They temporarily shut down the market, banned the discord server, and are now preventing people from buying stocks on the most popular app used by small time investors.
All of these moves hurt the small time investor trying to cash in on the next bitcoin-like bubble. This just creates more division, more disgust, and more of a class war than already exists. So sad to see.
interestingly, the page I got was cached from Cloudflare. I wonder if the twitter chatter / thread unrolling is up enough during all this nuttiness that it's brought the site down.
Baked into the exchanges (NYSE, Nasdaq) are circuit breakers which halt all trading on certain volatility conditions. The intent is to stabilize prices. This is not what happened here.
What happened here is a broker (Robinhood) decided to not accept certain kinds of orders. It wasn't a market shutdown, it was a specific manipulation to stop the purchase but _not_ the sale of an instrument, causing the price to drop.
Maybe you shouldn’t use USD either.
More money = more mining power, more trading power, ICO pumps and dumps that rose the overall crypto market volume, raising the hype and earned millions in the process for the early buyers/minters. The game was never equal.
Want to buy BTC? Get your ID ready, or do a local exchange which is quite inconvenient.
The revolution died as soon as you could a profit out of it.
KYC and government regulations are a pain, but the core decentralized, limited supply, secure nature of Bitcoin will remain fully intact.
Rich and powerful people have already tried to take it over, they ended up with their own forks and you can judge how those have done.
>decentralized How much of BTC is owned by large miners?
>Limited supply If we can't mine more, those with the larger supply have control.
>secure
For now.
Blockchain as the idea will propagate and is great, but bitcoin has failed.
>Please do not confuse Bitcoin with “the overall crypto market”
But it's value is quite tied to the crypto arket, isn't it?
Bitcoin doesn't solve any of our problems. It just shuffles around who's in power.
Aren't most crypto coins set up so that mining is only getting harder with time? The ones ending up rich are the old money, the guys that invested into it in its early days.
Source: I was a miner and would be a lot richer if I had just started purchasing coins earlier. :) Also any history book on cryptocurrency such as The Age of Cryptocurrency by Paul Vigna and Michael Casey from WSJ. The miners profiled in it are just trying to keep the lights on in 2015 and nothing has changed to the hamster wheel.
Fractional lending isn't possible because you can't make bitcoin out of nothing then charge interest on the nothing you lended.
Inflation is out of government control and no longer works as an unofficial tax. Related, money can't be printed at-will.
Large banks and corporations can't outright prevent transactions from happening.
The money can have value as a universal reserve currency without any specific political ties.
Removing big banks from the equation takes their hands at least partway off the politicians.
Seems like at least a decent upgrade to me.
Bitcoin currently inflates slightly. I think it should target a 1-2% steady inflation forever both to encourage spending and to replace lost coinage.
At the same time, inflation should not be a spending power advantage. By distributing inflation among miners, you don't give disproportionate advantage to any one group like governments currently enjoy. I view this as more fair and it removes the incentive to attempt to change inflation rates in the future.