lmao I hope he gets desperate the next time bitcoin spikes & pays some cryptology firm to 'crack' it and they wipe it by accident.
I'm glad I used all the bitcoins I've ever owned to purchase drugs online, no need to stress about imaginary value I might have stored on some hard drive.
and you were able to convert that "value" into something useful and rewarding!
In 2011, when he was living in Switzerland, he was given the 7,002 bitcoins by an early Bitcoin fanatic as a reward for making an animated video, “What is Bitcoin?,” which introduced many people to the technology.
That year, he lost the digital keys to the wallet holding the Bitcoin. Since then, as Bitcoin’s value has soared and fallen and he could not get his hands on the money, Thomas has soured on the idea that people should be their own bank and hold their own money.
“This whole idea of being your own bank — let me put it this way: Do you make your own shoes?” Thomas said. “The reason we have banks is that we don’t want to deal with all those things that banks do.”
Guy seems pretty down to earth. He didn't do any trading for those bitcoins, he was given them as payment for labor.
For reference, 7,002 BTC in 2011 was anywhere from $3500-$7000 depending on what month he was paid.
Also "reward for making an animated video" is a weird way of saying "payment for labor". Guess wages are going to start being considered rewards now...
I don't really get why people here are antagonizing this person, even if it wasn't payment and he traded for it. I get that most people that are into bitcoin are libertarian weirdos, but if you bought into it and made a lot of money that's not really unethical, at least it's not any more unethical than investing in the stock market which is actually propped up by systemic reaproppriation of surplus value.
add a “!” at the end
I prefer adding a $ to the front personally.
You know, this brings up a really interesting point about bitcoin that I'd never thought of before. As far as I remember, the number of bitcoins that can be generated is finite, as the mining algorithm becomes more complex until it is impossible to solve. It makes sense in theory; you don't want bitcoins to be generated forever because they would constantly be depreciating in value.
But, on the other side of the coin (heh), bitcoins can be permanently lost. Again, as far as I know, once a Bitcoin has been lost on a physical drive, it can never be recovered. which would mean, that at some point not only will the number of bitcoins in the world stop increasing, it will actually begin to decrease, because there will always be accidents where people lose hard drives, forget passwords, etc.
So doesn't that mean that bitcoin won't exist forever? Unless they divide them into smaller and smaller pieces, which I think also has a limit, at some point the number of bitcoins will decrease until there aren't enough left.
you don’t want bitcoins to be generated forever because they would constantly be depreciating in value
That's not the behavior you want if you think people should use Bitcoin as a currency. You almost never want your currency to increase in value compared to the cost of goods and services. Because this means you're in deflation. Think about it: If all you need to do to get a positive return is leave your money parked in an account doing nothing with zero risk, you have much less reason to invest in actually productive activities where you have a chance of losing money. With deflation, it makes sense to delay all your purchases because everything will be cheaper the longer you wait. Under capitalism, this is a terrible situation. It gets even worse when you consider that anyone who owes money has to pay it back with increasingly expensive money. This is why deflation like what happened in the Great Depression or Japan in the 90s is so crushingly awful. An appreciating currency is about as great as a pail of spit but you rarely hear this from Bitcoin enthusiasts. Don't get me wrong, some people benefit. People who already have huge piles of currency they have no intention of using.
Here's another downside. If Bitcoins can't be generated forever, that means that even if the population increases and the economy grows, the amount of currency in circulation remains the same. More people chasing the same amount of currency in existence. This is also very deflationary. The gold standard suffers from the same problem, which is why it failed so badly no one uses it anymore. You don't want your economy to be straitjacketed by tying it to some weird asset whose size / volume is controlled by something weird like the number of gold mines on your planet.
That said, I once had a brief discussion about this with a Bitcoin fan and he told me Bitcoin actually has a mechanism built in which lets them increase the max number of Bitcoins allowed to exist. This would ... partially... address the problem. (Who decides when to activate the mechanism? Answer: People who have tons of Bitcoin already and don't want to lower is value.) Anyway, Bitcoin is just software which can ultimately be changed whenever people decide to do it. Anyway, our existing money system does this already, much better.
If Bitcoin routinely increases in value, it can only function as an asset like Jackson Pollack paintings or sports memorabilia or something. But we all know Bitcoin is highly volatile in reality, so it fails on that level too. Basically, Bitcoin is useful only for engaging in crime or tax evasion. Plus, it isn't truly anonymous (every transaction can be traced by design) so scratch out that supposed advantage as well.
Totally agree. Bitcoin is fundamentally a money making scheme, not only because it is specifically designed to concentrate wealth through appreciation and mining difficulty, but because it's just dogshit as a currency in general. Add that to the security and anonymity problems, and it basically fails on every point that it was sold on.
I think at some point the premise of Bitcoin becoming a real currency was dropped completely, and now it's only sustained by newcomers' belief that they're going to be the ones who make money from it. Reminds me of a certain bullshit electric car company...
