Bitcoin Forum

Jeff Garzik recently twitted: "As such, I dare to do what few if any others do: My #bitcoin balance is 348.006 BTC."

https://twitter.com/jgarzik/status/480454809791635456

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JHg-ml0iOOs/UY0i3-tMteI/AAAAAAAACcs/wx-H9CdGNww/s1600/T%C3%ADo+Gilito.jpg

is that all?, id have thought he would have more..

all id say is i have been involved in bitcoin less time as him, less involved in the protocol and mining side of things. yet....

..
yet im shocked by his low balance

jeff, are you crazy? why are you doing this?

348.006 or 348,006 ?
 ;D

Not surprising. He is a developer not a market trader. Even Gavin admitted to selling a bunch of coin sub $30 back in 2011.

I can't see any other reason but to show off.

I have the same question, 348000 bitcoins or 348 bitcoins?

And this is what you say to those who are against bitcoin because they think that a very small number of first mover geeks are going to own the world.

ahh good point.. if 348k id understand but just 348.. shocked at lack of hoard

Who cares about this guys balance? You can tell when it's a slow news day or week around here.

That's all? Geez

So who is this guy and why does his bitcoin balance matter? I've never even heard of him.

That's like being a Star Wars fan and not knowing who Yoda is...

Eh. Is he  really that special? Can't be if I've never heard of him.

Just google his name and you'll find all the info you need on him.

He must mean 348,000, right? What a confusing way to word this, considering the differences people have in the use of decimal points! I have a feeling he is sitting on 348,000 if anything....

actually i am thinking, its 348btc.. why else would he need to go work for bitpay if he had 348k to his name?

.. put it this way, i have no need to seek contracted employment

You're probably right, but I hope he doesn't make these mistakes when hes adding a transaction fee  :D.

Not everybody stops working once they've got some money. And having the money in bitcoins is still a risk unless he cashes out.

He confirmed to me, it's 348 bitcoins.

https://twitter.com/jgarzik/status/480477929160208384

Damn, I was really thinking he got 348k  :o

Wow, this is surprising to me. Hasn't he been around for years? I would have thought at least thousands. Maybe he did have many thousands and sold them all and is now a fiat millionaire. :P

I would have taken every bet that he has more  ;D

Who is Jeff Garzik by the way ? Searched Google. There is no Wikipedia entry !!!

348.006*****

miner question

http://i.ebayimg.com/t/Minecraft-pickaxe-car-decal-sticker-/00/s/Mjc0WDI3NA==/$(KGrHqZHJCgFBsO4dC3MBQih0M(rR!~~60_35.JPG


but he don't tell the most significant bit, isn't it ? ...

Surprisingly small amount.

If he holds for a while they may be worth a lot more however.

Definitely anyone with this kind of BTC is really blessed.

That's how much I have!  So long as I stop counting at 348.

now I just wondering how much can I count mentally without loose the focus ...

Jeff Garzik is one of Bitcoin’s core developers. He also worked on the Linux kernel and other things.
This is his homepage http://linux.yyz.us/projects.html (http://linux.yyz.us/projects.html)  :)

so I guess ...

I can ask the importance of for him and bitcoin project

http://i57.tinypic.com/1zxquec.png

Thats probably his mac computers balance, lol. But, seriously, I bet a lot of big time early adopters sold the majority over the last couple years,  I know that I've sold enough  to make myself cry when I think about it. Still, there are hundreds, if not thousands of bitcoiners that did accumulate and held thru all the peaks and valleys.

Jeff is dispelling the myth that everyone involved with Bitcoin development and all early miners are rich. He's not. I am an early miner (ie, laptop era mid 2010) and I'm basically of zero net worth (I have about as much bitcoins as I have med school loan debt). Not everyone who helped build the ecosystem was doing it just to get rich.

I mined in the naive hope that the project would succeed and maybe someday someone who can't open a bank account can keep savings safe without having to physically defend them. I've been there. It sucks (I'm not exactly well built). Was I rewarded handsomely for it? Yes. Am I rich? No.

he is just saying 348 it really is 348,000 I know.

No he's not. He really means 2 less than 350...

