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Bitcoin

Jack Dorsey and Jay Z Invest 500 BTC To Make Bitcoin 'Internet's Currency' (techcrunch.com) 83

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey and rapper Jay Z have created an endowment to fund bitcoin development initially in Africa and India, Dorsey said Friday. From a report: The duo is putting 500 bitcoin, which is currently worth $23.6 million, in the endowment called Btrust. The fund will be set up as a blind irrevocable trust, Dorsey said, adding that the duo won't be giving any direction to the team. Btrust is looking to hire three board members. The mission of the fund is to "make bitcoin the internet's currency," a job application describes. Government in India has so far been reluctant to embrace bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Friday's move comes as New Delhi is inching closer to introduce a law that would ban private cryptocurrencies in the nation. It is also looking to create its own digital currency.
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Jack Dorsey and Jay Z Invest 500 BTC To Make Bitcoin 'Internet's Currency' More

Jack Dorsey and Jay Z Invest 500 BTC To Make Bitcoin 'Internet's Currency'

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  • Shit, when the volatility of BTC, they'd be better off just sticking to their local currencies...
    • There are some who think that volatility will decrease as more and more institutions support and buy Bitcoin. I'd say it is too soon to tell if that will be the case, but it does make sense. Of course, little in the finance world uses "sense" to function. ;)

  • Just like Swatch, who invested a metric ton to make the "Beat" the "Internet's Time"

    • Bet you wish you threw in $10 a decade ago.

      • Not more than wishing I had thrown 5$ on the right lottery numbers last week...

        I'm not following the market, but I don't think everyone of them is now worth any money.

        On the other hand, we still have half an apartment full of junk from my late grandmoms that has been sold to them as "collectibles" "absolutely guaranteed" to rise in price in the future. Today it's just plain ugly.

  • The mission of the fund is to "inflate the value of Bitcoin." I wonder if Jay's aware he's sucking money out of Africa. Maybe he just looks at it like another baggie of dope or bottle of D'Usse sold.

  • The financial elite now stands to lose a lot if cryptocurrency is outlawed - either much of their value will be wiped out if this happens, causing losses at the Wall Street casino and displeasing the magic line, or to avoid harming these people the world will pass through the crime finance singularity and will be stuck with this shit forever, generally worsening everything signficantly.

    • The financial elite now stands to lose a lot if cryptocurrency is outlawed - either much of their value will be wiped out if this happens, causing losses at the Wall Street casino and displeasing the magic line...

      The financial "elite" investing in Bitcoin, is exactly why that will not happen.

      Look at the utterly corrupt (and illegal) response to WSB shaking up the market. If BTC remains the tool of the "little guy", then it will be decimated by industry corruption. Start screwing with multi-billionaire investments, and you've got a real Catch-22 on your hands.

      ...or to avoid harming these people the world will pass through the crime finance singularity and will be stuck with this shit forever, generally worsening everything signficantly.

      Yeah, this. But I kind of doubt BTC will "dominate" fiat currency. They'll just be another alternative form of payment. Like going into massive crushing de

      • They'll just be another alternative form of payment.

        I don't see how BTC is a form of payment any more than GME is.

        Say hypothetically you could wire GME to other people directly, someone give me a reason using units of GME as a form of payment makes any sense at all. Nothing is priced in units of GME, it's too unstable, people only buy it to sell it for real currency later. As a currency, you're waiting for it to hyper-deflate so you can buy more in the future than you can now.

        Who even invests in foreign currencies like that? You do that as a hedge, if you

        • They'll just be another alternative form of payment.

          I don't see how BTC is a form of payment any more than GME is.

          Say hypothetically you could wire GME to other people directly, someone give me a reason using units of GME as a form of payment makes any sense at all. Nothing is priced in units of GME, it's too unstable, people only buy it to sell it for real currency later. As a currency, you're waiting for it to hyper-deflate so you can buy more in the future than you can now.

