Hmm. If you can mine 15 trillion hashes per second you are likely to find one bitcoin after 486 days (derived from numbers on this site www.cryptocompare.com). The human rate of hashing is .67 hashes per day. Based on a price of $1 million for one bitcoin, that would translate to a break even salary of one million-billionth of a penny per hour. Probably be hard to find good people at that rate.

China might be a good place to setup shop?

Ignoring the racism baked into that comment, smart people in China probably have more job opportunities than ever, with greater opportunity for wealth creation. China has one of the hottest tech industries in the world: Tencent and Alibaba each have market caps above $450B USD, and Baidu, JD, and NetEase are all in the $50-80B range. All these companies are rapidly growing. Not to mention the booming startup ecosystem across the country.

Labor is cheap in China. It’s not racism to make factually accurate observations.

>It’s not racism to make factually accurate observations.

That is not as true as it sounds at first glance. For example, a statement like "blacks are more violent and less educated than whites" is factually accurate, but frames the situation in a definitely racist way if you just leave it at that because without elaboration, it makes it sound like a fact of nature.

This is the problem with "facts and statistics can't be racist". No, technically they can't be, but if your conclusion you're drawing is that certain ethnicities are just genetically more criminal, you're handling the facts in a racist (and very incorrect) way (not implying in any way that you think like that).

> That is not as true as it sounds at first glance.

No. It is exactly as true as it sounds.

The conclusions one draws from facts are whatever they are. But the facts themselves are not racist, and it is not racist to say things that are factually correct. Ever. Full stop.

Also it’s ok to be white. Saying that it’s ok to be white is not racist.

Facts themselves are not racist. The person uttering them can be.

It's creepy to say irrelevant weird things, though.

If we consider stating facts without context needed to truly understand them as being equal on level of wrongness with something like discrimination, I think we should consider exactly how many people use such poorly informed facts. Gun crime facts, wage gap facts, just about any psychology paper cited ignores the limitations of the study (which likely has very few if any replications with different populations). Even medical research if filled with poorly stated facts that drop a lot of the details needed to understand the actual study done.

Given that stating facts without full context is the norm, attributing one specific case to racism seems hard to justify.

For a red delicious apples to granny smith apples comparison, look at the treatment of, framing of, and treatment of framing of crime facts based on race verses crime stats based on sex.

Interesting discussion. So when is it in your opinion allowed to draw conclusions based on personal attributes, e.g. when is something not discriminating.

I try to stick to Wikipedia definition, because people claim racism in a lot of situation where I wouldn't consider it as such: "Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another, which often results in discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity."

In theory, the discussed comment doesn't claim his race is superior, just stating that in China people are underpaid.

For sure he is projecting stereotypes, but that's not racism, it's a different thing.

Even the legal definition doesn't seem to make that comment fit:

"the term "racial discrimination" shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction, or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life."

> factually accurate observations

... in this case, it's a sarcastic quip based on an exaggerated truth.

the inferred reference you're missing is the 'all asians are good at math' stereotype.

East asians are good at math. Look at rankings by country. Obviously no one would actually do this, but if you were going to, China would be a great place to set up shop.

Youbate referring to a popular worldwide math test. There's no reason to believe those test scores aren't gamed, especially in Communist China where information is highly censored in general and the known "sampled" locations where the tests are given is highly suspect

You shouldn't project your own stereotypes onto other people. China is the current king of labor-intensive low-cost mass production

Remember, a hash that takes much longer than 10 minutes is worth absolutely nothing. You don't get a coin, and you can't participate in a pool.

What if you had a time machine and a lot of paper and pencils?

Go back a few years and trade a ream of paper for the 10k pizza bitcoins.

Heck, even pay the guy 100$ and say you are taking a huge risk here.

I was thinking of mining ethereum. there was a 250$ video card that could mine 500$ worth of ethereum per year. I thought wow thats profitable, but I did some more research. the same card could mine 1500$ worth 2 months ago, and ethereum was 30% cheaper.

that would have been a losing deal to get into, and it assumed the machine was mining 24/7 without issue. I tried mining with my existing card, but it spent a substantial amount of time building the DAG, and it really wasnt worth turning my PC into a space heater.

between more people mining and hashes getting harder, the price of the coin is not as much of a factor in whether its worth mining.

