If You Bought $100 of Bitcoin 7 Years Ago, You'd Be Sitting on $72.9 Million Now

M76 said:
I'm probably the only one, who still has no idea what cryptocurrency is. And how the hell it actually works. It seems like monopoly money to me, in the end all you can do is put it back in the box. But you can't actually use it to pay your way in life.
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Basically you have a cryptographic hash of a public/private keypair. Everyone recognizes your hash as the owner of bitcoins. Everyone can see it because there is an open ledger available to the entire world that can't be altered or erased. This eliminates the need for authoritative paternal third parties to hold your money. Though you can still opt in to those if you'd prefer.
 
Retronym said:
Basically you have a cryptographic hash of a public/private keypair. Everyone recognizes your hash as the owner of bitcoins. Everyone can see it because there is an open ledger available to the entire world that can't be altered or erased. This eliminates the need for authoritative paternal third parties to hold your money. Though you can still opt in to those if you'd prefer.
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That doesn't sound like anything to me. Just technobabble. There are hundreds of questions.
How do you get a keypair? how do you store a keypair? How do you actually transfer bitcoins to someone else without keeping a copy for yourself? If there is an open ledger what stops anyone from just taking out of it anything at anytime? OR is that was mining was/ is about? Trying to guess the keys with brute force?

I have zero understanding of how this actually works.
 
NeoNemesis said:
I don't know, but it sure would pay a lot of ransoms.

There's tons of stuff I could have invested in 7 years ago that would have made me filthy rich. Hell, if I had invested a few thousand dollars in Apple in the mid 1990s I'd also be a millionaire many, many times over.
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Exactly; hindsight is always 20/20.
 
M76 said:
That doesn't sound like anything to me. Just technobabble. There are hundreds of questions.
How do you get a keypair? how do you store a keypair? How do you actually transfer bitcoins to someone else without keeping a copy for yourself? If there is an open ledger what stops anyone from just taking out of it anything at anytime? OR is that was mining was/ is about? Trying to guess the keys with brute force?

I have zero understanding of how this actually works.
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I can explain it to you, but i can't understand it for you.

1. ECDSA.

2. I store mine on paper. Or in my mind. Or in a Sha512 text file.

3. You dont transfer your keypair to someone else. You sign a transaction on the ledger I mentioned. It is authenticated by powerful math on the most secure computer network on the planet, beyond ddos capabilities of any nationstate or the combination of all nationstates. The private key is 52 characters.

Here is one i just made:
L1Nw4DmY9G6bL7a1b475pCz38iffGctXfajoScCUjqcQPCpLJAUC
(understand that this is now compromised because i intentionally gave out the private key)

You can view it's public address here:
https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/address/1h6EhnHeJqT74Pd2Ghx3KtVGrA7aSG8k6


Basically there is not enough metal on earth to make the hard drives required to brute force key discovery. Oh, and if that wasn't enough, you can pay by script hash, meaning you can assign multiple keypairs as signatories to bitcoin; a hacker would have to guess multiple correct keys, AND also combine these correct keys together. The odds are incalculable. It's like finding a needle in the universe and touching the tip of that needle to the tip of another needle you found in another universe. The mining secures the network. The more mining, the more safety. The ledger being open means anyone can read it. Anyone can write to it via signing a new transaction, but nobody can re-write to it, as every single block (group of transactions over a finite amount of time) adds another cryptographic lock to all previous transactions, and you'd have to fool the software of all copies of the globally distributed ledger into thinking your altered copy is valid. Think of it like adding another password ontop of a previous password, over and over and over and over and over. Changing a single period in one previous transaction is not only impossible, but would be rejected by the mining community and be rendered invalid and useless. Thrown out.
 
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I am totally Bitcoin stoopid.

Is this stuff even really legal? Everywhere?
 
Dick Johnson said:
First, is there a Bitcoin exchange that's ever been in business for 7+ years without ripping off its customers (or getting "hacked" and having its Bitcoin "stolen")?

