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).
I'm a child of the 60s/early 70s who grew up watching Fred Rogers. My environment was hell as a child. His show was a small counterbalance. Every little bit helps.
I'd guess that his model of thoughtful kindness and calmness helped many kids (without any such neighbors) sense that alternatives to their emotional environment existed. And that they could hold onto their inner authorities.
There are lots of paper wallet generators but it seemed like an exercise in frustration to actually use the private key on the page to spend the money.
This.
only suckers keep their coin on exchanges.
Mtgox. Bitcoinica. Mintpal. Poloniex. Cryptsy. Bitfinex. Coincheck. All hacked, all lost their users coin.
Any coin on exchanges does not belong to you. Only coin in which you and you alone hold the keys, is yours.
>”It's not a good store of value over the long haul”
Well sure, but no one is storing their wealth in USD. You use it to purchase assets. What store of value can you purchase with BTC without first converting to USD?
>”Binance made more money than Deutsche Bank last year. They funded growth with an ICO.”
Concentrated more wealth, you mean. What, exactly, did they contribute to the economy? At the very least, banks provide liquidity. The furthest I can gather of any crypto company mission is “make money”.
I am in Argentina. I can do an investment on a company being founded in France tomorrow and cash out in 3 months on a secondary market to a buyer in Angola. The friction involved in doing this in a pre-crypto world makes it a non-starter.
One of the reason VC has its characteristic geographical distribution is because exit opportunities are extremely localized. No more.
This in turn unlocks a ton of talent-capital synergy opportunities for a myriad of projects outside of the large tech hubs.
But you're not doing it because of any intrinsic property of crypto-coins. You're doing it because they haven't been regulated yet. (I am not implying any ill intent on your part.)
You could do the same thing with normal investments, if trading houses and banks didn't do any KYC checks.
I don't know about "intrinsic". No other asset class has the same characteristics. It's making investments viable that were not viable before.
No regulation exists now in conventional banking that prevents me from doing that investment without crypto. It's just not practical and therefore unviable. I would need to surf through 3 different bureaucracies in 3 different languages and currencies. If you are doing this kind of thing, it's in your best interest to always do KYC, mostly not for AML - just for general due diligence purposes.
The fundamental thing is disintermediation, not deregulation. Regulation might be able to kill the space, but it would really be a triumph of the incumbents over a real progress opportunity.
PS I'm going at it from the investor angle here but it goes without saying that enabling investment enables entrepreneurship.
Most ICOs don't sell security tokens. They sell utility tokens. But many ICOs have happened that sold security tokens, they just tend to be more discreet these days because of the limits on public security offerings. The security token space is also very immature still.
On the other end of the discreetness spectrum, The DAO was a security ICO and it was the largest crowdsourced project in history at the time.
I am not familiar with any exit scam that was done based on issuing crypto-powered company shares, which is the topic of discussion. None of the ones you mentioned seem to fall into that category. Most are MLM type stuff.
Where you got the idea that I'm denying the existence of ICO scams, I'll never know.
Bitcoin has crazy volatility compared to gold and even USD. Sure, you can use it for speculation, but no one in their right mind uses Bitcoin as a store of value.
People just hope that someone else will use it as a sure if value, so that the price rises and they get rich off it. Ie, speculation.
Especially considering that approx. 90% of the volume of crypto exchanges -with the exception of U.S exchanges- (therefore Binance included) is what's commonly referred to as "wash trading". I'd estimate Binance's 1Y EBTDA to be $100M at best, but I suspect it's way lower.
I stopped trusting them when they stole the intellectual property of numerous small companies years before the _NSAKEY debacle. I know, I know, Bill Gates is supposed to be some kind of good guy now (malaria, etc.) but I can't think of any good reason to trust any robber baron, based on the past histories of robber barons. Even Andrew Carnegie was an asshole in the final analysis.
Except all the key players of this strategy are gone and Microsoft has embraced (full stop) open source as much as any major corporation in recent years.
But don't let actual evidence stop your pitchforks.
I see that Microsoft is not a corporation that is evil by design and that they are doing exciting stuff as well -- I don't hate them.
However, I am keeping my skepticism when they embrace open-source and am curious which 'actual evidence' you are referring to?
So far, many open-source efforts look more like marketing to me. For instance, WSL makes sense to keep people in a Microsoft environment (and to me at seems that more and more frameworks favor Linux and Mac over Windows).
Microsoft is basically the corporate version of the ship of Theseus at this point. The have a lot of questionable stuff in their history, but the leadership and the culture at large has shifted drastically since those days. At a certain point it is worth reevaluating one's opinions and question whether it is still worth hanging on to those old grudges.
I can certainly understand why people might be skeptical of GitHub being purchased by any of the big players in tech. But I don't see how Microsoft is really a worse buyer than any of the other potential bidders.
Yeah, I am not saying I would trust any other big competitor more than Microsoft.
However, I am still not convinced that Microsoft really changed as much as many people like to believe. I think it is obvious that they lost the fight against open-standards in many domains. Linux on Smartphones would be one example. Now they have two options, either to embrace these technologies or lose market. The question is: How genuine is their enthusiasm and are they really acting in the interest of open-standards? Do they still have strategies to hurt open alternatives to their own products in the long run?
I think the shift from a traditional sales focus to one on subscriptions and "The Cloud" is a pretty monumental change. Losing traditional sales markets like selling phones really hastened that change. I don't think you're looking for proof that they're genuinely enthusiastic, because imo desperation is the rawest form of genuine enthusiasm. It's whether or not they're altruistic in this particular field, and that has yet to be seen.
I don't think you have to be altruistic to have genuine enthusiasm -- some companies have fantastic plans to support open-source as well as their business plans. But I agree with the first point you are making.
I think it is naive to believe than any company that is beholden to investors would choose altruism over profit. Most corporate altruism is just marketing.
I don't think Microsoft is any more altruistic now, they just have adjusted their corporate strategy to recognize that supporting openness is good for business. That is enough for me.
> google gets praised for blatantly awful abuses of power
Do you have some examples of that? The first things that come to mind are AMP and related announcements, which were not received particularly positively here on HN.
Objectively, Western corporate-military ideology has been far deadlier in Asia and Africa than religious fundamentalism. The US has attacked far more countries and killed more civilians than religious extremists have.
https://loveanddeathincharlottesville.com