How come there are people who use Bitcoin but don't know who Jeff Garzik is? Is it because they don't appreciate the technology part of it and only care about the user and business aspects of it? I guess he's been pretty low key on the forums lately, but his name is still all over the source code.

Thats really surprising since he got one of the first Avalon units... mine have mined around that and I got them later than he did.

check the source on github , you will see he has helped bitcion get where it is now

also i agree with the others , this must be his spare change wallet

 i would have guessed he holds a few hundred thou

The culture is shifting and the history is being forgotten. I applaud Jeff for being very transparent regarding his holdings and reminding people that it takes real work by regular people to make Bitcoin grow into its potential.

Tell him to go store it at just-dice or something he has a way to go to 348 K Bitcoins but I like round numbers should go for 2 more haha

That said he still has a lot more than me less than I expected but 348*600 = 208,000
Enough to purchase a small house at least.

Hope he likes chip simulators like ...

http://visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html (http://visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html)

and music like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9seZGfsfZM4 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9seZGfsfZM4) (yes I stoped uplink here ... even don't know where mu dev cd is - not opensource )

348 coins could still end up being worth millions in time
Still not very much considering who he is, if true that is

Considering that Jesus Christ was sold at a price of 30 peices of silver, Jeff have a much better standing than Jesus ;D ;D

Architectures made the world and bankers bought it all, hope that bitcoin will change this

Wouldnt exactly call 348 bitcoins small potatoes!  Way to go Jeff!  In time maybe he'll be able to afford putting his very own custom satellites up in orbit.

Maybe it means he has converted most his coins into Fiat in preparation of a significant price drop he believes is coming, so he can get more coins during the next dip.

It's gotta be 348,000 btc, because 348btc is chump change amongst the big names, that's nothing to brag about. For being a core developer, those days you can get hundreds to thousands of btcs per day back when only a handful of people were mining/testing the technology. Why do you think pizza was 10,000 btc back then?

No. https://twitter.com/jgarzik/status/480477929160208384

What happened to his plan to launch Bitcoin satelites in to space? (It was a partnership between the Dunvegan Space Systems, owned by him and Deep Space Industries Inc.)  ;D I think he spent a lot of his coins in this project.

Guys 348 coins is a little over $200K.

I don't consider that a small amount.

On a side note, 348 coins is about 346.131721 more coins than mine  :-\

Yeah I would say 348 coins is a good amount....

Peter Todd also said he sold half of his bitcoins when Ghash hashrate hit 51% for 5 fiat figures. So basically he had max 315 BTC and now only max 157 BTC.

He's set for life with 350 BTC.

You'll be set for life with 50 BTC. If you can hold onto it long enough, you'll be set for life with 5 BTC.

+1000000000000000000000000000000000000

And he will be cursing this when Bitcoin hits $10K after 2-3 years. BTW... from where did you got that BTC315 figure? Did Peter Todd announced that he had that many Bitcoins?

Peter said he sold half his coins for 5 figures - e.g: 20,000

So it could be anywhere from $10,000 to $99,999. At today's exchange rates, the range will be BTC16.75 to BTC167.50. So his total stash could have been BTC33.5 to BTC335.  ;D

BTW, which exchange he used?

Check his last posts on here. I saw that he'd just mentioned it.

Depends on the market price, if bitcoin would be worth $10.000 in the future he'd have 3.480.000

On the side note,  https://twitter.com/_Magicaltux/status/480463347050373120 (https://twitter.com/_Magicaltux/status/480463347050373120)

True.

I don't know which exchange.
Maybe it was a private sale?

348? ....hmm okay

JEFF are you crazy? why only 348  :D ?

His later response suggests that it is 348 bitcoins:


Unless he means that he isn't a gazillionaire, but still has thousands upon thousands of BTC ;) haha.

Still a pretty good amount.

agreed.

Yes but, who really will hold that long if 5 is all they have?

There was a parody of Mark Karpeles that replied to Jeff that said: "I only have 650,000 bitcoin myself"

That's why it's surprising that he only managed to keep 348 bitcoins. Seems impossible. I guess maybe he never decided to put much actual investment money into it, perhaps.

I am not all that suppressed by 348 bitcoins.  A lot of the "early adaptors" (including myself) viewed bitcoin as something to work to promote, we spent bitcoins at every opportunity (10,000 BTC Pizza anyone).  We also gave a lot away (funding facets back in their day).

