A Beginner’s Guide to Getting Started with Bitcoin
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My original aim was to educate newbies to understand what Bitcoin is without digging into technical details.
https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Altern...
- a private key or set of private keys which are used to sign transactions - hardware wallets store this inside the "hardware wallet" thing
- a program that interacts with the Bitcoin/Ethereum network, can display balances on a (public) key or make transactions that need to be signed by a private key (those are different, you'd use e.g. Electrum for Bitcoin and Metamask for Ethereum)
Obviously both of these can be the same (you can store your private key in a file accessed by Electrum), but to reduce the probability of getting hackes people often separate the private keys from their wallet programs.
A coin-denominated account on an exchange is often also called a wallet, but it's just an account on the exchange like you'd have one in your bank.
Just go to Trezor’s home page and read. It’s the best wallet for most people, and they make money just like any other seller of wallets in a store.
Longer version:
1) Don't be the last sucker.
Thanks in advance.
But, it's worth knowing about possible biases everyone can posses. In this case, patio11 works for Stripe which is in a very strong position in the traditional currencies world ,which used to have Bitcoin support but ended it in 2018. So there might be some bias against Bitcoin there, but maybe not.
Again, not saying they are wrong in the article linked, just to keep possible biases in mind when reading it.
Same goes for reading pro-Bitcoin articles where the authors might be holding Bitcoin themselves. Useful to keep in mind.
Edit: Just to showcase what I mean, the linked article basically starts off with "The dominant use case for cryptocurrency is speculation" which shows that there is indeed plenty of biases scattered around the article. Not to say it's all false, but there is biases present.
I don't have any horses in this race (anymore), and I don't really have a strong opinion on whether I think he's likely right or wrong... I just find his writing on the topic amusing.
Any native English speakers who can translate this idiom? I always thought of this idiom as the "last bagholder" in ponzi schemes, rigged pump+dump stocks and alike, but would be weird to apply that to Bitcoin here so not sure if I understand it correctly.
People who say things like this assume that Bitcoin is going to $0 at some point.
That is the correct understanding.
Because Bitcoin has no inherent value, the only way to profit from it is to sell it to someone else. But if you're the "last sucker", then you are going to sell it to? If there's no one next, you have a bunch of bits that aren't useful for anything.
Bitcoin has (so far?) failed as a payment system, as a currency, as a reserve currency, a remittance channel, a timestamping service, a settlement layer, a bank for the "unbanked", a cypherpunk liberator, a money laundering tool, a drugs-by-mail tool, a unit of accounting, a store of value, and as a "disruptive" fintech technology.
So if you purchase it, what exactly are you expecting to achieve by that ownership, except to sell it to someone else in the future?
When I think of crypto/Bitcoin, I am reminded of Warren Buffett's view on gold:
> Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.
> Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?
[…]
> A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.
1. Selling
2. Not buying
Jokes aside. Simply treat it as highly leveraged investment. It makes sense to have those in your portfolio if you know what you are doing.
"The total energy consumption associated with the entire Bitcoin network exceeds that of countries like Ireland, Bangladesh and Austria" https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2020/12/calculating-clima...
If we consider second-order effects we can come up with a bunch more, including allowing drug sales, human trafficking, allows people to hide their assets and more. But again, seems focused on the limitations of the protocol and clients using it, not second-order effects.
Edit: I'm not saying Bitcoin are in fact causing all those things and I'm myself bullish on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. I'm only trying to reason why the environment impact was not brought up in the article itself.
What is impossible with Bitcoin, though, is jurisdiction over transfers. Bank/guardian will obey the court, cops can blast your safe to get your gold - but without your wallet key, they can’t do anything.
Whether this is a problem or advantage depends on your point of view; The people of Cyprus, who woke up one morning to discover that any deposits they have above 200KEur were unilaterally borrowed by the government until further notice, or the Americans whose gold was confiscated in the 1930s just before the USD devaluation, might have a different opinion than yours.
Personally, I think it’s a good idea for government to have such a power if and only if a proper system of checks and balances is in place ; and the ones currently available are less than stellar.
For the US, for example, I would rather have confiscation power require 50 state AG mulitisig (or at least, say, 40 of them) - the fiat system, as is, effectively allows one person to drive confiscation.
Also, yours is an argument against any bearer instrument. Consider gold or well hidden cash - if you don’t know where I put it or what the serial numbers are, you can’t confiscate it.
