[Post edited 29 Jul 16:13]

[Post edited 29 Jul 16:47]

[Post edited 30 Jul 17:30]

MW & Crypto by TacticalR 28 May 2021 12:57
https://i.imgur.com/Ku1eOas.png

I haven't followed the whole bitcoin saga, but I started reading 'Attack of the 50 foot Blockchain' a while ago and decided to finish it off before commenting. It's quite short (about 150 pages). It was written in 2017

I didn't realise how absurd the claims of the bitcoin boosters were, but it's been claimed that it's going to revolutionise money, business and society and get you to the moon. A lot of the boosters are libertarians. From the book:

'Bitcoin offered "equality" in that anyone could mine it. But in practice, Bitcoin was substantially mined early on — early adopters have most of the coins. The design was such that early users would get vastly better rewards than later users for the same effort.

Cashing in these early coins involves pumping up the price and then selling to later adopters, particularly during the bubbles. Thus, Bitcoin was not a Ponzi or pyramid scheme, but a pump-and-dump. Anyone who bought in after the earliest days is functionally the sucker in the relationship.

"Why should I spend money to make these guys rich?" is such a common objection that the Bitcoin Wiki answered it: "Early adopters are rewarded for taking the higher risk with their time and money." It is entirely unclear what the "risk" involved was, or how this would convince anyone who didn't already agree.

In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quite a "society" in the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and many addresses have been used only once or a few times. (The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small exchange in 2011) However, a Citigroup analysis from early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent, another 900 hold a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about 25% and another million about 20%"; and the distribution "looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution look like that of a workers' paradise."'

From its inception Bitcoin has been plagued by technical obstacles due to its impracticality:

'There is no way on earth that Bitcoin could possibly scale to being a general utility. At 1 megabyte per block, the blockchain can only do a maximum of 7 transactions per second (TPS), worldwide total. Typical throughput in early 2017 was 2 to 4 TPS.

Compare with the systems Bitcoin claims it can replace: PayPal, which ran about 115 TPS by late 2014; Visa, whose 2015 capacity was 56,000 TPS; even Western Union alone averaged 29 TPS in 2013.'

Numerous bitcoin exchanges such as Mt. Gox have gone bust or been hacked or both.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox

Dogecoin

If you've got 15 minutes there was a Business Daily episode this week about Dogecoin, which includes an interview with the author of 'Attack of the 50 foot Blockchain', and a discussion of Elon Musk's involvement. It's also interesting to hear what motivates the Dogecoin believers.

Dogecoin or bust
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct1jnj

[Post edited 30 Jul 19:23]