I myself have a great deal less than Jeff.

Neil

Me. I have 8 BTC and feel confident that I'm going to be doing extremely well within 3-5 years, if I can just find a way to maintain my current income. Tough in this economy, many of my friends' companies are doing layoffs and I'm looking for work.

Simple.. imagine you getin at 0.01$

@ 1$ its hundred times.. many would sold a important part of an investment if it does 100x  and will be happy to.

@ 10$ its thousand fold..  not selling ?

@ 1000$ from 0.01 its a 100 000 time the initial investment.  10$ become 1 million...

Many have sold most of their btc between x100 and x1000

I began when this was in the 0.15$.. had nmore than 5000 btc at one point.  Sold more than 99% of those between 1$ and 1200$.  Im not rich.. still have a mortge to pay and have no regrets at all..   I sold and spent at more than 100 times more value than my initial investment..

Its easy to dream about being a very early adopter or judge them or telling.. if I was there i would have.. blah blah..  

I own less than 30 btc in encrypted paper cold storage..

I will always keep at least one whole btc because someday buying a whole btc will be financially impossible for at least 98% of the world population.

In thoses days, we will buy cars priced in mBtc or Satoshi..

Get your whole 1 btc while its still affordable.

Wise words; sound advice.

Crazy. When I first saw this, I was sure he meant in the hundreds of thousands -- not hundreds. I suppose we are all probably guilty of selling a bit too early sometimes -- but you gotta lock in those gains sometime! :P

The gains are locked in the moment the Bitcoin enters an address for which you are the sole holder of the private keys. They are locked in by the inevitability of the way this game plays out.

I thought you had much more  :-[

I did, once. The most I had at one time was 74 BTC, but times have been tough for me this past year, and I've had to fall back on savings to support myself. It didn't help that my mother lost her house to foreclosure about 18 months ago...

The saddest part is that the house now sits empty and useless is falling into disrepair, because the bank can't sell it. Very few people can afford to buy a New England house in her former neighborhood in this economy.

Dang bro...I'm kinda shocked.  Now we really gotta get btc up to 6 figures then.  Plus you should get some income.

You're shocked because you forgot that Beliathon is a persona, not a real person. Beliathon is an internet Lion, it's fun to step into that mask and roar truth and righteous indignation at you, scream the terrifying truth until I'm blue in the face.

But the reality of my life is best characterized by long suffering interrupted by brief moments of peace and sanity. I am plagued by lifelong anxiety and depression secondary to PTSD. Maybe one day the posts will stop suddenly, and I'll finally have peace.
One thing I can tell you about suffering, it's fertile soil for growing the clarity of mind necessary to discern truth from illusion/myth. "Our lives run different ways, through the pain we see things as they are..."

I don't believe it for a second. He's got way more than that. He's hiding from the government. :P

Ok but explain why you stopped working (to escape wage slavery?)... While you advocate others work 3 jobs.... Someone as passionate about bitcoin as you should have more..I think....

 :D I think a good few of us can prove you can get into BTC early and still not be a $millionaire. Hell, I bought BTC on a $5,400 limit credit card when it was still ~$2.40. Still have that card maxed out from that, too. Blech.

Shouldn't you have 2000 Btc

Very good point. It's easy to look back and say if only I would have done this or done that but that's the beauty of life. Everyone that holds now will at least have another chance at it. ;)

I'm holding now for at least 5-20 years

Some people think "hoarding" is a problem in the bitcoin economy.

In reality, because of the easiness of spending or giving bitcoin, for a lot of people (myself included) it's actually very hard to hold, there's always the temptation of "doing something" with the coins.

Indeed. Many earlier adopters were young without significant pre-existing net-worth. Putting even a couple thousand dollars into *any* investment (including GPUs), let alone something that had a very real possibility of going to zero, was a big deal for a lot of us.

Gotta keep this all in perspective despite what seems obvious now. Many recognized that bitcoin had fantastic potential and could change the world. But it seemed like such a longshot that anything would happen near-term; ie, many of us thought we had *a lot* more time to accumulate (that's the line of thinking I unfortunately fell victim to, at least).

