Posted on 07/28/2024 2:27:34 AM PDT by RandFan
@disclosetv
JUST IN - Trump, if President, pledges to form a Bitcoin Reserve, using 210,000 Bitcoin seized by the Department of Justice, as the core of a new “Strategic National Bitcoin Stockpile.”
(Excerpt) Read more at x.com ...
Its been tried. What happens? People keep the bitcoin they have and/or continue to buy it. As long as people will accept it has value....and not just people in China but people outside of China....it will continue to have value regardless of the diktats of the local government. What happens if the EU bans bitcoin use? Europeans keep using it. They park more of their money in offshore accounts with Bitcoin. They can always cash out. They can always exchange that Bitcoin for something else of value anywhere else in the world they go. The EU government can't make it worthless by simply saying it. That's why multiple attempts by the CCP to ban it failed miserably and always will.
They don't control transactions. They can't stop one person from buying or selling or trading Bitcoin for something else with another person. All they can do is mine more Bitcoin at a pre determined rate until all 21 million Bitcoins have been mined.
Are bitcoin miners legally liable for their misbehavior?
What "misbehavior"?
What if the miners convert all their bitcoin holdings into other assets
the price of Bitcoin would temporarily decline before recovering just as with any commodity.
and then go "on strike" (i.e., stop processing bitcoin transactions or demand higher transaction fees)...what happens to the bitcoin system?
Miners don't process transactions. They are not needed to process transactions. Its peer to peer on the Blockchain for all to see. All miners do is mine more Bitcoin. They don't control the currency or the Blockchain.
People who say this is unlikely because it damages the trust and the value of Bitcoin fail to understand the cleverness of criminals.
There have been over a billion Bitcoin transactions since the crypto currency was invented in 2008. How many transactions are necessary for you to no longer be a skeptic? 10 billion? 100 billion?
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This year when I did my taxes, Turbo Tax for the first asked me about whether I had conducted any Bitcoin transaction. No being into Bitcoin, it was a wakeup call to me that the tax collectors are watching.
See my comment #30 above (about miners and transactions). Is that incorrect? Is so, where specifically?
Nobody controls it. Its on the Blockchain.
Transactions are processed by miners, are they not.
No. They are not.
Who controls the miners?
Nobody
I'm not saying there isn't value to the bitcoin system, but it appears to lack a system of checks and balances that, in the end, would be enforced by a legal system. In other words, it appears bitcoin owners don't have legal recourse in the event the system is hacked or intentionally broken.
The Blockchain IS checks and balances. It does not require somebody else to process transactions or to clear transactions or whatever. That's what it is to be peer to peer. Its not like Escrow at a Bank. There is no way to "hack" the ledger. It would immediately be obvious to everybody since the Ledger is open and on the internet. The only way to stop Bitcoin is to shut down the entire Internet world wide. And in my experience, I have yet to come across a system that is perfectly unbreakable, particularly when there's money to be made from breaking it.
So, for example, a “51% attack” by a cartel is impossible?
I disagree that “all” the others are just gambling schemes. Many are but some do have legitimate technology and value behind them. For example, XRP is rapidly becoming the largest way to transfer remittances around the world. Its far cheaper and faster than Western Union or Moneygram for example.
Other projects like Cardano are currently being used for a range of purposes from recording academic information to smart contracts, sending/receiving money, etc. Its also proof of state rather than Ethereum’s proof of work so if this particular technology turns out to be the way to go....
I also think other Tier 1 cryptos like Cosmos, Avalanche and Polkadot are also pretty sound investments.
Miners do tend to be more larger companies now rather than somebody doing it out of his garage. That much is true but miners hold a relatively small percentage of the total. Even all of them put together would be nowhere close to 51%.
Nope! They couldn't. The VAST majority of Bitcoin that will ever exist has already been mined. Most of it was mined before mining it became something larger companies became interested in. So all the miners in the world could get together and pool all the Bitcoin they hold and still never come remotely close to 51%
Another factor to consider is that a certain percentage of Bitcoin is lost. It was on old hard drives on computers sent to the landfill or if it was held by some major Bitcoin bull like Mircea Popescu who drowned unexpectedly, might never be able to be accessed by anyone. That's a percentage of Bitcoin that is never going to vote in favor of any change. The obstacles to a 51% attack are insurmountable IMO.
Couldn't developers pre-mine a large number of coins for themselves before the cryptocurrency is made available to the public. They might also include hidden inflation mechanisms to create new coins for themselves secretly.
And couldn't developers intentionally introduce backdoors or vulnerabilities in the code that allow them to manipulate the blockchain, steal funds, or reverse transactions.
And couldn't developers create a cryptocurrency designed to appear decentralized but actually be controlled by a small group of nodes operated by the developers.
Just curious.
Thx. I will consider your comments carefully. I am still learning about bitcoin and have a long way to go.
Sure they could do that......but it would appear in the blockchain and be visible to everyone. Everyone could see this was just a scam currency that was not decentralized and which could be manipulated by the founders. And they could see that it had backdoors or other such flaws. The Blockchain is on the internet and is visible to everyone. That's the beauty of open ledger.
Are you saying that it is impossible for bugs or vulnerabilities (open to exploitation by attackers) in the cryptocurrency's software code to exist? And that there are no points of failure or ways the decentralization can be eroded to create such vulnerabilities.
Only BTC, ETH and SOL are proven successful. No more than you can count on two hands. There less than One in every thousand.
In this thread to argue for unestablished hopeful adoption of blockchain crypto does more to prove every nansayer correct.
Only BTC is an achnowlwdged asset. Evertything but BTC is speculation.
The Blockchain is open ledger. People can see the code and can see the vulnerabilities. Its not that its impossible to build that sort of stuff into code. Its that its impossible to hide it unless you refuse to publish the code in which case nobody is going to trust you or your code.
My guess is that the 210k BTC is long-gone, and Trump is doing this to flush out the bad actors in our gumming who stole it all.
That isn’t how bitcoin is used.
And the power has gone out in a lot of places, for decent amounts of time, and bitcoin has kept ticking.
And really, if the power goes out everywhere for a long time, money is going to be your least concern.
That’s why you hold gold as well.
But its prudent to hedge your bets…both ways.
Really? It hasn’t been hacked in 15 years.
You might want to review your sources if you think that is the case.
Exchanges have been hacked. But that is akin to bank robberies; it doesn’t mean the dollar is bad because Jesse James hit the banks.
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