Of course, it would be better to distribute the hashpower more evenly, but mining is a business that depends on cheap electricity, and currently, China is the country that can offer the lowest prices.
We also have to consider who is manufacturing Bitcoin miners -- primarily Chinese companies who have access to cheaper labor and production materials and who are subject to much less manufacturing regulation. In turn, Chinese miners aren't paying huge import tariffs when they buy ASIC miners. Compare that to US miners who pay a 27.6% tariff! |
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We can make a reasonable move. We can restart Bitcoin from scratch. For all. As it was with Monero. What are you suggesting -- regular hard forks like Monero that will brick ASIC miners? That would swap mining centralization for development centralization and greatly diminish Bitcoin's POW security. That seems unlikely. Coinbase doesn't want to pay more than the market demands, and mining pools don't want to give up fee revenue if they don't have to. @squatter, But the real world suggests otherwise. Monopolies in real-world do all sorts of shady stuff to eliminate competition. Sure, I just don't think that applies in this case. There is no monopoly here. You're suggesting that exchanges and miners would collude to form a monopoly. For the reasons stated above, that would go against the financial interests of both parties. So in my scenario, Coinbase paying a premium to eliminate competition is quite possible Why would Coinbase pay a premium when a whole network of miners will do it at the market price?  I will expand on my example, Let's say Coinbase in the future decided to eliminate the lighting network. It makes a "deal" with the pools to not accept any "closing" TX from the Lightning Networks to establish itself as an instant way to send bitcoin payments with current mechanism this can happen. There is no incentive for miners nor Coinbase to enter into a deal like this. The fee market is the optimal way for miners to maximize fee revenue. It's also the optimal way for users to minimize fees paid. You can pay 10 satoshis per byte to get in the next block, or you can pay 1 satoshi per byte and let higher paying customers go ahead of you. The choice is yours as a user. Miners are much more predictable. They will operate by profit motive. This is a feature, not a bug. |
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Doesn't this look to costy for little benefit?
How much people keep trading shoes? I like blockchain but Nike doesn't need all that to prove it is genuine
The sneaker reselling market is huge. I've seen ridiculously long lines outside sneaker shops before product drops -- people buy up the whole supply to sell to collectors. It's a multi-billion dollar market and it's only getting bigger: Like many traders, Johan Aguirre makes a daily check on his holdings’ ups and downs across an electronic spreadsheet.
Aguirre, however, isn’t analyzing stocks, bonds or cryptocurrencies. He specializes in an increasingly tradable asset class — sneakers — on his favorite shoe reseller platform, StockX. Sometimes, he’ll pick up only one pair; at other times, he’ll buy in bulk.
“If it’s a shoe that I know I can sell,” he said, “typically I’ll buy the whole inventory that’s presented to me. And from the moment I know the sizes and the styles and the product code, I list it on StockX and it’s live right away.”
Aguirre, 31, is part of the evolution of the multibillion-dollar worldwide sneaker resale market, which is looking less like a hobby these days and more like an occupation. This is all great for Nike -- they immediately sell out their whole stock as soon as it's released. This whole gimmick will only further solidify their status as collectible items. It's smart business. |
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Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme. I get it, some people understand it and they are OK with scamming from BTC. But those who do not understand it... are in real danger of losing tehir hard-earned money.
