I don’t get it, I honestly don’t. I don’t understand anything about how bitcoin functions other than the surface level descriptions that raise more questions than answers. How they are farmed.. wtf?

Feels like a pyramid scheme where those involved early on must now be millionaires or better. I don’t really see of what use they are to anyone else. Can someone break it down?

DavidDesu said:

I don’t get it, I honestly don’t. I don’t understand anything about how bitcoin functions other than the surface level descriptions that raise more questions than answers. How they are farmed.. wtf?

Feels like a pyramid scheme where those involved early on must now be millionaires or better. I don’t really see of what use they are to anyone else. Can someone break it down?

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So...go read about it?

https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-explained-five-year-old/

It's actually a huge innovation as far as the technology goes.

m_shortpants said:

So...go read about it?

https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-explained-five-year-old/

It's actually a huge innovation as far as the technology goes.

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Thanks. All the articles I’ve read never explain it like that, just mention that currency is farmed by solving complex maths problems or something, that never made any sense. So.. are people raising the value of their bitcoins or creating more simply for taking part in the system that manages them? Is that how people farm them? It still feels like something very far away from the average member of the public. Like owning stocks and hoping they increase in value. Fuck it I just don’t get economics very well, lol.

criesofthepast said:

Being an early adopter and mining is different than pre-mining before public release and hoarding coins before the public has a go at it. Pre-mining never happened with bitcoin and yes it happens with a lot of scam coins nowadays.

Yes, there are untouched wallets with a million coins that are believed to be Satoshi's but he mined them when only a handful of people were paying Bitcoin any attention in the early days.

I know we can never be sure but safe to say by now those coins are lost. The guy is dead, passwords lost, or he has the biggest balls in history not to have touched the coins since their creation. I am going with he is most likely dead.

I know there are whales who own a ton of Bitcoin and control the market. But them being friends of the creator is a new one to me. I don't know where you got that from.

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NSA/FBI claims they know who the creator really is. Maybe he's dead? I couldn't say. He certainly couldn't cash out entirely, and I think there'd be a large reaction if anyone thought those wallets were being drained.

What I had heard from numerous sources was there were 20 or so associations of Satoshi who mined before bitcoin was really known at all, and that those mined bitcoins took up a large percentage of all bitcoins.

Cipherr said:

What the hell.... so this is why the barrier of entry into Crypto is so low that you can make these crazy gains as a layman (like myself). If this (all false btw) is what the average person thinks of crypto in general, it explains why getting in and getting profit is so easy at this point. None of the people likely smart and capable enough to go vacuuming up all the low hanging fruit pay it any mind because they believe a bunch of boogeyman wives tale bullshit they heard somewhere on the internet,

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If you're a layman, I probably know a lot more about it than you. Which is why I'm saying what I say.

Sure there is some intrinsic 'value' in a currency that is 'free from regulation', and people that care about stuff like that can doublethink themselves into forgetting about the volatility, which can never ever be resolved.

But it's not the Wild West appeal which is driving Bitcoin prices. Bitcoin gains because it is popular, which makes it more popular.