certainly Love Will Keep Us Together.
Borealice! I love ya too man!
I recall you liked the last time I called you a weasel - ultimately confirming the spot-on definition.
Personally, I like weasel.
Bitcoin is designed to remove trust, adding back trust does not make sense. It is just plain wrong.
Mmmkay, I’ll play.
Trust in what? Code? Code changes. The Core? The miners? The energy required rn to keep the network afloat? What?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m kinda with you, but but … I don’t even trust my dick these days, so there is that.
You are correct .. that trust is not eliminated.... even though trust is lessened and tends to be more verifiable, with the code, for example, even though many folks are not necessary good at reading code.
There are various aspects of mining collusion, and even centralized points in which governments could still compromise individuals that might be miners or developers, even though node runners seem the most decentralized.
The level of decentralization and self-operation and/or ostracization is surely far from perfect which may well inspire some folks to try to learn more and participate in several aspects of the technical aspects (though that did not put the Samurai developers in any kind of a good place.
should be fun for my birthday week coming up.
Well, Happy Birthday in advance phil!
May you live a long long time, buying the tops and selling the bottoms. We (it’s royal, motherfuckers) need you!
Yeah.. Phil living until 105 years would be a good target (until 2062) and hopefully he has at least 0.0105 BTC or even better 0.021 BTC remaining at that time that he is able to sent right before he keels over.
mining does not normally get easier to do
Tell ya what phil.
Let the hashrate crater, so we can mine on our laptops again! Huh? That would be great, no?
Looking forward to seeing Bitcoin becoming POS instead of POW, under ETF custody. All them, what reserves? Yeah, give me a hurray, hip hip …
Don't be retarded. The ONLY real meaningful invention with any of the "cryptos" is proof of work.
Proof of work was the invention/discovery that really gave paradigm-shifting meaning to bitcoin.. and too bad that other imitators did not at least try to keep proof of work instead of resorting to inferior security and/or incentive creation mechanism..
[edited out]
Yes. As I answered this question my mind hovered over whether or not to introduce that next wrinkle. I decided to keep it simple.
The ETFs (but not only them) introduce layers of trust risk that has an effect on the entire network. When they sell bitcoin shares short somehow it puts artificial but 100% real downward pressure on the market price. And I say "somehow" because there are more than one way for them to be short bitcoin.
Someone might say: "But they are legally required to hold Bitcoin 1:1 in their funds."
There it is. The point of TRUST.
When the main players are the GIANT BANK stakeholders in the Federal Reserve who HATE bitcoin and see it as a threat to the US dollar as well as the regulatory agencies who are FULL of people who also HATE bitcoin and see it as a threat to the US dollar then the idea that they might collude to control the BTC price is not really so far fetched. On top of that the rules around how they must purchase/hold the coins could have time frame or other soft variables that give loopholes to short selling.
There is institutional knowledge of manipulating various kinds of markets (and robbing the people for at least 50 years with various kinds of more sophisticated and confusing financial instruments, and they have been and likely will continue to experiment in the various ways to manipulate, control and even rob normies. They are not just going to roll over without a decently good fight, including but not limited to cooptation, too.
Trust me bro.
And as I said it is not just the ETFs. Leaving coins on exchanges is exactly as damaging, though a wee little more distributed.
Careful with your proclamations of "exactly the same" since at least "in-kind" redemptions are currently allowed through exchanges, even though those kinds of matters are likely manipulated too.. whichis part of the justification to keep large portions of the stash in private wallets.
It is elementary for exchanges to sell various coins short. They are naturally fractional reserve "banks".
Sure, they manipulate the spot price and likely work pretty closely with various powers that be (such as BlackRock) which was so much of a "hard on" reason that spot bitcoin ETFs were not approved and/or on the road to approval until Binance was beaten up and more or less brought into the fold in around late 2023 and whatever was going on around that, including the matters related to CZ.
Jack Dorsey has said he believes bitcoin will have failed if it is not used transactionally. I want to disagree with him. But I find it difficult.
Dorsey is right but yeah, he ends up building various businesses that are double edged swords, including that BitKey product of his that is like a fake wallet that is likely better than an exchange and lures folks into thinking that they are using a private wallet (with bells and whistle recovery avenues) when they are not using an actual private wallet with sufficient controls, verification and autonomy..
Bitcoin reduced to "digital gold" is tacet failure. Not because that is not a worthy use but because in that use case it is simple to centralize and control JUST like has been done with Gold for over 100 years.
Sure the goal is tot control and manipulate bitcoin like gold, yet that battle is not even close to being over yet since bitcoin is much more portable and verifiable than gold and designed from the ground up to be around 1,000x better than gold.
Excuse me? Or rather...what?
Cmon, don’t act so offended. Just remember the good ole days.

I am not offended, but it is because of posts like this most people don't care to 'predict' anything around here.
It's just a fact.
Jesus when did we become a bunch of thin skin girlies here?
It seems that guys can pretty much say whatever they like in these here parts, except if they are pumping shitcoins or paper bitcoin and bullshit like that, then they are likely going to get push-back.
Of course, historically we get trolls and bitcoin naysayers in these here parts too, and so they tend to get pushback too, especially if they don't back up their claims.
But...sure, peeps are going to post whatever they like.
However, I am bored to smithereens lately.
Are you trying to get us killed? Boredom is not necessarily a bad thing.
Cryptotourist too and there might have been some other user-names.... just a random and mostly unimportant attention-seeking whore.