One satoshi
A satoshi is the smallest unit of a bitcoin, equivalent to 100 millionth of a bitcoin.
The smallest possible piece of a bitcoin in the current bitcoin implementation does exist, but is pretty dang small.
It's estimated that ~20% of bitcoins are lost forever- worth around $140 billion at the current exchange rate. It's a brilliant lesson on artificially induced scarcity and its effect on market prices. I'm just blown away the more I think about it. Some anonymous programmer decided to code digital money that is inherently deflationary solely on the basis of the algorithm that it's built on- and the whole world decided these tokens have value! One of these days, we're gonna see this spill out into real world wars.
He didn't even code it. Dude just wrote a fucking white paper bad got a bunch of other people to help with the work
Yeah, and that makes it even more astounding. He published a paper about a theoretical currency and got thousands of computer scientists to dedicate their lives to it. Not even Jesus could attract such devoted followers.
CompSci is still in the humors phase of its development as a science or engineering discipline and I'm a software dev.
This isn't quite right. The max number of bitcoins is just based on the number of times you can subdivide a 64-bit floating point number. There's some technical spot in the design where this matters.
The complexity of the algorithm can be scaled up and down pretty arbitrarily, and it's adjusted block-to-block based on some formula in order to keep the average time to solve the algorithm worldwide at 10 minutes. Literally they just change how many digits of the right answer you need for it to be accepted, and I think currently you have to match the least 44 bits of a 256-bit number or something.
I don't remember how the hashing algorithm works exactly, but the basic idea is that it's very easy to determine if the answer is right or wrong, but you can only guess and check. I think there's a 3Blue1Brown video that explains in depth.
The relationship with mining is that the reward for adding a block to the ledger decreases as more bitcoins are added. This was just an arbitrary formula chosen to eventually reach a zero reward before it hit the max number of bitcoins. The only way new bitcoins are created is as a reward for solving the blockchain algorithm and adding a new block to the chain.
The reward isn't the only way miners are paid, though. The size of each bitcoin ledger block is fixed, and can only hold so many transactions (and there's one new block every 10 minutes because of the difficulty scaling). There are very often more people who want to make new transactions in ten minutes than there is room in a block. So when you initiate a bitcoin transfer you can add a bribe for miners to prioritize your transaction. Whoever puts your transaction on the blockchain gets your bribe money (in bitcoins, obviously).
Once the mining reward hits zero, miners will only mine because of bribe money, which the advocates describe as a smooth transition to a system of Market Rate™ transaction cost. But of course it's still deflationary by design.
And by any actual monetary theory accepted by literally anyone but the absolute craziest far-right goldbug whackjobs, you would want new currency to be generated forever so that it's constantly depreciating in value. Inflation is good.
The bribe system is entirely new information to me, thank you. And I agree, the appreciation of bitcoin value only makes sense from the perspective of the adopters, not from an economic POV.
Well NS went missing and his project got hijacked by Bitmain and turned into a shitshow
~
The transaction per second limit is unusably slow for mass acceptance and the tx fees are too high
Also a shit ton of the currency is locked or lost forever :(
God damn that is some existential hell type shit. Ever-so-close, ever-so-far, try to catch it and risk losing it forever.
How tf doesn't he have a password database with important passwords lol.
He could let some security experts have a go at it and hope it's not as secure as advertised.
I don’t think it’s possible to prove the contents of the hard drive without accessing it
Lmao and I felt bad for having 0.14 bitcoin locked on a Sony laptop that doesn't boot.
Oof, that's still like ~$5k.
I remember the days when Mt. Gox, which held 1/3 of bitcoin data, went dark and everyone with an account got scammed/lost all their BTC. Then it turned out 95% of all BTC was owned by less than 1% of people, and that was the beginning of the end (at least for me). Seems like people have made money in the short term, but cryptocurrency still has grift energy to it.
Seems like people have made money in the short term, but cryptocurrency still has grift energy to it.
I think this is a problem with currency in general tbh
Promissory notes exchanged for purely political purposes backed by labor theft and bondage? What could go wrong?
It's a Ponzi scheme. A negative-sum game (thanks to transaction fees) that can only end with a large number of losers.
Jesus that's a lot more than last time I checked. It was to buy drugs on the silk road and then it got banned and I never bothered with the other markets and just left all the login and recovery data in a file deep in several other folders. I guess I'm taking a laptop apart for recovery because 5grand is a hell of a lot of money for me.
If you still have it, pull the hard drive out and get a USB enclosure for a 2.5" (laptop-sized) hard drive. If the drive is still functional, you should still be able to access the files on it.
Still got it. I might actually try that, I have all the info on there. And apparently it's worth 5 grand which is way more than I thought.
