@RogerVer lets make a deal. At least 60k, my BTU for your BTC.

[popovicbit]

I got 5 on it.

[dooglus]

If you bought btc at a penny each and invested ONLY $100k you'd be sitting on 10 million btc right now.

When Bitcoin was a penny each there weren't 10 million of them. Do you think about what you're saying? It took 4 years for the first 10 million BTC to be mined. The 10 millionth Bitcoin was mined on Sep 22nd 2012 when the price was around $12 per BTC, and that's just the spot price. If you were trying to buy them all you would have pushed the price way higher.

Do you really think that the people who bought BTC cheap and held it all these years through the highs and lows were just "lucky"?

[deeplink]

Do you really think that the people who bought BTC cheap and held it all these years through the highs and lows were just "lucky"?

Certainly not. The people who bought or mined BTC in the first years were not taken seriously, they were ridiculed, laughed at and told they were crazy to throw away their time and money. Not even one in a million people understood it, but those who did certainly weren't just lucky.

[traincarswreck]

Certainly not. The people who bought or mined BTC in the first years were not taken seriously, they were ridiculed, laughed at and told they were crazy to throw away their time and money. Not even one in a million people understood it, but those who did certainly weren't just lucky.

Yes they were and thats the whole problem right now.  Ver is claiming he is smart because he was an early adopter.  A quote by Wei Dai comes to mind, who far more attributes such wealth and timing to luck rather than skill/intelligence. Any intelligent (and sufficiently humble) person would.

Being an early adopter is not an indicator of intelligence.

[QuestionAuthority]

If you bought btc at a penny each and invested ONLY $100k you'd be sitting on 10 million btc right now.

When Bitcoin was a penny each there weren't 10 million of them. Do you think about what you're saying? It took 4 years for the first 10 million BTC to be mined. The 10 millionth Bitcoin was mined on Sep 22nd 2012 when the price was around $12 per BTC, and that's just the spot price. If you were trying to buy them all you would have pushed the price way higher.

Do you really think that the people who bought BTC cheap and held it all these years through the highs and lows were just "lucky"?

Yes, they were very lucky that bitcoin kept climbing in price and they decided not to sell. I've watched Ver over the years throw 10-20k bitcoins around and that was many years ago, way before he could have wisely invested to grow his stash that large. Not everyone was stupid enough to buy a pizza with thousands of mined bitcoins. It doesn't have to be 10 million, one million is enough. Satoshi is believed to have that many. That was just an extreme example of what you could do today to become ultra wealthy tomorrow.

Many early miners ended up with 10s of thousands of bitcoin. You couldn't possibly be so uninformed that you've never heard of off-book buying so I'm not even going to respond to that one. BTW, Bruno was looking for you. Did you guys ever connect?

[European Central Bank]

Not everyone was stupid enough to buy a pizza with thousands of mined bitcoins.

that's a transaction that deserves everyone's respect. we might not be here if it hadn't happened.

[QuestionAuthority]

Not everyone was stupid enough to buy a pizza with thousands of mined bitcoins.

that's a transaction that deserves everyone's respect. we might not be here if it hadn't happened.

Ok, maybe, but it was also a transaction made by someone that never believed bitcoin would be worth very much. Just like all the 50 btc VIP forum members. Either that or all the VIP members really did want to spend $50,000 to impress a bunch of strangers.

[traincarswreck]

Ok, maybe, but it was also a transaction made by someone that never believed bitcoin would be worth very much. Just like all the 50 btc VIP forum members. Either that or all the VIP members really did want to spend $50,000 to impress a bunch of strangers.

If we view intelligence from a perspective of subjective hindsight we are always going to come up with messed up conclusions. It's ok if you do it on your own, but as a group it makes coherent dialogue impossible.

[European Central Bank]

Ok, maybe, but it was also a transaction made by someone that never believed bitcoin would be worth very much. Just like all the 50 btc VIP forum members. Either that or all the VIP members really did want to spend $50,000 to impress a bunch of strangers.

man, i dunno. it's so hard to put yourself into the mind of someone who was around back then. the level of legitimacy today would seem like 100 years in the future 5 years ago.

and pizza guy paid next to nothing in electricity for those coins so why not try doing something real world with it? i think i read somewhere he mined something like 120,000 coins.