Second, in theory, your $100 worth of Bitcoin is now worth $72 Million. In reality, how likely is it that you can find someone who will actually give you $72 Million.
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Had about 20 LTC in Bitfinix which got hacked and spread their losses across the entire community for a total hit for 36%. By the time I got reimbursed in USD they auto calculated my LTC payout at $2/coin a month it was worth $30/coin. Electronic currency is bullshit.
 
Retronym said:
I can explain it to you, but i can't understand it for you.

1. ECDSA.

2. I store mine on paper. Or in my mind. Or in a Sha512 text file.

3. You dont transfer your keypair to someone else. You sign a transaction on the ledger I mentioned. It is authenticated by powerful math on the most secure computer network on the planet, beyond ddos capabilities of any nationstate or the combination of all nationstates. The private key is 52 characters.

Here is one i just made:
L1Nw4DmY9G6bL7a1b475pCz38iffGctXfajoScCUjqcQPCpLJAUC
(understand that this is now compromised because i intentionally gave out the private key)

You can view it's public address here:
https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/address/1h6EhnHeJqT74Pd2Ghx3KtVGrA7aSG8k6


Basically there is not enough metal on earth to make the hard drives required to brute force key discovery. Oh, and if that wasn't enough, you can pay by script hash, meaning you can assign multiple keypairs as signatories to bitcoin; a hacker would have to guess multiple correct keys, AND also combine these correct keys together. The odds are incalculable. It's like finding a needle in the universe and touching the tip of that needle to the tip of another needle you found in another universe. The mining secures the network. The more mining, the more safety. The ledger being open means anyone can read it. Anyone can write to it via signing a new transaction, but nobody can re-write to it, as every single block (group of transactions over a finite amount of time) adds another cryptographic lock to all previous transactions, and you'd have to fool the software of all copies of the globally distributed ledger into thinking your altered copy is valid. Think of it like adding another password ontop of a previous password, over and over and over and over and over. Changing a single period in one previous transaction is not only impossible, but would be rejected by the mining community and be rendered invalid and useless. Thrown out.
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That still doesn't tell me what actually happens during a bitcoin transaction. I assume a new key is generated based on the old key you had. And the new key is stored in the ledger, and the new owner has the private key for the new key, and the old key is rendered obsolete?

And what is mining then? If you can't guess keys, what does mining do, why does it need insane amounts of computing capability, and how do you get free bitcoins out of it if it only adds new layers of security?
 
M76 said:
That still doesn't tell me what actually happens during a bitcoin transaction. I assume a new key is generated based on the old key you had. And the new key is stored in the ledger, and the new owner has the private key for the new key, and the old key is rendered obsolete?

And what is mining then? If you can't guess keys, what does mining do, why does it need insane amounts of computing capability, and how do you get free bitcoins out of it if it only adds new layers of security?
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Try google my friend. It has the answers you seek.
 
When you make a bitcoin address, the public section never changes. The private section never changes. Nothing ever changes except the amount of bitcoin assigned to the address. Think of it as a mailbox if that helps. Everyone can see the mailbox, but only you can open it. That said, a lot of people create new addresses rather than keep spending from one address, but let's stick to basics. You never store the private key in the ledger, only the public key. There is some math that can be easily checked, but not guessed, that is performed when you sign a transaction with your private key. Nobody can see your private key. Unless you do what I did earlier with the empty address and intentionally put it out there.
 
I'm sitting on 42 or 43 bitcoin but there is no fcking way I could get 80K for them. lmao.

I also have a bunch of dogecoin as well, a lot.
 
thebufenator said:
Try google my friend. It has the answers you seek.
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If you can't be bothered to reply with an actual answer, why do you reply at all? Does it hurt you that someone wants to discuss this here?
 
M76 said:
That still doesn't tell me what actually happens during a bitcoin transaction. I assume a new key is generated based on the old key you had. And the new key is stored in the ledger, and the new owner has the private key for the new key, and the old key is rendered obsolete?

And what is mining then? If you can't guess keys, what does mining do, why does it need insane amounts of computing capability, and how do you get free bitcoins out of it if it only adds new layers of security?
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You could probably start here.

https://bitcoin.org/en/how-it-works
 
Jon855 said:
You could probably start here.

https://bitcoin.org/en/how-it-works
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So that confirms my assumptions I think after a quick read.