Basically, the early adopters who currently have thousands of coins have to meet all of the following criteria:
1) Were risk-takers
2) Had significant net worth already, or were *uber* risk-takers
3) Understood economics and market dynamics enough to hold for years
4) Didn't have life circumstances that necessitated any significant liquidation along the way
5) Were either not married, had spouses that understood and accepted the risk too, or were willing to make investments without telling him/her

Sidenote - Jeff was one of my first introductions to bitcoin. I remember when I was initially diving in, watching some video of him explaining it (back in his ponytail days). He was obviously very sharp and technical, and had a strong passion for it. I'm thankful for guys like him willing to put themselves out there for bitcoin when it really was "out there", so to speak...


tldr; I fully believe Jeff is being is honest in his statement about his current btc holdings. It's just not that hard to believe, and he's a solid, straightforward guy.

this say nothing about JG selling the 20K BTC at the aths, or how many were sold on the way.

You could legitimately claim to hold 348BtC and have made killing on the way to that.

The issue with hoarding bitcoin is that it is generally believed that the price of bitcoin will rise in the future. As a result people have no incentive to spend their bitcoin until absolutely necessary.

He was in possession of first ASICs, I wonder why his balance is so weak but I guess he spends money (on bitches and drugs ;)...

Watch out we got a Bitcoin Baron over here!

An excellent read about possible alternative futures, and the psychological control methods of capitalism (http://www.weareplanc.org/we-are-all-very-anxious/#.U6fgWPldXTp). This article is so good it has earned a place alongside Voltaire in my signature.

Excerpts:
"One aspect of every phase’s dominant affect is that it is a public secret, something that everyone knows, but nobody admits, or talks about. As long as the dominant affect is a public secret, it remains effective, and strategies against it will not emerge.
Public secrets are typically personalised. The problem is only visible at an individual, psychological level; the social causes of the problem are concealed. Each phase blames the system’s victims for the suffering that the system causes.
And it portrays a fundamental part of its functional logic as a contingent and localised problem."
--
"When misery stopped working as a control strategy, capitalism switched to boredom. In the mid twentieth century, the dominant public narrative was that the standard of living – which widened access to consumption, healthcare and education – was rising. Everyone in the rich countries was happy, and the poor countries were on their way to development. The public secret was that everyone was bored. This was an effect of the Fordist system which was prevalent until the 1980s – a system based on full-time jobs for life, guaranteed welfare, mass consumerism, mass culture, and the co-optation of the labour movement which had been built to fight misery. Job security and welfare provision reduced anxiety and misery, but jobs were boring, made up of simple, repetitive tasks."

“We do not want a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation is bought by accepting the risk of dying of boredom”
-The Situationists

"The mid-century reorientation from misery to boredom was crucial to the emergence of a new wave of revolt. We are the tail end of this wave. Just as the tactics of the first wave still work when fighting misery, so the tactics of the second wave still work when fighting boredom. The difficulty is that we are less often facing boredom as the main enemy. This is why militant resistance is caught in its current impasse."

---

Consumption culture has largely solved the problem of boredom by replacing it with near-constant distraction. Look down at your smartphone, dear American worker. Check your facebook. Engage your digital fantasy world, don't think about your real life.

Another excerpt will serve to elaborate:
"New products, such as video-games and social media, involve heightened levels of active individual involvement and desocialised stimulation. Workplace experiences are diversified by means of micro-differentials and performance management, as well as the multiplication of casual and semi-self-employed work situations on the margins of capitalism. (...) Capitalism has encouraged the growth of mediatised secondary identities – the self portrayed through social media, visible consumption, and lifelong learning – which have to be obsessively maintained. "

Capitalism is an extremely adaptive virus. It lives inside your brain, and the brains of everyone you know. There it thrives on your ignorance, your inability to honestly face your own suffering and trace it back to its roots. And it is malignant as fuck, destroying you from the inside out.

In contemporary capitalism, the dominant reactive affect is anxiety.
"Today’s public secret is that everyone is anxious. Anxiety has spread from its previous localised locations (such as sexuality) to the whole of the social field. All forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety. It has become the linchpin of subordination. One major part of the social underpinning of anxiety is the multi-faceted omnipresent web of surveillance. The NSA, CCTV, performance management reviews, the Job Centre, the privileges system in the prisons, the constant examination and classification of the youngest schoolchildren. But this obvious web is only the outer carapace."

