I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday (2011) | Hacker News Reader

I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday (2011)

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Having contracted for people in cryptocurrency making sniping bots and other tools previously I learned within a few months that I want to have nothing to so with this environment. It is so absurdly crowded with scammers and takers and just the absolute worst kinds of human behavior. It is actually player versus player in the real world.

Using the same line of reasoning: drug dealers use the us dollar. I don't want to have anything to do with drugs and drug dealears therefore I want nothing to do with any environment that uses us dollars.

This is not analogous at all. What are you talking about?

> Having contracted for people in cryptocurrency making sniping bots and other tools previously I learned within a few months that I want to have nothing to so with this environment. It is so absurdly crowded with scammers and takers and just the absolute worst kinds of human behavior. It is actually player versus player in the real world.

There’s no wrong with crypto if you understand it’s simply a ponzi.

I wish I’d realized it early then I could have approached it correctly instead of paying attention to the question of whether it represents anything real.

And if it didn't waste electricity equivalent to a country.

How much energy is spent, and how much pollution is caused by traditional finance?

Are you really gonna spew this line of reasoning dear crypto bro?

You know the answer and energy cost of both here. One serves an entire a nation at an energy cost that is less than this waste of computation.

The other causes a enegy cost equivalent to entire countries for a total of 250k transactions. Never mind the sheer monumental ewaste generated. Bitcoin is a trash currency and any advocates are garbage for the sheer environmental disaster they cause. It single handedly undoes renewable trends but le number goes up.

The fact this low hanging fruit hasn’t been banned from above is frankly shameful.

Don't worry - if it's so inefficient it will succumb to more efficient alternatives that perform the same function, right?

I wonder why that still isn't happening after 15 years? In fact it seems to be only growing stronger.

A reasonable conclusion is that it's not what you think it is.

Lots of crypto tech doesn’t use this much energy. Proof of work is pretty obsolete by now, so it’s just no longer a relevant argument.

Sure Bitcoin is expensive energy-wise, but criticize Bitcoin for that not crypto.

Like proof of stake, which seems to just codify the bad parts of capitalism?

> Critics have argued that the proof of stake will likely lead cryptocurrency blockchains being more centralized in comparison to proof of work as the system favors users who have a large amount of cryptocurrency, which in turn could lead to users who have a large amount of cryptocurrency having major influence on the management and direction for a crypto blockchain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake#Centralization

Proof of work is pretty obsolete? Lol.

What is money if it isn't proof of work?

Wow. That's a really high horse you're riding over there. Are you saying that the "crypto bros" are using free electricity to power the likes of bitcoin?

If they are paying for the electricity what are you actually arguing against? The free market? Freedom?

Next time you start getting ideas abour banning things look into history for examples when banning shit was attempted and what happened.

If it is unclear what I am saying, read my comment again. Pretty obvious what I am saying that as a currency Bitcoin is garbage.

The value is artificially propped up with tether, easy trading and illegal activity. The energy costs undoes any green movements all so number goes up.

It provides 0 useful economic activity for a Country and should have been banned years ago if governments were run competently.

The world would be a better place if it never existed and proponents are garbage people.

On what grounds could a country's public servants prevent people using electricity in a way that harms no one else, after purchasing said electricity in the free market from approved suppliers?

It's absolutely none of your business what I do with electricity after I've purchased it, so long as I don't use it to harm anyone else. If you try to stop me, I'll sue you for damages.

Aha! Please tell me more about how your 7 transactions per second magic internet money is going to replace global finance and help the unbanked in Africa! BTW, have you guys decided whether your funny token is an asset or currency?

Through fast payment rail networks built on top. But that's not important to it's success. The "funny token"'s base layer (the bitcoin network) is optimised for storing large amounts of value for large periods of time meaning that it will attract a large portion of the wealth in the world just as it is.

I feel like the entire country at this point runs on the statement « You just had to be there sooner ! » Whether it is stocks, houses, jobs, even life expentacy (!!!), newer generations get the shiniest toys and the best memes, but apart from that, I understand why some people have nostalgia for a time they didn’t know. Ah, it’s just a transition, I hope !

The same applies to the money in your bank. It just so happens to have stronger maintainers behind it.

USD is a ponzi, too

It is not because the entity issuing the dollar (America) grows and produces stuff. Ponzi schemes are money laundering schemes. These are entirely different.

Wrong. Fiat is fake, the US government does not grow or produce things, people do, they just believe the dollar has value.

