Until prices are regularly set (and stable) in BTC, holding 80+M in BTC is a huge risk.

If I order something with my CC in the US, prices are also denoted in dollars. But it withdraws from my Euro account with respect to a specific conversion rate.

> If I order something with my CC in the US, prices are also denoted in dollars. But it withdraws from my Euro account with respect to a specific conversion rate.

Yes, and here you're holding Euros and selling them to buy dollars to buy items.

Similarly, if you were mostly doing business in the US, picking a different fiat currency to hold your money in would be a risk and that risk would increase the more volatile the exchange rate is.

The key point here is that until the prices you're paying are stable values in BTC, there's significant risk in holding a currency different to what your contracts are in. If I have $10,000 dollars and have a contract that requires me to pay out $5,000 dollars next year I know I have enough. If I have 0.5 BTC and the same contract then I do not know if I have enough.

Shameless plug for Watsi incoming... Consider donating monthly. They don't spam you and your money is going to a great cause. https://watsi.org/monthly

Disclosure : Am not satoshi.

There's likely more at play than just typewriter vs non-typewriter.

That's your opinion, and a bizarre one at that, since one-space isn't any more clear in a proportional font than a non-proportional font. Proportional fonts help pack letters within a word, not pack words within/between sentences.

> It certainly sends a signal to me that the person has absorbed a “rule”, but not its purpose,

It sends a signal to me that a person looks for bizarre ways to feel superior to others, instead of trying to understand why someone behaves differently.

I was probably wrong to try and fuzzily remember an anecdote rather than look it up :) but my understanding was that in a proportional font the combination of a period and space was good enough to show the end of the sentence clearly for whatever reason.

> It sends a signal to me that a person looks for bizarre ways to feel superior to others, instead of trying to understand why someone behaves differently.

This is fair. Though I promise I don’t feel superior to pretty much anybody if that helps. Learning about this actually came from wondering why some people used two spaces after sentences, not starting out judgmental. I think I was mainly thinking of formal contexts where you would already be judging somebody's choices (resume, professional portfolio, publications) more so than just random language use in comments or whatever. But I didn't put my finger on that last night!

I had this uneasiness writing my own comment and reading your comment, and did some actual reading this morning, and this turns out to be one of those things where the story I absorbed about it was too simple. There seems to be ongoing debate about this just like everything else, and even though most publishers and editors prefer 1 space after a sentence. I had though I heard that spaces after periods actually render a little wider anyway but that seems to be wrong?

I knew I worded my comment kind of badly and probably shouldn’t have made it in the first place. But at lest posting it helped me get corrected on my assumptions.

Someone writing by hand obviously does not count a discrete number of spaces, and a cold-metal typesetter has a wide variety of spaces available: they might use a one-and-a-half-en space (either a single piece of type or an en space followed by a half-en space) or an em space.

It must have been the introduction of the typewriter that brought the idea of "two spaces" instead of "wider space".

Come to think about it, why not the movable type printing press as the starting point?

Here's a test. I definitely put two spaces prior to this sentence.

EDIT - indeed it seems that HN changes the spacing.

HTML frustrates me; I don't know why it defaults to collapsing spaces, when so often my spaces are intentionally semantic.

"Two Spaces After a Period: Why You Should Never, Ever Do It": http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/...

"Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong (or, the lies typographers tell about history)"

http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324

It has been a difficult habit for me to break.

Note I’m not implying the person has done anything wrong... on the contrary. But someone with a large quantity of BTC has reasons to be wary of rogue actors.

http://www.favicon.cc/?action=search&keywords=pineapple

https://github.com/PineappleFund/pineapplefund.github.io

Bitcoin has endowed many people with financial means in a way completely orthogonal to their day-to-day work. Say what you will about bubbles, but this "fund manager's" perspective is healthy check on reality.

The crypto currency hype only (or at least mainly) redistributes wealth, in my eyes to (tech savvy) people-with-means-already.

Yes there might be empowering stories of "smart single moms" making serious money by betting on Bitcoin, but as a whole it only enlarges income equality between people, arguably one of the issues of our time.

