well cryptocurrency economics is becoming just the same as fiat economics.

telling people holding their own funds and spending them p2p just doesnt work. that crypto assets are just too heavy to operate like that.
this is why so many wall-streeters/bankers are loving alternative networks like LN, etf's and sidechains.
so that crypto assets get locked up in vaults and contracts requiring the wall-streeter/banks sign off.
people then trade un blockchained, unaudited payment methods. and then after a time they simply drop the connection between the locked asset and the unaudited payment method

actually. moral exchanges make money no matter what the price is. 0.3% of any price is still 0.3%

as for the historic exit scams. exchanges actually do run off when the price tanks.
this is because they take the BTC.
when the price tanks. people are buying coin. but there is not enough coin to then give to customers as a withdrawal
(MTGOX, cryptorush, mintpal, name them all. disappeared at the drop)

when the price goes up. many people are throwing coins at the exchange so they can get fiat. exchanges love to stay open when prices go up. they hate it when prices go down because people start withdrawing their coins.
which is why when a exchange is not moral and has taken the coin. there is not enough to supply customers. so the exchange has to make up lame excuses about being hacked or bad coding causing double spends

satoshi doesnt need to turn up

bitcoin already has a centralsied power house making decisions on the upgrades. and if satoshi did turn up firstly that power house wont just give him back the reigns. secondly we dont need on person or one group. we should be concentrating on multiple groups and teams using consensus. not thinking about centralising code decisions

hense why is satoshi was to just genuinely him write a message. to write a actual meaningful message.

this drama is just some hacker or disgruntled ex employee of p2pf who wrote a message

if only the disgruntled ex employee at p2pfoundation or hacker decided to make a more practical message

                                          (^ not real message ^)

what people dont realise is that the "bankers" are these guys
www.dcg.co/portfolio

what they are doing is behind the exchanges they control
EG
bitflyer       changetip      coinsetter
bitoasis      circle             genesis
bitpesa       coinbase       itbit
bitso          coinhouse      korbit
bitwala       coinjar          kraken
buda          coins.ph        luno
......and thats just half the alphabet

they are OTC trading using reserves behind many other platforms
EG
Altonomy, Atlantic Financial, Bitbank, Bitfinex, Bitmax, BitMEX, Bitso, BTCBOX, BTSE, Buull Exchange, DGroup, Coinone, Crypto Garage, GOPAX (operated by Streami), Korbit, L2B Global, OKCoin, The Rock Trading, SIX Digital Exchange, Unocoin, Xapo, XBTO, and Zaif.

to arbitrage coins and fiat between these exchanges using a blockstream service, a variant of LN called liquid

https://blockstream.com/2018/10/10/liquid-launch/

guess you didnt get the memo

bitmain S15's new release
bitmain S9's on discount
canaans avalons on discount

minings not dead.
most efficient miners have a mining cost of $3100
bitcoin price is $4k. so its profitable to mine

what your not realising is yes those who bought s9's in 2017 at $2k mathematically are not breaking even IF you put those numbers to 2018 stats. but those S9's had a year to get funds in. so what they are mining with now is rigs that paid off the hardware cost and now just paying off the electric. which at 5cent a kwh is still profitable

the reason hashrate drop is because farms are swapping rigs to the next gen asics.
EG for every two S9's they can swap it for one S15
2xs9=2.6kwh usage
1xs15=1.6kwh usage

so same hashpower less electric
going one step further. to prevent a hash spike like 2013 that just shot them in the foot with a two year limp. they are being smart.
for every 8 units they are not swapping for 4 next gen. but instead 3 units. to make the difficulty go down. so that they can still mine for less cost. instead of the endless cycle of trying to push and fight for more power
......
transaction servers?
um you do realise that an asic does not even have a hard drive and does not store the blockchain right. they are just glorified calculators tasked with only one job. calculate a hash from another hash.
ASICS do not collate transactions. they do not list them as a block
a node does that. and then a node creates a hash for that block. then the node sends a hash to asics and then the asic calculates a new hash from the first hash.
emphasis mining is nothing to do with transaction collation/block formation
learn the difference between a ASIC farm and a node
......
anyway this is all just temporary drama. just wait until the big main batches of mining rigs get delivered in the last week of december. and the hashclimb really begins. which then affects the market/mining value equilibrium to put some buy pressure on the markets

