re: Crypto exchange FTX declares bankruptcy

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Didn’t Belize or some other Central American shithole elect a 40 year old crypto bro as their president and he put the entire national budget into crypto? I wonder how that’s going

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El Salvador. And it has been put on hold.

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A place with zero taxes, powered geothermally by a volcano and funded by bitcoin bonds. That is what La Unión, a small city in the eastern part of El Salvador, will become if President Nayib Bukele's ambitious plan comes to fruition.

But nobody is holding their breath. After a buggy rollout of the Central American nation’s bitcoin wallet and delays to its “bitcoin bonds,” some are skeptical of the plans.

According to the outline presented by Bukele in November, Bitcoin City will include residential and commercial areas, restaurants, an airport as well as a port and rail service. With the city laid out in a circle (like a coin), the vision is for a crypto haven with no income, property or capital gains taxes.

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CoinDesk

No it's not. You buy btc on coinbase for $1 then immediately sell it on binance for $2 because their market price is higher. That's arbitrage.

Buying btc then holding it until it goes up and selling isn't arbitrage

Kanye was right

I think it’s not controversial to say SHA256 proof of work with current hash rates cannot be beaten by brute force, and nobody has been able to find a method better than brute force to beat SHA256. So, you cannot validate a block full of fraudulent transactions unless you control the majority of mining power on the network.

However, for complete transparency one would have to admit there were some protocol exploits with respect to what could potentially be in a validated block in the very early days of BTC that never got exploited because they were discovered by people working on the code before anyone could find them, but to some extent that’s to be expected in the infancy of any code base. It helps that the code is open source with a shite ton of volunteers who have worked/are working to make it more robust and efficient.

As far as the future goes, quantum computing may take down SHA256, but I think there are quantum safe encryption algorithms out there. If there aren’t, that’s not just the end of BTC it is the end of all internet security.

Ok, “arbitrage-like motivations of most market participants”. That doesn’t change the underlying analysis.

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Serious question: how are NFTs doing?

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Somewhat serious answer: This FTX thing just caused NFTs to have their first actual use case, albeit for laundering and stealing money. People were able to pay cents on the dollar for FTX accounts, have them KYC'd in the Bahamas, funds withdrawn, and then sent as a single NFT to the new owner of the account.

I mean at least a couple of these centralized efforts weren't using blockchain at all. Was FTX? I honestly don't know.

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Ok, “arbitrage-like motivations of most market participants”.

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Proper arbitrage requires seeing the price in two or more locations simultaneously. When a sufficient difference to profit is spotted, you quickly buy in market 1 and sell in market 2 to capitalize. The locations could be different exchanges or countries.

If you are describing simply buying in market 1 and selling in market 1 after value has gone up, I don't believe that would qualify as arbitrage (as it has nothing to do with the price difference at the exact moment of time in different locations).

Also, I think it was you, boosie, who was questioning crypto/BTC having real world use. I highly recommend the video linked below. The guy being interviewed, Jason Lowery, is a military officer (actually part of Space Force in some capacity), currently developing a thesis for Bitcoin use for his PhD at MIT. His overall premise is that BTC-- particularly thru Proof of Work and its direct tie to energy / power-- creates real world security in a way that was not previously possible without violence.

The video covers a lot of philosophical ground to get to his main point, touching on property rights, the dinstinction between real power vs abstract power (example: Real power is alpha in a wolfpack becoming alpha through violence; abstract is a pharaoh having power over a population because he convinced them he was appointed by God and is a God/man)... which leads to argument that PoW represents real power in contrast to PoS, which can be changed at the whims of programmers.

Youtube - BTC098: PoS vs PoW with Jason Lowery

Sure-- and to be clear-- I'm not calling him out in the post above; just answering with a well thought out use case.

As to blockchain v BTC, I forget exactly where it is in the video I posted, but the host plays a clip of Jaime Dimon making that distinction (blockchain has value, BTC does not), which the Lowery guy takes issue with.

For one, Dimon has a vested interest in discouraging people from using BTC/decentralized finance. He/JPM are a big part of the centralized landscape that wield a lot of power currently. Of course, he's going to perpetuate the notion of BTC being a scam, then lift the tech from it's defi origin to use in a centralized way. And a good number of people are just going to parrot the idea that "blockchain good/BTC bad (ponzi)"-- as at least 4 or 5 people in this thread have already done-- without any conceptual knowledge of what they're talking about outside of that catchphrase.

Full disclosure: I have enough in crypto to maybe buy us a couple of rounds of beer at a bar, so I'm not arguing from a vested perspective. I have, though, been looking more and more into the topic and I think it's valid.

And I see the current fiat system being far more corrupt and manipulated against the people than crypto-- though the degens and multitude of shitcoins are ruining it.