I am young, have a high income and a tiny net worth. I got lucky by buying a tiny amount of bitcoin a few years ago purely because I was interested in the tech. There's lots of things about my situation, and the situation of other people in my society which are unfair. But baby-boomers with nest eggs cashing me out because they feel entitled to make an easy buck and are buying something they don't understand doesn't seem like the most important injustice.

That's condescending, hypocritical bullshit. Why do you feel entitled to "cashing out" on their savings because you're tech savvy?

> Not necessarily rich people (not just rich people), but well-off people who have money they don't need sitting around.

This is straight up delusional. I'm appalled that you would spend so much time describing who you think invests in cryptocurrencies, just to justify yourself profiting off them. Actually, most people who invest in the stock market know better than to get involved with bitcoin. Most people who hyped its value lately are the kind of people who have no idea what's about, invest poorly and have fewer funds. [1]

So yes, most likely your profit came from "broke people, people working several jobs on minimum wage, people who have to use food pantries, people trapped in debt". At least don't try to pretend it's otherwise.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/amp/2017/12/12/bitcoin-mania-mortag...

At least in Europe, it is not uncommon that bank/pension/state funds (in effect: everybody's money) buy in latest to these stocks.

Allocating resources in society is a hard problem, and capital markets overall provide a valuable service in deciding where resources should go. But when some of these markets function more or less like a lottery (or ponzi scheme), I don't see why a society should support (or even worse: idolize) its participants.

Satoshi designed the supply to rapidly mint the majority of coins to the smallest group of users for the least amount of effort/capital/work input.

It's designed to manipulate any user who joins the system after you.

Satoshi could easily have chosen a linear curve to align with time, user growth, and increase in work input yet instead the manipulative log curve was chosen.

Old users are now incentived to attempt to psychologically exploit new people by selling the asset for far more than the cost of production or acquisition.

Anti-sybil attacks would be immensely beneficial. Encouragement of honest economic activity. Scaling of bandwidth and fees.

The ideal solution is a PoW that is computationally useful and desirable, BOINC, folding@home. Ethereum almost does this, but PoW algos as they exist now are anti-scale by design, where increasing computational power does not improve the network at all.

The foreseeable longevity of PoW is ungodly waste, when a world wide distributed computing network has potential far far beyond brute force hash puzzles.

The Bitcoin network/ecosystem has nothing to offer in this sense— there's no plausible reason for it to be "raising" money by direct sales, and no one owes it taxes. So the initial tokens were distributed based on the fact that they were mined by early adopters before the difficulty got to be too great. There is indeed a basic unfairness in this, but it's not obvious to me how to resolve it for future projects of this kind.

B) There are (a lot of) stocks that do not pay dividends and never will. There are a lot of stocks that were issued by companies that never made a profit. Both of those categories are traded with a value above zero, how do you explain that?

People then switch to arguing that it's a great store of value. Given its volatility this makes no sense.

[0]: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h

Cryptocurrencies in general have a lot of utility and solve real problems.

There's no reason that a crypto-exchange cannot be as secure as a bank (or more), and that governments cannot insure crypto deposits up to some value. Those are purely problems for regulators/governments, which have been relatively slow to adapt legislation.

The problems you highlight are real, and can be good reasons to favour traditional currencies, but they're also easy problems to solve - the thinking has already been done once for traditional currencies and the solutions for crypto are mostly identical.

I suppose it could be even worse though, it could be the upcoming UB fork.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Bitcoin's current transaction fee is like $20, and the value of Bitcoin itself has gone up 25% in the past week alone. If I bought a pizza last week using $20 worth of Dunning-Krugerrands, that same pizza would be $25 this week for no reason. That alone makes it useless as a currency.

Someone buys it at a certain price (because it has intrinsic value), which realizes the value of the currency.

a) this is valid point, but bitcoin is failing currency. if there was a central authority then its value would have been stabilized. never gonna happen with bitcoin.

b) expected income. for bitcoin, it's nil for ever. don't confuse investment with speculation.

I said that early adopters take risks that pay off when conservative investors are looking for safe plays.

Seriously, shame on you.

The difference is that if amazon is worth let's say 50 billion and they have 10 billion revenue and 9 billion operating costs then not paying out the excess 1 billion as dividends doesn't mean they magically disappear. A 50 billion company with 1 billion in the bank account is in reality a 51 billion company.

