I am well aware that most people on Hacker News hate Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies so a lot of these types of studies and articles that are negative end up making their way to the top.
It is strange that this study was from 2017-2018 and yet they only considered data from 2009-2013. Would be nice if there was an explanation as to why.
One thing I wanted to point out is this seems to be presented to shine a negative light on Bitcoin, but I have a feeling that if you were to plot the owners of any equity you would find the exact same patterns. People who get in early will own a majority of the supply.
For example take a look at Morgan Stanley stock. 86% of the shares are owned by institutional investors and of that chunk, five institutions own 58% of them:
I also think these types of patterns with regards to transactions probably exist with other currencies as well, but it is just that the data is not available for the public to analyze.
Fractional reserve banking is independent of the currency. You can implement a bitcoin fractional banking system if you have trusted party available (the bank) and as long as you consider bitcoins to be homogeneous. Although it'll be funny (and borderline eco-terrorism) to use bitcoins if there exists a trusted party (like CME for bitcoin futures, bitcoin wallets, bitcoin exchanges, your ISP, your hardware manufacturer).
Limited bitcoins doesn't make it any less vulnerable to being marketed (yes, there is a lot of marketing $ behind it) as a get rich quick scheme. In fact, the growth of fiat value of bitcoin is the biggest reason people see it as an investment vehicle. Bitcoin system might be helpful in countries with oppressive governments and no trustworthy party, but I don't see largest orders of bitcoins coming from North Korea.
I don't have some kind of incisive analysis. I just think the tech is interesting while the loudest cheerleaders come off as some mixture of scammy and cult-like. There are other things that I feel roughly the same way about; it seems to be a standard hazard of being on the cutting edge of R&D.
Bitcoin is not marketed as anything. There is no company and there are no marketing or sales people. That is part of the beauty of it.
The decentralized claim refers to a decentralized network where the miners and nodes connected to the network are decentralized and no single entity controls 51% of the network (if they did it would collapse). Ownership of coins is not the same as hashing power.
Nowhere do people claim that the coins themselves are decentralized.
Hi Craig, I'm sure you know that it only takes 1 or 2 Chinese Bitcoin mining pool CEOs to get more than 51% of the network's hash rate [0]. Mining hasn't been decentralized since 2013 unless your definition of "decentralized" is just "not 1 entity" and so "2 entities" qualifies as decentralized... how is that useful?
I would really beg to differ on that, based on the sheer number of ads I´ve seen over the years on reddit for people to write blogs praising bitcoin, to say nothing of the blatant pump and dump schemes you can find on the dark net.
At least some of the people who got in early, seem to know how to spend money on advertising.
Interesting, I would be curious to see some of these ads. Are you referring specifically to Bitcoin or other crypto currencies (many of which are flat out scams)?
That said, my point was that any “marketing” was not done by a dedicated team or company. It was done by individuals who got interested in the technology and wanted to share it with other people.
Nah, it was just idiots that were marketing "let me show you how to get rich with bitcoin" courses, etc. I always wonder how much HN hates crypto just because it's important to have a good story for sleeping on crypto.
I do not really understand it. Posts about other technologies on here lead to civilized, intelligent conversations, but for whatever reason, any post about crypto or Bitcoin just leads to attacks and arguments.
The reason I find it more inexplicable is that when you think about just the idea of peer to peer programmable finances/money without requiring any trusted intermediary that is a huge idea. In my opinion, it is almost as revolutionary as the internet itself.
I guess we will see how things progress over the next 10-20 years.
Why is it revolutionary? Who really cares that much about not requiring a trusted intermediary, besides anarchists? Our civilized world is built on trust.
It was a Bitcoin advocate who said "nothing is cheaper than proof of work", given the precondition that you don't trust anyone. Curiously, they saw that as an argument in favor of proof of work. Bitcoin detractors see that as an argument in favor of trusting someone, because proof of work is insanely expensive and an ecological disaster.
Based on your reply, I am fairly convinced you have already made up your mind so it is somewhat pointless to spend my time trying to convince you otherwise, but I will say a couple things.
For one, while our civilized world is built on trust and you may trust Banks, Governments, Tech companies etc, the majority of millennials do not trust Banks or Governments. Numbers outside the US are even lower. For more information about this I would recommend watching this presentation:
I believe money is something that you should be able to have full control and ownership of. Governments and banks can lock or seize accounts/funds for any reason. Banks can limit deposit/withdrawal/transfer amounts. I don’t think that right now this is a big problem, but in the future, imagine banks getting hacked and funds stolen or even a bank run. There are a lot of scenarios where I can see our financial system failing. If inflation rates increase then it will drive more people towards things like Gold and Bitcoin. Look at what has been going on in Venezuela.
