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Solve : 9 Million in Bitcoin thrown away on Hard Drive... OOPS!!!? |
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Answer» 9 Million in bitcoin thrown away on hard drive to landfill....OOOOPS!!! Bitcoins are hilarious. And a huge source of regret for many, either because they mined them and threw them away like this guy, or because they declined to jump on the bandwagon back when they were easy, and keep thinking of how much money they could have now. Hindsight is a glorious thing...Bitcoins disgust me, and the price increase disgusts me, because nobody really thinks about what it means. Why would demand for bitcoins go up? Who would want BitCoins? Most people seem to wish they had them so they can sell them; so the question is, who is willing to pay this premium?. It takes some thought. But what kind of people would be actively seeking a virtual currency on an unregulated, decentralized marketplace? Probably the types of people that don't want to leave a paper trail in their transactions. It's a lot harder to associate a given Bitcoin account with a person than a credit card statement, especially when that transaction record is an encrypted set of blockchains. So we have to think- the price of Bitcoins went up a lot recently. Most people are thrilled. "yay these bitcoins are worth more"; many people will state something like yourself, Calum, "oh you guys are just jealous". But who is stopping to think about why demand is so high? Who wants these Bitcoins, and why? One answer, and one answer only that I can think of. You know what it is. payment for illicit content. Now I am of course not saying the people thrilled about bitcoin, purposely ACTIVE parts of that. What I'm saying is that we have to think- why is demand so high? Who wants bitcoins, and who is willing to pay that premium, and why?" And every time I ask myself that question, the only answer I can think of is that they want to use the bitcoins for something they either cannot or do not want to use legal tender for. And the only thing that comes to mind when I think of that particularly in combination with the Internet is illicit content. The Biggest one in terms of illicit content appears to be Child Pornography. More recent busts, I seem to recall, showed evidence of bitcoin transactions and/or a bitcoin wallet on the perpetrators machine. This has been a rather well known fact. Bitcoin has practically worked with Tor, a ANONYMIZATION network that has been the go-to Child Porn Spigot for years. Worse still, in using Tor, Bitcoin transactions- which otherwise only identify via IP and Bitcoin Address- become almost entirely anonymous. Then I got to thinking, well, this is pretty well established- one of the main users of bitcoins are those who have the most to gain from it's decentralized and unregulated nature. And they would probably be the only ones actually buying bitcoins- Most folks that are excited about this price jump are miners- they don't sell them. But one has to realize that in order for you to sell a bitcoin for ~100 dollars, somebody has to be willing to buy a bitcoin for 100$. The only thing I can ever think about when somebody mentions bitcoins is that it's being used as tool to allow sick, twisted individuals to continue to abuse children and sell their twisted abuses which will scar those children for a lifetime with other sick-twisted individuals, in exchange for a virtual currency that by it's nature is more difficult for law enforcement to track or trace transactions with. if I had any number of bitcoins, I don't think I could sell them for that reason. A million dollars would be nice but based on what I can learn about where you can spend bitcoin (there are like 10 placed in the world that accept it, it's hardly something you can use in place of a credit or debit card), the fact that there is actually a demand and people willing to spend that much money to get bitcoins makes me strongly suspect that the people paying for that million dollars are going to be living with the psychological trauma for the rest of their lives. Or, in a worst case, not living. And it's all made so much easier for those disgusting individuals due to the decentralized, unregulated nature of Bitcoin. Now I'm not saying Bitcoin was designed for this. Nobody had this in mind. It just happens that the goals of "a new virtual currency that makes it so the guv'ment can't track my spending habits" and folks that go, "golly, I'm a sick, twisted individual and I would like to watch disgusting videos were children are forced to perform acts that traumatize them for the remainder of their life, assuming the videographer doesn't kill them to eliminate witnesses, but I really don't want that to show up on my credit card statement" happen to coincide in implementation. So when you go to sell your bitcoins, ask yourself what kind of a person would actually want to spend