But I still don't understand mining. If you need mining to confirm transactions, how will transactions get confirmed if mining is no longer profitable? As it's already isn't for the average joe. Of course there is a self balancing taking place as less people mine the ones who still do share a bigger profit, but won't that slow down transactions?
 
M76 said:
So that confirms my assumptions I think after a quick read.

But I still don't understand mining. If you need mining to confirm transactions, how will transactions get confirmed if mining is no longer profitable? As it's already isn't for the average joe. Of course there is a self balancing taking place as less people mine the ones who still do share a bigger profit, but won't that slow down transactions?
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People join mining 'pools'. Mining is very tricky. Because there are so many miners, the difficulty ramps up. Without that, miners would receive too many newly-minted bitcoins for their service. If they leave, there is a difficulty adjustment. If it then becomes incredibly easy to mine, more people will mine again. So the market will reach a point of equilibrium. The mining reward can't really be abused, because the difficulty always adjusts for mining power.

Point blank: Normal people will never turn a profit from mining. Those days are likely over. Try out for the NBA instead.
 
Retronym said:
Point blank: Normal people will never turn a profit from mining. Those days are likely over. Try out for the NBA instead.
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No, I wasn't thinking about that, well maybe I did 5 years ago. But even then it seemed too much of an investment for too little reward. I'm merely trying to understand how it all works, as it gets more mainstream. I literally gave zero fucks about cryptocurrency until now.
 
At todays price, I've had $ 733,371.76 gone through my wallet.

Fucking jumping off willis tower "sears tower".

https://blockchain.info/address/12NcNYb2oEh6ANo95AakEjPqQdgbcxh4m9

Back in 2011, my very first few bitcoins I bought this
9KcFxNf.jpg



https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820235009

My review of it.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/SingleProductReview.aspx?ReviewID=3084845

Technically, I've got a $6,666 USB reader.

meh.
 
Retronym said:
People join mining 'pools'. Mining is very tricky. Because there are so many miners, the difficulty ramps up. Without that, miners would receive too many newly-minted bitcoins for their service. If they leave, there is a difficulty adjustment. If it then becomes incredibly easy to mine, more people will mine again. So the market will reach a point of equilibrium. The mining reward can't really be abused, because the difficulty always adjusts for mining power.

Point blank: Normal people will never turn a profit from mining. Those days are likely over. Try out for the NBA instead.
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I wished there was a real interview with the real creator of bitcoin, I am thinking it will be an interesting mind indeed.
 
Hitti2 said:
At todays price, I've had $ 733,371.76 gone through my wallet.
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I paid somewhere around $29,000 in today's prices for a computer monitor.

I'm trying to not make myself crazy and just chalk it up to living. Are my needs met, etc.

I think bitcoin is increasingly going to be a plaything of the rich, not something to buy coffee with. And I'm fine with that.
 
Retronym said:
I paid somewhere around $29,000 in today's prices for a computer monitor.

I'm trying to not make myself crazy and just chalk it up to living. Are my needs met, etc.

I think bitcoin is increasingly going to be a plaything of the rich, not something to buy coffee with. And I'm fine with that.
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I paid $225k for a pair of headphones when coins where $8 a pop or so :(
 
I mined for a few hours one day just to see what the deal was. created 0.14 of a coin. a few years later I remembered I had it and bought $140 worth of stuff with it.
Wish I had mined a lot longer. :(
 
SixFootDuo said:
I'm sitting on 42 or 43 bitcoin but there is no fcking way I could get 80K for them. lmao.

I also have a bunch of dogecoin as well, a lot.
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You're right, you could actually get $100K for them today (at $2400/each). It's very easy to do now these days as well. All you have to setup an account on Coinbase, and you'll have a $15K/week limit to sell through them. You can then setup an account on their exchange GDAX, and you'll get another $10K/day withdrawal limit through that (which you could request to increase). The total process, without any extreme levels of verification, would take you around 2 weeks to have all of the cash sitting on your bank account.

Just pay your long term capital gains tax, because I doubt you're flying under the radar with that amount. ;)
 
Geez, that shit is starting to look like the CO2 chart Al Gore used in the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" years ago, with no end in sight - but of course we know it'll tank sooner or later.

