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.
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).
Where is any value being added to actual citizens and such?
They shall cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall be removed: their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the LORD: they shall not satisfy their souls, neither fill their bowels: because it is the stumbling block of their iniquity. Ezekiel 7:19
I ordered the chain, which we had begun to heave in, to be paid out again. Before it stopped running with a muffled rattle, a cry, a very loud cry, as of infinite desolation, soared slowly in the opaque air. It ceased. A complaining clamour, modulated in savage discords, filled our ears. The sheer unexpectedness of it made my hair stir under my cap. I don’t know how it struck the others: to me it seemed as though the mist itself had screamed, so suddenly, and apparently from all sides at once, did this tumultuous and mournful uproar arise. It culminated in a hurried outbreak of almost intolerably excessive shrieking, which stopped short, leaving us stiffened in a variety of silly attitudes, and obstinately listening to the nearly as appalling and excessive silence. ‘Good God! What is the meaning—’ stammered at my elbow one of the pilgrims—a little fat man, with sandy hair and red whiskers, who wore sidespring boots, and pink pyjamas tucked into his socks. Two others remained open-mouthed a whole minute, then dashed into the little cabin, to rush out incontinently and stand darting scared glances, with Winchesters at ‘ready’ in their hands. What we could see was just the steamer we were on, her outlines blurred as though she had been on the point of dissolving, and a misty strip of water, perhaps two feet broad, around her—and that was all. The rest of the world was nowhere, as far as our eyes and ears were concerned. Just nowhere. Gone, disappeared; swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind.
“I went forward, and ordered the chain to be hauled in short, so as to be ready to trip the anchor and move the steamboat at once if necessary. ‘Will they attack?’ whispered an awed voice. ‘We will be all butchered in this fog,’ murmured another. The faces twitched with the strain, the hands trembled slightly, the eyes forgot to wink. It was very curious to see the contrast of expressions of the white men and of the black fellows of our crew, who were as much strangers to that part of the river as we, though their homes were only eight hundred miles away. The whites, of course greatly discomposed, had besides a curious look of being painfully shocked by such an outrageous row. The others had an alert, naturally interested expression; but their faces were essentially quiet, even those of the one or two who grinned as they hauled at the chain. Several exchanged short, grunting phrases, which seemed to settle the matter to their satisfaction. Their headman, a young, broad-chested black, severely draped in dark-blue fringed cloths, with fierce nostrils and his hair all done up artfully in oily ringlets, stood near me. ‘Aha!’ I said, just for good fellowship’s sake. ‘Catch ’im,’ he snapped, with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth—‘catch ’im. Give ’im to us.’ ‘To you, eh?’ I asked; ‘what would you do with them?’ ‘Eat ’im!’ he said curtly, and, leaning his elbow on the rail, looked out into the fog in a dignified and profoundly pensive attitude. I would no doubt have been properly horrified, had it not occurred to me that he and his chaps must be very hungry: that they must have been growing increasingly hungry for at least this month past. They had been engaged for six months (I don’t think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still belonged to the beginnings of time—had no inherited experience to teach them as it were), and of course, as long as there was a piece of paper written over in accordance with some farcical law or other made down the river, it didn’t enter anybody’s head to trouble how they would live. Certainly they had brought with them some rotten hippo-meat, which couldn’t have lasted very long, anyway, even if the pilgrims hadn’t, in the midst of a shocking hullabaloo, thrown a considerable quantity of it overboard. It looked like a high-handed proceeding; but it was really a case of legitimate self-defence. You can’t breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence. Besides that, they had given them every week three pieces of brass wire, each about nine inches long; and the theory was they were to buy their provisions with that currency in riverside villages. You can see how that worked. There were either no villages, or the people were hostile, or the director, who like the rest of us fed out of tins, with an occasional old he-goat thrown in, didn’t want to stop the steamer for some more or less recondite reason. So, unless they swallowed the wire itself, or made loops of it to snare the fishes with, I don’t see what good their extravagant salary could be to them. I must say it was paid with a regularity worthy of a large and honourable trading company. For the rest, the only thing to eat—though it didn’t look eatable in the least—I saw in their possession was a few lumps of some stuff like half-cooked dough, of a dirty lavender colour, they kept wrapped in leaves, and now and then swallowed a piece of, but so small that it seemed done more for the looks of the thing than for any serious purpose of sustenance. Why in the name of all the gnawing devils of hunger they didn’t go for us—they were thirty to five—and have a good tuck-in for once, amazes me now when I think of it. They were big powerful men, with not much capacity to weigh the consequences, with courage, with strength, even yet, though their skins were no longer glossy and their muscles no longer hard. And I saw that something restraining, one of those human secrets that baffle probability, had come into play there. I looked at them with a swift quickening of interest—not because it occurred to me I might be eaten by them before very long, though I own to you that just then I perceived—in a new light, as it were—how unwholesome the pilgrims looked, and I hoped, yes, I positively hoped, that my aspect was not so—what shall I say?—so—unappetizing: a touch of fantastic vanity which fitted well with the dream-sensation that pervaded all my days at that time. Perhaps I had a little fever, too. One can’t live with one’s finger everlastingly on one’s pulse.