nearly 100 dollars for a single bitcoin. I cannot think of many legitimate reasons for a person to be willing to buy a single bitcoin for 100$; I mean, of course people want to sell them, most people mining are jumping all over the chance to sell their bitcoins, but few think about what motives a person would have to spend that much money on a Bitcoin and for what purpose they wish to have Bitcoins.Quote many people will state something like yourself, Calum, "oh you guys are just jealous". That's not what I was saying at all. There are legitimate uses for Bitcoin, people can invest in it and gamble that the price will increase without using it for nefarious purposes. Some stores do take Bitcoin as payments, and it's easy enough to turn BTC into cash, Amazon vouchers, etc. Certainly it's not as popular a payment option as Visa or anything, but it's becoming more popular as the days go by. Sure, BTC can be used for some terrible things, taking advantage of its anonymous nature, but so can cash, which is just as anonymous. Investing in BTC is one reason to want to buy or mine them, same as investing in any stock market where the value can fluctuate, sometimes hugely. Of course if there's no way to spend them at all then the system is flawed and will eventually crash, because investors alone can't hold up a market like that forever, if everyone buys some and sits waiting for the value to increase then it's just not sustainable, but investing is certainly something that does go on and is one reason for someone to buy Bitcoins. I didn't really want to start a debate on whether Bitcoin, Litecoin or any other cryptocurrency is a good or bad thing, or what it could potentially be used for, I was just saying that certainly among a lot of my friends, the general feeling is one of regret as we all heard about it, went "pft, this won't amount to anything, no way this'll take off" and here we are some years later thinking about what could've been. Also, the worth of one BTC is largely irrelevant as it's possible to transfer pieces of one, so whether 1BTC is worth £.01 or £845.90 makes no difference to its anonymity or what it could be used for.Quote from: Calum on December 01, 2013, 09:34:21 AM That's not what I was saying at all.Fair enough, but it is true that some people will make similar statements. I was outlining why even if I had, say, 30 million dollars worth of Bitcoins, (or really any amount) I would not be comfortable selling them. Quote There are legitimate uses for Bitcoin, people can invest in it and gamble that the price will increase without using it for nefarious purposes.I accounted for that in my reasoning- not in the post, arguably. Generally, in that case the idea is to buy low and sell high. Bitcoin's price normally fluctuates a lot, for whatever reason (Especially when you have people hacking the system and stealing the guy who owns 40% of all bitcoins' Wallet and selling them all for 1 cent, which happened a few years ago if I recall). But my reasoning is that, if a person wants to buy low and sell high, buying now doesn't seem wise- because doing so would mean as you say gambling that it will in fact go higher. Possible? yes. But it would seem wiser to just wait for it to go down again. Quote Some stores do take Bitcoin as payments, and it's easy enough to turn BTC into cash, Amazon vouchers, etc. Certainly it's not as popular a payment option as Visa or anything, but it's becoming more popular as the days go by.Personally my other problem- aside from the whole case of it being so well-used for nefarious purposes with bitcoin is that it doesn't really solve a problem. Quote but so can cash, which is just as anonymous.Cash has to be handled in person, or mailed. The latter would be the more common case for obtaining questionable merchandise; and both will leave a stream of personal contacts; the first with people they know, where they met to 'exchange goods' etc. to former also has the tracking records of the post. Bitcoins are different- they can be exchanged completely anonymously. With Cash, you have Criminal A giving money to Criminal B, giving it to Criminal B; one of them get's busted they can lead law enforcement to the others. With bitcoin, it's untracable. All you have is a Bitcoin address that is randomly generated and an IP; the IP can be hidden behind proxy's or Tor, making transactions effectively anonymous. Quote Investing in BTC is one reason to want to buy or mine them, same as investing in any stock market where the value can fluctuate, sometimes hugely. Of course if there's no way to spend them at all then the system is flawed and will eventually crash, because investors alone can't hold up a market like that forever, if everyone buys some and sits waiting for the value to increase then it's just not sustainable, but investing is certainly something that does go on and is one reason for someone to buy Bitcoins.At their current cost I find the