This is trivial to avoid by using two-factor authentication on one’s google account.
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I recommend also having a good password that you don’t use elsewhere. 2FA is beatable in a few ways if the person already has your password.
You should do both. These days your Google account is extremely important. If someone gets into your Google account and you are using Gmail as your primary email, they can reset the passwords on many of your other accounts. Also don’t use SMS for 2 factor.
So, here’s a question I’ve had for a bit but never really cared to do the actual research to come to a real conclusion as to if this would be good or bad.
How does Cryptocurrencies deal with “lost” money? Like, there is a maximum-ish to the amount of bitcoins that can exist, and people will, through accident and carelessness, lose the keys to the wallets that contain that money. How does the market react to that? Just a simple lower supply means what’s left is worth more? Except, you can’t really tell that the lost currency is lost, just that it’s dormant and hasn’t moved in a while. So would the market treat the effectively missing currency as being part of the supply, even though it can’t be? what happens when, over time, or hackers, you have more than 50% of the currency in this state? 75%?
Any hot takes?
I just have ill thought through questions.
my mediocre understanding is that Crypto are technically infinite but functionality limited in the sense that “printing” coins follows an exponential decay.
This is muddled by the fact that a new type of coin can be created and repeat this process anew.
and that “losing” coins could easily be a move to inflate their price before you unload them. Thanks to blockchain you only get to make this trick once, but it could be a hell of a trick if you are the first one to make it.
having read the article, it could also be a the perfect way to freeze your ill-gotten gains so the cops don’t get them.
A cryptocurrency could be designed such that they’re mined forever. Bitcoin is not. There will only ever be ~21 million.
“Wouldn’t that be deflationary and incentivize hoarding?”
Reader, you are onto something.
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Yep, but that’s the thing - it’s basically the same problem they had with Gold-backed currency instead of Fiat currency. Bitcoin is essentially designed to be a digital equivalent of Gold-backed currency, because the original developers, as best we know - certainly everyone who has come since - tend to be pretty hardcore goldbug Libertarians. To them, this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, one that’s explicitly designed into the product.
No one can mark it as “lost” but the available supply in crypto markets to buy for transacting or to speculate on becomes limited anyway and thus drives up value.
As a consequence, verified accounts have been disabled from Tweeting.
Anyone who sent money is either a very very easy mark or is sending it in to congratulate them on pulling a good one.
At first I thought “that’s a tiny haul for how high profile the accounts were”
Then I saw the scam was literally “send Bitcoin and we send back 2x” and now I’m shocked at how much money they made.
And not much of value was lost.
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Hours later, the rabbit hole digs deeper.
https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1283540820402925568
Anyone who posts the screenshots on Twitter is suspended.
This is a fantastic summary of how cryptocurrency has abjectly failed.
https://marker.medium.com/the-bitcoin-dream-is-dead-8b621d2d7dbd
Man, everyone once in awhile a good medium article reminds me how sad it is everything went behind a paywall in the way that it did. I’m not opposed to paying, but when the majority of medium articles are still self-help/business improvement fodder you see on linkedin its hard to justify. I used to read a ton of people on medium in its hey-day.