Nim receives $100k in Bitcoin donations
nim-lang.org
nim-lang.org
Bitcoin's coolest feature is perhaps it's biggest weakness. I think virtually all of the people to whom Bitcoin is appealing have had access to a banking system which means we have never had to think about securing our wealth. IMO being able to safely secure the secret that would unlock a wallet from both destruction and theft is not easy. You can avoid the risk of destruction by redundantly storing the secret. Hardware wallets are a great option, probably the best one. Let's hope it's enough.
BTW: I did a mini-matching fundraising for a couple of days for Zig, based on some cryptocoins I had that were gathering dust. Conveniently enough there's a broker out there that was able to receive the cryptocurrency, exchange it and forward it to the Zig Foundation. This relieved the Zig team from the hassle of securing or exchanging the funds. See the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28790988 -- I was able to donate my cryptocurrency to match funds donated using conventional means.
That's why I bury all my gold in the backyard.
Not disagreeing with you but then there are two places (or more) where the secret can be found and your funds stolen. As to having, in addition to that, a hardware wallet makes for yet another potential attack vector: is the hardware wallet unlocked by your fingerprint? Is the fingerprint reader secure? Is it protected by a PIN? How safe is your PIN? Is the HSM in the hardware wallet really unbreakable and really erasing everything after three tries and no attacker can bypass that?
https://twitter.com/nim_lang/status/1452773004417585154?s=20
If only for this specific use case (e.g. donate to wikileaks), there is actual intrinsic (and social) value in Bitcoin
$1 billion would take a day to clear, but it would still be 100% free.
Irreversibility of such a transaction would be ridiculous for all parties involved, of course they don't offer that.
Also, opening bank accounts these days is done entirely online and usually you get approved within an hour or so. Apart from having to scan my ID with my phone's camera, I don't remember any bureaucracy.
But yeah, if you want to donate to $shadyorg, somebody might stop you or come after you.
Don't see how Bitcoin is better in this regard.
Because there's obviously a clear and universal agreement on what falls in the $shadyorg bucket.
Like when Visa and their cronies decide to cut off donation to an org they don't like just because.
Must be nice where you live
However it does not therefore follow that making your own money that consumes as much power as Poland (60 days of power for the average US household per transaction) or generates as much e-waste as the Netherlands each year is a better solution in any way. Certainly not while miners re-activate shuttered fossil fuel plants and burn Kazakh coal. It's an abject, unmitigated disaster. All while processing the transaction volume of a small Costco.
If anything it distracts from actual solutions.
Each country is surely going to legislate within its borders, but outside it's quickly turning into the international law territory. And the great secret of international law is that there isn't any.
Bitcoin at least provides actually internationally enforceable operation framework. You cannot unilaterally alter the deal.
If organization X is considered shady by country A, but totally legit in country B, then Visa operating in both countries A and B cannot allow transfers from B to A. Regardless of what country B and its residents think, Visa would get into trouble with country A. Country B cannot legislate Visa to ignore the laws of A, and there is no recourse for residents of B.
Marijuana is a federal crime in the US and basically everywhere else on Earth, but you can buy pot at Canada's government-run pot dispensaries online with your Visa, Mastercard and American Express cards. Like at http://ocs.ca
Lol. In my country there is no easy way to do an international bank transfer. Crypto is literally the only solution I can imagine if I want to donate a few bucks to a FOSS project, all other options would be too much effort and too expensive.
It's also super disingenuous to suggest that the Bitcoin network isn't collecting its take. Miners are collecting block reward in the amount of 0.004BTC per transaction, roughly $250. This is a direct reduction in net welfare of the system. That's on top of the transaction fees of roughly $3-5.
So yeah, Bitcoin costs $255 to transact, vs a free ACH.
This is also not intrinsic value. Intrinsic value is the calculated value of Bitcoin which remains $0. All value ascribed to Bitcoin is extrinsic, and this transaction extracted non-trivial value.
I don't think you can make that determination unless you know why the sender chose to use Bitcoin.
Avoiding the law is a genuine and legitimate use case of Bitcoin not better served by the classic financial system.
There is strictly no such thing as intrinsic value. There is only supply and demand. We've talked about this before, but I guess there's no convincing you.
I can take gold and turn it into electronics, jewelry and so on. I can do things with it beyond looking at it. What that's worth is subject to market value, but intrinsic value is a math-based derivation of the present value of an asset based on its attributes and qualities (and their utility and marketability), not calculated from what the market will bear for its direct transaction.
Not that I'm advocating gold, I'm just using it as an example.
Pickled cucumbers cannot be used to manufacture bitcoin miners, yet one can surely argue that they have “value” and a certain “price” (= “market value“) which is expected to be a proxy for the perceived intrinsic value.
How you perceive the intrinsic value is subjective, while market value is (though to be) objective. For example, if you personally don’t know what to do with pickles then they have zero (or even negative) value to you. Other people might have different valuation.
It's like trying to tell your debt collector "the real money is the friends we made along the way." Ok, maybe to you, but those kneecaps are still going to hurt in the morning.
> Pickled cucumbers cannot be used to manufacture bitcoin miners, yet one can surely argue that they have “value” and a certain “price” (= “market value“) which is expected to be a proxy for the perceived intrinsic value.