idea that it's being purchased as an investment a bit difficult to go with. Of course maybe a lot of stupid people are investing in something when it is at it's highest price. Also, the worth of one BTC is largely irrelevant as it's possible to transfer pieces of one, so whether 1BTC is worth £.01 or £845.90 makes no difference to its anonymity or what it could be used for. [/quote] The worth indicates demand. It means people are willing to buy Bitcoins at that higher price point. I find it difficult to think of any particularly salient reason for a person to want to buy Bitcoins. At it's current price point buying to hope it goes even higher would just be stupid. On the other hand, people might be banking that it is a "bull market" and will continue it's upward trend. It will fall eventually. As the price goes up the incentive to exploit the system get's higher- Right now the protocol assumes the Client is being completely honest about what it is doing, so it's only a matter of time before there is some massive crash brought on by yet another case of market engineering. Quote from: BC_Programmer on December 01, 2013, 05:10:25 AM . A million dollars would be nice but based on what I can learn about where you can spend bitcoin (there are like 10 places in the world that accept it, it's hardly something you can use in place of a credit or debit card) Woah woah woah, there are way more than just 10 places that accept bitcoin. This is just a small portion of the places you can spend bitcoin: https://www.spendbitcoins.com/places/ You can even buy cars with BitCoins: http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/buying-digital-car-digital-money-tesla-s-bought-bitcoins/ Quote from: Google on December 06, 2013, 12:34:18 PM Woah woah woah, there are way more than just 10 places that accept bitcoin.Woah woah woah, is this your first experience with hyperbole? Quote This is just a small portion of the places you can spend bitcoin: https://www.spendbitcoins.com/places/The fact that it needs a list at all proves exactly my point. Quote You can even buy cars with BitCoins: http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/buying-digital-car-digital-money-tesla-s-bought-bitcoins/At one dealership.Quote from: BC_Programmer on December 06, 2013, 06:37:49 PM Woah woah woah, is this your first experience with hyperbole?Irrelevant. Quote from: BC_Programmer on December 06, 2013, 06:37:49 PM The fact that it needs a list at all proves exactly my point.You are correct that it cannot yet be used in place of other method of payment, but you are not correct that there are only 10 places in the world that accept it. That's all I was trying to point out. Quote from: BC_Programmer on December 06, 2013, 06:37:49 PM At one dealership.Yep.Quote from: Google on December 12, 2013, 12:02:05 PM Irrelevant.No. It's not irrelevant at all. Do you know what relevancy is? Quote You are correct that it cannot yet be used in place of other method of payment, but you are not correct that there are only 10 places in the world that accept it. That's all I was trying to point out.And I was trying to point out that the '10' figure was a low figure for the purpose of underexaggeration. That's called "hyperbole" and the fact that you cannot recognize simple literary devices and instead take everything at face value is borderline trolling. Quote from: BC_Programmer on December 12, 2013, 12:06:37 PM borderline trolling. +1 Quote from: BC_Programmer on December 01, 2013, 10:36:00 AM so it's only a matter of time before there is some massive crash brought on by yet another case of market engineering. The start of this month had Bitcoins at around $1200 each. This was because of the Congressional hearing on virtual currencies. Bitcoins have since dropped like a stone to 50% of that value, because China's central bank barred financial INSTITUTIONS from handling bitcoin transactions, which resulted in the largest bitcoin exchanges no longer being able to exchange for the chinese yuan, it dropped like a rock. In other words, there was a massive crash brought on by market engineering. Anybody who purchased Bitcoins since mid November, which was right around the time Bitcoin advocates were saying "it's totally stable", and many people hitched a ride on the bull market- and didn't cash out have lost a significant portion of their 'investment'. If only somebody could have predicted that it was only a matter of time before there is some massive crash brought on by yet another case of market engineering. Oh well, guess it was impossible to predict.I think it was just the hard drive that he through away, and he went to the land fill looking for it with no luck. Do you think anyone will ever find it, probably not. That might be a new thing in the future, when you find an old computer in the garbage, check the drive for bit coins!!!! Better odds playing lottery |
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