          Who even invests in foreign currencies like that? You do that as a hedge, if you were going to buy stuff in the other country anyway, then if the currencies go one way you spend foreign currency, if it goes the other you hold and convert your local currency.

          BTC is bizarre, like a bunch of people bidding up rubles to an insane level, because the whole world is going to be spending rubles someday, but definitely not now while the value is increasing and swinging wildly, and there doesn't seem to be any practical reasons for the rest of the world to ever start using it as a currency, it's going up because of FOMO mostly.

          It can't be both a speculative investment AND a currency, and as an investment, you're betting on it becoming a currency and everyone else having to buy in.

          Thank you for reminding me (with the GME reference) just how damn volatile this entire thing really is. You're right.

          Unfortunately, FOMO is powerful. Mining challenges aside for a moment (different crowd anyway), there is a finite amount of BTC. And FOMO is almost as strong as YOLO, which has quite literally driven humans to their death before. THAT is how powerful these idiotic social forces are. (Mass Narcissism feeds that crap, so imagine me playing the worlds smallest violin, in response to that.)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        Bitcoins are currently worth $890 billion, this is obviously all owned by janitors and Uber drivers, I'm sure the elite have no interest and no stake at all. ~

    • Explain to me again how you outlaw data?

    • Or they're just trying to create a company script (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday February 12, 2021 @10:50AM (#61056066)
      Billionaires have more than enough money to control the value of Bitcoin using market manipulation, and the decentralized nature means it'd be hard to regulate and stop them.

      Now imagine paying all your employees in bitcoin. Imagine they pay rent and buy food in bitcoin. Imagine they take out mortgages in Bitcoin. Imagine controlling the value of everything...

      So you've got a currency that you've got defacto control over and that you can force people to hold and spend. It's a 21st century company store. You load 16 bits, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt...

      • Billionaires have more than enough money to control the value of Bitcoin using market manipulation

        No they don't because they would literally need to invest a LOT into bitcoin in order to recovery very little profit. Bitcoin is not the stock market. It's not a few big players playing with the funds of small companies, it's lot of small players playing with a single large monolithic fund.

        Bitcoin's spike due to Telsa investing $1.5bn moved the value by barely 10%, FOMOing pushed it up another 2% after that. A simple regulation change in China in 2018 dropped its value by 50%. Remember that. It's a volatile

        • you don't really have to buy all that much to completely much up a market. You're relying on forcing smaller BT holders to do what you say on threat of devaluing their coin.

          You can't really have a decentralized market. You can have some competition if you have a powerful third party (read: Government) step in and play referee, but otherwise, well, it's a competition. That means winners and losers. And the winners use the spoils from their last round of victories to give them an edge.

          It's the same re

          • You're relying on forcing smaller BT holders to do what you say on threat of devaluing their coin.

            Who is smaller? That's the bit you're missing here. An institutional holder of shares, or an institutional trader of something physical is able to use their size in relation to these many small markets the manipulate it. I.e. Goldman Sachs was able to by it's size hoard a significant amount of aluminium manipulating it's supply. That's great if you're a big company with lots of small markets to play with. But again bitcoin is not many small markets. It's one big one. To effectively manipulate a market you r

      • Its all fun and games until a lone saboteur, the janitor you pissed off, corrupts all the backups of your wallet(s) and then gets to work on wiping everything else.

        Here, "you" and "your" is any individual or corporation with wallet(s)

  • If Jack Dorsey and twitter are involved (Score:4, Funny)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Friday February 12, 2021 @10:38AM (#61056002)
    I will take a pass. This most likely is going no where.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by aitikin ( 909209 )

      I will take a pass. This most likely is going no where.

      By nature of a "blind irrevocable trust", Dorsey would no longer be involved...in theory.