...
your last point about re-deploying asics to brute force old bitcoin addresses .. seriously.. addresses are ecdsa
asics are ONLY SHA256

that like trying to crack math using emojis

just using the magic numbers above.. well not so much for anything before spring 2018
for instance the asics of winter 2017 were using 14thash miners that cost $2k-$3k
not the $900 rigs of 2018

but if you math the numbers out the long way round. you can work out the magic numbers of previous batches and then put them to use against hashrate/price data..

screw it.
2017 had a magic number of between 270-380

you also gotta know when the batches were released to know when to start adjusting the ranges.
like a chart i have from a few months ago showing the year to date of a few months ago

ranges can be useful. but i just went for the cheapest/most efficient miners of a time. rolled with that. as ranges just had too much scope/spread at times.
like this

the bitcoin network is not one entity. yes there is one group that decide the rules of the protocol due to peoples foolish trust that on group should develop the nodes and treat any other software as enemy.. which is sparking a weakness to the decentralised concept. but as for the holdings. they are not stuck in a groups control.

everyone has a copy of the ledger and their privatekey.
the private key is not a password to a server.
there is no bitcoin server.

even if all the exchanges that are just businesses that work as separate entities shut down people can still OTC trade, local face to face trade

people like the OP need to wake up that bitcoin is not exchanges and exchanges are not bitcoin.  
mixing exchanges and bitcoin to presume they are one and the same is foolishly like saying a retail store is the dollar
"OMG if walmart shut down the dollar is untradable"

nope. although you can use a business to swap currency for something else. doesnt mean if a retailer disappears so does the whole currency.
yea some people that deposit funds into the businesses address would lose the self control of the funds and if that business shut down getting them out is next to impossible with a immoral business.. but bitcoin is not reliant on an exchange
people should become less reliant on letting businesses hold their funds

all the coins in circulation are not suck in an exchange. the coins are not shares of an exchange. so the comparison to enron is wrong on many levels

90%
??
sorry but no

you dont understand the many layers of value.
yes the spike of 2017 went up beyond value and into FOMO speculation and was not sustainable. but bitcoin is still above the cheapest cost to mine bitcoin. it has not crashed. it just corrects down if it PRICE moves too far away from cheapest cost VALUE to mine it.

your thought process would have a point in a asset with zero cost in creation such as PoS coins but its not the same for PoW coins.

as for 90%
20k down to $2k....... never happened this year

anyway. keep an eye on the hashrates
using canaan(avalon) discount $200 asics multiply the number of exahash mining by 83
using bitmains s9 discounted at $400 asics multiply the number of exahash mining by 104
using bitmains s15 asics multiply the number of exahash mining by 117
using bitmains lastgen s9's multiply the number of exahash by 154

and you will have a good range of mining costs which prices like to keep around where there is not much speculation

if prices go too far above that range then yep, pure speculation.

pools no
a pool is just a stratum address used as a gateway for multiple asics to share work together. pools dont need physical locations.
FARMS on the other hand are fixed.
it takes too long to move such huge amounts of equipment and organise contracts to pre-buy electric at discount(many farms contract for 12 months, to ensure constant supply without brownouts aswell as getting the physical capacitors/cabling to supply the facility sorted)

though you may think that most pools are just 1 farm facility per company tag on the pool pie chart
https://www.blockchain.com/pools
each of them segments are actually more than one facility/farm

if you click on the block tally below the pie chart and then look at details of the blocks made by a particular tagged company/group. you will see that the blocks they mine differ.
some blocks are pure legacy and use a legacy address for their coin reward. some use bech32 addresses for coin reward. meaning although tagged as one group. they show that tits actually diverse facilities that individually choose what/how to mine

that said. getting back to the point. a pool is not a facility locked down to a physical location its just in essence an IP address which a group links to. a company/group could easily make many ip addresses as backup so if an IP is taken down the asics autoswitch to another IP address in seconds.

as for farms(physical facilities of large amount of asics) well thats for them to motivate themselves as to how to protect themselves.