As far as the electricity use, please consider taking a look at this article:
It also links to a couple of other sources that show how gold mining, paper currency/minting, and electricity used from the banking system all use orders of magnitude more electricity than Bitcoin mining does. If ultimately Bitcoin can replace banks or even gold, then it will have done the world a favor. Most miners also use renewable energy such as hydro and solar which would otherwise just go to waste.
Andreas Antonopoulos makes the argument that it will actually help the world come up with cheaper and more efficient power by allowing people to subsidize the costs by mining Bitcoin:
I didn't ask you to list the usual excuses. You just replied with them out of habit.
I asked you why anyone but an anarchist should consider it "revolutionary" to burn crap-tons of electricity so you don't have to trust anyone.
The most you addressed that point is to tell me "actually millennials are anarchists", which is one of the sillier things I've heard about millennials recently, and that's saying something.
Well clearly you just glazed over what I said which was also what I expected.
I personally find the idea of having complete control over your own money, being able to program it, and being able to send it to anyone in the world fairly quickly and cheaply without any intermediary revolutionary. It doesn’t hurt that it is impossible to counterfeit, and your money can be stored completely in your brain.
If you don’t find those ideas revolutionary that is fine, but I think 10 or 20 years from now you may be surprised.
Outside of any of the technical feats, there is also the fact that Bitcoin is the best form of money in terms of the properties of money. Limited/fixed supply, divisible to 8 decimal places, can’t be counterfeited, easy to transact with, etc. I don’t see how anything else can even compare.
I am also curious why you think burning crap-tons of electricity to run the current financial system where you have to trust everyone is any better?
This is the same reasoning that Bitcoin folks regurgitate with a lot of rhyme but no reason. It's like people have memorized this cult reasoning over and over again and think they have some intelligent reasoning on how this whole crapcoin fiesta makes any sense.
The irony of this whole argument is that people are holding BTC in the hopes that the price against USD will get higher over time.
If that doesn't sound stupid, I don't know what does....
By "marketed as" people just mean "described as by people promoting it"? Or possibly "described as by people promoting it who have a financial incentive to do so".
This seems obvious to me?
Saying "bitcoin isn't marketed because it isn't run by any particular company" in response to people saying it is "marketed" in certain ways seems like missing what was clearly meant to be communicated.
Bitcoin was heavily marketed as a currency. It failed at this.
Bitcoin was heavily marketed as decentralized where no single entity owns 51% of the network. In fact Bitmain likely already does or soon will control 51% of the network [1].
The remarkable thing here is that despite these clear, observable failures... Bitcoin will go on. The true believers will continue to HODL and while shorts may pile on in the absence of fundamental economic data there's little reason to buy or sell. The price now is purely a popularity contest.
I think you are missing my point. If Bitcoin is “marketed” as anything, it is by people who got interested in the technology, learned about it, and started to spread the word to other people.
You could say the same thing about many open source software programs or apps.
What I was saying is that there is no company behind Bitcoin that represents it or speaks for it. When you say “Bitcoin was heavily marketed” you mean that people explained it that way to others.
You might read the Bitcoin paper written by the inventor of Bitcoin. There is absolutely no doubt that Bitcoin was originally and has always been marketed as a currency. I can see why you might want to deny this but, please, it's insulting to try and rewrite history when the facts are widely known.
I have read it multiple times, in fact. I am not denying that it was originally intended as a peer to peer currency, but saying it was marketed as that when the creator was publishing an academic paper of sorts and releasing it for free into the world is a bit of a stretch. Marketing implies that there is a customer you are trying to sell a product or service to.
He or she did not care about getting rich since the original coins have never actually been touched. The creator did not even know that people would start to exchange existing currencies for Bitcoin at the time the paper was published or that it would catch on at all.
I am not trying to rewrite history. I was only stating that Bitcoin is not a company. There are no big corporations controlling it. There is no sales team. There is no marketing team. Anyone who promotes it is doing it out of their own free will.
Let me point out that you're accusing other people of glossing over what you wrote, when they're actually saying they've already heard all the stock fallacious arguments and tired marketing slogans you're regurgitating, while you're glossing over what they are writing.
So let me repeat an important point that you just now glossed over yourself: Your attempt at rewriting well known history is insulting. Hacker News is not the proper audience for your Bitcoin marketing, not the proper venue to insult people's intelligence. Please stop insulting us by acting like it is.
YOU by your own free will and greed and behavior are an integral part of the decentralized marketing team whose existence you deny, and it's insulting that you keep repeating the same things while glossing over what other people keep telling you.
Of course only small communities have a majority of btc. Too many people - geeks included - spent too many years believing the fud being broadcast about Bitcoin while others were collecting btc. I've seen the blistering scorn from some here on HN over the years.