  • Pyramid scheme (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Xylantiel ( 177496 ) on Friday February 12, 2021 @10:41AM (#61056016)

    There are other digital currencies that have fixed the problems of bitcoin. Anyone pushing bitcoin at this point is just pushing a pyramid scheme. Bitcoin is a deflationary currency -- the world learned more than a century ago that deflationary currencies are bad for economies and literally kill people due to the economic instability that they cause. Pushing these things in low GDP countries is indefensible.

    Pushing Bitcoin as a transaction service : dumb because there are better ones.

    Pushing Bitcoin as a currency : dumb because it is deflationary.

    Pushing Bitcoin to pull dupes into the next tier of your pyramid scheme : makes perfect sense.

  • Go back and read slashdot when the iPod was released. All the comments were wrong on every level. Now it’s happening with bitcoin. Too funny.

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by hackertourist ( 2202674 )

      No, we've been right all along. You just don't want to be the one left holding the bag when the inevitable crash happens.
      - A currency whose value fluctuates by hundreds of % is worthless.
      - A payment system where a single transaction costs $100 (and where this cost will inevitably increase) is worthless.
      - A payment system that consumes more energy than all creditcards combined for 1/1,000,000 of the transaction volume is worthless.

    • getting involved in something so dodgy. One line of thought though you will see crop up is that no matter how big Bitcoin gets the billionaires (who were much "poorer" 10 years ago and had less power then) could easily buy enough to manipulate the currency, and as such the currency was never going to be stable (because you can't have a stable currency that prone to market manipulation).

      Basically in a normal, functioning society the things people like about BT (it's decentralized nature that makes it har

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sebby ( 238625 )

        It's just another 1%-er scam - just this time that 1% is a bunch of geeks.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sebby ( 238625 )

        If fact, this just reminds me of the craziness we keep seeing.

        A while back, some bitcoin booster replied to me with this clip [twitter.com] as a counter argument (yeah, cause throwing around twitter links's the way you prove your point :rollseyes:) in which a rich white guy throws around a bunch of buzzwords on an obscure TV news show and actually says stuff like "[bitcoin is] capable of storing and channelling energy over time without power loss" - L! O! L!

  • That is too much money!
  • Ok Slashdot crowd hates Bitcoin but there are at least 2 bitcoin news per day. What's the point? Also they usually don't qualify as "news for nerds".

    • Negative emotions bring traffic. Like news channels, worldwide.

    • The hate is really puzzling. Slashdot really hates bitcoin and Tesla for some reason. An electric car that runs Linux? Oh no fuck that give me my 1979 Chevette any day!

  • If they would like to have a cryptocurrency of genuine utility and value to the internet, here is an alternate proposal. Buy $23.6 in gold bullion (about 400 kg), stick it in a vault, and subject it to periodic audits. Issue cryptocurrency "gold notes" based off of that. (Not my idea: this was basically a side plot in Cryptonomicon.) Instead of proof of work and wasting electricity, use the gold as the agreed-upon store of worth, and focus on fast and efficient transaction clearing. As I understand it,
  • Is there any reason the supply of bitcoin needs to expand over time to be a tradeable commodity? What if 'bitcoin' were just a blockchain that recorded the trading of a fixed number, say 2^64, of coins?

    A commodity of a fixed quantity is not a good currency. But growing at a rate more or less irrespective of demand does not fix that problem. If there were a fixed quantity of bitcoin, there would be no mining needed, and it would be the same as a company that grows in value without ever issuing new share

    • We'll find out eventually. Unless the protocol is changed, there will never be more than 21 million [investopedia.com] Bitcoin. Over time the reward for adding a block to the blockchain will diminish from where they are today (6.25 BTC, ~$300,000) to nothing more than the transaction fees that the miners are able to charge to those who want to have their transaction included in the block.

  • SA power load sherdding is bad for mineing

  • I have a question about BTC. Does anyone expect that, once enough is mined that it is ‘all’ mined, (as I recall there is some kind of built in cap) or it becomes entirely impossible to mine profitably, will the price of BTC stabilize? The volatility of it seems to make it damn near useless as a day to day currency, which is what these yahoos seem to want.