If you do, immediately copy everything you want off it. Lots of hard drives that fail after sitting disused for a while do so after the second start up so try and approach it as if you have only one chance. Have a second drive with enough space ready and copy the stuff you want right away. Feel free to work on it after but just as a precaution I'd suggest that given the value involved.
Why are we mad at people who are into bitcoin? I know a lot of them are weirdos and chuds but it's not a bad thing in and of itself right?
The crypto nets consume more power than some countries. Bitcoin in of itself is a solution looking for a problem. That is, imo no one has come up with a thing crypto would solve that isn't solved by something's else more efficiently and cheaper.
Bitcoin in of itself is garbage.
Oh that's true, I forgot how wasteful it is. Though that's inherited from capitalism.
edit: When I say it's inherited from capitalism I'm not excusing it
No it's not. Bitcoin is wasteful because it works by having millions of computers guessing numbers until one gets it right. This has nothing to do with capitalism.
It's because of capitalism that people are running millions of computers trying to guess a number
I don't think you can blame this one on capitalism as much as the concept of money itself
That's one way to look at it I guess.ninsinr know if it's very helpful in this particular instance but it's correct
I just mean it's one of many perverse incentives created by capitalism, wasn't trying to excuse it in any way.
BitCoin is perverse in many ways
knowing that Silicon Valley & "early morning grinders" have all gone fully in on obsessing over it should raise more suspicions than it quells
The BitTorrent founder I remember was setting up a peer to peer crypto. Dunno what happened to that. It was called chia I think
Personally I just don't like how the cult following around it are like "IT'S A WAY OF FREEING OURSELVES FROM THE MODERN ECONOMIC SYSTEM AND TAKING BACK POWER FROM THE BANKERS AND BIG CORPS" because like.... I mean.... Communism...
Idk, just some "almost getting it but slightly missing the point" shit. I don't like it.
in my opinion I think that BitCoin is ultimately an NSA/CIA psyop that is boosting Western "speculation" & obsession with the market while simultaneously undermining & digitizing & recording international crime syndicates' movements & transactions. All this while coalescing a honeypot of weirdos whose fortunes are riding speculative spurts & fits in the "Line"
BitCoin is also anti-communist because of its tacit underlying technology being a way to thwart regimes of state-backed currencies
This is why China has banned BitCoin banking or facilitation by banks, without outlawing the currency itself.
the energy that's been going into the farms is, iirc, comparable to belgium in the same period
So people who know how this kinda shit works, what happens if something of that much value just disappears?
It is estimated that already about 20% of mined Bitcoin are effectively unrecoverable so his are a drop in the bucket basically.
However if he managed to recover them and dump them all on the market it'd probably crash the price at least short term.
Markets are fucking dumb
However if he managed to recover them and dump them all on the market it’d probably crash the price at least short term.
I hope he recovers them and dumps them all on the market.
Imagine when he fails both attempts the app makes the same sound Sonic makes when you lose rings lol.
-7DeadlyFetishes
Should be able to just sit on it until encryption technology moves on. Eventually quantum computers will make existing encryption obsolete which will require quantum encryption. As long as he doesn't wipe it before then he will eventually be able to decrypt it.
Just have to hope the value doesn't crash before then.
I mean the problem with that is thinking the average Joe is going to have access, even paid, to quantum computers anytime soon. For rent quantum computers that can (enough qubits) and are available to rent to crack reasonable encryption from the 2000 or 2010s era would be deemed a national security threat because there are still leaked, encrypted docs and files, as well as data in transit which was siphoned encrypted with older schemes. The value of these things for national security purposes and for research in say the field of medicine means I think any private ones built are going to have their available time occupied for a very long time by customers with a lot more money. There's also the consideration that businesses who had stuff stolen from them that is of a serious trade secret and maybe rising to national economics secret level have stuff like ironkeys they've "lost" that if one could simply rent these things anytime soon for that could cause issues.
Additionally hard drives can suffer mechanical failures from age and even disuse and flash storage (and magnetic platters for that matter) can suffer bit-rot so there are no guarantees with time that it will still be recoverable.
Lastly, depending on the model of ironkey he used it could have used AES (although I think most older models of that era used RSA or other non-symmetrical algorithms which are quantum vulnerable).
Quite frankly I think (hope anyways) by the time that stuff comes along that he no longer cares because the US has dissolved and bitcoin collapsed.
FYI for anyone reading, AES, particularly AES-256 is not vulnerable to quantum computers in any meaningful way, the minor increase in cracking speed they present (baring other breakthroughs against the algorithm that can for instance halve the key size search space) means you can crack it in 5000 years instead of 5 million, hardly useful (it's actually worse than that but just an example). So if you're worried about the government and those NSA quantum computers, use AES. In fact ideally use cascading ciphers with AES as one of them so a failure in one does not grant access. Just don't lose your passwords and make sure they're sufficiently long and hard to guess.