I cannot make sense of this argument. Pickled cucumbers have an intrinsic nutritional value. They're food. Sure they don't have calories, but they have vitamin A, K, calcium, potassium, sodium. You know, things you need, to live.
Folks are welcome to have their extrinsic valuation of pickles too, but that doesn't mean they don't also have an intrinsic value.
> Intrinsic value is the calculated value of Bitcoin which remains $0.
You ascribe no intrinsic value to Bitcoin arbitrarily, because from your viewpoint there is no useful applications for it. And yet, one can use Bitcoin, for example, to store data on Bitcoin blockchain permanently, or to pay miners for performing transactions – this is intrinsic value, similar to nutritional value of pickles.
Not because there's no applications for it - there's crime - but because the value created doesn't accrue to Bitcoin, it accrues to the miners. You cannot use, touch, look at, do anything with a Bitcoin. You can pay miners to move it. That value accrues to miners.
[edit] It's like hoping your Starbucks gift cards go up in value because Starbucks sells more coffee.
Mining rewards are incentive to secure the network. Security increases the net welfare of the system.
Let's compare apples to apples. If you're including mining rewards in the cost for a bitcoin transaction, you should also includes Wells Fargo's payroll in the costs for a "free" ACH
Only to a point. That's the problem, Bitcoin does not and cannot have a negative feedback cycle. It's got the 50 seatbelts problem. If you keep adding seatbelts at some point you're so far beyond safe that any additional incremental seatbelts are simply waste. If you're already consuming 10x as many resources as anyone can possibly muster to attack the network, then any incremental expenditure is simply waste, not added value, not security.
> If you're including mining rewards in the cost for a bitcoin transaction, you should also includes Wells Fargo's payroll in the costs for a "free" ACH
Wells Fargo provides far, far more services than simply facilitating interbank transfers.
ACHs aren't exactly free but they're close, it's like 3/10th of a cent in volume. Low enough that banks are willing to eat it to keep you as a customer. This is actually enough to cover all the costs associated with operating the network, including payroll, as it operates on a cost recovery basis. Because they're not setting fire to all the world's coal to achieve their security model, and a few server racks at the NACHA just aren't that expensive.
Non profits have always been able to take whatever assets that can be valued.
>Essentially what we did was move the funds to hardware wallets owned by the core development team.
How often is it that an org makes their team personally and physically hold funds? Seems like a liability
I’m not an economist or even an intelligent person, so this could be a terrible assessment of the situation.
Currencies don't skyrocket in value because it cripples the economy if that happens. In currency terms, it would yield a deflationary spiral. What happens is people save their currency instead of spending it, which causes retailers to lower the prices to incentivize spending. This in turn means they have less money to pay their workers, and they have to cut their pay and lay them off. This means the workers have less money to spend and the cycle continues.
Even without a deflationary spiral, there's something called the paradox of thrift. [1]
Something like 80% of Bitcoin hasn't moved in the last year.
If we set aside the influence of USDT, the narrative you're pointing to would be that people are valuing Bitcoin more highly because of its utility as some form of currency - maybe, one day. In reality, due to its fundamental limitations and incentive structures (2-3 tx/sec), it cannot be a currency. It will always be the currency of the future, forever.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/paradox-of-thrift.asp
The decreasing inflation and other technical merits are super interesting, though.
Does that sound wrong as well?
EDIT: censored to not look like I'm shilling/pumping.
If the dev team allocates the address (or if every.org adds support for that coin), I'll post a link to the transaction here.
BTW I donated BTC to Zig earlier this month [1], only reason I mentioned a different coin here is that the Nim team mentions both BTC and Eth in their post and I don't prefer going to an exchange.
And I'll throw in some in doomroot's name because they are too cynical ;)
evidence, for doomroot's sake (trust but verify): https://nanocrawler.cc/explorer/block/818E31FBA9C4983AE54CE7...
And let's say another 500 USD up for grabs as a match. Any donations from HNers to the Nim project (in any kind of currency) I'll match for the next 48 hrs up to $500.
The master public key will let you cycle to an infinite number of new and unique addresses to send funds to.
But purely client side merchant solutions for bitcoin (and other crypto assets) are sorely lacking!
BitcoinPayServer pretty much sucks.
Sure it was gambling but it was neither black market nor money laundering.
P.S: an estimated 3% to 5% of the world's GDP is linked to criminal activities. There are hundreds of politicians in the Pandora papers. Money laundering predates cryptocurrencies by a very long time and it's a problem on a whole different scale.
I know Bitcoin proponents can be quite dismissive of anything that could potentially sound negative towards crypto, but I feel like we should not be having a discourse on HN where a joke like this has to be explained or which has people downvoting OP for making it. No matter your stance on Bitcoin it’s volatility is a matter of established fact, and it’s a fun joke, how the hell did humor die in the crowd of wallstreet bets HODL’rs screening yolo while betting their house on a stick because the ticket has high meme-value?
I understood that :) My point was that although Bitcoin is volatile at this moment, I much rather receive donations in a volatile currency than no donations at all.
-- people who have donated $0 to Nim
Bitcoin != USD.
In fact I seem to recall being told that was rather the point.