.More fundamentally, trust-based systems are built on recursive assumptions:
Eventually, without a root of trust—whether a state, a court, a verified identity, or long-standing social capital—the entire structure becomes circular. There’s no ground truth. Just reputation built on sand.And so, the real limitation isn’t crypto per se—it’s that trustless systems don’t exist. At best, we shift trust: from institutions to code, from names to keys, from legal consequences to probabilistic deterrents. But the requirement for trust itself never goes away.
In a pseudonymous setting, the cost of betrayal is minimal. A buyer can stiff a seller and vanish. A seller can deliver garbage or nothing. Reputation can be reset at will unless there’s an expensive cost to identity creation or a strongly linked personal history—which violates pseudonymity.
Thus, bootstrapping trust in such environments is not just technically hard—it is philosophically incoherent without compromising at least one of the pillars: privacy, decentralization, or enforceability.
It follows that if you can’t bootstrap trust, you can’t bootstrap anything that depends on it—including money. Money, at its core, is a social contract, a belief system upheld by collective trust. We accept currency in exchange for goods or services because we trust that others will accept it from us in turn. That belief is reinforced by institutional structures: central banks, governments, legal systems, and ultimately, enforcement mechanisms.
But the moment that trust breaks down, the system unravels. If people no longer trust that their money will hold value tomorrow, they will try to offload it as fast as possible, converting it into hard goods, foreign currency, or anything perceived as more stable. This behavior accelerates inflation—sometimes catastrophically.
We’ve seen this repeatedly in history:
The underlying mechanism is always the same: money ceases to function as a store of value when the population no longer trusts the system that issues and manages it. Once the shared illusion cracks, even fiat currency—backed by laws, taxes, and armies—can become just colored paper.Now contrast that with crypto. Cryptocurrencies claim to solve this by removing central authorities and placing trust in mathematics and distributed consensus. But this is not true trustlessness—it's merely replacing institutional trust with collective belief in code and game theory. And the cracks are showing: when confidence drops, as in market crashes or protocol failures, value disappears just as quickly—if not faster—than in fiat regimes.
So the uncomfortable truth is this:
Without enforceable trust, money becomes unstable. Without shared trust, money becomes meaningless.And that brings us back to the core issue: you cannot build a functioning economy without some root of trust. Whether that root is institutional, social, or cryptographic, it must be anchored, persistent, and costly to betray. If it’s not, the system becomes inherently fragile.
The reason I used pseudonymous here is exactly because we assumed govs are bad. If govs are good, then crypto degenerates to just a slower system for transactions.
Other currencies get their value because the governments that provide them make people pay taxes. If you want to pay the tax the US government charges you, you're going to need some USD - so there's guaranteed demand, and hence intrinsic worth.
There's also other debt that the US government provides in USD - which provides value as well, in the form of bonds.
BTC has no such driver of wealth. Except perhaps money laundering/transfers without AML provisions.
Yeah bitcoin is (at best[0]) a kind of consensual hallucination, worth something because people believe it is. Fiat is someone with a Navy telling you it's worth money, it's very different.
[0] in practice there's a difference between the idea of a distributed digital currency and the ponzi schemes they give rise to I'm real life. Bitcoin is some greater fool thing, it's not a medium of exchange.
People value a way to store money securely in a place that can’t be physically robbed, that can be sent internationally with low fees quickly.
You don’t need anything else.
For years the haters on here would screech “but it’s volatile” - not really anymore. I wonder what they’ll decide to hate it for now, rather than changing priors.
This doesn't explain why the currencies of different countries behave differently.
In my view, money is a technology. People use a technology if they find it to be useful. I know this sounds circular, but bear with me. A "major" currency is designed to be useful as a medium of exchange, temporary store of value, and tool of government economic policy. For it to serve these purposes, a government has to moderate its own behavior to some extent.
Thus my view is that the value of a major currency is based, not on the expectation of paying taxes in the future, but on more general expectations of the future behavior of the government.
With that said, paying taxes is good use for money that's a short term store of value, because you rarely need to hold onto your tax money for more than a year before paying it.