According to Wikipedia: A pyramid scheme is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products. I was never promised payments for recruiting other Bitcoin investors. Were you? You could argue the Bitcoin market operates by the greater fool theory -- people invest because of an irrational expectation that prices will always rise, not because of intrinsic or fundamental value. That's about it, though. Anyone claiming that Bitcoin is a Ponzi or pyramid scheme doesn't understand how those work. |
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Miners can't solo mine, that's a fact. In the current environment, Miners are being forced to work in the pools. I would rather question why no one has challenged this "pool" concept so far. It's the 1st step towards centralization iyam. I think you've pointed out why -- because solo mining is untenable for most miners. Not all, but most. P2Pool emerged as a way to challenge mining centralization by allowing for hash pooling without centralized payouts. It never caught on for multiple reasons covered here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=921093.msg10118511#msg10118511https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=921093.msg10126962#msg10126962These pools can/already dictate which TXs go through and which don't. That is too much power for something which is technically decentralized... In practice, pools operate as expected. They order transactions based on fee rate. That's exactly how Bitcoin was designed -- with transaction revenue rising to replace the mining subsidy as incentive for honest mining. I don't see the problem here. Miners have always had the power to decide which transactions get confirmed. It's not just pools. As for filling the blocks that's not really a strong argument. Once the chunk of miner's earning is coming from the Fees there is literally nothing stopping them to only include transactions which they want. There was never anything stopping them from doing that. Consider this in the future. Let's say Coinbase becomes "huge" in the future and they make a "deal" with these pools that they will only include Coinbase's TXs into the blocks they form and will reject any other TXs. That seems unlikely. Coinbase doesn't want to pay more than the market demands, and mining pools don't want to give up fee revenue if they don't have to. Anyway, miners should include whatever transactions they want. That's how the protocol works. |
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"Blockchain-based sneakers."   It is a way for Nike to fight counterfeit products. Every Cryptokick shoe they make will be cryptographically secured and you will be able to check and verify on the blockchain if the product is genuine and comes from Nike or if it is fake. It also holds information on previous owners. If you buy a pair of genuine Cryptokicks and after a year you sell them to someone else that digital ownership can be transferred to the new owner. https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/12/10/nike-blockchain-sneakers-cryptokick-patent/ They don't actually need a blockchain for this. Since Nike is a trusted authority anyway, this could be done just with cryptographic signatures and a database. |
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Ah, so this is what Jeff Garzik has been up to lately: Zheng said that having Jeff Garzik as SpaceChain’s Chief Technical Officer helped in that regard. Garzik was one of the early bitcoin core developers and he led SpaceChain’s effort to build out the software soon to be integrated with the ISS. He’s also been thinking about blockchain in space even before SpaceChain founded, said Zheng. The distance between the planets makes it impractical. The propagation time is more than ten minutes.
It's obviously impractical for mining, but is that a problem for receiving blockchain state or broadcasting transactions? I would think these would just be delayed. |
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Well I guess Bitmex will have a lot of explaining to do here, not siding with anyone here, but it looks like Arthur Hayes may have forget something here, early investors claiming back his investors and then some. Maybe, maybe not. We have zero information about Amato's claims and no way to judge their merit. This could be totally frivolous. The fact that he says the investment " was supposed to later be converted into equity" makes it sound like he didn't cross his Ts or dot his Is. All we know is that Amato is claiming that BitMex "gave him false information." That probably alludes to a buyout under false pretenses. For example, maybe Hayes claimed the platform was closing, or misrepresented its growth to Amato to deter him from realizing the equity. The numbers seem really inflated. Amato is probably just looking for an out-of-court settlement. |
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I thought Mr. Sun denied all involvement in its sale at the time. Looks like that was a lie which is nicely consistent with his MO.
The recent stuff around Digibyte signals that they're going to head further into questionable behaviour. As if exiting the US market and moving to the Seychelles didn't make that clear.  I hadn't heard about the Digibyte scandal. It comes off very unprofessional to say the least, and confirms my suspicions that Sun is far more intimately involved in Poloniex's management than he lets on. You don't need to dig very far to see that Poloniex is obviously being used to prop up TRX. |
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It's not miners who are driving fees up. They have strong incentive to fill blocks as much as possible. Due to limited block space, fees will always rise as transaction volume increases. It's users employing horrible fee estimation -- including exchanges like Bitmex -- that drives fees up so much. Lots of exchanges weren't batching transactions in 2017 (and still aren't), which greatly exacerbated the congestion. In theory in more decentralized mining you could increase the chance of a tx with small or no fees to be mined at some point, either because some miners dont have the same txs, or because they dont sort the memory pool on tx fees, because they are not mining 100% for maximizing profits etc I'm not sure that's a function of mining centralization. I think it has more to do with how capital-intensive mining is, which in turn is a function of market demand for bitcoins. The extreme example is when Bitcoin was CPU-minable and the mining costs were almost imperceptible. Profitability is not a concern when sunk costs barely exist. That dynamic drastically changes when it costs thousands of dollars just to buy a single miner, not to mention the other overheads involved. Naturally, hobby miners get forced out of the market, and a purely profit-motivated industry emerges. |
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I know this is true however you need the fiat x tether pair in the other Fiat currency as well, otherwise you cannot do the remittance. This makes things not so easy. Why do you assume that makes things difficult? That's actually what the OP was talking about, how there are robust OTC Tether/fiat markets emerging. We are used to focusing on Tether's banking problems, but that only pertains to the primary Tether market -- the actual redemption of USDT directly by Tether. Chinese (and Russian) liquidity is being built on secondary markets. It's based around OTC liquidity providers that don't need to mandate Tether's KYC requirements and who don't require constant USDT issuance/redemption. The vast majority of this economic activity requires no banking at all. Brokers are buying and selling USDT for cash at high volumes. Volatility is irrelevant here, as a bitcoin transaction can be done in less than 30minutes. In 30minutes btc volatility is basically zero as exchange fees plays a bigger role.