[QuestionAuthority]

Ok, maybe, but it was also a transaction made by someone that never believed bitcoin would be worth very much. Just like all the 50 btc VIP forum members. Either that or all the VIP members really did want to spend $50,000 to impress a bunch of strangers.

man, i dunno. it's so hard to put yourself into the mind of someone who was around back then. the level of legitimacy today would seem like 100 years in the future 5 years ago.

and pizza guy paid next to nothing in electricity for those coins so why not try doing something real world with it? i think i read somewhere he mined something like 120,000 coins.

I guess that's one way to look at it. Satoshi Nakamoto and The Winklevoss Twins own more btc than anyone else and never moved the price to get them. With bitcoin lofty ideals, 1% of bitcoiners hold 99% of the wealth. Funny that they bitch about Wall Street doing the same thing.
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/1-bitcoin-community-controls-99-bitcoin-wealth/

Read this report on the wealth of Satoshi Nakamoto. He's never bought a pizza or anything for that matter.
https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/

[muyuu]

I'm still in disbelief about this. He cannot be so tilted, or can he? I'd rather swap my BTC 1:1 with PepeCash tokens than BTU. It has zero prospects at this point.

Reminder that if there's a pool I'm in, would like to know a bit in advance to go for the cold storage.

[jonald_fyookball]

everyone keeps saying "BTU BTU"...BU may be a huge part of the catalyst that gets us to bigger blocks, but if it does, there will be many different compatible implementations (Classic, XT, Core,etc) all taking part.  In fact, there may be a larger kind of 'emergent consensus' coming as there is a new talk planned for May.  We may have >1MB coming, but it won't necessarily be "BTU".  It will be interesting to see how the exchanges treat futures tokens or what the OP would think of that -- i'm pretty sure Ver and Loaded are smart enough to realize these dynamics though for their deal.

[dooglus]

You couldn't possibly be so uninformed that you've never heard of off-book buying so I'm not even going to respond to that one.

You tried telling us that we could have bought 10 million Bitcoins for one cent each. That isn't true. Even "off-book" by the time 10 million Bitcoin existed they were trading for a thousand times more than that.

BTW, Bruno was looking for you. Did you guys ever connect?

I've not heard from him for a long time, no. He can PM me here or on reddit if he wants to talk to me.

Just like all the 50 btc VIP forum members. Either that or all the VIP members really did want to spend $50,000 to impress a bunch of strangers.

It wasn't $50k at the time. Anyone wanting to be a VIP member could have easily bought the 50 BTC membership and instantly rebought the 50 BTC at market prices - $5 each or whatever it was back then. It was never about spending $50k to impress a bunch of strangers.

[smoothie]

Not a XMR hater, just pointing out facts. I think the coin got good tech, but I don't see how it solves the scaling problem at all.

And the fact is, blocksize increases solve the capacity problem, at the exact same scale. Blocksize increases do not change the scale at all.

Big blockers really don't like this fact, which is why they have never dared refute it.

Dynamic block sizes solve block scalability.

Privacy isn't free. There are trade offs.

Seems people forget this when they are used to the concept of the welfare state giving them a free lunch.

[kelsey]

Do you really think that the people who bought BTC cheap and held it all these years through the highs and lows were just "lucky"?

from experience most who held (from lows to highs) did so because they forgot about btc or ignored it for years LOL

[notthematrix]

notthematrix, the link to the video was in every post you have quoted of mine so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtDTNA85rm4

See the comments. 4th comment down.

Are you a bought account? It seems like not long ago that you could write and read.

Oke found the message 24h later now.....
But still NO SIGNED COMMITMENT
ver can post anything , does not mean he does it , I see no commitment in form of a SIGNED transaction message

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/60ozkh/rogerver_lets_make_a_deal_1_for_1_trade_at_least/



so everybody can check for them self on the bitcoin command line!!
As explained here!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/60ozkh/rogerver_lets_make_a_deal_1_for_1_trade_at_least/

So I come back tomorow to see any progress!!! , to me it looks like Roger is a JOKE
like BU is a JOKE!

Still no signed proposal from Roger Ver 
For every hour that passes this guy becomes more of a Joke.
Because math is so much stronger then rhetoric.
Still waiting.....

[jonald_fyookball]

Who cares if he didn't sign it.  Obviously its him unless you believe someone hacked his youtube and bitcointalk account. 