>Other currencies get their value because the governments that provide them make people pay taxes
That's demonstrably false, because countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela experienced hyperinflation (the complete devaluation of a currency) in spite of the fact that their governments were still forcing people to pay taxes with those currencies. So clearly that alone is not enough to provide intrinsic worth to a currency.
The reason for that devaluation is that trust was eroded. GP's premise is correct, that fiat has value because of governments, but the reasoning here is not fully correct. The value is in the trust that the government and the institutions will continue to function properly.
Imagine you have one of these addresses precomputed and you see it in a flashed alert
Do you sweep to a new address or what?
EDIT: Hypothetically, not running on Majorana-2
Perhaps also see the linked page "Top Dormant for 5 years Bitcoin Addresses":
* https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-dormant_5y-bitcoin-address...
I wish I had access to my old wallet. I mined around 1.5BTC with my laptop and I deleted the wallet after a while because it was worthless.
Same. I mined 32 BTC circa ~2010-2011. Then I did a clean install and forgot I had everything saved on the HDD and nothing written down. I remember them being worth about $1 a pop at the time and thought "fuck it", but I never bothered minting any more.
I think many others, including me, have also the same experience of mining a few and then either forgetting or deleting them because they thought it'd never turn out to be worth anything.
you probably would have sold it at $100 or something anyway
Yep. I used to pay my Dish Network bill with BTC. Youth is wasted on the young and hindsight is 20/20
This is definitely something I remind myself of for any investment I sell and later on explodes. For bitcoin there were way too many highs that I definitely would have sold at.
I know, that's why I'd like to have the wallet now :)
Even if BTC hits 1 million in the future, 150k now would be life changing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466896
Personally I think that this can be considered on the "bug" side of Bitcoin's finite number coins: if, over time, they are lost, then there's a smaller quantity† of currency that is useable to actually do stuff with.
This can make the 'rate of deflation' that occurs worse:
* https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral
* https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2014/06/the-perils-of-bitcoi...
* https://crypto.bi/deflationary/
† I am aware of satoshis.
I don’t think that’s much of an issue for usage. Since a bitcoin can be divided in to 100,000,000 satoshis. There would only need to be a handful of coins left accessible for the system to be usable.
Being deflationary I agree is a problem, but not the idea that there aren’t enough usable coins left.
When I listen to Bitcoin discussions, one of the advantages people bring up is that there is a limited number of it and you can’t just “print” more.
Considering this, while it is true that all this makes deflation worse, I’d assume most bitcoin hodlers would not mind this.
> When I listen to Bitcoin discussions, one of the advantages people bring up is that there is a limited number of it and you can’t just “print” more.
Which can limit economic growth. When money was based the amount of gold available, there were long periods of economic stagnation because of liquidity issues:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine
The stagnation only ended when new sources of shiny rocks were found (California; New World).
I find it a dumb idea what whether or not people can get credit to start/expand businesses would be dependent of solving math problems. Yes, credit creation can be "too easy" and become a problem, but making it "too hard" (or physically/mathematically impossible) is even more dumb.
> I find it a dumb idea what whether or not people can get credit to start/expand businesses would be dependent of solving math problems.
That’s quite a mischaracterization. We can at least agree that Bitcoin’s supply is set up to increase at a pre-set rate over time. The math problems are the means to enforce that rate. Not the controlling factor.
In US in 19th century stocks of banks that went bankrupt were used as a sort of paper money to solve the problem of money availability.
So the finite amount of base money would just mean that derivative products would be used as practical money.
>there were long periods of economic stagnation
During the "long depression" GDP was still growing at 3-4% so it was hardly stagnation.
> During the "long depression" GDP was still growing at 3-4% so it was hardly stagnation.
I don't know of many things that are viewed positively that have been given a label with "depression" in it.
