deepceleron
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December 08, 2011, 01:43:37 PM |
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That is kind of disturbing. It is like a bank having all it's cash in the teller's drawer instead of in the bank vault.
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the joint
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Activity: 1834
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December 08, 2011, 07:40:01 PM |
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So, let's say 470,000+ BTC go MIA forever...should result in a nice little price increase.
On a related note, how do we know that 1,000,000 BTC haven't already been lost forever? Is there a way to know exactly how many BTC are in circulation and not just how many have been created?
1) Why do we need to know this information? 2) The market determines the value based on buying and selling. Whether or not there are 1,000,000 BTC lost or not doesn't matter, b/c the supply & demand of the market will still even out. This the same thing as stating that the federal reserve doesn't know how many US dollar bills have been lost. It has an effect, but is evened out by captial markets anyway. To the extent someone would "find" a bunch of coins and choose to sell them, it would hurt the price, but the market would even out. Knowledge of the market affects supply and demand. If there's the possibility that 1 out of every 21 Bitcoins that can ever be created is lost, that's a huge piece of information that drastically affects the way I trade. |
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phelix
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Activity: 1708
Merit: 1019
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December 11, 2011, 05:53:04 PM |
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So, let's say 470,000+ BTC go MIA forever...should result in a nice little price increase.
On a related note, how do we know that 1,000,000 BTC haven't already been lost forever? Is there a way to know exactly how many BTC are in circulation and not just how many have been created?
1) Why do we need to know this information? 2) The market determines the value based on buying and selling. Whether or not there are 1,000,000 BTC lost or not doesn't matter, b/c the supply & demand of the market will still even out. This the same thing as stating that the federal reserve doesn't know how many US dollar bills have been lost. It has an effect, but is evened out by captial markets anyway. To the extent someone would "find" a bunch of coins and choose to sell them, it would hurt the price, but the market would even out. Knowledge of the market affects supply and demand. If there's the possibility that 1 out of every 21 Bitcoins that can ever be created is lost, that's a huge piece of information that drastically affects the way I trade. like how? please elaborate |
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Red Emerald
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December 11, 2011, 07:30:35 PM |
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But mining and computers were also slower back then, so if you're guessing how much someone would have just based on the fact that it was difficulty 1 at that point you're probably assuming too much.
Um. The same number of coins have been made each day since the beginning. It doesn't matter that the miners were slower because ALL of the miners were slower. There were also fewer miners back then and so less people to distribute the block reward to. And I agree that those should be stored offline. |
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SgtSpike
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Activity: 1400
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December 12, 2011, 06:05:37 PM |
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Question: How do ANY of you know that that is the full amount deposited on MtGox? You all keep talking as though this is the entire MtGox fund? What if the cold storage is 1M or 2M BTC, and this is just the amount they like to keep on hand to fill withdrawal requests?
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boonies4u
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December 13, 2011, 06:56:05 AM |
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Question: How do ANY of you know that that is the full amount deposited on MtGox? You all keep talking as though this is the entire MtGox fund? What if the cold storage is 1M or 2M BTC, and this is just the amount they like to keep on hand to fill withdrawal requests?
We never said that the address contained the entire MtGox balance, only that is a large balance. |
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SgtSpike
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Activity: 1400
Merit: 1005
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December 13, 2011, 08:32:06 AM |
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Question: How do ANY of you know that that is the full amount deposited on MtGox? You all keep talking as though this is the entire MtGox fund? What if the cold storage is 1M or 2M BTC, and this is just the amount they like to keep on hand to fill withdrawal requests?
We never said that the address contained the entire MtGox balance, only that is a large balance. Only $1.5M worth. It really wouldn't be that hard for MtGox to cover that amount at this point, I think. They've made bank on trading so far... |
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BadBear
v2.0
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Activity: 1652
Merit: 1127
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December 13, 2011, 01:58:54 PM |
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Question: How do ANY of you know that that is the full amount deposited on MtGox? You all keep talking as though this is the entire MtGox fund? What if the cold storage is 1M or 2M BTC, and this is just the amount they like to keep on hand to fill withdrawal requests?
