All capital goods that show price appreciation have those "amazing similarities".

You don't actually have to print a paper wallet per se to be doing cold storage.

You could just keep your private keys on a computer that isn't connected to the internet. For example, put the relevant install packages on some kind of removable media, freshly install an OS and Bitcoin-qt completely offline, and then just generate the addresses on that computer that you want.

The internet will never have seen any of your private keys whatsoever, and your wallet.dat on that computer from that point forward will remain a valid backup (assuming you do not exceed I believe 100 addresses). If you are not doing any spends (obviously) from that machine, you're not in any danger of making new change addresses in the background that are not amount your intentionally labeled ones.

If at any point you wanted to spend funds on those keys, you don't even need to put that PC online. From the Bitcoin-qt console you can display private keys, then sweep those funds directly into say Blockchain.info or some such service. (Basically exactly like a paper wallet user would).

Another even simpler option is to just copy over the files for a web-based paper wallet key generator such as bitaddress or some such site. Load it offline directly off disk on that computer, and save the print output of the web browser to document format files such as PDF. You now could have a subdirectly filled with paper wallets complete with QR codes that you just display on the screen to sweep with a smartphone later without even running any kind of wallet whatsoever. If that offline PC is physically secure in your possession, then that's just as secure as a paper wallet.

A price of 0.016 per gigahash breaks even within about a year if you assume that difficulty only averages about 10% per retargeting, and by the end of that year you're mining only a matter of satoshis per jump.

That's simply not going to happen. Slightly more realistic but still fantasy-world optimistic assumptions show that even if jumps only average about 20%, you're still talking maybe 0.01 total ever.

I think what probably happened is that somebody in the DOJ didn't understand what mining was and asked somebody to explain it, and the person explaining happened to choose the analogy that mining is a lottery to produce a valid hash, and the rate at which you hash corresponds to the number of lottery tickets.

Allow some offhand conversation like that to filter through various echo chambers and telephone-games, and suddenly a conversation like that turns into equating mining with gambling, when there isn't necessarily anything real to go on.

Destroying any semblance of frangibility and network effects in order to protect people from something that should be their responsibility in the first place is not a good idea.

This is potentially even crazier and more sustainable than your run of the mill Ponzi.

The GH/s prices in BTC have always supported more than enough to pay what that amount of hashing power would generate until the end of time. I'd even go so far as to say it's stupid and unnecessary to even really have the hashing power in the first place, or at least start out with some and just start selling ficticious GH/s.

In the traditional Ponzi setup, the revenue of new investors is required to pay off older investors. If this kind of scheme decided to go Ponzi, they don't even need the revenue of new investors, because the buy-and-hold GH/s buyer is basically locking into giving the hosting company a loan with negative interest. It doesn't even matter how the buyer behaves because by putting new GH/s on the market, the revenue already takes care of all future "mining" revenue payments no matter how it changes hands, so long as it's always possible to sell new GH/s above total BTC ROI on that hashing power.

The only way a scheme like that would start falling apart is if difficulty leveled off such that the GH/s prices at any given time were actually discounted compared to projected mining revs.

Definitely a losing deal unless you magically make money day trading GH/s themselves.

The organization itself can dump as much hashing power as they want on the market making you a perpetual bag-holder.

They've basically invented a business model where they can be in perpetual IPO mode and constantly create new shares.

They don't even need to actually have the hardware to back all the GH/s they issue, because the market price they can dump into is always higher than that amount of GH/s will ever mine until the end of time. They could in principle operate as a Ponzi for a long time without anyone noticing it, as long as there are sufficient people willing to hook up to Ghash.io to make its total hashrate look plausible, because the immediate BTC sale of any GH/s they dump onto the market will pay off any simulated mining earning plus generate a profit.

All allegations of Ponzi I'm seeing center around one very clear thread. They confuse "price" with "value" and are convinced that Bitcoin has no inherent value outside of new fiat money coming in. Thus the claim goes that newer adopters become the bag-holders for earlier-adopters.

Once you point out that a Ponzi scheme is a very specific thing where investors are defrauded by a single entity paying older investors with money from mew investors, then the conversation suddenly becomes "whatever, then it's a Pyramid".

I guess a form of money where your balance is secured by the largest single-task supercomputing cluster ever assembled in history, that lets you pay anybody in the world with no intermediary institution for almost zero fee has no inherent value!

There is one glaring and immediately obvious problem with the OP.

A fixed supply has an easily mathematically-determined upper limit on total leverage given a specified minimum reserve requirement.

The current system has no such property because the un-leveraged supply is not fixed.

I would immediately change your email account's password, because the above scenario is absolutely correct, and for someone to have bothered to do this in the first place, they likely would've had reason to believe they were in control of your email.

We're going to see a period of sustained growth over two to three weeks building to the $1500-2000 range, followed by massive rally to around $6000, stabilizing medium term to around $4000-4500.

Email will never gain mass adoption. In order to send it, you need to open a terminal session on a network-connected Unix machine and execute arcane commands. The masses will never adopt email.

The reporter was committed to a certain theory and narrative from the get-go and shoehorned everything possible to clumsily fit that story, culminating in a creepy delusionally-reported in-person confrontation.

It is Satoshi Nakamoto's daughter, just not necessarily the person who created Bitcoin.

All we actually know from the Newsweek article is that there's some guy from Southern California actually named Satoshi Nakamoto who has a vaguely relevant educational / professional background, who happens to allegedly have libertarian political tendencies, and reacted in a threatened manner when confronted by a reporter unannounced at his door. And that the reporter was able to manipulate estranged or disgruntled members of his family to contribute quotes that could be spun in such a way as to support the journalist's flimsy hypothesis.

The dialogue between the journalist and the subject of the article, and the police officers, is obviously completely fabricated and/or delusional, and there simply isn't a smoking gun anywhere in the entire article that can be corroborated independently whatsoever.

There is literally nothing but bullshit in this article.

There is zero fallout of any consequence.

This is a hail mary from an irrelevant organization on the brink of annihilation trying to resurrect itself with sales. What can some 64-year old schlub of modest means in Southern California possibly do to hurt them?

That has nothing to do with hash success probability as a function of target.

There is zero evidence presented in the Newsweek article that can actually be independently corroborated. The entire presentation is contingent on trust in a news organization on the brink of nonexistence, with every incentive in the world to publish anything it takes to sell a large run of their first foray back into paper editions.

Bitcoin is a soft target, they can print whatever they want with zero standards whatsoever, generate as much hype as they want to spur sales, and there will be absolutely no consequences.

That's kind of too unfocused a question to really answer, and the assumptions behind how it's phrased are leading because it suggests that the security of balances is strictly inherent to the protocol / system itself and not necessarily best practices on the user software side.

There's a lot to enjoy here, reading all this narcissistic self-aggrandizing bullshit

Please tell me this is all just a giant satire, because this is some of the most self-important nonsense wordporn garbage I've ever seen.

You literally could take a Markov bot and feed it bunch of random papers and it would produce something equally illuminating!