> Figures from Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz show net national product increased 3 percent per year from 1869 to 1879 and real national product grew at 6.8 percent per year during that time frame.[32] However, since between 1869 and 1879 the population of the United States increased by over 17.5 percent,[33] per capita NNP growth was lower. Following the end of the episode in 1879, the U.S. economy would remain unstable, experiencing recessions for 114 of the 253 months until January 1901.[34]
> The dramatic shift in prices mauled nominal wages – in the United States, nominal wages declined by one-quarter during the 1870s,[14] and as much as one-half in some places, such as Pennsylvania.[35] Although real wages had enjoyed robust growth in the aftermath of the American Civil War, increasing by nearly a quarter between 1865 and 1873, they stagnated until the 1880s, posting no real growth, before resuming their robust rate of expansion in the later 1880s.[36] The collapse of cotton prices devastated the already war-ravaged economy of the southern United States.[17]
> Thousands of American businesses failed, defaulting on more than a billion dollars of debt.[35] One in four laborers in New York were out of work in the winter of 1873–1874[35] and, nationally, a million became unemployed.[35]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression#United_States
Seems like a grand-ol time.
If Congress had not demonetized silver in 1873, the metal’s decreasing value would have curbed the deflation of the time. I believe that this was one of the US Government’s greatest mistakes ever, because the reaction to the economic crisis in the 1870’s had a profound effect on the failure of Reconstruction. Friedman wrote a paper on this, called “The Crime of 1873.”
What happens when all bitcoin is mined, societal collapse?
It will go from the near totality of people acquiring their bitcoins through purchase to actual totality.
We have other coins too.
Losing some bitcoin is effectively equivalent (over the long term) to distributing it to all other holders (proportionally). So this is fine.
Which is equivalent to deflation, which parent suggests is harmful to bitcoin's viability. In order to claim that "this is fine" you would need to refute the claim that deflation is bad.
> Which is equivalent to deflation, which parent suggests is harmful to bitcoin's viability.
Deflation is built into Bitcoin by design and is one of its most notable features regarding its coin growth schedule. This pros and cons of that approach have been discussed ad infinitum in the crypto community.
I wonder when did cypherpunks started to discuss this kind of mechanisms for digital currency. Was it obvious from day one or an idea that came later in the design phases.
> Was it obvious from day one or an idea that came later in the design phases.
The Bitcoin paper came out in 2009, and the deflationary criticism was already recorded in 2010:
* https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Deflationary_spiral&...
2014 article:
* https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2014/06/the-perils-of-bitcoi...
Cypherpunks were discussing digital gold and Austrian economics in the 1990s. I wouldn't say there was any kind of consensus but the ideas were out there.
The finite nature of btc, low transaction volume, and increasing cost of mining made deflation a given. The original designers simply did not solve this problem. BTC’s dominance in the crypto community suggests that this trait was advantageous for BTCs growth as existing holders are incentivized to add additional use cases/transaction volume.
There were early attempts at inflationary cryptocurrencies too but they didn't catch on; all other things being equal, people prefer to hold currencies that gain value over time, not lose value.
And the word currency, or current, implies movement, no?
So I think it's the issue of thinking people will use it as a currency, not that it is not a valuable asset
Given the context, "this is fine" is obviously an ironic reference to the cartoon dog sitting on a chair at the dining room table with a mug of coffee in a burning house meme.
Normally I would say you're right, but I read the context opposite to you; I read the "fine" as a straight/literal statement: the author of "this is fine" is disputing the author's parent's statement that "this can be considered [a bug]".
> Losing some bitcoin is effectively equivalent (over the long term) to distributing it to all other holders (proportionally). So this is fine.
To those that have, more will be given. What about those that do not have?
Slavery.
You can't actually know if they are truly lost or not, though. Any dormant wallet could reactivate at any time, just like the wallets in this story.
Fair point. It seems largely that bitcoin is a store of value rather than a currency that you do stuff with at this point.
This is one reason why Bitcoin isn't a good currency. Deflationary trends give holders a lot of incentive to keep holding and never spend.
You can buy a lot of pizzas with it now
You can't buy a single pizza with it now. Only by exchanging it for an actual, better currency
You can buy a pizza from me with Bitcoin now.
I’m not a vendor or even a chef. But, anything is negotiable.
