Without btc, I don't think so - for a very large number of altcoins. BTC is the gold of the ecosystem. Most altcoins are so volatile that you can't trust them as store of value. Even if you believe in your altcoin it will most probably have worse economic characteristics compared to BTC, and thus you are mathematically certain that you will be "diluted" or devalued in the long run. In most cases, keeping your alts in ...btc, will allow you to buy more of the same alt later on.

It's not any coincidence that the btc=gold of crypto principle has been recognized by multipool miners where you can switch between various coins all the time (to maximize profitability) and then get paid in btc directly.


Some want to sell for usd, some want to hodl. The same applies even to asic btc miners.


Lol... there are various scenarios where it doesn't involve theft. And if you are paying, well... it's not theft.

The vast majority of altcoins don't even have altcoin X / USD pairs. You are forced through BTC first to cash them out. It's not that big of a step, or so twisted.


Mining (alts)=>btc (with GPU) is happening. As I said we don't need to theorize about it. It is happening. Now.



Lol


Well someone is mining with those GPUs and it ain't the Chinese...

1. GPU mining for bitcoins is alive and well. But it has to be done indirectly, through altcoins. GPU =>altcoin=>bitcoin, voila!

2. GPU miners are different than ASIC miners in that you can resell the hardware (PCs, CPUs, RAMs + the GPUs themselves) after a few years and get something back or even repurpose the systems for something else. It has even less CAPEX if you start with used hardware. Obviously, buying older GPU hardware is not the same in terms of speed and power efficiency but people with subsidized power wouldn't care that much, would they? (Kind of like saying that no matter how slow the mining hardware is, it can still be profitable with extremely cheap or free electricity)

Still, it ain't happening (China centralization of GPUs).

What the west lacks, is access to cheap and fast ASIC equipment. There are people who can run mining hardware for free (flat electricity bill) or very cheaply for various reasons related to their power setup, location, etc etc, yet they don't have access to cheap and fast ASICs. Theoretically they can use older hardware and still be profitable, but in the grander scheme of things, they will not represent a significant percentage of the hashrate pie while using outdated hardware. The situation would be different if there was cheap access to efficient ASIC hardware for westerners, provided by western chip industries. The situation where mining companies keep their miners for themselves and simply create farms, or sell to outsiders with very big profits, is creating mining asymmetries.

We don't have to theorize on what would happen. GPU mining, for example, never became centralized in China despite the lower electric costs there.

They don't need to subsidize anything. Just sell superior hardware. Those that have access to cheap electricity will figure out the rest.

Personally I'd be more worried if the hashrate was under NSA's jurisdiction.

Chinese miners have acted OK so far, and the chinese exchanges seem to have pretty large volumes. Actually the chinese may need bitcoin way more than westerners in RL, due to devaluation dangers and capital controls.

The real question of centralization that the westerners should ask themselves, is how is it even possible to have a tremendous edge on IT / chip manufacturing / chip architecture etc etc, and then don't even use that advantage in creating competitive ASICs that make the Chinese ones seem like ancient tech.

Why is no large western industry creating bitcoin-related equipment? Why is there an "invisible hand" that prevents them to do so? This type of centralization where every large western manufacturer has "ignored" bitcoin hardware is one of the primary reasons why the situation is like it is in terms of hashpower distribution. Cheap power exists in several US and European locations too - so it's not just the power cost.

I'm not sure I'm following. My base is this:


So, I can check for correctness pretty easily, but to solve the problem it could take generating, inputting and verifying 10.000 tries max (or if I was looking for a DES 8-char password, a lot more) versus just checking for correctness.

On one hand I must have a process to increase the counter loop, input something, check something, restart the loop, on the other hand I only have a process of inputting / checking for the one final answer.

Say if the pin is 6666, or even 0000, in one process I've gone through many more steps to start generating and checking candidates, on the other hand I already know that the pin is 6666 or 0000 and I'm just checking it to see if the computational problem (cracking the pin) is solved.

The process of solving the computational problem (=finding the right pin) takes more time than simply verifying that the problem is solved with the right answer (=checking the pin). If that happens for even one problem, then how can P=NP as a broader "rule"? It can't.

Let's say I launch an ETF in London. You live in the States. Can you create an "investment company" in the UK which then buys from my ETF in London?