If BTC cracks 1 million won't that mean there's 2.1 trillion dollars worth of USD BTC in circulation in addition to all the other currencies?

Only in the most theoretical sense. Since there is no underlying asset, you are going to run out of buyers real fast at that amount.

If the market can't clear, the price will drop until it does. Saying bitcoin has reached a certain price carries with it the implication that the market is clearing at the price, i.e. that people are indeed buying.

Million-USD transactions already occur in BTC all the time.

You can't really know that except for a few publicized ones. Those "transactions" you see are simply transfers. They "could" be a transfer to someone in exchange for USD. Or, as they are in almost all cases, they are transfers from one wallet to another both owned by the same person or exchanges that are holding large amounts of BTC moving money around internally as well.

To support your argument, according to this[0] the largest recent transaction about 3 hours ago was almost 25 million USD. 5 other transactions also exceeded 1 million USD in the last hour or so.

[0]: https://blockchain.info/largest-recent-transactions

I could be wrong, but I read somewhere that almost all of those large transactions are inter or intra exchange movements simply moving money around into different wallets. Also, they only indicate a transfer, it seems very unlikely that anyone has cashed out $25m all at once with bitcoin.

There's a VR webapp that was shared recently that shows live btc transactions. Just thought i'd share that for the 10 minutes I watched it the other day I saw numerous 10M+ transactions

Those are transfers, not necessarily transactions. No one probably traded 10m in bitcoin for USD. If an exchange transfers btc from one wallet to another for holding, it will show up on the transactions list.

You only run out of buyers if there are sellers.

I have 1 BTC but I lost the wallet. So that's one less BTC in circulation. (Literally, it is impossible for that BTC to circulate).

I'm in the same boat. CPU-mined somewhere between 1.5 and 2 BTC back in 2010 or 2011, and lost the wallet years ago. I wonder how much BTC has been lost to similar mistakes, but I guess there's no way to know or even estimate, right?

I managed to loose ~53 BTC too. I'm pretty sure a large percentage of bitcoin is gone forever.

https://www.google.no/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/11/25...

If bitcoin price is derived from the bid ask, most of the worlds money would have to be parked in bitcoin, does that even make sense?

"parked"? No, since no real money or asset is held to back up bitcoin. It could go to $100 million tomorrow based on a few transactions, but that wouldn't be indicative of what anyone else will be able to get for it.

Now that is just wrong. If the price went to $100m tomorrow it is because people are buying and selling bitcoin for that price.

All it takes is a single trade at a $100M valuation and, for that nanosecond, that's the value of Bitcoin.

Yes but no one really considers that to be the market price.

Yes, the exchanges would, at least until a bunch more lower transactions took place.

Money supplies are constantly inflating, every financial instrument can be looked at as a form of money, and quite a few of them are actually considered to be money, such as treasuries and traveler's cheques. According to Wikipedia, the broadest measure of money supply currently in use was 10.5 trillion, in 2013.

That cryptocurrencies are not currently considered to be money by the world economic order, it goes into a much broader range of financial assets like stocks and bonds. The S&P 500 market size reached 19.6 trillion USD in 2016

Bitcoin has a lot of room to grow before it even comes close to playing in that league. Everybody on HN should be buying crypto right now, the upside is that huge.

Except it isn't parked in any way. The money goes from the hands of the optimistic buyers into the hands of those who decided to cash out just now. The only asset "backing" Bitcoin is the people willing to buy it.

It's weird to complain that because btc is backed by no set, it it not really worth it's process in USD, which is also backed by no asset.

USD is backed by "the full faith and credit of the US government". BTC is backed by the Internet and meme magic.

21 trillions, or about 3 times the value of all gold mined in the world.

And around the market size of the S&P 500.

It would be way more effective to work a minimum wage job and buy some Bitcoin with that money.