All bitcoin and most other cyrptos are trackable, In fact, every bictoin ever mined can be traced threw all wallets it's passed through since the day it was mined, and that going back to 2009. That's not a surprise and has always been known by anyone and everyone with even a basic understanding of how it works.
But it is anonymous, at least unless & until it passes through a wallet with an identifiable owner, such as a a crypto exchange. At that point, the exchange could be contacted and an account owner could be identified via the KYC thing they all do. This is why hacked/stolen crypto is such a problem for hackers to liquidate, and some hacked BTC has sat untouched for years after it's theft because it's digitally tainted.
But for those that want privacy, some cryptos such as ZCash and Monero address this by obfuscating transactions so they cannot be seen or tracked. This level of privacy is both a feature and a liability when it comes to hacking.
I hope you didn't take my teasing you too seriously.
I am not up to speed on cryptocurrency, I don't understand where the initial lump sum came from to start up. It seems like a really elaborate Ponzi scheme to me.
I hope you didn't take my teasing you too seriously.
Of course not! Usually I catch those things though.
There was no initial sum of BTC. All BTC in existence is the result of mining. The first mining done took about 10 minutes on an 15 year old computer and yielded the first 50 bitcoin. Every 10 mins after that, 10 more bitcoin.
Imagine your computer making $5 million dollars every 10 minutes while you are eating lunch.
But the current value is the open market value. A ponzi scheme has funds tied up inside of a shady business that only gives you promises and, if your are lucky enough to be early, pays you. Bitcoin is not that at all.
What is being "mined" is more bitcoin. The way mining works: Think of it as a warehouse full of Rubik's cubes. Computers are put to work solving them in a specific order, so all competing computers are working on the same cube. The first one to solve it wins and gets bitcoin added to it's crypto wallet, then the computers all start working on the next puzzle.
Every 2 weeks the bitcoin software evaluates if the puzzles are too hard or too easy and adjusts the "difficulty factor" of the puzzles so that one should be solved about every 10 minutes on average. If the average is less than that, the puzzles get a little harder, or if it longer than that, they get easier. That way no matter how many computers are competing to solve the puzzles, one will still be solved about every 10 minutes.
In addition to awarding bitcoin to the winner, bitcoin transactions submitted globally get recorded in the new block which is added to a long chain of previously solved cubes (the "chain" of blocks or cubes). Think of the solved Rubik's cube as a new block being added to the blockchain, and inside that cube/block are the latest bitcoin transactions.
That's basically how mining works. Although unlike with Rubik's cubes, there is no method to solve the puzzles. The work for the computers is simply in guessing very big numbers and see if each it guesses is the solution to the puzzle. There is no known method of computing the number. Brute force guessing is the known way to find it.
Bitcoint is a scam. Sure some people make money. It is actually worthless.
True, it has no inherent value. But neither does the US dollar.
Bitcoin is a pump and dump scam to take money from the little guy.
Current market cap is $1.8 trillion. It's too big to pump and dump. Some alt coins are definitely pump and dump. Stay away from them. But Bitcoin is less manipulated than gold is right now.
A war comes and knocks out the power and it's all gone. Poof.
Wrong. A meteor could come and wipe out half the planet, and bitcoin will still continue on the other half. And it wouldn't matter which half is destroyed.
Try that with any national currency.
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
That passage is far more applicable to US dollars than bitcoin. These days you are restricted from buying and selling things in dollars if the gov and/or finance institutions decide they don't like you any more. Cash is hardly a remedy when some 1.5% of all dollars in existence are in paper/coin form.