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What underlying value does btc buy or hold? It's rarely accepted anywhere. How can it be made stable? It's risky to invest large sums in if it can just collaps

What underlying value does btc buy or hold? It's rarely accepted anywhere. How can it be made stable? It's risky to invest large sums in if it can just collapse at any time. Is it even demonstrably secure against the potential of malicious original owners/operators running away with large sums of money? If there are original owners/operators, where's the governance, paper trail, and audit of them? What if there are security or structural flaws? Who's going to fix them? Who decides what fixes to implement? Who reviews the fixes? How can it can be converted to money if countries make exchanges illegal or tax it into oblivion?

DennisP 6y ago
> Is it even demonstrably secure against the potential of malicious original owners/operators running away with large sums of money? Are you talking about Bitcoin itself here? There are no operators holding your money. It's secured by standard cryptography implemented in open source code, and the entire ledger is public. There are developers who fix bugs that come up, and make minor improvements to the protocol occasionally. Ultimately it's everybody running the software who decides whether the changes actually deploy. (If you're talking about Coinbase, they do hold your money and they are regulated and audited.)
- airhead969 6y ago
  The ledger can be public and people can choose what code to run, but someone started it. Do does anyone know how distributed (as a running system, not as a protocol) BTC actually began vs. is? And someone early likely has a giant pool of BTC. Does anyone suspect BTC is a long con? I'm not talking about who is holding money at present time, but running away with the value from piles of BTCs (either historic wallets, customer wallets, or modern investment), cashing-out, and dumping BTC's value.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    How would that be more of a con, than a company founder who holds a large amount of stock?
    - airhead969 6y ago
      It's entirely different if a "founder" can walk away with their now insanely valuable "stock" or someone else's "stock," effectively a partial pyramid scheme.
      - DennisP 6y ago
        I mean, Elon Musk could sell a large amount of TSLA if he wanted, just like Satoshi could theoretically sell lots of BTC. Neither can sell someone else's holdings.

DennisP 6y ago

> Is it even demonstrably secure against the potential of malicious original owners/operators running away with large sums of money? Are you talking about Bitcoin itself here? There are no operators holding your money. It's secured by standard cryptography implemented in open source code, and the entire ledger is public. There are developers who fix bugs that come up, and make minor improvements to the protocol occasionally. Ultimately it's everybody running the software who decides whether the changes actually deploy. (If you're talking about Coinbase, they do hold your money and they are regulated and audited.)

airhead969 6y ago
The ledger can be public and people can choose what code to run, but someone started it. Do does anyone know how distributed (as a running system, not as a protocol) BTC actually began vs. is? And someone early likely has a giant pool of BTC. Does anyone suspect BTC is a long con? I'm not talking about who is holding money at present time, but running away with the value from piles of BTCs (either historic wallets, customer wallets, or modern investment), cashing-out, and dumping BTC's value.
- DennisP 6y ago
  How would that be more of a con, than a company founder who holds a large amount of stock?
  - airhead969 6y ago
    It's entirely different if a "founder" can walk away with their now insanely valuable "stock" or someone else's "stock," effectively a partial pyramid scheme.
    - DennisP 6y ago
      I mean, Elon Musk could sell a large amount of TSLA if he wanted, just like Satoshi could theoretically sell lots of BTC. Neither can sell someone else's holdings.