[Raize]

Not everyone was stupid enough to buy a pizza with thousands of mined bitcoins.

that's a transaction that deserves everyone's respect. we might not be here if it hadn't happened.

Ok, maybe, but it was also a transaction made by someone that never believed bitcoin would be worth very much. Just like all the 50 btc VIP forum members. Either that or all the VIP members really did want to spend $50,000 to impress a bunch of strangers.

Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. That's not true for everyone, and even laszlo possibly had an inkling of an ulterior motive with his purchase. Did you ever read laszlo's account of Satoshi's response to him having started GPU mining? Here's a link.

Basically, laszlo had mined far more than the 10k coin using a GPU. Satoshi encouraged him that a more widespread adoption would help grow the network and adoption rates. Here's what he said (we don't really have proof this was Satoshi, but laszlo didn't really have reason to make it up)

A big attraction to new users is that anyone with a computer can generate some free coins. When there are 5000 users, that incentive may fade, but for now it's still true.

GPUs would prematurely limit the incentive to only those with high end GPU hardware. It's inevitable that GPU compute clusters will eventually hog all the generated coins, but I don't want to hasten that day. If the difficulty gets really high, that increases the value of each coin in a way since the supply becomes more limited. The supply is the same: 50 coins every 10 minutes.

But GPUs are much less evenly distributed, so the generated coins only go towards rewarding 20% of the people for joining the network instead of 100%.

I don't mean to sound like a socialist, I don't care if wealth is concentrated, but for now, we get more growth by giving that money to 100% of the people than giving it to 20%. Also, the longer we can delay the GPU arms race, the more mature the OpenCL libraries get, and the more people will have OpenCL compatible video cards. If we see from the difficulty factor that someone is using too much GPU, we can certainly pick this OpenCL stuff up again then. Maybe my effort to maintain GPU innocence is running out of time. It's worked out so far.

What laszlo probably saw, that others at the time hadn't really considered, was that doing an actual transaction with the coin might have the effect of gaining wider exposure for the coin, which let him do more pizza trades. So supposing he had a lot of coin, he could set a bunch of it aside for pizza trades to grow adoption, while keeping the rest of it as a stash that would grow over time. As he even would go on to say...

3-4 years ago there were less than 100 people frequenting this forum, and I was pretty happy to trade 10,000 coins for pizza.  I mean people can say I'm stupid, but it was a great deal at the time.  I don't think anyone could have known it would take off like this.

He claims he's sold out all of this coins, but he very well may have stashed some away that he holds onto and just tells people its all gone. That's what I would have done had I been lucky enough to be one of the first GPU miners. I mean, imagine all the people that had at least 100 bitcoin when it hit $1000 in 2013. Were they stupid for having sold at least some of it? If you'd asked that question in 2014 or early 2015, the answer would have been a definite "no". But by today's standards was it stupid? Maybe? It's hard to say with the price where it is. Five years from now? Probably, but we're still not sure, network dominance in the cryptocurrency space might be a fleeting prospect.

I get what you're saying, though, it's unlikely that Laszlo repurchased or started GPU farming coin at the $2 bottom in 2011, or at the $160 bottom in early 2015, but how many people are really that good at timing anyway? He had a family and wasn't going to keep GPU mining or FPGA mining and his time was probably better invested elsewhere than paying attention to Bitcoin. Not everyone can spend every waking minute on Bitcoin, after all. I guess my contention is with calling him "stupid", he got what he wanted out of it, can't fault him for that.

I donated 10 BTC to help out the forum in 2012, so I'm an idiot as well, right? Now I don't own a single coin to my name because I spent all $10k worth of that coin I ever owned on the forum... I promise! 

[QuestionAuthority]

Do you really think that the people who bought BTC cheap and held it all these years through the highs and lows were just "lucky"?

from experience most who held (from lows to highs) did so because they forgot about btc or ignored it for years LOL

Yeah, that's what I think too. That's has more to do with dumb luck than mad trading skillz. Ver was an angel investor. I would expect him to have a bunch hanging around. This guy named James Howells bought something like 7,500 btc in 2009 and threw away a hard drive. He remembered he had some after the price went up and looked for the hard drive only to remember that he threw it away. That's like buying Apple stock at the beginning and throwing away the certificates. That's got to sting a little.