Can US law get involved with the internal processes of a company that operates abroad? Shouldn't the regulatory barrier extend only up to the level where you own the shares to your company and get profits or added value which might be taxable in the States?

In general, young guys won't write with double space after a sentence. This is a relic from the typewriter era.

Say I want to crack your 4 digit pin (0000-9999).

No matter what I do, I have to generate the numbers, try them, verify them.

Simply verifying the answer is just a subset of generating candidates/trying/verifying. So verification time alone is always less than trying candidates AND verifying.

Time spent (cracking + verifying) > (verifying), because verifying alone is (at least) -1 step.

So P ≠ NP.

Can't they bypass USA regulatory resistance and go to the UK -or elsewhere- to launch the ETF?

That's correct.

They said they downloaded Electrum, yet no UK IP address did so that day.

Every type of demographic has a type of look. This is well known and can be "reversed" - in other words telling what one is, by just looking at them. It's a subtype of mentalism (cold reading). You can tell things about people by how they look, how they express themselves, how they move, how they act, etc etc. You can classify people, even find out intimate details about their lives.

When people say "oh who gives a fuck how he looks", or "looks don't matter", what they are really saying is "I have no clue how to correlate what I'm seeing so I need other type of data".

The obsession about "more data" is very eloquently described in "Psychology of Intelligence Analysis" by the CIA. To make a long book => short, it says that the obsession of data analysts with more data is ridiculous because the truth is in plain sight most of the time, so they only need to process the data they have in a better manner. Mentalists and others trained in cold-reading would agree and laugh about such an obvious (to them) conclusion.

IT nerds don't look like Wright. People who are involved in computer science complex theoretics like how to solve the Byzantine General problem, don't look like Wright. Heck, even an average class of C programmers don't look like Wright.

Why they don't look like Wright? Because geekiness is a function of time-sacrifice. Time is finite. With 24hrs/day and only so much to focus on within a given day, before taking time to sleep, eat, and do other stuff, you don't have time to develop your extremely complex skills and do all the other things that ordinary humans do. Thus something has to give. Typically, what is viewed as less important, like what other people wear, social relations, etc etc, go out the window first. You don't care about things like "fashion" thus you dress, let's say, in a more ackward way that makes you stand out. You might also develop high degree of introversion which in turn will lead to myopia which will mean that you'll need glasses. Myopia / short-sightedness, is not a function of biology, but rather a function of the mind. Most geeks/nerds are short-sighted and highly introverted. Geniuses will typically exhibit some anomalous characteristics which is a result of the time-scarcity equation. You can't do everything within finite time constraints and it will *show*.

In this regard (I'm not mentioning other things like forging "proofs"), Wright is a highly anomalous Satoshi candidate. He is also highly anomalous for one other reason. He seems to be trained in controlling his facial expressions and posture. This is intelligence level stuff that is used on political leaders (and most typically fail at their "lessons" - leaking all sort of information through their body language - again a consequence of finite time / you can't teach a politician right away what it takes intelligence operatives years of training).

What if they don't need to scale? What if they break down a 2000 qubit problem into emulated segments of 5 qubits, just like a 8-bit processor can do with 16-bit or 32-bit operations? They might take a speed penalty for doing so but still be lightning-fast.

I'm no expert on qubits or quantum cryptography but we have to rule this possibility out completely. And then we also have to rule out the possibility that there aren't any technologies deployed by governments which are way more advanced than the marketplace (say IBM's 5 qubit QC).

And he was buying at mt.gox for 1200$?

Hmm, I think I remember what was going on at 5000... we were going in 5k then reverting to 4999, as troll posts were getting deleted. It's possible that what is now number 5000, back then wasn't 5000 but some other number (due to deleted messages that affect the counter).

I mean using the 5 to emulate more qubits. Kind a like using an ALU to emulate an FPU or using a 8bit processor to do 16 or 32 bit math.

I wouldn't be surprised if they told us, some time later, that 2 qubits were actually enough to do everything (albeit slower).

My reasoning is that if quantum bits are anything like normal bits, then they could be emulated upwards at the cost of speed. But with quantum speeds being already too fast that wouldn't be such a problem.

So you panic-sold because you thought others would panic-sell, in a sense trying to move faster than them and profit. Makes sense as you say it, the only part that doesn't make sense is the lack of a fundamental reason to panic sell in the first place, other than herd behavior and market-trader addiction to news that "have to" move the price upwards or downwards.