Thought I'd check how much in donations they've gotten. And I saw this massive 10 Bitcoin donation from back in 2023 (worth $800,000 now...)
From the activity history, neovim last sent bitcoin out of the address in 2019 so it's been max 7 years since they've definitely had access.
Does anyone from the neovim project know about this? Seems like a pretty significant amount of funding to have sitting there. Hope it can come to good use as I use neovim daily.
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/1Evu6wPrzjsjrNPdCYbHy3HT6ry2EzXFyQ
I wonder how people at large crypto exchanges handle that. Perhaps shamir share the access to the pkey password and store parts at secure places like a bank? And make official access protocol akin to dnssec, but simplified?
We explored using smart contracts to have logic perform the 3/5 consensus rather than a cryptosystem, but that was never rolled out while I was there. Social recovery wallets in general did not take off, which was a big learning moment for me that very few people actually cared about the technology and what they really wanted was an app with as many gambling features as possible that uploaded their keys to google drive.
"Not being seizable" hasn't really worked out for bitcoiners who've been arrested. Or for that matter robbed at gunpoint.
Managing your private keys is cumbersome, error prone, requires some computer literacy, the list goes on.
Tbh I have been kind of impressed by how L2 businesses brought back centralisation in every possible way. I guess it's more efficient for them.
In the same way, the internet was supposed to be decentralised, everyone being in charge of their own servers. But in practice nobody has the time to set up their own MX servers.
Nothing wrong with putting money under a mattress for 100y if the value of money is not evaporating.
For most of human history the money was stable. It’s the disasters of 20th century wars that eroded the value, and 21st century lack of monetary discipline that keeps driving it down now.
This is, in part, why there were expeditions to find gold.
The Japanese Lost Decade?
Greece Debt Crisis?
>For most of human history the money was stable.
Absolutely ridiculous. People have been counterfeiting and debasing money for as long as there has been money.
The idea that you can put away an amount of money under your bed that buys 1,000 loaves of bread or one GPU, leave it there for decades, and then have it buy exactly the same number of loaves of bread or GPUs is a fantasy. You can hold onto the shiny rock but you cannot stop the world rotating around you and changing all its relative prices.
> For most of human history the money was stable
Achieved by a combination of restrictions on trade, price stability laws, occasional crippling shortages, and quietly shaving bits off old coins. A much poorer world.
"Delayed gratification" is also provided by investments producing returns. An economy with lots of investors will outperform one where people stuff their cash into their mattress, and deflation makes it very hard for potential investments to beat that strategy.
> For most of human history the money was stable.
[citation needed]
The Spanish empire was driven to collapse by hyperinflation. Even in the US, there were financial collapses in the 19th and 18th century. Bank runs have been a thing for as long as banks have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run
Your premise is based on faulty assumptions. The existence of credit itself is what causes monetary instability, and without credit the world would look very different.
Indeed. Credit is money; ultimately anyone can expand the money supply with an IOU.
A healthy amount of inflation keeps the economy going.
See the so called 'Long Depression' in the 19th century. Which was only a depression of the price level, everything else did well.
For a more sectoral example, see how computer hardware used to get cheaper and cheaper all the time, but total spending on hardware went up.
How does that work? When inflation goes to 18%, borrowing rates go to 23%.
(Hint: the gold might be under a mattress or in a vault, but you can still an almost arbitrary amount of gold denominated debts and loans and deposits.)
At the micro level, the change in price is too small for every day purchases. Would you starve yourself for one day because the pizza will be one cent cheaper tomorrow?
At the macro level, every interest rate will be adjusted based on the base inflation/deflation rate, so the net effect is zero. Banks will offer a higher profit rate for their savings account to entice people to deposit their money in the bank instead of their mattress.
(At the moment, there's a smallest fraction you can send on the network, but they can change that.)
However I expect that adding more decimal places will actually happen, but adding extra bitcoins won't.
Bitcoin addresses encode the ripemd160 hash of the public key, so by default when payments are made to new addresses they are not quantum crackable.
But when someone spends from an address they publish the public key to the chain as part of the spend. From then on, any new deposits sent to the same address are at risk of quantum attack
If they haven't accidentally done this, they've definitely got some balls
Also, I gotta say I do not think Bitcoin is a bubble or whatever (IMO a real value there), but really this sort of site makes it seem like it is a bubble with the sort of "blind to history" boosterism.
Go read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, or Market Wizards series, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, or any number of books about financial history and there are endless people saying 'it will never die and all the doubters are just wrong' before any big market crash.
It's worth saying something with real value can still have a bubble - both bicycles and the internet were huge market bubbles at one time, but they're also undeniably valuable.