    • No one really knows. Bitcoin is an ongoing experiment and I'm excited to see the results.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ThePyro ( 645161 )
      Once it's "all mined", there's still profit for miners because they receive transaction fees. The volatility has less to do with the mining rewards than it does with the amount of speculation (lots) vs. actual usage (almost zero). Speculators are constantly jumping in and out of the pool based on headlines: an exchange was hacked (bad), Elon Musk tweets again (good), etc... It's the same pattern you see in the stock market, just magnified and accelerated a bit.
  • instead they should engage (and invest) in Cardano (ADA).

  • Excellent Twitter threads about Bitcoin (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Friday February 12, 2021 @12:09PM (#61056356)

    Here's a couple of good Twitter threads [twitter.com] by Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) about what Bitcoin really is (with an earlier one further down below).

    *** TRIGGER WARNING The Bitcoin boosters might want to avert their eyes! ***

    Let's discuss the environmental cost of bitcoin. Because despite all the push for sustainable and green investment in the tech sector, there's a giant smoldering Chernobyl sitting at the heart of Silicon Valley which a lot of investors would prefer you remain quiet about. Thread (1/)

    TLDR on bitcoin economics: It's a pyramid-shaped investment scheme backed by the collective delusion that value can created out of nothing by convincing greater fools to buy it after you do. [references earlier thread, also down below] (2/)

    That alone is sufficiently awful on its own merits, but on top of this the environmental damages of bitcoin are enough to make even Greta Thunberg weep at the pointless waste of it all. (3/)

    The underlying technology of bitcoin is based on the notion of "mining", a technical term for a process that keeps the network running and processing transactions. (4/)

    I won't cover the details of the algorithm, suffice it to say the premise of bitcoin mining is to prove how much power you can waste, and the more power you can waste, the more tokens you can probabilistically secure in exchange for your energy waste. (5/)

    And so people have set up entire warehouses of computer hardware dedicated to run 24/7 consuming power and performing the trial computations required by the protocol. Globally this consumes *nation state* levels of energy to keep it all running. (6/)

    Bitcoin mining is essentially a fucked up version of Candy Crush where you solve puzzles for coins, except the coins go to buy darknet fentanyl, launder money for warlords and provide gambling for hedge fund managers. (7/)

    And the scale of this waste has some scary numbers attached to it. A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh, or half a million times more energy consumption than a credit card payment. (8/)

    The bitcoin network annually wastes 78 TWh (terrawatt hours) annually or the energy consumption of several *million* US households. WolframAlpha gives some scary comparisons to help you relate to how much energy this is (think nuclear weapons). (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=77.78+terrawatt+hours [wolframalpha.com])(9/)

    Unlike other economic activities, the bitcoin scheme produces absolutely nothing for all this waste. It is a pure speculative activity of people gambling on the random movements of prices and the only output is simply shuffling numbers around in a computer at insane cost. (10/)

    In addition to the energy waste and CO2 emitted, the mining process itself requires constant replacement of hardware and produces a steady stream of waste from broken and exhausted computer parts. All of which are full of toxins and rare earth metals. (11/)

    The network produces 11.27 kilotons of waste annually or 96 grams of electronic waste per transaction. This is the equivalent annual e-waste as several small countries and equivalent to the waste of 482,456 people living at the German standard. (12/)

    Try to imagine a future where paying for your morning coffee involved smashing an iPhone and burning enough fossil fuels to run your entire household for 60 days. That's the environmental cost of the "revolutionary" technology behind #Bitcoin in a nutshell. (13/)

    Climate scientists have estimated that #Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2C. And this is just one of *hundreds* of other cryptocurrency networks that run on this apocalyptically wasteful set of ideas. (14/) (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 [nature.com])

