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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 y

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'?
  - dheera 5y ago
    > If you're the best at mining, you get the most coins Exactly, so I'm demonstrating that Bitcoins are printed out of thin air by doing some arithmetic. The fact that a concept of "counterfeit" doesn't even exist demonstrates that ALL of them are printed out of thin air. You don't need to pan for gold, you don't need to save a kitten, nothing. All you need is to punch some numbers into a GPU or ASIC and voila you have thin air printed Bitcoin. As opposed to USD, where the person who has the most coins isn't the one who can print a physical dollar bill most efficiently. There is a notion of counterfeit, there is centralized governance, and thin air printing is not allowed at the threat of arrest by that governance.
    - bidirectional 5y ago
      If there's a hard 21 million coin limit, I don't really see it as 'out of thin air'. There are 21 million Bitcoins that have and will ever exist. It's no more printing from thin air than pulling gold from the ground is. Besides, why is panning for gold or saving a kitten fundamentally any different? A difficult physical process must take place, the fact it happens to be digital does not make it magic, despite how complex these devices may seem.
  - kmonsen 5y ago
    Well if you are much, much better at mining you can just fork it and take all the bitcoin? A side effect of this is you only need to be much better at mining for a short time.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 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 in theory but not in practice. The person you're responding to was talking about practice, not theory. Practice is what matters in this case.

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'?
- dheera 5y ago
  > If you're the best at mining, you get the most coins Exactly, so I'm demonstrating that Bitcoins are printed out of thin air by doing some arithmetic. The fact that a concept of "counterfeit" doesn't even exist demonstrates that ALL of them are printed out of thin air. You don't need to pan for gold, you don't need to save a kitten, nothing. All you need is to punch some numbers into a GPU or ASIC and voila you have thin air printed Bitcoin. As opposed to USD, where the person who has the most coins isn't the one who can print a physical dollar bill most efficiently. There is a notion of counterfeit, there is centralized governance, and thin air printing is not allowed at the threat of arrest by that governance.
  - bidirectional 5y ago
    If there's a hard 21 million coin limit, I don't really see it as 'out of thin air'. There are 21 million Bitcoins that have and will ever exist. It's no more printing from thin air than pulling gold from the ground is. Besides, why is panning for gold or saving a kitten fundamentally any different? A difficult physical process must take place, the fact it happens to be digital does not make it magic, despite how complex these devices may seem.
- kmonsen 5y ago
  Well if you are much, much better at mining you can just fork it and take all the bitcoin? A side effect of this is you only need to be much better at mining for a short time.
asdfasgasdgasdg 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 in theory but not in practice. The person you're responding to was talking about practice, not theory. Practice is what matters in this case.