When a dividend is paid out the value of the stock is reduced by exactly the amount that is paid out. If the money is used to buy more delivery infrastructure (trucks, buildings) the value of the stock remains the same. From the perspective of a share holder who can sell his shares to someone else nothing has changed. You either have 50€ worth of stock plus 1€ or 51€ worth of stock.

With bitcoin there is no revenue that can be paid out or be invested. If bitcoin goes "bankrupt" what assets can you liquidate to obtain at least a fraction of it's value? How does it work?

It's narrow index funds that are gambling. Not all index funds.

Even if you fail to do that as long as you have started investing sufficiently early enough - let's say 30 years before retirement (around 35 years old) - you probably have experienced at least one recession and recovery until retirement. If suddenly markets crash during retirement by 50% on an asset that is up by 150% does it matter? You still got away with a profit.

And nobody forces you to liquidate everything at once. So sure if you plan to draw out 4% of your stocks you will have decreased your portfolio by 8% every year.

I am actually quite sad to see the current state of the cryptocurrency community, and how people in it these days widely misrepresent the risk and intricacies of bitcoin/crypto.

When I first got into bitcoin, most people were there because they were fascinated in building a decentralized currency. Profit seeking was always a part, but not the predominant part.

I'm a little bit sad to see where crypto is today. But I think the original faction is still alive.

There's only two ways this bubble will burst:

1. Inflation: the value of fiat currencies drops to match the supposed value of bitcoin, which negatively affects everyone

2. Only the first people to cash out actually turn a profit. Every other person who invested will lose everything.

Either way, the money you now made from bitcoin, came from people who will probably lose their savings contributing to the bubble.

Same criticism to the headline of this thing - it's an X amount of bitcoin, not a dollar amount which will be outdated within the hour.

Hopefully by 'donating' it to these charities, who will probably choose to sell slowly over time or hold it, that alleviates the problem.

It's safe to assume that not all banks are as altruistic as one would hope.

https://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/07072016_o...

Though my bank did invest in Coinbase so they are probably pretty ahead of the times.

talking with bankers is an art. I have plenty of "software services" that primarily transact in bitcoin and cash out to bank accounts from bitcoin exchanges.

Do 10 payments for £10k each, and you'll usually get the same call.

If the word bitcoin is mentioned, even once, then you'll get a letter saying "Dear Mrs X, We are withdrawing financial services from you, and your account is now closed".

This even happened on two so called "bitcoin friendly" banks...

its easy to get this problem in the US but I know how to navigate it here, all of my bank statements have the transactions as listed as BTC somewhere. Coinbase tx's have BTC in the statement line item, some of my OTC exchanges do too.

Congrats on your huge BTC surplus!

To make the biggest difference, consider looking into Effective Altruism[1] (an idea, not a charity) if you haven't already. Their motto is “using reason and evidence to do the most good”.

Perhaps do away with the charity proposal form, and instead choose one or several of the most effective charities as ranked by GiveWell.org[2] (who do rigorous effectiveness analysis). OpenPhilanthropy[3] is a charity that takes the EA perspective.

Unfortunately, seemingly worthy charities are often orders of magnitude less effective than the few most effective causes. Charity evaluators like GiveWell help us find the gems that can leverage our money many times more effectively.

For more info about Effective Altruism, listen to Tim Ferriss[4] and Sam Harris[5] interview the co-founder of Effective Altruism, check out this NYT piece[6], or read Doing Good Better[7].

[1] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

[2] https://www.givewell.org/

[3] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/

[4] http://tim.blog/2015/11/22/will-macaskill/

[5] https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/being-good-and-doing-...

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/upshot/effective-altruism...

[7] https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Good-Better-Effective-Altruism/...

It's very likely there are fewer than a dozen people that have ever held >100,000 Bitcoins. That would take two weeks of mining every single block in the days of 50BTC coinbase rewards. Reasonable estimations of Satoshi's mining vs. others in the pre-GPU days makes 100,000 very tight for more than a few individuals. This would also require continuous mining for several months unless you were the only person mining (which isn't the case for anyone but Satoshi). Hardly 'for kicks'.