It’s a solid store of value. One can borrow against that held BTC, and as it appreciates over time, the loan-to-value ratio improves, without having to do anything. Also avoids capital gains taxes since you're not spending it.
Bitcoin is the world's number one store of value for converting young, impressionable men's wages into thin air and moving those dollars to other people instead.
It's a compelling rival to multi-level marketing for women in that both prospects entice low-socioeconomic standing peoples into thinking they are building value instead of consuming it.
Deflation is what you want for investment assets. Btc is primarily a value store and commodity like gold, not a currency. Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.
The original bitcoin whitepaper was titled: “a peer to peer electronic cash system”
The initial intention does not change the practical reality.
>> Btc is primarily a value store and commodity like gold, not a currency. Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.
> The original bitcoin whitepaper was titled: “a peer to peer electronic cash system”
The goalposts, they move.
> Deflation is a good thing when you are parking value.
And is deflation a good or bad thing for the livelihood and well-being of human beings?
How many people in the US has a mortgage or some kind of debt (student, medical)? Inflation makes the burden of debt easier, deflation makes it worse.
And the Top (0.)1% already has an easy enough time with parking/generating value. Deflation would only help them more (and make things hard for everyone under them).
Inflation punishes savers and rewards debtors, i.e. it disincentivises the more economically productive behaviour.
Saving isn’t economically productive, on a societal level. Spending is. Investing is.
Deflation inherently disincentivizes doing anything with the currency other than sitting on it. Want to buy something? You’d be better off waiting and buying it tomorrow because it will be worth less in your deflationary currency at that point. No one has an incentive to lend their money to others to use it more productively, so no growth occurs. No one buys anything, producers can’t sell anything, and no one can get capital to start any business ventures. The sole, viable way to accumulate wealth is to take the currency and stuff it under the mattress.
This results in a society much like Europe described in a Jane Austen novel, where wealth is simply inherited and the upper class doesn’t actually serve an economic function. They just exist to perpetuate their wealth and dole out subsistence wages to those who work their estates and have absolutely no chance of improving their station.
It’s an inherently broken system and a perfect example of Chesterton’s fence by tech types assuming they know better than everyone else.
> Inflation punishes savers and rewards debtors, i.e. it disincentivises the more economically productive behaviour.
Quite the opposite.
Deflation encourages hoarding of cash because it just sits there and increases in value. "If you want to retain the purchasing power of your money, it should participate in society via investment." — Nick Maggiulli
Isn't saving (i.e. sitting on assets) less economically productive than spending? Inflation rewards productivity by making productive use of money the only way to avoid loss over time?
I love how people bring up deflationary spiral as a "peril" while the prerequisite for it is the universal and smashing success of Bitcoin.
The only "problem" Bitcoin poses for economies is for governments to fine-tune their local economies via currency production and related controls. In that sense, we should watch how events unfold in Turkey.
* among major "regular" economies, Turkey has the highest % of people holding crypto (≈20%). Second only to special zones UAE and Singapore (31%, 24%).
* Turkish lira is steadily inflated over the last 30-40 years, well over 10% and recently over 50%.
* Turkey does not have mandate for pricing goods in local currency: you can pay in dollars or euros, along the local lira.
* When you enter Istanbul airport, Every. Single. Gate. is marked with BTCTurk ad, inside and outside - the major crypto exchange in the country.
* Istanbul city market is full of traders who use USDT on Tron.
The experiment of social game "Bitcoin" boils down to this: will the people self-organize the functioning economy with monetary freedom, while the gov loses its grip on it; or will the economy collapse without government's regulation and protective management?
This is just a convenient way to access stable western currency. Having been to Russia and Argentina during their worst inflation years before crypto, they solved their issues by asking for US paper dollars. Crypto is just saving them currency exchange fees.
And there's no way Turkiye is behind the value of BTC. It's still driven by speculators.
> Turkish lira is steadily inflated over the last 30-40 years, well over 10% and recently over 50%.
Because the authoritarian government took over the previously independent central bank and lowered interest rates. Higher inflation was predicted by mainstream economists, and they were right.
* https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/20/turkeys-erdogan-sac...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_interventions_under_E...
