[QUOTE="johnarb, post: 4835311, member: 498490" Bitcoin is decentralized, so not sure what you mean by insiders. There are whales, maybe that's what you meant.[/QUOTE] Manipulation of markets should be made impossible or at least very difficult to have a market that is not a scam or a ponzi. Forex markets are huge, so difficult to manipulate by a few people. The same is true for most stock markets. For crypto's this is not true at all. One of the reasons why it is not true is because of the way it is structured. Structure can cause problems for manipulation. Crypto's don't have these "problems": you have no costs you can repeat this endlessly without it costing you any money and manipulate the market to go up. This is pure manipulation and it was already exposed in past by Israelian and US universities in the past when BTC went up strongly in a very short time. Last week it happened again. Whales are manipulating prices up. In 1 hour time price went up more than 20%, from 4150 to 5080. Volume went up 10-20 times the normal value without any explanation. Pure manipulation from whales selling and buying to themselves, each time at a higher price.
That is the spirit. It is perfectly alright to trade a ponzi or an overheated stock, as long as you know and accept the danger and don't stay holding the bag. Trade it, don't hold it.
The USDT issue is well known and has been blown out of proportion. I think it's only responsible for 5% of the btc cap.
Not price competitive. I'd need half a roof to run a single miner @nearly 2k$ usd worth of Chinese panels without accounting for batteries. Let that sink in.
On Aug. 15 2010, an unknown hacker nearly destroyed Bitcoin. The hacker generated 184.467 billion Bitcoin out of thin air in what has become known as the Value Overflow Incident. Satoshi Nakamoto quickly hard forked the blockchain to remove the 184.467 billion Bitcoins, which is the only thing that saved Bitcoin from dying an early death that day. Essentially, the code for checking Bitcoin transactions did not work if outputs were so large that they overflowed when summed, and a hacker figured this out and took advantage of it. There is supposed to be a fixed maximum supply of 21 million Bitcoin, but the hacker, in a single transaction, created 8,784 times more Bitcoins than ever should exist. If this hack hadn’t been rectified, Bitcoin would likely have died then and there, which would mean the entire crypto space as we know it would not exist. The price of Bitcoin would have plummeted to zero instantly once users realized that it could be minted at will. Bitcoin would have lost all of its trust and reputation. Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s infamous and anonymous creator, created a code fix within 3 hours of the incident first being reported on Bitcointalk. Early Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen worked alongside Satoshi to bring about a quick resolution. Within 5 hours of the incident, Satoshi released version 0.3.1 of Bitcoin, which prevented future printing of Bitcoins via this exploit and rewound the blockchain to erase the hacked 184.467 billion Bitcoins. This was a hard fork, so two different versions of Bitcoin existed in the immediate hours after version 0.3.1 was released. Satoshi monitored the competing blockchains closely and urged miners not to mine the bad chain because doing so would make it take longer for the good chain to become the dominant chain. Just 19 hours after the incident began, the good chain became the dominant chain according to Satoshi.The bad chain still existed and disrupted some users for at least the next day, but ultimately, the good chain generated from version 0.3.1 became the Bitcoin blockchain everyone uses today.
In software cycle, it is expected to discover major bugs (and in fact desirable) in the early stages so they can be resolved with minimal impacts. To describe bitcoin value plummeting in 2010 has to be a joke (or being deceptive). What was the price of each bitcoin at that time and how much adoption did it have?
I’d like to hear from BTC Bulls the solution to some of the following weaknesses: 1) Ability to scale; BTC suffers slow transactions speed when volume increases. 2) The high concentration of miners in China - demonstrating the opposite intent of decentralization. 3) Miners gaming the fee schedule for recording transactions. 4) Miners having an entrenched interest thereby thwarting solutions to 3).