When I first ran across Bitcoin in 2010, I thought it was a scam but was intrigued by the tech. After studying it for about a month, I realised it wasn't a scam (though scamsters abound in cryptocurrencies, as in all things money) and went around to my friends in the tech community in my city to show it to them. They know me to be literate in networks and cryptography but only one person in the ten or twelve I approached was equally interested. The rest poopooed Bitcoin, some outright laughing me out of their offices.
Institutional thinking is what kept a lot of smart people from even looking at Bitcoin early on. The findings in this study shouldn't be surprising. In five years, should the internet still be functioning, Bitcoin will be more spread out than it is now.
What are you basing this on, your gut feeling? If I look at where I can actually use bitcoins, or crypto currencies in general, the list is dwindling. A few years ago I could buy coffee with crypto, I can’t today. A few years ago I could buy certificates (if I could also pass them) and other Microsoft products with crypto, I can’t today. A few years ago I could rent an vacation home with crypto, I can’t today. Hell these days I can’t even conver crypto into actual money in my country.
Maybe it’s not like that in the US, but the only useful thing I can spend crypto on as a Scandinavian is paying for my domains.
I'm basing it on eight years of experience in Bitcoin.
"Bitcoin for coffee" and the like is a waste of the tech, imo. Buying network services such as you described is a better use as intercountry payments with debit cards isn't always feasible.
Bitcoin's use is better as a transnational currency when traditional payment channels are cumbersome. To be frank, Bitcoin still has some work to do in the payment channel dept but Lightning Network is getting there.
In the US, there are more than a few places where you can trade out btc for gold/silver and sell the metal for fiat. It's preferable to selling on an exchange, imo.
If you can't spend now, hang onto your btc until you can. Saving is always a good idea.
I think Gandi does still accepts bitcoin just fine for their services https://wiki.gandi.net/en/billing/means/bitcoin I was renewing a domain this week,and Bitcoin was listed on the checkout page, and I'm pretty sure it would be for all domain services (such as certificates).
An oligarchy isn’t defined by a set of stable oligarchs. There can be a shift in power in a oligarchy and there typically will be because the oligarchs aren’t friends.
If you look to ancient Athens, it wasn’t uncommon for an oligarch to be exiled. If you look to modern Russia, well, there is a reason a lot of former Russian oligarchs chose to live in London and not a Russian prison.
An oligarchy is almost always a turbulent place, most of them making the BTC powershifts look calm.
Churn at the top is the exact thing you want in a dynamic, robust economy. You don't want equality. You want movement. Sure, Russia and Athens had some churn. But it was incredibly low.
It's still a small group in control, so still an oligarchy. But the fact that there is a constant rotation of oligarchs makes it a little different, like maybe you could be the next oligarch.
When bitcoin appeared, everybody was saying that "only retarded people would `invest` in such an obvious scam. you would be better to blow your money in Vegas, at least you'll get a free drink". Now the same people say "it's not fair that some got to buy it at such cheap valuations".
No we are still saying the same. Lots of people made money on pyramid schemes, that doesn’t make them a good investment. The longer a pyramid scheme runs, the dumber it is to invest in it.
If you truthfully believe bitcoin will develop into a stable alternative to state run currencies, great, I wish you good luck.
I don’t. To me it is like religion - they can’t all be right and they are mutually exclusive. I don’t trust myself to be able to pick the winner among all the losers.
The notes and coins for the euro were first issued in 2002, and the first bitcoin was mined in 2009. What makes one a pyramid scheme and the other not?
The answer surely can't be "every currency issued by a government is stable forever and every crypto-currency will collapse before 5 years".
What I'm saying is, there are a lot of currencies out there, and some are more stable and have a better track record than others. You may not trust yourself to pick a winner among the losers, but I suspect you do use at least one currency from time to time, so you have picked one by default.
Pardon my ignorance, but how is it possible to track Bitcoin holders? I thought that it was really easy to create multiple Bitcoin addresses, so if a rich miner wanted to hide his holdings he could create a separate address for each transaction and he would in effect be untraceable right?
There is lots of other metadata to collect:
You can monitor which nodes received the transaction first. Edge nodes can get IP address of sender. Who are the transactions with? Amounts, quantity, and time of day/week/month could all provide correlation.
Bitcoin wallets generally generate multiple addresses so most users have many. The wallet software does the work of displaying all addresses combined as a single balance. This is different than Ethereum where generally most users have 3 or less accounts. The effect of this is that Bitcoin appears less concentrated than it actually is in comparison.
Any entity that controls more than 51% of network capability (i.e. owns and operates a lot of expensive hardware) can, in theory, begin making fradulent transactions called "double spends".