But yeah, a few million bucks would be nice right about now, I think I had .5 BTC in some wallet long ago that I'll never recover, oh well.
 
Problem is that if you actually tried to move the bitcoin in to cash you would quickly find that there is no one with 72 million to buy it from you. bit coin works fine for small purchases but as soon as you start talking about real money it all falls apart. If all the bit coin millionaires cashed in the whole thing would collapse.

True all currency is fiat currency, but fiat currency backed by a real world government carries a lot more weight and security than fiat currency backed by faith and hope and rainbows.
 
kinjo said:
Problem is that if you actually tried to move the bitcoin in to cash you would quickly find that there is no one with 72 million to buy it from you. bit coin works fine for small purchases but as soon as you start talking about real money it all falls apart. If all the bit coin millionaires cashed in the whole thing would collapse.

True all currency is fiat currency, but fiat currency backed by a real world government carries a lot more weight and security than fiat currency backed by faith and hope and rainbows.
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Wrong.

People have moved millions in a single transaction. Bitcoin is still here. One person cashing out 72 million is doable in a market worth tens of billions.

There are many exchanges now. Things have advanced in the last several years.

It's true that EVERYONE cashing out would see a price collapse. That is economics 101.
 
I had over 50 bitcoins over the course of bitcoin history, maybe upwards of 100. I wish I held, sold ranging from $10 to $800. Probably sold them all in all for less than 10k. I suppose my impatience got the best of me :(. I remember dumping 15 or so bitcoins near $10 mark thinking they were done for near the beginning of them before they were mainstream.
 
Retronym said:
Today there was about 1.9 billion dollars traded.
It's a safe bet there were some large holders making multiple sales or buys.
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It looks like two posts above this one someone with your exact user name challenged people on remedial math.

Unless that wasn't actually you, I find it hilarious that you don't seem to understand 1.9b in trade volume @ 72m per transaction would only be around 26 distinct transactions. The notion that a 72m sell-off within a 1.9b pool wouldn't tank the value is laughable even though 1.9b apparently seems like an unfathomable number to you.

Retronym said:
People have moved millions in a single transaction. Bitcoin is still here. One person cashing out 72 million is doable in a market worth tens of billions.
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Back to your remedial math point: tens of billions of dollars still only equates to a few hundred trades at 72m per. Do you have the slightest idea how much volume is traded *per second* in a legitimate market exchange?
 
Retronym said:
People have moved millions in a single transaction. Bitcoin is still here. One person cashing out 72 million is doable in a market worth tens of billions.
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Retronym said:
147 million dollar transaction from 2013.
Did not kill Bitcoin

https://www.fastcompany.com/3022159/fast-feed/someone-just-made-147-million-bitcoin-transaction
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Please learn the difference between moving bitcoins around and liquidating them for cash, which was the topic of conversation.

Moving 147 million dollars worth of bitcoins from one address to another wouldn't have any impact on the value of them. Why would it? More importantly, why would you even think it did or have anything to do with our conversation if you had the slightest idea of what you were talking about?
 
Mope54 already got it, there's not a market for $70+ million dollars worth of bitcoins. Last time people tried to get out the bitcoin market crashed. Nearly half of exchanges failed during that period, taking people's money with them.

Bitcoin is risky. It's not possible to convert Bitcoin to USD quickly and there are fees for doing so. At the same time the inherent volatility of Bitcoin makes it useless as a currency. Why spend a fraction of a bitcoin on a sandwich when that bitcoin might be worth twice as much tomorrow? I really don't see any real-world use for it other than buying drugs off the dark web.
 