[QuestionAuthority]

Not everyone was stupid enough to buy a pizza with thousands of mined bitcoins.

that's a transaction that deserves everyone's respect. we might not be here if it hadn't happened.

Ok, maybe, but it was also a transaction made by someone that never believed bitcoin would be worth very much. Just like all the 50 btc VIP forum members. Either that or all the VIP members really did want to spend $50,000 to impress a bunch of strangers.

Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. That's not true for everyone, and even laszlo possibly had an inkling of an ulterior motive with his purchase. Did you ever read laszlo's account of Satoshi's response to him having started GPU mining? Here's a link.

Basically, laszlo had mined far more than the 10k coin using a GPU. Satoshi encouraged him that a more widespread adoption would help grow the network and adoption rates. Here's what he said (we don't really have proof this was Satoshi, but laszlo didn't really have reason to make it up)

A big attraction to new users is that anyone with a computer can generate some free coins. When there are 5000 users, that incentive may fade, but for now it's still true.

GPUs would prematurely limit the incentive to only those with high end GPU hardware. It's inevitable that GPU compute clusters will eventually hog all the generated coins, but I don't want to hasten that day. If the difficulty gets really high, that increases the value of each coin in a way since the supply becomes more limited. The supply is the same: 50 coins every 10 minutes.

But GPUs are much less evenly distributed, so the generated coins only go towards rewarding 20% of the people for joining the network instead of 100%.

I don't mean to sound like a socialist, I don't care if wealth is concentrated, but for now, we get more growth by giving that money to 100% of the people than giving it to 20%. Also, the longer we can delay the GPU arms race, the more mature the OpenCL libraries get, and the more people will have OpenCL compatible video cards. If we see from the difficulty factor that someone is using too much GPU, we can certainly pick this OpenCL stuff up again then. Maybe my effort to maintain GPU innocence is running out of time. It's worked out so far.

What laszlo probably saw, that others at the time hadn't really considered, was that doing an actual transaction with the coin might have the effect of gaining wider exposure for the coin, which let him do more pizza trades. So supposing he had a lot of coin, he could set a bunch of it aside for pizza trades to grow adoption, while keeping the rest of it as a stash that would grow over time. As he even would go on to say...

3-4 years ago there were less than 100 people frequenting this forum, and I was pretty happy to trade 10,000 coins for pizza.  I mean people can say I'm stupid, but it was a great deal at the time.  I don't think anyone could have known it would take off like this.

He claims he's sold out all of this coins, but he very well may have stashed some away that he holds onto and just tells people its all gone. That's what I would have done had I been lucky enough to be one of the first GPU miners. I mean, imagine all the people that had at least 100 bitcoin when it hit $1000 in 2013. Were they stupid for having sold at least some of it? If you'd asked that question in 2014 or early 2015, the answer would have been a definite "no". But by today's standards was it stupid? Maybe? It's hard to say with the price where it is. Five years from now? Probably, but we're still not sure, network dominance in the cryptocurrency space might be a fleeting prospect.

I get what you're saying, though, it's unlikely that Laszlo repurchased or started GPU farming coin at the $2 bottom in 2011, or at the $160 bottom in early 2015, but how many people are really that good at timing anyway? He had a family and wasn't going to keep GPU mining or FPGA mining and his time was probably better invested elsewhere than paying attention to Bitcoin. Not everyone can spend every waking minute on Bitcoin, after all. I guess my contention is with calling him "stupid", he got what he wanted out of it, can't fault him for that.

I donated 10 BTC to help out the forum in 2012, so I'm an idiot as well, right? Now I don't own a single coin to my name because I spent all $10k worth of that coin I ever owned on the forum... I promise!  

I don't think they were stupid. I think they really didn't believe the price would skyrocket so fast. That amounts to not really believing in bitcoin. Someone mentioned just buying more to replace what you spent. If you believed it would grow so fast you should buy as much as you can and as much as you can afford with every penny you have and hold, hold, hold.

Ok, maybe the pizza had this great magical effect. I just believe it was more likely that the slashdot and gawker articles that happened at the same time were the real reason for the meteoric rise. You do know the largest holder of btc was the US government because they took Ross Ulbrich's coin away from him, right. Drug addicts and pushers (with the help of a few online articles) really put bitcoin on the map, not a pizza purchase. I doubt you can find anyone outside the members of this forum that even know the pizza story but everyone at the time heard of Silk Road.