We never said that the address contained the entire MtGox balance, only that is a large balance. Only $1.5M worth. It really wouldn't be that hard for MtGox to cover that amount at this point, I think. They've made bank on trading so far... Except, how are you gonna buy 500k bitcoins? MTGox only has around 190k on the order books, and that would jack up the price significantly, making it prohibitive to purchase them. |
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btc_artist
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Activity: 154
Merit: 101
Bitcoin!
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December 13, 2011, 03:56:26 PM |
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They wouldn't have to buy them all at once...
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BTC: 1CDCLDBHbAzHyYUkk1wYHPYmrtDZNhk8zf
LTC: LMS7SqZJnqzxo76iDSEua33WCyYZdjaQoE
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BadBear
v2.0
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December 13, 2011, 04:05:14 PM |
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I don't think they would even try, more likely they would reimburse in fiat.
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SgtSpike
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December 13, 2011, 04:13:45 PM |
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I don't think they would even try, more likely they would reimburse in fiat.
If someone stole 500k BTC, they'd probably start selling them immediately. So the thief sells, MtGox buys, the price should stay *relatively* stable, and everyone goes on their way. Probably though, MtGox would reimburse immediately from their cold storage, so their customers would not have to wait for this action to happen. |
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BadBear
v2.0
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December 13, 2011, 04:19:50 PM |
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Well let's hope we never have to find out.
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ribuck
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December 13, 2011, 04:42:04 PM |
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The same number of coins have been made each day since the beginning.
No that's not true. Satoshi set the initial difficulty of "1" so that it would generate less than 6 blocks per hour. He didn't want to generate a lot of blocks until more people got involved. I can't remember the starting rate, and I can't find a reference to it right now, but I'm pretty sure it was less than one block per hour. After a while, there were enough people generating that "6 blocks per hour" was reached at the starting difficulty of one, and from that point onwards the difficulty "auto-adjusted" to try to maintain that target rate. |
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gmaxwell
Staff
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Merit: 8382
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December 14, 2011, 08:14:20 AM |
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The same number of coins have been made each day since the beginning.
No that's not true. Satoshi set the initial difficulty of "1" so that it would generate less than 6 blocks per hour. He didn't want to generate a lot of blocks until more people got involved. I can't remember the starting rate, and I can't find a reference to it right now, but I'm pretty sure it was less than one block per hour. After a while, there were enough people generating that "6 blocks per hour" was reached at the starting difficulty of one, and from that point onwards the difficulty "auto-adjusted" to try to maintain that target rate. Right, well, it was at full rate at the excitement of the initial announcement but soon fell far below one block an hour and stayed there for pretty much all of 2009. The area under the red line is less than one block per hour, and this is a log scale graph: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-ever.png |
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Red Emerald
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December 15, 2011, 01:43:50 AM |
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The same number of coins have been made each day since the beginning.
No that's not true. Satoshi set the initial difficulty of "1" so that it would generate less than 6 blocks per hour. He didn't want to generate a lot of blocks until more people got involved. I can't remember the starting rate, and I can't find a reference to it right now, but I'm pretty sure it was less than one block per hour. After a while, there were enough people generating that "6 blocks per hour" was reached at the starting difficulty of one, and from that point onwards the difficulty "auto-adjusted" to try to maintain that target rate. Right, well, it was at full rate at the excitement of the initial announcement but soon fell far below one block an hour and stayed there for pretty much all of 2009. The area under the red line is less than one block per hour, and this is a log scale graph: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-ever.pngHow many coins were generated during that time? And how many people were mining? I think my original post would be more accurate if I had said "The same number of coins have been made each day since the time people started caring about bitcoin" which might as well be the beginning. |
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thelema93
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March 02, 2014, 03:59:54 AM |
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Say, I pay someone using Mtgox withdrawal and see the payment getting filled by the following address: http://blockexplorer.com/address/16eRAfcohaLsTzoDSnLejjqMZMDQezxFEiWhat the...? Shouldn't such sums be in cold storage? That's something like 5% of all existing Bitcoins in a single key, who will pay if that key gets stolen? Edit: hell, didn't Gox have "lol Bitcoins sent to null" before? That transaction transmitted the whole bunch of them, imagine a software error occurs there! Yes, the transfer happened with neat speed, quite fast for an operation that I would manually check if I was in the position of operating on more than 400k BTC. 5000 BTC of this ended up here and is still there: https://blockchain.info/address/1HB2nvhVp8KweLj3gUEZrpDBiCqGv8GBan |
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