no amount of code will ever stop people pooling effort. even PoS is seeing people pooling their stake together

its simple

regulators hate it that they have to regulate, audit, investigate, prosecute. they prefer to set the rules and then make the licenced business:
create the policy the business has to follow to remain inline with regulation
investigate its customers
audit its finances via the business paying for auditors


so 'futures' because it doesnt involve having 'holdings' to back the contracts(gambling) of assets it offers to bet against, means that the SEC doesnt have to keep checking audits/investigate that a business is 100% backed all year
but things like ETF however mean that the SEC has to do extra checks and monitor such businesses

the better way to succeed getting accepted for anything new with the SEC is to organise things so that you can desplay that your business is not going to cause any inconvenience to the SEC

put it into prospective
if you only have 4000 employee's and 26,000 money service businesses to monitor.. let alone the ones not licenced or regulated
or imagine you as one person had to deal with all the paperwork, meetings, audits, and reports of 7 businesses. wouldnt you want to avoid the ones that would waste your time because you have to spend weeks auditing their books and vouching for them endlessly.

now ur exaggerating
firstly the number of people that bought at $21k......... 0
the number of people buying around $20k very very small amount. probably 5 people bot trading
and those bot traders were selling as fast as they were buying. so no 400% loss.. more like 1% loss

the $20k did not last long. large percentage of traders were not active on that time period so stop even trying to make out the $20k was a stable price that lasted long enough to cause community wide losses today. it affected not even 1% of the community

the thing you should be looking at is the long period of prices remaining above $5800 which everyone had ample oppertunity to take advantage of
EG 12 months of prices remaining over ~$5800 baseline. if you just do 1% profit a day =365% profit a year
smart traders never buy  at a high. so pretending loads of tradrs or institutions bought right at the tip.. thats a laugh.
sorry but nah traders buy make a 1% sell. and repeat as fast as possible. if the price is going up they buy make 1% sell
repeat repeat repeat.
if the price jumps up more then 1% before they sell then hold off and then as soon as it goes down they sell.
EG if a price moves up 7% instantly. they sell when it starts to move down thus ending up 6% profit by the time they sell

they dont buy at $18k se 20k and just hold.  and then see 19k 18k17k16k15k14k before asking should they sell. they would have sold as soon as 20k turn down. meaning selling at 19k.. meaning 1k profit

i think you need to challenge yourself to some lessons of economics

just because a chart shows a market touched $20k does not mean everyones purchase price was 20k
i have coins from 2012. i never would value them at $20k

i grabbed data of the day it went to $20k
on that day when prices were above 19k. meaning a 19-20=5% shift
i can count 15 EASY bot oppertinites to make a total of 15% (there could be more. but i counted just the easy ones)

so lets say that over all the exchanges. 750k was the combined day volume.
thats not 750k people. thats not even 750k coins. thats at most 50k coins bot-trading repeatedly 15 times.

them 50k coins would not have bought at 20k and held on for 12 months and decide to sell finally at the mid $3k range
they would have sold in the 19k range making at worse 1% loss
500coins = only a dozen million $$ not hundreds of millions not billions

(facepalm)
seriously..
market cap is an empty number.. there is no $$$

i can make a blockchain with 5 trillion coins. i can sell one coin for just $1
yep $1 once
and that booms to make the market cap $5trillion.
yet the only $$$$ existing in the network is $1

bitcoin does not have billions of $ stored up
no $ evaporated
they never existed in the first place

the market cap is a empty number made from taking the current bitcoin price and multiplying it by coins.
its not a balance sheet of bank accounts of $$

funny you mention that.
institutions love investment loss..
its tax deductable. meaning they have to pay less tax, thus they are happy

what you dont realise is they are happy to have tax deductions 2018. and with a low price can begin 2019 at a low = instant great start. then when the price of btc goes up due to
the "next gen asic rush"
the "ETF basket obtaining rush"
and the "btc recovery correction"

2019 will be great for them

so for now this price is called "yay great, discount discount discount"

and next rebut i predict the daily 'volatility'
institutions get bored of 0.5% movements. they love 5% 10% swings.. its more money, without having to get their feet dirty having to do any actual work

its more about the ones that are first with ASICS (th manufacturers who the Quality assure test the hardware before delivering in december to customers)

(simply numbers by dividing the millions down to simple digits for simple demo)
imagine the network was at say 56hash (call it 4x of s9 miners 14hash)
instead of swapping 4 s9 for 4 s15(28hash) which would make that pool able to achieve 112hash
they instead swapped 4 s9 for 2 s15 to get 56hash capability.

the costs would go down meaning they can sell for less and make a profit. or even now and again swap 4 s9s for just 1 s15 to bring the hashrate down while still profiting

its like in a 10 second race why push yourself to do it in half the time knowing if you do it in half the time youl be expected to half time it every race. better to just race at 10 seconds. and if you can still win without exerting urself then reduce your speed a lil more. thus win without risking cost to your limbs
because you learned from 5 years ago trying to run as fast as possible left you with a 2 year limp.