Any common user of the network that is unfortunate enough to get caught up in this scheme would lose their money. And the long term value of the network would most likely plummet, but in 2013 it didn't for some odd reason :)
Unless I am missing something, this paper is referring to connections between addresses when it mentions the “Bitcoin network”. Not actual mining nodes. It does not have anything to do with a 51% attack.
In that case, the select few owners of these coins could dump their holdings to buyers who are otherwise unaware of these large numbers of "hidden" coins. The owners make good money, the buyers overpay.
After that, it would be up to the core developers and the new holders of the coins to make the Bitcoin ecosystem a valuable place to exchange money. If they do that, then the coin will survive all that inflationary volume.
If the oligarchy never dumps, then they've just aided Bitcoin price support.
A coin does not equal a vote in Bitcoin version support, only hashing power does.
But de facto, I suspect wallet size is correlated with hashing power.
When I think of political control and Bitcoin I think of people who have the power to build a consensus for a hard fork. It wouldn't really make sense for someone controlling 51% of the network to hack the network. Then all their bitcoins would be useless because everyone else would abandon the network.
They could do short, targeted 51% attacks without doing much harm to the value of Bitcoin. In 2013 Ghash.io a mining pool had an employee who carried out mining based doublespends against a gambling site [0]. Very few people abandoned the network because very few people were impacted by this attack.
The Ghash double spend was a pretty big deal, and instigated a big campaign by miners to switch away from the Ghash pool. So it was costly for the pool, and it was probably not happy about its employee executing it.
Any player that directly owns 51% of the hash power, rather than just pooling, would similarly be economically incentivized to avoid such double spends, as they provide very little payout, while undermining confidence in the protoocl.
My suspicion is that a few users have a ridiculous amount of bitcoin across many many wallets and that they use these wallets to prob up the value of bitcoin. This slowly drains their bitcoin assets, but keeping the value of BTC high relative to hard currencies like US dollars means that they still make lots of money. There's enough wealth concentrated in enough individuals that they could probably go for years propping up the value of bitcoin until they run out of enough bitcoin to keep the value propped up or until BTC actually becomes useful as a reserve currency for the real world. If the latter happens first, then they get rich from making something useful. If the former happens first, everything comes crashing down like a house of cards, but they still get rich.
Is this online "epdf" viewer by Springer running sluggish on purpose? Or is that just because of my dated notebook? Whenever graphs are rendered my CPU usage just spikes.
With the emergence of electronic id cards in several countries (e.g. Estonia, Germany), there is the real possibility of equally distributing currency to card holders, even depending on properties such as current residence or birth date (dystopian version: names or only people with specific biometrics: eye color, heights or specific facial features). It is possible to create a signature scheme that guarantees privacy while avoiding double spending. One limitation to this is that organisations wanting to use signatures (at least in my country) must register with the government as a service provider, which might be a point of failure.
Those are not contradictions, you realise that right?
MLM schemes are bullshit, don’t waste your money.
If you buy into Herbalife now you are truly not making a good decision, because there is already a huge pyramid of people above you.
MLM schemes are a bad idea at the start because they are unlikely to take off, and they are a bad idea when they are running because they are unlikely to be profitable for anyone at the lower levels due to the unsustainable structure of profit distribution.
>Leonardo Ermann from the National Commission for Atomic Energy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and colleagues from the University of Toulouse, France, have examined the structure of the Bitcoin-owner community by looking at the transactions of this cryptocurrency between 2009 and 2013.
The study is 5 years old?
Guessing back then it was libertarians and drug dealers.
Also isnt this true of any early adoptor? The first smartphones were a small group too.
The bigger question is- Why is this news?
This seems to be agenda driven rather than a discovery. Who benefits from pushing anti-bitcoin ideas? These are not accidents, these studies are expensive to run. Why was this study completed?
Oligarchy means controlled by the few. Anyone with a Raspberry PI, decent network bandwidth, and a few terabytes hard drive can be a node and start validating and relaying transactions. Besides, Bitcoin is not proof of stake, so having a lot of bitcoin does not give someone more control of the network. So no, Bitcoin is not an oligarchy. All of these big addresses likely belong to exchanges like CoinBase, etc.
It is strange that this study was from 2017-2018 and yet they only considered data from 2009-2013. Would be nice if there was an explanation as to why.
One thing I wanted to point out is this seems to be presented to shine a negative light on Bitcoin, but I have a feeling that if you were to plot the owners of any equity you would find the exact same patterns. People who get in early will own a majority of the supply.
For example take a look at Morgan Stanley stock. 86% of the shares are owned by institutional investors and of that chunk, five institutions own 58% of them:
https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/ms/ownership-summary
I also think these types of patterns with regards to transactions probably exist with other currencies as well, but it is just that the data is not available for the public to analyze.