So, are we pretty safe in assuming that whatever happened to Bitcoin over the last month was some extended pump-and-dump scheme?
It might be much simpler than that: just a speculation bubble.
Honestly, if ma and pa have a ransom to pay to have their files unlocked. This may be how they actually do that.
I remember looking at taking a flier on some bitcoin back in 2013-2014. I was only going to spend like $200, but the coin website require you to basically hand them your identity. Front and back scans of driverâs license, etc. I laughed and said fuck that. I saw there were vending machines but the closest one was 5+ hours away so I said fuck that.
If there was one of these local to me I would have totally done it, and my $200 would have turned into, what, like $2,000. I donât regret it. But since I def would have used it, I donât see it as silly. (or at least any more silly than the entire concept of cryptocurrency, now that I properly understand it)
Seventy-six thousand dollars, at current prices. Hundred eighty thousand about at peak price. But no point regretting it, because frankly, the bitcoin market is 90% people holding coins waiting to get rich by selling them off, with the remaining 10% split between scammers, and people looking to buy drugs or child porn. So unless youâve got a class scam, or some drugs and child porn, youâre unlikely to actually extract much if any of that value.
Adventure of Link: Game over Ganon laughing noise
The SEC deserves credit for this one:
https://www.howeycoins.com/
EDIT:
To be clear, the above site is an educational tool; the SEC explains it here:
https://www.investor.gov/howeycoins
So basically, the state of any proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining these days is such that really only the big boys can get into it to make any money. What more, the hardware guys are churning up custom ASICs specifically for mining purposes like mad and even with attempts to change the algorithms to prevent custom ASICs from working, it doesnât take that long for the ASIC engineers to come up with new designs to cope:
https://blog.sia.tech/the-state-of-cryptocurrency-mining-538004a37f9b
Itâs a little surprising to me that people have spent real effort making so-called ASIC-resistant algorithms, when it seems like common sense that ASICs will always be way more cost-effective at implementing any particular algorithm than than general-purpose hardware. Iâd guess those kinds of algorithms would mostly just end up being even more of a waste of energy, too.
Also this degree of centralization is pretty damning for cryptocurrencies considering theyâre basically worthless without the selling point of decentralization. Technically I guess this only applies to those based on proof-of-work, but I havenât really heard of there being a viable alternative.
Pretty much. Itâs obviously fairly expensive to fab anything, so the biggest defense against asics would be for coin prices to plummet.
Itâs a weird problem anyway, why do people care if someone does the work on a single purpose device instead of a CPU/GPU other than self-interest for their existing investment? Shouldnât you want people to use the most efficient methods? Nope. It all feels very faith based.