Def super successful. Crazy how the flaps held given how they seemed to disintegrate on re entry. They said they’d try and catch the booster for flight 5 if the booster splashed down successfully this time and it did so fingers crossed. That’ll be a pretty wild thing to see. Could happen soon too. Next flight might be within about a month.
I'm not a tax expert so wondering, shouldn't the potential loss be computed off the non payment of exit tax at date of exit or 2014 levels? (which would have computed to much lower than 48mm)
The article says it's mainly 2 things: under-reporting on the exit tax, but also not reporting the dividend more recently (2017) when he transferred the coins to himself from the companies.
Given the monetary policy Satoshi chose and the headline he picked to include in the genesis block, I really don't think you can infer what he himself thought bitcoin was meant to become, even if he referred to it as cash originally.
Beyond that I don't see how it matters what something was designed to do or what early adopters personally used it for or thought it was meant to be used for. The only relevance for a technology is what it's actually adopted for over time and the total addressable market cap for a store of value being 100x + of that of a medium of exchange, it makes perfect sense to me that that's the feature the market converged to by far as reflected amongst other things by the relative prices between current btc and bch...
Satoshi wrote extensively about what he imagined Bitcoin could become, including in emails to me that I later published. Certainly, what was done to the original Bitcoin completely voided Satoshi's goals and offers an abject lesson in the difficulty of keeping institutions on-track over time.
Note that the same tactics that were used to wreck Bitcoin are now being deployed against Nix, as the open source community has struggled to learn the right lessons from Bitcoin.
> it makes perfect sense to me that that's the feature the market converged to
The market certainly didn't converge to that outcome. It was the result of relentless political scheming and psychological manipulation of a small number of people, combined with criminal tactics like DDoS attacks. The winners of that fight have then tried to retcon what happened as some sort of natural or obvious outcome, but then why did it require so much viciousness and illegal behaviour?
The market value of all cryptocurrencies seems to move in tandem, or at least did many years ago when I last cared about this topic. It reflects nothing more than the general hype and brand awareness around Bitcoin and crypto. Certainly a "store of value" that can't directly be used to purchase things is worthless, as any government that wishes to void that store of value and force users back into their own currencies can do so overnight by simple legal fiat.
I haven't personally done a deep dive on Satoshi's intentions probably for the specific reason I've always failed to see why former intentions or aspirations for technologies, even by their own creators would have any relevance towards their future use cases. If Edison had said light bulbs were for heating should we then oppose them being mostly adopted and optimized for lighting?
As a very passive but very interested stakeholder at the time of the block size wars it really felt to me there was heavy politicking and various degrees of !@#$ going on from all sides. The amount of viciousness certainly didn't surprise me given the immense magnitude of the stakes involved with potentially replacing a market in the hundreds of trillions of dollars.
I'm not sure I follow your last point. Stores of value certainly don't have to be mediums of exchange to build market cap (whereas the converse is true). That's true of the great majority of monetary wealth in the world. Most of fiat currency is held in treasury bond form (not a medium of exchange), real estate is heavily monetized and stocks to a degree. The actual dominant medium of exchange today is cash mostly in bank deposit form and it's a tiny fraction of that market which mostly sits on longer term horizons in assets that perform the function of storing value better. Are you saying a government might void converting stores of value to mediums of exchange? Or cryptocurrency specifically? In essence that they would make those assets illegal altogether? If they did it's true they would become worthless, at least for that jurisdiction, but some of the market obviously disagrees with that assumption, and landmark events like the bitcoin etfs continue to point the other way.
Very simply? If the conspiracy theories about their scamminess were wrong and they did what they said which was hold dollars without duration exposure (mostly cash and tbills). Then once rates got hiked they were basically the only bank equivalent in the world with captive depositors that couldn’t just take their money to competitors and they were able to keep all the interest (4-5 bn per year currently). Which incidentally they’re now using in part to load up (substantially) on btc with house money.
I don’t know what the truth is obviously for sure but this story is extremely possible and plausible. It doesn’t mean they were particularly good traders. It means if true basically they were disciplined and didn’t trade at all and are now benefitting from massive upside on their set up resulting from monetary policy and regulatory conditions driving their popularity.
> It means if true basically they were disciplined and didn’t trade at all
That is, excuse the phrasing, a metric fuckton of discipline that most people on the planet would find hard to exercise. At one point, their minting of Tether implied they were banking half a billion dollars a day.
They sat on that from $6B 2 years ago to a claimed $80B now?
