BTC is NOT traceable. There is nothing to hack. The Gov't can't stop it. That's the whole point of the encryption. Tom Lee explained it would cost billions of dollars to counterfeit just a single BTC. There is no benefit to do that. He explained you are better off hacking the Fed then BTC. And I disagree with Baron on the drugs. That is NOT what is driving the price but it might be driving the use. IF that were to be true, drugs are not inelastic. Meaning there are economic substitutes. If Heroin, priced in BTC becomes too stretched vs Heroin in Dollars, people will take the risk and transact the drug in dollars like they have for decades. It never stopped Pablo Escobar.
Crypto Currency Observations...
- Thread starter Scataphagos
- Start date
BTC is NOT traceable. There is nothing to hack. The Gov't can't stop it. That's the whole point of the encryption. Tom Lee explained it would cost billions of dollars to counterfeit just a single BTC. There is no benefit to do that. He explained you are better off hacking the Fed then BTC. And I disagree with Baron on the drugs. That is NOT what is driving the price but it might be driving the use. IF that were to be true, drugs are not inelastic. Meaning there are economic substitutes. If Heroin, priced in BTC becomes too stretched vs Heroin in Dollars, people will take the risk and transact the drug in dollars like they have for decades. It never stopped Pablo Escobar.
Under Chinese capital controls, BTC likely useful to get money out of the country... a form of money-laundering.
Could be the best (only?) way to make profit outside BTC and a couple of other big ones is to get in on an ICO at a super-cheap insider price, if possible.
Then when it hits the exchange valued at $.01, you cash out leaving the other suckers holding the bag.
Would think after a few of those people would catch on and even that wouldn't work.
I mentioned Electroneum originally. It's supposed to hit exchanges on Nov 1. It was a $40 Million offering, but I don't know how many coins will be in circulation. Once we see that, we'll be able to tell the intrinsic value. My guess it will be <$.01, but those who bought it in the ICO are hoping for $1-$2. Curious to see.
To get paid 10MM in BTC dosen't some one have to be willing to pay you in BTC ? If governments want to regulated this out they can. In your example just put a HUGE payroll type tax on any non fiat payments...no 10MM BTC. Similar to what the U.S. did to tobacco.
Also the Saudi Prince has a similar position as yours on the debt issuance question. The future regulation on BTC may be indirect but it will come.
If I have 10 million in BTC as a company I can pay you, my employee whatever your wage is. Yes, we "both" need to have it and that is the point Tom Lee made in the video. It's like a social network. The more people that own bitcoin, the more valuable it becomes. This contradicts the "cornering" theory that it's being manipulated. If one person accumulates too much it's value will drop, not go up because it ceases to have transactional value. For example, if I was the only user on Facebook it wouldn't be very fun. But if all my friends join, then it becomes an ecosystem.
From my understanding, the hashtag contains all previous transactions, or something to this effect. This means, to me, that its something like a fingerprint. You have no idea who it belongs to when you find one, but slowly you can start to eliminate potential candidates. The hashtag may one day reveal certain participants if someone makes a transaction with someone else that reveals their identity. I'm not an expert on this, but I've seen enough articles about this to to warrant caution if you want to be a criminal and think you will never be caught if you transact with BTC.
The rest of your post with regards to hacking is not central to my point.
Baron
ET Founder
The only part of the puzzle that you're missing is that bitcoin itself is not, and has never been, the ecosystem that Tom Lee was describing. The ecosystem is made up of the darknet marketplaces that bitcoin got integrated into. If it weren't for the drug marketplaces like Silk Road, Agora, Alphabay and countless others, then bitcoin would have very little usefulness. But because these marketplaces brought on bitcoin as the standard currency, then bitcoin was able to piggy back on the growth of these social networks. That's why the 1100+ other coins out there don't have any success. There's no exponentially growing network of users that these alt coins are being integrated into as a currency standard.
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There is no identity. That's the whole point to the blockchain. It's not like a social security number where if you get my name and number you can impersonate me. There is no name to your unique coin. There is no way to connect that coin to you therefore it cannot lead to you. Your coin is a gateway to a unique location within the blockchain that only your encryption knows. I cannot use that encryption to find you or locate you even through the process of elimination. If you could do that, you could mine your own coins very easily and defeat the purpose for the blockchain.
But Baron the argument you are making is that price does not matter. There is an arbitrage here in a way that at some price level, whatever sex slave, drug or weapon that I'm buying on the dark web, there has to be a price where I switch to dollars. For example, say I was buying a gun for one bitcoin 6 months ago at $200. The seller accepted $200 for a gun that is worth 6k today. If I sell a gun today in exchange for 6k in bitcoin and it drops back to $200, I lose a fortune. At some point, there has to be a fair value for a given product even on the black market.
Just the very fact that there is a history of transactions would make me nervous enough. If I knew how a dollar bill traveled around my city for a week, it would be highly informative, even if I didn't know who used the dollar to buy something and who received it as change.
A simple search turns up this article.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/...eful-bitcoins-arent-as-anonymous-as-you-think
I also recall a few months back that when a wallet site was hacked, transactions were able to be matched up with identities. Like I say, but knowledge about this all is very limited, but just the fact that every transaction has a history would make me very cautious if I wanted to do something illicit.