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.

threw all

"threw all"? You've been away too long, campadre. :)

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.

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.

Obviously short sighted of the hackers. ;)

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.

Imagine your computer making $5 million dollars every 10 minutes while you are eating lunch.

I was goofing around playing day trader/dip buyer one day and made like $18,000 in ten minutes, but I squandered it on stocks like DANA, CSX, and AAL.

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.

What startup capital do you refer to? Bitcoin was innovative software some small few programmers made

Good ideas are never allowed to go forward without the elites taking their cut. Can I sell you a smile, sunshine?

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?

Bitcoin is a pump and dump scam to take money from the little guy.

Pump it, dump it repeat as long as you can. The government should just make trading bitcoin a felony punishable by death.

A war comes and knocks out the power and it's all gone. Poof.

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.

Where is any value being added to actual citizens and such?

Repeat after me. Pump and dump.

“The other shoe went flying unto the devil-god of that river. I thought, ‘By Jove! it’s all over. We are too late; he has vanished—the gift has vanished, by means of some spear, arrow, or club. I will never hear that chap speak after all’—and my sorrow had a startling extravagance of emotion, even such as I had noticed in the howling sorrow of these savages in the bush. I couldn’t have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life.... Why do you sigh in this beastly way, somebody? Absurd? Well, absurd. Good Lord! mustn’t a man ever—Here, give me some tobacco.”...

listverse.com/2019/12/20/...ach-churning-recipes-for- human-flesh/

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.

Remember when Zuckerberg was called into congress to explain FB's proposed crypto? Had to look it up but it was going to be called Libra. They didn't call anyone into Congress for Bitcoin. Why? Because there was no one to call. As a decentralized entity, no one is in charge.

I don't agree with the idea that anything the Elite don't like don't succeed, ergo, anything and everything that succeeds is automatically a product of evil. That's defeatist thinking, or more to the point, inaccurate. There are stupid people everywhere, including in the Deep State ranks. Look at Victoria Nuland, for example. She opens her big mouth which is why she was eventually retired.

Even the Elite have to put up with stupid people on their side.

Where is any value being added to actual citizens and such?

The value of bitcoin is in it's utility. It's a method of payment.

All economies NEED something to serve as a currency. Without currency, everyone can only barter with one another which is very inefficient because you want to trade your lumber for eggs but the egg guy doesn't need lumber, so you waste time finding someone that needs lumber that the egg guy wants. All that searching around wastes production time. Money was invented to solve this problem, and it also solved the problem of measuring the relative worth of completely unrelated goods.

So every economy NEEDS a money, a currency. That is a service crypto can provide, and providing that potential service to everyone is where it derives value in the market place. And bitcoin payments are made between people which is de facto proof that it is providing that service now.

The free market has clearly decided that bitcoin has value, and the above is, I believe, at least part of the reason why.

I'm still pissy about the TooBigToFail balout bologna from 2007

The 2008 financial crisis and the response by congress to bail out the criminally Big Finance institutions that created the crisis was PRECISELY what inspired someone calling himself "Satoshi Nakamoto" to create bitcoin. As a decentralized currency, it would be immune to and centralized entity control. No one person is privileged with bitcoin production or usage in any way.

It's no coincidence that bitcoin was first switched on in 2009, right after the crisis.

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.

Because it's decentralized, there was no stopping it.

The same was true of opium until it wasn't.

Unless you are holding a chunk of gold in your hand, or under your pillow it can be taken away from you.

Gold can be taken from you far more easily than Bitcoin can.

With only your memorized crypto wallet key and having nothing else, say you are dropped off in a Vietnam jungle with just a pair of shorts to your name, you could obtain a computer or smart phone, download the electronic wallet software, set it up with your key, and you then have access to spend your funds. That is literally how it works. Unless and until they can scan your brain to get your memorized key, your bitcoin is secure unless and until you decide to give it away.

As a decentralized currency, it would be immune to and centralized entity control.

Except that it isn't, as you acknowledged today. State can seize at any time. It's just paper...promises

Unless and until they can scan your brain to get your memorized key, your bitcoin is secure unless and until you decide to give it away.

I have a bad habit of writing down complex passwords.

Gold can be taken from you far more easily than Bitcoin can.

That makes me want to own physical gold. I will bite any fucker tries to take it. :)

The same was true of opium until it wasn't.

Opium is a tangible product. Crypto is not.

As a decentralized currency, it would be immune to and centralized entity control.

Except that it isn't, as you acknowledged today. State can seize at any time. It's just paper...promises

I never said crypt could be seized at any time.

I have a bad habit of writing down complex passwords.

For most wallets, the passwords are 12 words. Put those 12 words in the correct sequence, and you got your wallet. The number of combinations from a 2048 word vocabulary is enormous.

Could you memorize 12 words?

I never said crypt could be seized at any time.

Aside from threw/through discrepancy,

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

I still think you at least implied that some central or otherwise imposed authority might decide they don't care what your computer says you own.

I can't even memorize twelve notes

I still think you at least implied that some central or otherwise imposed authority might decide they don't care what your computer says you own.

Bitcoin is trackable but (apart from obtaining the private keys to wallets) not seizable. Hacked/stolen bitcoin is xferred to the hacker's wallet, and it's plainly visible to the whole world. The victims can log on to the internet and see exactly how much of the stolen bitcoin is in the hackers wallet. But without the private key, it's absolutely untouchable. And unless and until the hacker tips his hand in some way, ownership is completely anonymous.

I still think you at least implied that some central or otherwise imposed authority might decide they don't care what your computer says you own.

It's not what my computer says I own. It's what the entire global network of miners say I own, and what they say is done by an automated vote system. It's very democratic. Majority wins.

You see, the so-called "blockchain" is very redundant. Every miner (node) has a complete record of all bitcoin transactions back to day 1. And any new miners coming on board will obtain a complete copy of the entire blockchain if they want to join in the mining. If any miner should tamper with their copy of the blockchain to insert an illicit transaction, the blockchain will then not match the blockchain held by all other miners, and that miner will be cut out of the network loop.

So in order to seize a wallet's bitcoin, a hacker would need to fake that transaction in a majority of all bitcoin nodes globally at the same time. This is in practice not possible. In theory, such a hack is called a "51% attack" where an illicit operator would obtain control of at least 51% of all mining nodes. Potentially this could happen if that much computing power was added by a single controlling interest to the global mining network, but that's not even close to feasible given the current complaints about how much global power goes to bitcoin mining.

But back to the point: No, no government or bank can't simply decide to seize bitcoin from a particular wallet.

Case in point: Theer is a current case right now where someone accused in a tax case has been ordered by the judge to turn over the private keys of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin. There is no order for fed marshals to seize it because that can't be done. The guy is forced by court order to turn it over and could choose to defy that order if he wants.

Texas Court Orders Bitcoin Investor to Surrender Keys to $124 Million Stash

decrypt.co/299978/texas- c...keys-to-124-million-stash

Thanks for the read pinguneite, interesting stuff.

I feel like them evil ppl are about ready to push the mark on folks.

You see, the so-called "blockchain" is very redundant. Every miner (node) has a complete record of all bitcoin transactions back to day 1.

via AT&T or CIA. You don't think they can get their hands on bits to save their asses? Do you really think TV stars can hit those notes?

I feel like them evil ppl are about ready to push the mark on folks.

You are not as dumb as I thought. But you are still blinded by hatred of the Jews.

There is hope for you.

Not that you would listen to me as you seem to despise me. But I would recommend giving up some of your hate.

I can't even memorize twelve notes

I grind the serial numbers off my FRNs I should be safe.