Still no audit, though. Just "attestations". The difference is the attestation just says "at one moment in time, this much money was in accounts". You could get a short term loan (remember how Bitfinex and Tether used to pretend that they were independent, until people asked why parties A, B, C were the same parties A, B, C on each side of their loan contracts when they borrowed?).
You and I can't buy a house on a mere attestation of accounts - funnily enough, lenders want to see how we acquired that money. But these clowns can stand on stage at Davos and say "Yeah, we've banked a billion a week for the last two years, trust us, you don't need an audit". I know that comparing investment to revenue is not apples-to-apples, but to get an idea of what that incoming cash looks like? You're on the scale of Saudi Aramco. Samsung. Alphabet.
Hmmm can’t speak to the likelihood of their actual inflows but tens of billions of usd from global participants that are functionally shut out from usd pipes is really very reasonable. It’s 0.25% of M2.
What amuses me a bit is how shocked it can seem to people for them to “sit” on 80 bn dollars. It’s literally what they’re supposed to be doing! And no one can imagine they’re actually doing it. I don’t know. I like to think that’s what I’d do if I said that’s what I was doing… I feel like I would. But apparently we now think when someone is entrusted with a pile of money to keep as such they’d be irrational not to risk their customer funds and yolo into mismatching risk to try and pick up some yield… when did that become the expected norm?
You made a straight up declaration about proof of work in a pretty condescending and unsubstantiated way. I literally applied your exact framing and wording to present that approach from my point of view, and you hated that version of exactly your text. I could reply it proves the exact same point about you. I think either of those versions are not helpful to anyone, which is what I was trying to illustrate.
It also demonstrates a basic lack of understanding of how the energy markets work and how as just about the only intermittent buyer of last resort, proof of work is about to positively impact the energy infrastructure in a pretty substantial way and will probably converge on tapping into exclusively stranded / wasted energy (about 30% of energy production vs less than 0.1% of global production used by pow today). If anyone is genuinely interesting in educating themselves on the topic I'd recommend the two fairly recent episodes of What Bitcoin Did with guest Harry Sudock.
> It also demonstrates a basic lack of understanding of how the energy markets work
Which energy markets?
It's not like bitcoin mining is legally or geographically constrained to countries with well-functioning energy markets and a reputation for environmental thinking.
Proof of work schemes could provide a positive marginal return when energy would otherwise be curtailed, but that's just a side effect of being a very price-elastic source of demand. These schemes can just as easily operate with polluting energy made cheap through local political corruption.
For that matter, the freest energy is stolen energy, so mining malware will forever have the edge on that front.
Bitcoin is neither clean nor dirty because it has no governance to make it such. At absolute best it is a neutral energy buyer of last resort, replicating all our political flaws on the world stage.
Bitcoin mining is not a buyer of last resort, it's a capital asset that the owner wants to be run continuously in order to make back the capital expense, and produces no ultimately useful output.
It's a misconception to think a miner will only locate on energy sites with continuous supply. It can still make perfect sense for a miner to locate on a site with variable demand (which by the way is basically every energy production site in the world that is by design compelled to build to accommodate peak demand). What a miner will do is then negotiate energy costs (which are 80-90% of their variable costs) with the producer who is happy to sell his excess production at any cost above 0 for all excess power untapped. All it takes is enough excess production at a (much lower) price than conventional rates for this to breakeven positively vs full operation alternatives.
As chips commoditize and energy trends towards 100% of all costs, miners will step into these situations exclusively.
As far as your claim that bitcoin is useless that's a personal judgement. My personal judgement is that reintroducing sound fixed supply censorship resistant money to the world is of enormous benefit. But that's beyond the scope here. I don't think it's constructive to make judgements about what people value and chose to expend resources towards. If you have a problem with externalities then have a debate about that. But who are we to judge if someone wants to heat their pool? If they do so through carbon emissions then consider taxing that. The sustainability of the energy production is your issue really, not the energy use.
Wrong. Stop making false excuses and rationalizations and shilling for Bitcoin's Proof of Waste. Bitcoin is China's way of exporting coal through the atmosphere. Bitcoin shills also produce huge quantities of hot air and CO2 by endlessly repeating false claims like "Bitcoin doesn't run on coal".
>The vast computing power needed to create new bitcoins has driven up energy bills for residents and businesses
>Millions of people who have neither mined nor traded a bitcoin are nevertheless paying for bitcoins to exist. That’s because the vast computing power needed to create new bitcoins consumes enormous amounts of electricity and has driven up energy bills for residents and businesses, according to University of California at Berkeley’s Matteo Benetton and Adair Morse and Chicago Booth’s Giovanni Compiani.