This article gives another point of view: https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...
Some arguments are a bit far-fetched, I wish there was some overview article taking all these points into account. These kinds of footprint analyses are quite novel anyway and of course don't exist yet for Bitcoin in the most convincing fashion.
Or they compare the total amount of energy consumed, but when making their calculations they "forget" to take into account that the total amount of money in circulation is around 80 trillion dollars (some sources say more, some less, I settled on the CIA estimates that are usually very precise ) directly employing million of workers (5 million only in Europe+USA), while bitcoin market cap is only 600 billion (rounded up by me) and employees zero workers.
Money is used everyday by billions in countless transactions (~1 billion transactions a day only counting CC), bitcoins owners are only 5 million and make only 300k transactions per day.
Also consider that bitcoins are designed to burn energy to exist, money works even if suddenly communications shut down or on a desert island in the middle of the ocean with no internet connection, you don't need to keep a copy of a public ledger of all the transactions and can be reused many times and recycled.
- Lack of anonymity: This can easily be addressed with coinjoin wallets and after that by using Lightning transactions over Tor.
- Slow and expensive transactions: Essentially a solved problem thanks to the Lightning Network and other off chain technologies. At this point it is just a matter of adoption and UX.
- Irreversible transactions: This is a feature not a bug. If market participants don't trust each other they can use Multi-signature Transactions which allows a trusted third party to "mitigate" and reverse the transaction if needed.
Edit: Another sure tell of a scam is when proponents get really triggered by negative chat. If you really believe you're holding something great, you don't care about other opinions. In fact, you want to keep buying more and leave less for the rest.
Over approx. 20 years, Lewis collected around $311 million U.S. dollars from investors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Paul_Lewis_Jr%2E
In another ~20 years we can stop calling Bitcoin a Ponzi Scheme, but speculative investment can fuel exponential growth for much longer than you might think.
Not saying that calling Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme is particularly insightful, but if I believe Wikipedia, Madoff's Ponzi scheme had been going on for more than that when it was brought to a halt.
More info: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-adoption-venezuela-research
it is weird to see how the cryptocurrency nerds, with their massively polluting, "I got mine" high-tech get rich quick schemes, grab ahold of the mantle of champion of the oppressed and poverty-stricken.
It's disgusting, phony and hypocritical. It's either acting in bad faith or delusion - I can't tell which, perhaps they blend into each other.
What's discussing is handwaving real-world problems because they don't fit your agenda.
Calling this projection is insulting, and IMHO very much projection itself. bad faith, deluded, or both.
I can't tell if this is bad satire or real bad faith, but my family actually escaped the fascist regime and the nazi invasion and it's a miracle I am alive, I'm much older than you think...
but "check your privilege" rhetorical aside, how is bitcoin helping Venezuela people to escape the oppressive regime?
Venezuela hyperinflation has political roots, there's history of crashing south american economies as the most popular ways to dethrone the elected government without military intervention to install regimes. If the country can adopt bitcoins it's because the government allowed them (Venezuela bank stashed a lot of cryptos), IMO it's pretty weird that an oppressive government would allow something that goes against their interest...
Competently run central banks, unlike incompetently run central banks or crypto mining algorithms, intervene to reduce the money in circulation when its purchasing power falls faster than they're comfortable with.
(Obviously debtors did not continue to be helped either, as businesses and lenders adjusted repayment terms accordingly, including a strong preference for receiving USD in untaxed offshore accounts, or just gave up altogether after incompetent monetary policy had ruined them.)
When the conclusion is fixed, you'll get bad faith arguments.
Please elaborate on this conspiracy theory.
If you don't believe in Bitcoin, you don't have to try to manipulate other people by making obviously false statements and weak arguments against it. Bitcoin is free system, you don't have to participate. No one cares.
Isn't it absurd that so many people's primary hope to acquire wealth is by putting their money into something that was recommended to them on Twitter and that they don't even understand?
This is a zero-sum game, where the money you make, someone else loses. Crypto could be incredibly useful if it was simply a fully decentralised, cross-border, (anonymous) payment solution that is pegged to a basket of existing currencies. Wait, we already got that. It's called stable coins. But yeah, no 'get rich quick' in that one, so apparently a lot less interesting.
Who knows what amazing businesses could be created if the crypto preachers focused their energy and attention on actual value-producing entrepreneurship instead of FOMOing others into buying the random coin of the day.
Not to mention extremely damaging: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952