"We need to think about how people’s deliberate and ostensibly voluntary self-exposure, through social media, visible consumption and choice of positions within the field of opinions, also assumes a performance in the field of the perpetual gaze of virtual others (back to social media). We need to think about the ways in which this gaze inflects how we find, measure and know one another, as co-actors in an infinitely watched perpetual performance. Our success in this performance in turn affects everything from our ability to access human warmth to our ability to access means of subsistence, not just in the form of the wage but also in the form of credit. Outsides to the field of mediatised surveillance are increasingly closed off, as public space is bureaucratised and privatised, and a widening range of human activity is criminalised on the grounds of risk, security, nuisance, quality of life, or anti-social behaviour."

Think for a moment of the suffering experienced when you lose a job - you not only lose a vital source of income (=survival), you often also have long-standing social relationships mercilessly severed. To say nothing of the stigmatization and shame one feels in relation to one's peers!"

"Since everyone is disposable, the system holds the threat of forcibly delinking anyone at any time, in a context where alternatives are foreclosed in advance, so that forcible delinking entails desocialisation – leading to an absurd non-choice between desocialised inclusion and desocialised exclusion. This threat is manifested in small ways in today’s disciplinary practices – from “time-outs” and Internet bans, to firings and benefit sanctions – culminating in the draconian forms of solitary confinement found in prisons."

"The present dominant affect of anxiety is also known as precarity. Precarity is a type of insecurity which treats people as disposable so as to impose control. Precarity differs from misery in that the necessities of life are not simply absent. They are available, but withheld conditionally."

I hold that no human being is disposable. The wealthiest money-producers and the least able to produce any quantifiable value for society - are and must be equally precious, equally priceless, in a society that values life over money.

"Precarity leads to generalised hopelessness; a constant bodily excitation without release. Growing proportions of young people are living at home. Substantial portions of the population – over 10% in the UK – are taking antidepressants. The birth rate is declining, as insecurity makes people reluctant to start families. In Japan, millions of young people never leave their homes (the hikikomori), while others literally work themselves to death on an epidemic scale. Surveys reveal half the population of the UK are experiencing income insecurity. Economically, aspects of the system of anxiety include “lean” production, financialisation and resultant debt slavery, rapid communication and financial outflows, and the globalisation of production."

If you find yourself in NYC, and you ever want to horrify yourself, pay a visit to any of NYC's HRA Foodstamp application centers. Take a gander at the hours-long lines and compare them in your mind to the food lines of the Great Depression:

http://images.politico.com/global/news/090210_depression_miller.jpg

"Many more discourses of scapegoating and criminalisation treat precarity as a matter of personal deviance, irresponsibility, or pathological self-exclusion. Many of these discourses seek to maintain the superstructure of Fordism (nationalism, social integration) without its infrastructure (a national economy, welfare, jobs for all). Doctrines of individual responsibility are central to this backlash, reinforcing vulnerability and disposability. Then there’s the self-esteem industry, the massive outpouring of media telling people how to achieve success through positive thinking – as if the sources of anxiety and frustration are simply illusory.  These are indicative of the tendency to privatise problems, both those relating to work, and those relating to psychology."

Related: Bruce Levine - The Rebel Yell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1IwSprOWi8)

Current tactics and theories aren’t working.  We need new tactics and theories to combat anxiety.
"If the first wave provided a machine for fighting misery, and the second wave a machine for fighting boredom, what we now need is a machine for fighting anxiety – and this is something we do not yet have." <<< Enter Bitcoin and its offering of potential financial liberty

"Current militant resistance does not and cannot combat anxiety. It often involves deliberate exposure to high-anxiety situations. Insurrectionists overcome anxiety by turning negative affects into anger, and acting on this anger through a projectile affect of attack. In many ways, this provides an alternative to anxiety. However, it is difficult for people to pass from anxiety to anger, and it is easy for people to be pushed back the other way, due to trauma. We’ve noticed a certain tendency for insurrectionists to refuse to take seriously the existence of psychological barriers to militant action. Their response tends to be, “Just do it!” But anxiety is a real, material force – not simply a spook."