M76 said:
... I'm merely trying to understand how it all works, as it gets more mainstream. I literally gave zero fucks about cryptocurrency until now.
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Just so you know, while there are lots of cryptocurrencies, the excellent documentation on bitcoin.org is relevant to all of them.https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide

It's dead simple to generate a wallet, conduct a transaction, and even set up mining. However, the layers of tech under the hood is extensive and would take weeks to explain in forum-posts back and forth. I don't imagine too many folks here want to get in too deep. ;) However, hop on mumble and chat over a game. :)

Succinctly as I can muster (lots of stuff simplified and left out): a script generates your encryption keys and starts downloading the massive ledger of all past transactions. This is called your wallet. It never has anything in it; instead, all relevant transaction history (literally hundreds of gigabytes worth) is verified and compounded to ratify your wallet's balance. This enormous ledger is called the blockchain. It is "peer reviewed" and can't be tampered with. (People try all the time, some have been successful, but it technically can only work against other people also fucking with the timeline. It's also way harder to do now than it was years ago.) Transaction servers operate in a mesh to verify transactions and are automatically paid to do work from the transaction fees. The other more interesting type of server is mining. All miners do is guess hash values for the next ledger page (blockchain). Good guesses are paid by the transaction servers by verifying the next hash is correct, verifying with many peers, and creating a transaction from the protocol itself -- a big chunk of coin. The protocol is designed to steadily generate less and less coin for good guesses. This means there is a set amount of coin that can possibly be generated, and is slowly leaked into the pool. This also means that starting a new coin, which has no street value (yet), hyping it up, then trading for bitcoin is a popular pasttime.

However, "market" and "mania" are two huge topics on their own.

Alternative cryptocurrencies are fun. I played around with them for a bit, but determined that electricity is a bit too expensive in my area to make it work for me. The neat thing is, I did successfully pay for my electricity by generating obscure alternative coins and selling them for bitcoin! It works, but you need to settle down and read a lot before investing. Just like any trade market. It helps to group up with friends. Some people run what's called a strata protocol to track and verify guessing together. It's possible to never guess correctly, in spite of lots of heat and noise coming from your GPUs. ;) Strata distributes the reward over the pool by a weighted amount based on work done by each client. Think of it like folding@home work units, but with realtime peer verification and tracking.

Retronym said:
I paid somewhere around $29,000 in today's prices for a computer monitor.

I'm trying to not make myself crazy and just chalk it up to living. Are my needs met, etc.

I think bitcoin is increasingly going to be a plaything of the rich, not something to buy coffee with. And I'm fine with that.
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It helps to really wrap your head around the concept of "value". It's literally insane. It is not called market mania for nothing.

And it's true that forex traders have taken cryptocurrencies more seriously, and the markets are clearly being manipulated by whales. This doesn't mean it's off limits for the rest of us. There's always need of a chump to make the markets go 'round. :)
 
"If you bought $100 of it 7 years ago, it'd be worth 72 million"

Sure, and nearly impossible to divest yourself of.

Sure, buying in is easy. And it's not that tough to divest small amounts (though, on occasion, it can be a real pain).

Now try to divest yourself of 72 million in bitcoin.

It'll probably be almost as pleasant as being waterboard while having a soap in a sock party during a 5-man testicle "massage" with baseball bats...
 
DeathFromBelow said:
Mope54 already got it, there's not a market for $70+ million dollars worth of bitcoins. Last time people tried to get out the bitcoin market crashed. Nearly half of exchanges failed during that period, taking people's money with them.
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When Mt Gox was hacked, 850,000 BTC stolen, and everybody rushed to withdraw? That's not really a good example. Also, the 850,000 BTC that were stolen had a value of over $450 million at the time. And the BTC user-base has grown a lot since then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox
"The value of a single bitcoin fell to a low of $55.59 after the resumption of trading, before stabilizing above $100. Around mid-May 2013, Mt. Gox traded 150,000 bitcoins per day, per Bitcoin Charts."


Chas said:
"If you bought $100 of it 7 years ago, it'd be worth 72 million"

Sure, and nearly impossible to divest yourself of.

Sure, buying in is easy. And it's not that tough to divest small amounts (though, on occasion, it can be a real pain).

Now try to divest yourself of 72 million in bitcoin.

It'll probably be almost as pleasant as being waterboard while having a soap in a sock party during a 5-man testicle "massage" with baseball bats...
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A person can easily spend 2 minutes withdrawing $10,000 each day - which I don't think would be unpleasant at all. It certainly would be more pleasant that going to a job for 8 hours to make only a couple hundred dollars each day.
 
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So your answer is "Just withdraw it slowly over 20 years"?

Yeah, no.
 
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