You cannot make up an arbitrary metric and try to compare them.

If your argument reduces to "money isn't real, it just stands for something real" then I'm just not sure you and I are going to have a constructive discussion.

The USD is the world reserve currency. So yeah, they really do not compare at all.

> Ponzi schemes are money laundering schemes.

No, that's like saying "bank-robberies are drug-smuggling."

A Ponzi scheme involves investors being defrauded by someone lying about the status of assets and money flows.

It does not automatically imply any kind of money laundering, and in fact it can operate just fine even when every single scent being invested is from entirely clean sources.

"Money laundering" as in the flow of cash and assets is obfuscated to appear as something it is not.

No, laundering it's far more specific than that, it means the original money is somehow "dirty" (revenue from criminal activity) and is being "cleaned."

In contrast, a Ponzi scheme can operate just fine with 100% clean investment money coming in some unsuspecting victims, and the (smaller) amounts flowing back as dividends would also be clean.

The most precise definition of money laundering may be that. But in general, laundering anything means to pass it off as something it may not be, particularly in a dishonest way.

But good on you for really getting your definitions down I'm sure you're super fascinating at parties.

Neither of them are a Ponzi scheme, we just have an epidemic of people misusing the term.

Not really. I dont recall ever-reading about people being scammmed into buying USD. But the term Ponzi here is definitely quite loose and cryptos have some value as digital asset outside government jurisdiction. Well unless they completely vaporize into thin air...

> simply a ponzi

*sigh* Welcome the 2020s, where anything economically unsustainable-looking that somebody doesn't like gets blithely tarred as a "Ponzi scheme".

Bitcoin? Ponzi scheme. Social Security? Ponzi scheme. Housing market? Ponzi scheme. Monopoly™ board game? Ponzi scheme.

No, at a minimum any "Ponzi scheme" requires somebody to be telling you actual lies about assets and money flows. Without that, you are at the very least dealing with a different category of scam.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/ponzischeme.asp

I’m curious if he still has this quantity of bitcoin with him at hand, as that would make him not just a rich man but one of the largest owners of bitcoin.

Coins for distributed AI training.

CAIN

So anybody know the end result? Did he get some, all, none, in the end?

It was directly mentioned in the post:

> I attempted to withdraw the bitcoin balance into my own wallet, and hit the limit that Mt Gox has, preventing you from withdrawing more than $1000 USD worth of bitcoins (at the current market value) in a day. This transferred 643.27 bitcoins to my personal bitcoin account before hitting that limit. It was pretty well known that the limit for transferring bitcoins was actually broken in Mt Gox. It stopped you from moving more than that in one withdrawal, but you could immediately ask for more and get another $1000 USD worth, over and over. I decided against this, since it was exploiting a bug, and I definitely didn't want to do anything suspicious looking or improper.

I can't believe crypto is coming back and driving back up the prices of GPUs as we finally find a use for them [1].

It's annoying enough having cash-rich crypto companies pivot into AI (with no idea what they're building and no product sense), but now we'll have to fight for consumer GPUs too.

And to anyone equivocating GenAI to crypto, realize that the former brings incredible tools and productivity boosts. Tangible value. Ordinary creative people without deep skills can use GenAI to draw masterpieces with LCMs. They'll be able to direct films and make music. There's still a curve, but it's gentle and the rewards are outsized.

[1] Gaming and scientific computing aside.

> ... and driving back up the prices of GPUs as we finally find a use for them

Bitcoin is mined using ASICs while Ethereum is now using proof-of-stake. These two represent more than 30x the value of the next shitcoin (not counting stablecoin).

What coins are still mined using GPUs?

I don't know, but the price of used 4090s has gone up $500 in the last quarter.

But let's blame it on crypto anyway? This makes zero sense

I've been buying in small bulk quantities from crypto people.

These people told me crypto people are buying the GPUs again. There's even some crypto website they showed me where they get pricing information and comparables.

I don't know or care what coins people mine, just that their activities have restarted and that it's making demand go up.

This is unsubstantiated by the fact that it does not make sense to mine on GPUs. And it hasn't made sense in years.

I don't know what to tell you. I don't have time to get to the bottom of it, this is just what I'm told by my supplier.

Crypto people were never using as many 4090s as they were 4060s and 4070s. Their price has gone up because of the AI craze, not crypto, as they are one of the few consumer nvidia cards with enough ram and compute to run decent local LLMs.

That's because of ML use.

You can't think of another thing that is popular now which would be responsible?

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