If you look in old forum threads, you'll see that many people mining in 2009 and 2010 mined several blocks over few days or weeks of mining. That would net a few hundred coins, and sometimes a few thousand. The majority of mining was done this way. The opportunity for many individuals to mine 100,000 simply was not there. If you actually talked to more than one individual who did this, you probably met 2 out of the 3 biggest Bitcoin miners ever.

But my real question is: How on earth did you manage to resist selling your holdings for such a long time after you crossed the $1MM mark? That's some superhuman level of self control.

I have no idea if that happened here.

The world needs a lot more people like this. The example being set here should be emulated by many others.

https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5...

(I am not your tax advisor. Please don't take tax advice from random internet people.)

Granted, I can't remember if you're supposed to actually be able to turn a profit by doing this trick, or if it just makes it a little cheaper for rich people who want to temporarily own fancy things.

Give well is a meta-charity that tries to find out which charities maximize donation effectiveness and might be a good place to start looking.

https://www.givewell.org/

It's a good place to start.

A friend of mine who works in philanthropy educated me against my misconception that charities that spend a higher portion of their funds on non program fees (i.e. middleman type expenses, and not direct to the person who receives the benefits) are actually often more effective, rather than less.

I'm not an expert here, but this friend of mine is particularly thoughtful, so I'd say it's worth at least evaluating your position before you critique people like this.

[1] https://watsi.org/faq#does-watsi-accept-bitcoin-donations

[2] https://blockchain.info/tx/d290acbfa7c619ad4215537ae83bfe165...

It is liquid capital - and its value is $86mm since you could liquidate this at any moment without moving the order book.

I remember from last time someone tried to dump a bunch onto the market the price crashed - by definition then - is that more liquid or more illiquid? Liquidity is obviously on a spectrum and these crypto-assets very quickly become illiquid depending on how many people are wanting to sell; searching for the example it seems the specific event I was thinking about was regarding Ethereum's Ether - https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/22/ethereum-price-crash-10-cent...

Here's another brief article that showed in the search listings re: market manipulation - https://steemkr.com/bitcoin/@crypto-pro/how-to-make-altcoins...

The point being that it's perhaps only liquid until too many people at once want to remove their money. People of course didn't and don't try to dump it (currently) because they're not going to want to sell for 1/300th (example) of what it was the day before, so everyone just waits until it rebounds. This is why these global decentralized Ponzi Schemes are dangerous for society because they can survive because there's such a supply of potential people using relatively small amounts of money, these growing number of people putting relatively small amounts of money increases the number of people incentivized to wanting it to grow in value - so they all speak positively and market it to their friends to buy, etc. All of the current holders need new money/people to come in for them to realize "profit" (unreasonable wealth transfer) by acknowledging/validating/legitimizing the 'current' value of the crypto-asset of their choice.

https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c765...

What's their game plan ?

While some coal in landlocked and inaccessible locations is fired up in an environmentally unfriendly process to mine Bitcoins, most miners are powered by hydrogen dams, geysers and other geothermal energy sources that cannot be transported or stored.

Worse, Bitcoin's energy consumption scales based on the price of bitcoin, not on transaction volume. The more USD each bitcoin is worth, the more miners will spend on energy to get that sweet, sweet block reward.

So it isn't a "meme" and Bitcoin's proponents would do well to concede that "yeah, bitcoin pisses away a lot of electricity--sorry about that...".

Until Bitcoin is done bootstrapping and the block reward is zero.

By the way there is no such thing as a waste of energy. This isn’t soviet Russia, neither you nor the government dictate how one is allowed to use energy. As long as you have the funds to pay for it, you are free to use the electricity how you see fit.

If you’re reasonably concerned about the environmental concerns of how energy is produced, take it up with the producers. Stop technology-shaming.

Do you also suppose that we should reduce vehicle emissions by increasing the cost of gasoline? Why isn't it fair to blame vehicles that run on gasoline and vehicles which are particularly inefficient at running on gasoline?

No it's not. I'm saying you can fix the problem by modifying one constraint. Fix the cost of energy, and you fix your problem with energy wastage. It will make absolutely zero difference to bitcoin what the price of energy is. If energy is more expensive, mining will reduce, and bitcoin difficulty resets to the lower mining hashrate.

> Do you also suppose that we should reduce vehicle emissions by increasing the cost of gasoline?

Of course. It's ludicrous to think otherwise.

