3 ms·

I mean, Bitcoin is printed out of thin air as well. Just because you compute some hashes you can get something that people value at $40K? It's not that differe

by dheera 5y ago

I mean, Bitcoin is printed out of thin air as well. Just because you compute some hashes you can get something that people value at $40K? It's not that different than if we had a "cat picture" coin that anyone with a cat could manufacture cat pictures at will and sell them. Granted Bitcoin is a little bit more governed in terms of technical difficulty and cryptographic security, but that doesn't change the fact that it's printed out of thin air in a decentralized fashion. If I developed some hardware in secret that could mine Bitcoin 10X faster, there would be nothing illegal about using it to my advantage. If I had a hypothetical device that could print it 1000X faster, I could do that too. Maybe I do. You wouldn't know if I did. Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme as well. That $1T market cap of Bitcoin? Was there really $1T USD put into it? I don't think so.

viraptor 5y ago
People like to say Ponzi scheme, but that's got a specific meaning. Having secret hardware which can mine it faster is not it. Being worth more money than was put in is not it. (Otherwise almost every stock market ticker would be a Ponzi scheme)
- yqe78 5y ago
  I’m amused that you expect someone who openly thinks money is a joke to grasp the subtleties of what constitutes a Ponzi scheme. I know Ponzi schemes are bad. I think your money is bad. Therefore, your money is a Ponzi scheme. That’s the entirety of the logic employed by the comparison. Just wait until you hear what they’ve done with the term “market capitalization”.
  - dheera 5y ago
    Ponzi schemes mathematically just reduce to a lottery with slightly better odds than most lotteries.
TheAlchemist 5y ago
You can't just 'create' a Bitcoin out of thin air and say - hi guys, here is my Bitcoin. But a private entity (based in Bahamas) can do that with Tether. And you can use those to buy 'real' Bitcoins. It works perfectly until somebody tries to convert a big enough amount of those Tethers to real USD. In real world, I'm not sure it's a very good example, so feel free to challenge it, would be: - somebody prints perfect fake 100$ bills and floods the market with them - prices of real goods go up significantly - at one point somebody notice that those fake dollars have a small red dot in a corner - they become instantly worthless, and all prices crash as there is suddenly much less real dollars than everybody thought It's not a great analogy as there is nobody guaranteeing the conversion of those fake dollars to true dollars in the first place. Tether pretends to be doing that - but it appears more and more that they are just printing them out of thin air.
- dheera 5y ago
  > You can't just 'create' a Bitcoin out of thin air and say - hi guys, here is my Bitcoin. Sure you can. If your "counterfeit miner" secretly works 1000X faster than the miners everyone uses, you can still most certainly say "here is my Bitcoin" and it will be usable. If the hashes you generate are indistinguishable from the hashes generated by an AntMiner, you have made Bitcoin out of thin air. Yes, creating such a "counterfeit miner" would involve technological feats. But that shouldn't be the deciding factor here. It's still a PoW coin and assuming you are a super-powered genius hardware inventor with an insanely advanced lab, you can do the work much more efficiently without anyone knowing. And the coins would be actually legal to use. Which is VASTLY different from USD in that if you have a secret lab to create USD bills that are indistinguishable from the real thing, it's still illegal. With Bitcoin, it's still decentralized, i.e. printed out of thin air. If the coins you generate work with the system, they're legal and valid, it doesn't matter how you generate them or how much work you really did.
  - bidirectional 5y ago
    If you had such a miner, you would be awarded a large proportion of the coins mined in the future. These coins are part of the 21 million capped supply of Bitcoin, and this would not be secret as everyone would be able to see your activity. All you will do is speed up the rate at which the cap of Bitcoin is reached. No unlimited printing is possible. I have no idea where 'counterfeit miner' even comes into this. If you're the best at mining, you get the most coins. That's not controversial, it's a decentralised system, who would even be deeming you counterfeit? Were the first ASICs 'counterfeit'?

by dheera 5y ago

viraptor 5y ago

People like to say Ponzi scheme, but that's got a specific meaning. Having secret hardware which can mine it faster is not it. Being worth more money than was put in is not it. (Otherwise almost every stock market ticker would be a Ponzi scheme)

yqe78 5y ago
I’m amused that you expect someone who openly thinks money is a joke to grasp the subtleties of what constitutes a Ponzi scheme. I know Ponzi schemes are bad. I think your money is bad. Therefore, your money is a Ponzi scheme. That’s the entirety of the logic employed by the comparison. Just wait until you hear what they’ve done with the term “market capitalization”.
- dheera 5y ago
  Ponzi schemes mathematically just reduce to a lottery with slightly better odds than most lotteries.

TheAlchemist 5y ago

You can't just 'create' a Bitcoin out of thin air and say - hi guys, here is my Bitcoin. But a private entity (based in Bahamas) can do that with Tether. And you can use those to buy 'real' Bitcoins. It works perfectly until somebody tries to convert a big enough amount of those Tethers to real USD. In real world, I'm not sure it's a very good example, so feel free to challenge it, would be: - somebody prints perfect fake 100$ bills and floods the market with them - prices of real goods go up significantly - at one point somebody notice that those fake dollars have a small red dot in a corner - they become instantly worthless, and all prices crash as there is suddenly much less real dollars than everybody thought It's not a great analogy as there is nobody guaranteeing the conversion of those fake dollars to true dollars in the first place. Tether pretends to be doing that - but it appears more and more that they are just printing them out of thin air.

dheera 5y ago
> You can't just 'create' a Bitcoin out of thin air and say - hi guys, here is my Bitcoin. Sure you can. If your "counterfeit miner" secretly works 1000X faster than the miners everyone uses, you can still most certainly say "here is my Bitcoin" and it will be usable. If the hashes you generate are indistinguishable from the hashes generated by an AntMiner, you have made Bitcoin out of thin air. Yes, creating such a "counterfeit miner" would involve technological feats. But that shouldn't be the deciding factor here. It's still a PoW coin and assuming you are a super-powered genius hardware inventor with an insanely advanced lab, you can do the work much more efficiently without anyone knowing. And the coins would be actually legal to use. Which is VASTLY different from USD in that if you have a secret lab to create USD bills that are indistinguishable from the real thing, it's still illegal. With Bitcoin, it's still decentralized, i.e. printed out of thin air. If the coins you generate work with the system, they're legal and valid, it doesn't matter how you generate them or how much work you really did.
- bidirectional 5y ago
  If you had such a miner, you would be awarded a large proportion of the coins mined in the future. These coins are part of the 21 million capped supply of Bitcoin, and this would not be secret as everyone would be able to see your activity. All you will do is speed up the rate at which the cap of Bitcoin is reached. No unlimited printing is possible. I have no idea where 'counterfeit miner' even comes into this. If you're the best at mining, you get the most coins. That's not controversial, it's a decentralised system, who would even be deeming you counterfeit? Were the first ASICs 'counterfeit'?