Volatility is not irrelevant at all. We're not talking about exchanges either. The Chinese don't have access to liquid, centralized exchanges with banking. We're talking about high volume OTC transactions in cash, and moving value across borders. If a Chinese importer in Moscow buys bitcoins from a Moscow OTC broker, he can't immediately liquidate those bitcoins for cash on the other side of the border. In the meantime, the price of Bitcoin could drop 10% a day. Why take that risk?That's what Chinese Tether users seem to be asking themselves. |
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I wonder if Heart is attracting attention from the SEC. I don't see any restrictions on investment from US persons. Despite this humorous disclaimer --  -- it definitely reads like a common enterprise with an expectation of profits from third party efforts. Why are people buying HEX from him, if they didn't believe his promises about the returns? He's even suggesting predictable returns by presenting HEX as a "certificate of deposit." This is how most people view CDs: CDs are similar to savings accounts in that they are insured "money in the bank" and thus virtually risk free. |
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A stock IPO is a poor comparison. By the time a company finally goes public, it's already been through many stages of funding and is usually an established, profitable company. It'd be interesting to see how much Nike or Walmart's earliest private seed investors profited. I'm sure those numbers would blow this IPO data out of the water. |
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@squatter it doesn't have to be 51% attacks, Just look at what happened with the bitcoin tx fees when we were "mooning". Miners can definitely extort whatever fees they want... They can basically hold the network hostage. It's not miners who are driving fees up. They have strong incentive to fill blocks as much as possible. Due to limited block space, fees will always rise as transaction volume increases. It's users employing horrible fee estimation -- including exchanges like Bitmex -- that drives fees up so much. Lots of exchanges weren't batching transactions in 2017 (and still aren't), which greatly exacerbated the congestion. |
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I'm sure it's used on a small scale, but it sounds like volatility is a major deterrent for those looking to move capital offshore. The real winner here appears to be Tether. Since Tether leverages blockchains to cut off government tracking and third party meddling but also retains price stability, the Chinese are taking to it.
I believe bitcoin can be sometimes easier than tether. There are much more local fiat pairs against bitcoin than tether. But in China, Tether is actually used in 99% of Bitcoin spot trades, according to Chainalysis. Tether isn't just a base pair for cryptocurrency markets anymore, either. Like the OP points out, it's becoming a robust remittance vehicle and is becoming the preferred option over Bitcoin for that: Business is brisk thanks to a constant flow of Chinese merchants who come in daily with heavy bags of cash. Oleg said his OTC desk sells about $3 million worth of crypto every day. Most of it usually goes to China. But what’s perhaps most surprising is which crypto.
Only 20 percent of Oleg’s sales are in bitcoin, the oldest cryptocurrency with the largest market capitalization. The other 80 percent is in the dollar-pegged token known as tether, or USDT.
Tether’s best-known application is allowing crypto traders to move money between exchanges quickly to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities. But according to several Moscow OTC traders, it has at least one real-world use case – as the go-to remittance service for local Chinese importers.
The total volume of USDT purchased by Chinese businesses can reach $10 million to $30 million daily, these traders said.
“They accumulate a lot of cash in Moscow and need tether to transfer it to China,” said Maya Shakhnazarova, head of OTC trading at Huobi Russia, the Moscow office serving high-roller clients of Singapore-based exchange Huobi Global.