Again. Give me a break...

Um what? Certainly we have made great progress as a civilization switching to cleaner forms of energy production but calling greenhouse pollution a "non issue" at this point is pretty nuts!

However, there's a few additional variables that are very important.

1. The price of Bitcoin may fall dramatically, or your business and investments might fail. Now you can't help anyone.

2. By saving the smaller group of people, you will alter the course of history. Some of the people in the larger group might never experience the disease or accident that required medical intervention. Some of them will never even be born.

I think it's better to choose the predictable outcome that is guaranteed to ease suffering, instead of gambling with people's lives.

P.S. I just finished watching the first episode of 11.22.63 [2] a few minutes ago. (It was incredibly good!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2879552/

(Edit: nvm, misinterpreted the website)

https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c765...

https://twitter.com/watsi/status/938241988121583616

I'm having a bit of trouble connecting this transfer back to address 3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5zMAKG8FK3kJM4rjt which currently holds the coins that he says will be donated. If true this should be possible though...

EDIT: Oh wait, here is the connection:

https://blockchain.info/tx/d290acbfa7c619ad4215537ae83bfe165...

I have to say, I'm generally pretty skeptical of stuff like this but there is evidence here that this is legit.

EDIT2: They also encoded "pineapplefund.org" in a NULL transaction. Even more reason to believe.

https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c44ad5f83ddc84d08967c765...

"4,894 BTC ~$84 million USD remaining"

on the site. It initially appeared as if he/she was asking for donations. I guess that's actually the amount of money yet to be distributed.

Pineapple Fund: Donating $86 million USD in/through BTC to charity.

I think the current one makes it sound like they are donating 86M BTC. I know that's above the theoretical maximum, but that's not the point.

And you even know thats above the maximum so your concerns should have been disregarded as erroneous stimuli as the rest of our brains are already programmed to do.

* Legal: Taking on precedent-setting cases (e.g. establishing code as a form of speech, overturning Betamax Doctrine, challenging censorship laws). Full list is here: https://www.eff.org/victories

* Technology: Helping launch projects like LetsEncrypt (now its own org), Privacy Badger, Certbot, Panopticlick, Democracy.io, HTTPS Everywhere.

* Advocacy/activism: Pushing state & federal legislatures in the US and around the world to pass laws that protect user's rights, and not to pass laws that would harm them. Also to push regulatory bodies (e.g. FCC) similarly.

(I'm a Tech Fellow at EFF but not speaking for the org in any capacity)

Probably the two fastest ways to find out what we do (and how we're funded) is to:

* Read our annual report: https://www.eff.org/files/annual-report/2016/index.html (our reporting year is from June-July, so this is up to this summer).

* Read some of the stories from Hacker News -- our work is often covered here, because the topics we defend with our lawyers, activists and technologists are often close to people here. So, for instance, working to stop controls on crypto, the fight for net neutrality, defending people who are creating or innovating new tech, stopping the worst effects of DRM, tracking the consequences of AI, challenging mass surveillance in the courts, founding and supporting Let's Encrypt, etc. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=eff.org&sort=byDate&prefix&pag...

We've been around for over 27 years now, so some of the stuff you might discover online about us might not look so relevant now, but helped set the groundwork for the modern Net. So, it's now (almost exactly!) 20 years since the Internet censorship provisions of the Communications Decency Act was declared unconstitutional, but you still sometimes find GIFs of the Blue Ribbon Campaign EFF worked on to raise awareness of that issue on the early Internet. And the project you mentioned -- the Cooperative Computing Award -- is one of these earlier initiatives. It was fully funded in 1999 by a generous single benefactor, in order to encourage distributed computing in a period where it was felt that the incentives were more strongly aligned to centralise processing power. We've given out two of these prizes over the last 18 years, with two more to go. Of course, distributed computing -- including platforms like Ethereum and concepts like blockchain validation -- is more established now than it was in 1999.

Our budget for all of our work is in the order of $10 million, a large proportion of which comes from individual members' donations. To give hopefully relevant comparisons, the MPAA took $76 million in 2015; the 2016 budget for the ACLU was $138 million. We try to remain agile with what we have, but where new technology and civil liberties meet, there's always new things to do.

https://www.eff.org/cases