blah blah investors blah

btc as a currency detached from fiat. EG users buy bread, milk, toilet roll. dont need to worry about what institutions want
for the last 6 years i have been paying rent, buying food and transport and the prices have been moving from
$100->$1200->$250>$500->$300->$900->$6000->$4000
and im still able to pay rent, buy food and transport

also 100k losing 80% is 20k... not 30k

also ~6k losing 80% = $1500
price didnt go down that low. it didnt even go into the the $2k range.

even last years $20k CORRECTED down to ~$6k which is not even 75% and as i just said was a correction from a temporary spike. not a crash from a stable price.

sems op neds to refine a few things if he wants to talk economics. like atleast state facts not exaggerations
investors love low prices on deflationary currencies. its called DISCOUNT

legally #116
in short
if an exchange sees a btc deposit that under 50% DIRECT taint of coins from those addresses. green flag
if an exchange sees a btc deposit that has 50% taint of coins from those addresses. RED FLAG
if the exchange has information that the person depositing is not the criminal attached to the taint. green flag
if the exchange has information that the person depositing is the criminal attached to the taint. RED flag
if the exchange customer is not the criminal attached to the taint and shows no relationship to the criminal. green flag
if the exchange customer is not the criminal attached to the taint and shows relationship to the criminal. RED flag

if there are any red flags then freeze account
else if 3 green flags (under 50%, customer is not the direct criminal, customer has no direct relationship to criminal) dont block

what the treasury announcement is not saying is that the exchangers and the ransdomware guys knew of eachother and the exchangers still processed transactions without reporting it.
which made their exchange illegal.
if an exchange is running a business of exchange in america it needs a money business licence and needs to have a policy to report funds transfer IF the business becomes aware that the funds are directly involved in criminals
EG funds coming in are from a criminal and the criminal is using the exchange to swap funds to take out different funds back to the criminal (laundering)

if just handling funds that at some time somewhere may have orginated back to criminals. even without knowledge of the crime is still an 'accomplice'.. then many managers of walmart and cashiers of walmart in detroit should be arrested for simply handling cash

displaying the addresses is just showing one piece of 'proof' of a relationship, but has not shown the other proofs of relationship.

bitcoin is pocket money created by machines owned by people not by governments.
imagine the machines like complicated calculators that people can own in their homes

its done by putting a list of peoples pocket money spending together into a list, like writing down math stuff in a maths notepad. and then doing some complex maths based on stuff of that page of the notepad

each new notepad page has a link to the previous page, simply like "continiung from previous page" but using the complicated maths result to prove its continuing from the last page.
that way all pages of a math notepad can be proved to link together to stop anyone from just cheating and slipping a new page in the middle of a notepad so that teachers can easily spot who done their homework and who didnt


the people that own the complex calculators that do the complex math get paid new pocketmoney if the complex math is correct. but thy can only spend it after 100 new pages of maths homework is done and correct after the page that people want to spend their rewards from.
because the maths teachers around the world that check the answers not only want to check the answers are right. but also want to see lots of homework added on afterwards that its impossible to change an earlier answer because so many pages have been added to a math notepad

what its not saying is the 2 exchanges and the 2 randsomware people knew of each other and the exchangers knew they were funding ransomware and didnt report it
they were running an illegal exchange

the 2 published addresses are just posting proof that funds looped through the exchange that originated from the ransomware
to show proof of a financial relationship. but an actual AML crime is about knowing the PEOPLE receiving the funds and exchanging the fiat knew of the crime and still funded the criminals without reporting the criminals.

imagine detroit. street dealing fiat. imagine a dealer walked into walmart to buy gum.. walmart CEO is not liable because although fiat can be traced through its cashiers draw, there also needs to be proof that walmart knew their customer was a drug dealer and helped the drug dealer process a transaction.

what the treasury is not saying but the law requires is that an exchange could end up in trouble if it can be proven that there is a joint relationship and knowledge of a crime. and that the ones knowingly trading with criminals didnt report it. and that they were operating as a money business without a money business licence

its not a blanket ban that anyone touching funds with taint of criminal proceeds. otherwise walmart managers in detroit would get arrested for simply accepting cash payments