The tether-for-rubles purchases often take place in offices like Huobi’s in the steel-and-glass skyscraper district of Moscow City.
“There are a lot of OTCs here in Moscow City, a bunch of offices in every building, and the volumes for them all can reach several dozens of millions of dollars a day. It’s all paid for in cash,” Shakhnazarova said.
Chinese grey-market importers used to rely on bitcoin before the 2018 bear market, another OTC dealer, Roman Dobrynin, told CoinDesk. As the price was ever-growing, merchants and the intermediaries helping them buy crypto could make some extra money along the way.
But since the beginning of 2018, hoping that your bitcoin will still be worth the same or more at the end of the transfer became too risky.
“As the price was going down, tether became much more convenient to use,” said Dobrynin. “China is totally reliant on USDT, they trust in it a lot, plus it’s very liquid.” His own clients are mostly Chinese, and they usually find him by word of mouth, connecting via Telegram. Nowadays tether is more common than a few years ago, however bitcoin is still the most common cryptocurrency and the easier one to exchange back to fiat.
In China, I believe it's very easy to exchange either Bitcoin or Tether to fiat. For remittance, the market is showing a preference for Tether, though. That has obvious implications for capital flight. |
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I'm quite surprised with this. Because, if it's no longer Circle, nor Justin Sun, who is running Poloniex? Now, from what I've read about Justin Sun, he's far from being a humble investor... Circle is out of the picture entirely. Justin Sun's "Asian investment group" is running Poloniex now. All former obligations -- like the outstanding debt to bitcoin lenders -- falls on Polo Digital Assets, the Seychelles company. Although I don't think they actually consider it a debt or itemize it on their balance sheet that way. They've already written it off, I'm sure. Justin Sun is probably not being forthright -- same as when he initially denied involvement. For all we know, he is the majority shareholder. We have no idea what the shareholder stakes in the new company really are. |
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Of course, they do. Just as all the people who live in a country with stringent currency controls.
I would do it too, under those conditions.
I'm sure it's used on a small scale, but it sounds like volatility is a major deterrent for those looking to move capital offshore. The real winner here appears to be Tether. Since Tether leverages blockchains to cut off government tracking and third party meddling but also retains price stability, the Chinese are taking to it. |
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Satoshi might have hoped for an ecosystem where mining was less concentrated At least we are "identifying" that mining has become "concentrated", The top mining pools will BTW disagree with your statement The 1st step towards fixing something is identifying something is wrong... The worse thing which could happen is we let these things slip by till its too late to fix. Whether it's even a problem at all is an eternal question. In 2014, GHash.IO exceeded 51% of the hash rate. There was no 51% attack, but the community took it as a wake-up call and GHash.IO's share of the hash rate perpetually fell thereafter. For years, trolls have been fearmongering about the likelihood of collusion among the top pools to attack Bitcoin. Yet, this threat has never materialized. Miners can quickly leave malicious pools, and mining pool administrators have strong financial incentives not to destroy their business with such an attack. These economic realities have been enough to secure the system thus far. Remember also, 51% attacks don't give miners that much power. At worst, they can censor transactions and perform difficult-to-coordinate double spend attacks -- at great cost. |
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I'd rather use a platform that says they can require AML/KYC at their discretion -- but in practice, doesn't. This is what BitMEX says in their terms: HDR reserves the right at any time to verify your identity for the purposes of complying with the Seychelles’ Anti-Money Laundering Act 2006 or any other Applicable Law. That seems much more legally defensible than what BaseFEX is doing. |
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Don't run a botnet from a country (like Romania) that has an extradition treaty with the US. That seems to be the overall lesson here. How the authorities went about getting these guys to pay for their actions remains unknown
Presumably, they tracked the malware distribution to Romania and then worked with Romanian law enforcement to identify, arrest and extradite the offenders. If its to go by your submission, then its ok to go hack or even scam people of their resources with only one caveat, ensure you do it in a country outside the United States and also be sure that the country you are in does not have an extradition agreement with the United States. First, I was speaking with tongue in cheek. Second, it wasn't a comment on morality anyway, just a comment on what got them caught. To put it another way: Good luck extraditing a botnet operator from Russia. |
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