There are many of us who have been around a long time and still can't claim that we are sitting on a any sizable fortunes!
My most profitable hobby? sure, Monetary independence? well call me if we do another 100x jump!

i was thinking more about this, he was in real early see this link

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=showPosts

maybe he cashed out and never kept a lot of coins , i would still think JG to be a huge holder of btc

I have a bit under one bitcoin to my name. 

I never solo mined and solved ~60 or so blocks in total, with the vast majority of those being before the reward was halved.  So I guess something like 2500-3500, unless I either god incredibly lucky or incredibly unlucky on the pooled mining...

I had to mine bitcoins to buy new hardware, so I don't regret selling them as I mined them.  If I hadn't, then I never would have gotten to my max of ~12ghash/s, I would have been forever at the 1.3ghash/s or so after buying four 5830's...  I mean with the 20/20 hindsight, it would have been better to NOT reinvest, and just horde all the coins those initial four 5830's made (likely in the hundreds)...  but that's not something I can kick myself over.

I do regret selling the ones I mined when I was at 12ghash/s though, seeing as how at that point I wasn't buying any more hardware (ASICs coming).  I still wouldn't have had a million $ worth, though (using today's market price).  Probably made 500 or less of that total after I reached 12ghash.

...that being said, if I had gambled on and received that first generation Avalon, I'm relatively certain I'd have several hundred bitcoins still in storage.  I mean, the vast majority of ASICs didn't start hitting the market until about 2-3 months after that first batch of Avalons.  I'd be baffled as to how someone couldn't be a 'bitcoin millionaire' if they had purchased one of those for $1200 or w/e it was (and received it).

I'm surprised anyone would release their bank account, investment account or Bitcoin wallet balance. I wonder if he would mind telling us where he banks and what his account balances are?

This...

I put in only what I could afford to lose, which was not very much at the time. I was a jobless recent graduate.

The people that have got / will get really wealthy, I think, are the bigger fish, non-nerds who have been getting in since ~2012+. The rich get richer!

Wasn't his essentially the first Avalon?  I think he made 16BTC just on the first day!

That's still a decent amount if you consider people still expect a bitcoin to be worth $60k-300k each one day.

Agreed.  Also, people have to remember that up until Nov-Dec 2012, his stash was still only worth ~$3480 in total (given ~$10/btc).  At that moment in time, that's not a life changing amount of money.  And it took 4 years for his stash to be worth up to even that much.  He probably sold hundreds or thousands more in that first 2-3 year time frame.  So no, this is not even surprising.

Couple this with the fact that most low net worth young people have the patience of a gnat (they think in only days/months, not years), and it doesn't surprise me at all that hundreds and thousands of coins were pissed away on trivial crap for years up until bitcoin started to really be worth a lot in 2013.

I can certainly agree with that... I pissed away the equivalent of $5 million in coins at today's priced, going out drinking...

That is his BTC stash, he has $3 000 000 worth invested in WhoreCoin / BeerCoin / PornCoin in Vegas.  ::) ;D

Some people believe in using a currency, to grow a currency, not sitting on coins, counting your riches, like Scrooch McDuck.

Or he may just show people begging for coins, that he has very little. Or to hackers, who might want to target him.

Or it says "I am not corrupted" or "bribed" Look I have only a few coins.  :D

He'd have to have more than that!

Wasn't he the first person to own an ASIC miner?

I remember that thing was making $2,000 a day when Bitcoin was only $20 each

He posted it himself on Twitter.

Maybe if both of your read the comments you'll find he even states 348BTC

Well even if it is pretty nice, its nothing compared to big whales.
People need to realise that exchanges are the ones with most bitcoin funds, and unique role to bitcoin price movement.
Imagine all that fees from multi-million tradings happening each day in and out..
Major exchanges can affect the price soly on keeping their profits in bitcoin/ liquidating them for fiat.

cheers

I think he exchanged most of what he mined for fiat to pay for bills, ect.

Yah, that old comma vs period thing can defintely confuse people.  I've been thrown off before when visiting USA vs Europe, etc.

He's now Scrooge McGarzik

I would be glad to have even 10% of that, or maybe even 5%.

That's quite a large sum of money. And it will likely be a lot more within a few years.