Let's assume bitcoin has a tiny but positive probability of running the world economy in, say, 50 years. Ie bitcoin is a lottery ticket.
The fair value for a lottery ticket is some positive number. In 99.99..% of cases, the ticket will expire worthless. (In 0.00..1% of cases it will be worth quadrillions.)
The fair value of a lottery ticket is not a bubble, even if most lottery tickets expire worthless.
---
Now, of course, it's still possible to overpay for lottery tickets. Eg if you buy an actual lottery ticket in retail, the whole transaction usually loses you at least 50 cents on the dollar for lottery taxes alone.
But that's a separate issue.
Lottery tickets were only an example.
but i think the primary point of the comment was to highlight the "Bitcoin has been declared dead 478 times" part
All are criticism that can be evaluated on their own but it's irrelevant how much bitcoin grew since they were made.
From western perspective, maybe, but there are many people in the world who don't trust neither their government, nor western ones: Iranians, Russians, some Chinese, etc.
BTC is a nice safe place for money, which can't be touched by neither of state adversaries. Underperforming some other asset classes is totally acceptable, when your expectation for the brokerage account is effectively zero after arrest/freeze/sanctions.
For most of the people you mention, a fiduciary cryptocurrency like these 'stable coins' is the better product.
(If you don't trust the value of the USD, and thus don't want a stable coin linked to that, you could use one that's linked to Swiss Franks or the Singapore dollar.)
Well, if only we had something like that with a proper liquidity!
USDT/USDC are useful for the exchange to fiat, but have freeze function in their contract, thus posing a risk for big longterm savings, and they rot under the inflation (which btc generally beats).
There are indeed a couple of unfreezable stablecoins, but they don't have mainstream adoption and proper liquidity. USDT kind of captured the market by being first, and USDC is heavily pushed by the major institutional players, so here we are.
But that's true, it's more about crypto in general.
Also the transaction cost. Is it any better?
Its about 2 cents for a coffee(10k sats ~= 7.6 usd), or 0.2%.
Versus 1.5-3.5% that visa typically charges.
Better odds than a casino, but still basically a casino.
They should send it to a dead wallet instead.
Neovim first.
I've never "purchased" Bitcoin or any cryptocurrencies ever because it is not money or legal tender and never will.
But as long as others giving you real money for this garbage, it would be better to use it for a project like neovim :)
Yeah no.
You know what happened in el salvador? A Lot of people got their initial crypto stolen.
And you know what real people do? They use euros and dollars as hard cash. Like i have seen in Iran.
That's true for bitcoin, but not for cryptocurrencies in general. Especially those that moved to proof-of-stake.
Ah yes let’s ignore the tons of energy being used in giant data centers run by visa and Mastercard to operate the payment cards used by billions of people around the world.
“Yeah no.”
You know what happened in USA? A lot of people got their cash stolen.
Your arguments are as coherent as the dissonant “Yeah no.”
Bitcoin uses a massive amount of energy and has neither the transaction amount, nor the transaction speed and a LOT of features visa/mastercard and a normal bank provide.
Losing your key to a wallet? BTC gone
Fraud? Yeah and now what?
Seller or buyer protection? hahaha no
Lets not compare apples with stones okay?
However the value is as much as people agree to value it and for a typical person both have little utility. Maybe BTC has even more utility because it facilitates remote transfers of value very easily.
So as long as the network exists there is intristic value in BTC. I believe more than one can say about gold.
Still, a good portfolio will contain both gold (in small coins likely as a kind of "war hedge") and BTC as a kind of hyperinflation hedge.
Not really. Try using gold in retail.
[0] https://www.goldback.com/
Your gold might give you food, your btc is rotting on some hard disk on a computer you can't / wont use.
BTC as a hyperinflation hedge? We have seen already what happens to btc when money gets tide: BTC drops.
We don't know where the Bitcoin has come from, so it needs to go through extensive anti money laundering checks.
Save the hassle of all of that taxes, accountancy and just send everything to a dead wallet.
Nah, you would have a lot more to pay in taxes.
Might as well send it to a dead wallet, it's not real money anyway in many countries as legal tender.
How about they use the bitcoin to donate?
You just have to be able to sell it for money.
Not sure how this applies to donations though, and of course this will almost certainly be changed in the future, .nl is leading the way in taxing _unrealised_ gains; we are sure to follow!
Why does HN collectively tolerate this level of understanding when it comes to crypto
> Why does HN collectively tolerate this level of understanding when it comes to crypto
Well that's really funny. Because the 7 years are about tax liabilities not the speed of bitcoin transactions.
So maybe you made a statement about crypto advocates here...
And the tax liability sister comments all disagree with each other
Notably, the parent commenter hasn’t replied at all yet