Thank God that would never happen in the US.
> and smashing success of Bitcoin.
It's a success today, we haven't gotten to when they stop issuing any more, and mining is funded by transaction fees. I suspect there are going to be some problems then.
Like what? As far as I can tell, it will solidify its store of value.
> Like what? As far as I can tell, it will solidify its store of value.
Which is the bug:
> No currency should be able to buy the same basket of goods over very long timespans through hoarding. If you want to retain the purchasing power of your money, it should participate in society via investment.
* https://twitter.com/dollarsanddata/status/159265180975079833...
That’s a “hot take” that people take as an axiom. What if it isn’t? What is the precise definition of “participating in society”? What level of earning and spending is considered morally good and who’s to decide that? (Meta questions arise when discussing conflicts of interest of the deciders.)
> useable to actually do stuff with
You mean actually buy stuff? Come on, everybody knows that BTC is used mostly for speculation ...
Discussion landed in another thread (74 points, 32 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466896
why did i not mine bitcoin in 2010? fuck
Because it's a stupid waste of resources, and you had better things to do.
I have been saying for a decade
Satoshi isnt gonna move wallets 1 through 10
But he probably had wallet 55, 182 and 281-290 and has been spending this whole time. Any founder of a crypto project can do that.
The guy found his hd at the dump?
The day Satoshi finally decides to move some btc around, I wonder how many automatic emails, api calls, etc will be performed because of so many people setting up alerts.
Probably North Korea.
On a side note, if quantum algorithms break elliptic curve cryptography, then wouldn’t Satoshi’s wallets and others be flooding the market with coin transfers?
The BTC network will need to require all addresses with large Bitcoin UTXOs to send them to new wallets, that are quantum-resistant, by a certain date, or lose the ability to move that money.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no proof that a general solution to elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem can't be found.
It's reasonable to assume that a solution hasn't been found yet though, otherwise that would be the world's best kept secret.
That's downstream of P vs NP.
Can they be spending sidechain coins quietly or is that visible too?
April 2011 is not Satoshi era. Satoshi had dropped out of public Bitcoin forums by late 2010.
F word is what caught my eye first
Price is dumping today, i wonder how much of a role this is playing. those coins will be hitting an exchange likely. This has always been the problem with bitcoin.. the implicit assumption is that many coins are lost , but if the early adopters start cashing out, prices will fall fast. Institutional buying and retail is still small relative to the early adopters. There are many people , miners who are quietly siting on huge fortunes.
And it’s a major US holiday, whatever that indicates.
It pains me because I learnt about bitcoin way back in 2010 and
I learned about it here, but everyone said it was a scam and not to buy
I learned about it from my friend, but couldn't bother with downloading a wallet client and mining etc
A superposition of wrong and right if there ever was one.
Easy to kick yourself in retrospect but if we could see the future we'd all be millionaires. AAPL was $0.28 in 2002 (adjusted for splits, something like $12 at the time).
It is still a scam. Its just that critical mass of delusional people bought into it like Gamestop or Tesla stock. Even super obvious scams like Nikola take years to register price wise.
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You probably would have sold or lost them anyway. Probably a tiny percentage of people from 2011 still held
As someone who has been into crypto since 2012 and isn't rich, yep
... and? What is happening with people's attention span?
You're supposed to be able to fill in the second half of the sentence based on context. They consider it to be obvious from the first half.
They must be an expert in number theory. I have a marvelous continuation of this sentence which
Where did they transfer them? I see fck in a few lol.
Imagine finding a file on an old laptop from when you were just futzing around 15 years ago. And it was worth $9 billion.
It's not that. These are addresses with 10k BTC each. That's very intentional storage even for 2011.
Wasn’t 10k bitcoin the price of a pizza or something back then?
10K BTC for two Papa John's large pies. see https://marketrealist.com/what-is-the-bitcoin-pizza-transact...
That's about US$500M per pie these days ( 1BTC ~= US$100K )
BTC ranged between $0.30 and $27 back in 2011 so not quite
Aha, so the new administration finally found the NSA's wallet? /s