    Climate change is not some abstract threat happening elsewhere, it is very

    • Don't you have anything constructive besides this tired copy pasta?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dAzED1 ( 33635 )
        in my opinion, trying to argue against the extreme environmental disaster and pyramid scheme that is bitcoin is very constructive. What /isn't/ constructive, or useful in any way, is the exceptional amount of damage the ridiculously pointless currency does, under the auspice of meaningless benefits that can be had elsewhere at a millionth of the environmental damage.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rinikusu ( 28164 )

      Nano is the answer. It's here, it works, it's fast as fuck and doesn't require giant farms of miners to maintain nor does it have any fees to use on the blockchain (that's not saying exchanges won't charge to withdraw, etc, but you send 1 nano to me, i get one nano and you're only out 1 nano. What a concept!). What it doesn't have is eyeballs and marketcap. Elon (or anyone) dumping 1.5 billion into nano would spike the price unrealistically, but as a long time supporter, fuck I'd love to see $3k Nano. Serio

  • Tax write-off (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WoodstockJeff ( 568111 ) on Friday February 12, 2021 @12:20PM (#61056394) Homepage

    Donating these bitcoins has taken whatever Dorsey and Jay Z paid for the bitcoins and turned it into a $23M charitable write-off against taxes, rather than capital gains.

    Bitcoin was closer to being a "currency" back when you could use it to buy stuff. Now, you sell stuff to be able to buy bitcoins, and no one except another bitcoin believer will buy them from you.

    The moving of large blocks like this tie up the "scarce resource", making the "available" bitcoins "more valuable", and less likely to be used for what they were supposed to be good for.

  • Because I'm not using your rollercoaster monopoly "money" without somebody stabilizing it, and overriding 51% attacks.

    Oh wait, then its whole defining point will be gone! ^^

  • Bitcoin's proof of work model is anti-environment. Dorsey should know better.

  • Maybe I'm missing something, but can someone explain how Bitcoin really works? By that I mean, let's say I mine 1 coin. I now have a digital something or other.

    I go to sell that digital something or other. Is someone giving me real money for this? Who is on the other end when I sell? Where does the real money come from?

    I'm asking because unlike real money, there is nothing backing Bitcoin so I'm presuming some other sucker is using their money to buy what I produced.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ThePyro ( 645161 )
      Yes, people will give you real money for it (I've done it, in fact), but you have to use a Bitcoin exchange (e.g. Coinbase in the US), which almost operates like a bank. They require proof of your ID, and they'll need your banking account info to make the deposit.
    • It's a fallacy that nothing backs bitcoin. Mining new bitcoins requires a significant amount of real energy and investment.

      • Which is irrelevant. With real money, you have the backing of the government. More stable governments, such as the U.S., Canada, Japan, etc, back that currency by honoring the request to use it when spent, wherever it's spent.

        There is nothing similar for Bitcoin. It's just some guy (or guys and gals) spending their money to produce a digital something which isn't supported by anyone or any government. From what I can see, it's all based on hope. Hope that if you have one of these digital items, someone wi

    • Maybe I'm missing something, but can someone explain how Bitcoin really works? By that I mean, let's say I mine 1 coin. I now have a digital something or other.

      You aren't going to be mining any Bitcoin to speak of. Bitcoin mining today is done on an industrial scale, with entire datacenters of machines containing mining-specific ASICs to execute the algorithm as efficiently as possible, in dedicated circuitry. For the vast majority of Bitcoin users, you are spending fiat currency at an exchange in order to acquire it. If you're one of the extremely few businesses who accept Bitcoins as payment for goods or services, you are cashing out your Bitcoin for fiat cu

  • With our new Bitcoin normal, better redo the calculations. Be sure to outline best and worst cases. Here is your best case: Elon immediately sells all Bitcoin using the profit to give away free Teslas. Here is your worst case: World-wide adoption of Bitcoin.

  • Seriously.

    I hope they lose everything on this.

  • This level of manipulation and exploitation was not the intent of currency. Time to go back to the only way to earn an honest days pay for an honest days work.

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