Home » Posts tagged 'exchanges'

Tag Archives: exchanges

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 5

December 10, 2017

Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 5


Gustave Courbet Sunset on Lake Geneva 1876
Chapter 1 of this five-part series by Dr. D is here: Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 1

Chapter 2 is here: Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 2

Chapter 3 is here: Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 3

Chapter 4 is here: Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 4

Next up: all 5 chapters combined in one big essay.

Dr. D: Bitcoin can be stolen. Although “Bitcoin” can’t be hacked, it’s only software and has many vulnerabilities. If held on an exchange, you have legal and financial risk. If held at home, you could have a hard drive fail and lose your passwords. If it’s on a hardware fob like a Trezor, the circuits could fail. For a robust system, computers themselves are pretty fragile. You could write down your passwords on paper, and have a house fire. You could print out several copies, but if any of the copies are found, they have full access to your account and stolen without you knowing. You could have your passwords stolen by your family, or have a trojan take a screen or keystroke capture.

Hackers could find a vulnerability not in Bitcoin, but in Android or AppleOS, slowly load the virus on 10,000 devices, then steal 10,000 passwords and clear 10,000 accounts in an hour. There are so many things that can go wrong, not because of the software, but at the point where you interface with the software. Every vault has a door. The door is what makes a vault useful, but is also the vault’s weakness. This is no different than leaving blank checks around, losing your debit card, or leaving cash on your dashboard, but it’s not true that there are no drawbacks. However the risks are less obvious and more unfamiliar.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 1

December 5, 2017

Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 1 


Gustave Courbet The wave 1869
A while ago, I asked a regular commenter at the Automatic Earth, who goes by the moniker Dr. D, to try and write an article for us. Not long after, I received no less than 31 pages, and an even 12345 words. Way too long for today’s digital attention spans. We decided to split it into 5 chapters. After we work through those 5, we’ll post it as one piece as well. Dr. D, who insists on sticking with his nom de plume, picked his own topic, and it’s -fittingly- bitcoin. A topic about which one can cover a lot of ground in 12345 words.

Now, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t throw in my own two Satoshis: Dr. D claims that “..everyone has an equal opportunity to solve the next calculation..”, but while that may perhaps have been sort of true at the very start, it isn’t now. It’s not true for the computerless or computer-illiterate, for those too poor to afford the electricity required by bitcoin mining, and for various other -very large- groups of people.

The equal opportunity idea sounds nice, but I think bitcoin runs the risk of creating just another set of elites, while reinforcing existing elites, who can afford to either buy bitcoin at whatever price at some point in time, or spend large sums to build mining ‘installations’ in locations where electricity is cheap. And sure, there will be losers among elites too, but inequality itself will not change; only the faces of winners and losers will, while the world’s real losers will remain just that.

It’s nothing new of course, inequality is our society’s middle name, but maybe that is precisely the problem. Maybe bitcoin should have come with an inbuilt way to spread wealth, not just shift it around.

Then again, it may all just be a giant bubble. Or a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress