Apple Has Included Bitcoin Whitepaper in Every Version of macOS Since 2018

[Analog Kid]

You are implying that cryptocurrencies only have use for criminals.

Where did I imply that?

I did say it is commonly used for ransomware attacks. Your source agrees;

“While crypto can be a preferred tool for certain categories of crime, such as ransomware attacks, the same can’t be said generally.”​

​

I also said it can be used to buy drugs and for dark web transactions, which is also true:

The Beginner’s Guide to Buying Goods on the Darknet – Featured Bitcoin News

Darknet markets (DNMs) supply all manner of goods, some legal, others less so, but all purchasable with cryptocurrency and delivered to your door. Indeed,

news.bitcoin.com

My whole point was that this isn’t the only use of bitcoin:

What do you have the power to purchase with Bitcoin […]?

I'll tell you what: Dollars.

We agree it is used (and as linked above, promoted for use) in crime. We agree that is not the only use. This whole conversation is evidence of our agreement on that fact.

Africans received $105.6 billion worth of cryptocurrency payments

You are still missing what is being said. I said it is not a primary use case. Your source states:

"Although the African continent receives only 2 percent of the global value of all cryptocurrencies"​

Some fraction of which would be remittances.

This is also not true. Recall that Bitcoin has a settlement time of 10 minutes, other cryptocurrencies can be even less than that. That 10 minutes is your settlement risk - the period of time when value can fluctuate. The reality is within any given 10 minute time frame, cryptocurrencies don't move all that much - certainly far less than the very expensive fees incurred with competitors such as Western Union.

None of what you said explains why what I said is not true. You claimed what I said is wrong and then just said "it's true, but it happens a little bit at a time".

You must hold/own bitcoin in order to transact in Bitcoin.

You must spend bitcoin to transact in bitcoin. You can still transact your very last satoshi.

Some people believe that blockchain has value and bitcoin does not. I, and many others, argue that the two cannot be separated. Bitcoin is the incentive for the Proof of Work. Without the reward, the blockchain inherently will not be decentralized, and once it is not decentralized, it can no longer be immutable. If a majority of hashing power fell within any given party, they would be able re-write transaction history.

So the valuable part, in your assessment, is the blockchain. Bitcoin is merely a means of conferring payment for that value. You could pay the miners in Jelly Belly's, or back pats.

No, you are misunderstanding what I am saying. But to address your new point, programmatic inflation, particularly the "halving" moments where inflation drops by 50% (approx every 4 years) tends to drive BTC price upwards, but that is merely a historical observation. In your example, you cite the 300% inflation, but you fail to continue - if/when Bitcoin reaches $120,000/coin, the car would cost 0.5 BTC and the inflation would be negative - but that isn't true, and that is because your example actually doesn't address inflation at all.

Maybe I'm not understanding the way you're using words. Define for me what you believe the meaning of inflation to be. Not the mechanics of Bitcoin, but the definition of the word inflation. Let's start there. For me, inflation means a loss of purchasing power. As my example shows, Bitcoin isn't immune to that.

I like that you think of it as a currency. As I said, most governments and regulators treat Bitcoin as a commodity.

The US IRS treats it the same as foreign currency. Earnings are ordinary income. Holdings are property.

It makes sense when you realize that all US government accounting is done in US dollars so you need to separate out the part that is earnings from the part that is gains due to fluctuating exchange rates.

Again you take my statements out of context - adoption for other currencies such as USD never stop either. If someone new comes into the world, guess what...they will end up using currency if they are lucky to get old enough. That is not cultish or bares any resemblance to a Ponzi scheme, it is just a matter of fact. Markets grow, and population growth is an important factor for that historically.

The context is that your reason for the increasing value of BTC is because of the growing adoption. As you said:

as adoption grows from quite literally 2 people to millions/hundreds of millions/billions of people, one would expect value to grow [...] Price increases when more people buy and fewer people sell. You can only sell Bitcoin if you have first bought it. Thus, as adoption grows, price tends to increase until people sell. At some point one would expect market saturation and an equilibrium to be reached.

Nobody says that about the US dollar. They don't say it skyrockets in value because the population keeps increasing. It's because the dollar doesn't rely on a steady supply of suckers to maintain its value.

Tell that to people in Zimbabwe or the plethora of populations where their national currency has collapsed. It is naive to assume that it can't happen to anyone. I appreciate you pointing out that exception because you are right, these tend to be unstable economies or governments. And again, this can happen anywhere.

What you said is that it "tends to" happen, which it doesn't. It has happened, and it can happen, but it rarely happens in the stable and developed countries where Bitcoin is most prevalent. If you look at BTC holdings by nation, where does Zimbabwe sit?

When you move away from a national currency you take on other risks. Look at what happened with the Asian financial crisis in the '90s, or El Salvador's BTC experiment, or any country that takes on foreign denominated debt. Even the Euro crisis of the 2010's was largely because national governments weren't in control of their own currency. If you can't control your nations currency, it can control you.

Bitcoin isn't a solution to bad government decisions, or a protection from them, it just opens up other vulnerabilities.

Absolutely, Bitcoin and Gold have both been tremendous hedges over time. GBP and EUR have not been stable, look at a max-year chart of each. In fact, Bitcoin has outperformed the financial markets in 7 out of last 10 years.

Show me the numbers.

There are tons of literature that discuss this. The following is an excerpt from https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/09/1580/

As the Latin word fiat (“let it be done”) suggests, fiat money is a state-issued means of exchange which a government simply declares to be anything which, when presented as payment, extinguishes a debt owed to another. More specifically, as John Maynard Keynes stated in his Treatise on Money (1930), fiat money is “created and issued by the State, but is not convertible by law into anything other than itself, and has no fixed value in terms of an objective standard.” In short, it has no intrinsic value in itself inasmuch as fiat money is not representative of a fixed and known amount of a commodity such as gold or silver. Instead fiat money is ultimately backed, as the U.S. Treasury states, “by all the goods and services in the economy” as well as a confidence that the issuing government can ultimately pay its debts.
The high level of the U.S. federal government’s public deficit, for example, is at least partly premised on the unspoken supposition that the Fed (which is, after all, a government institution that operates within legal parameters set by Congress and whose members are nominated by the President) can simply print more money in paper or electronic form if creditors become worried that the U.S. government’s borrowings cannot be covered by anticipated taxation revenues, foreign borrowings, and its existing resources. This in turn encourages more people and governments to buy U.S. government debt in the form of bonds, which permits more deficit-spending, thereby encouraging a cycle of ever-spiraling public debt.

Thus, prior to the delinking of the American dollar from gold in 1971, the money supply between 1960 and 1970 grew by 47%, while the public debt grew by approximately 34%. In the decade after the dollar’s delinking from gold, however, a rapid acceleration occurred with the money supply growing by approximately 87% while the public debt increased by almost 139%. Between 1980 and 2005, the pace further accelerated at the respective ratios of 254% and 753%. The absence of some form of “golden brake” (even the pseudo-gold standard that existed between 1946 and 1971) is surely part of the reason for the accelerating increase in public debt.

Ok, I've read that. It says there is fiat money. It says there is debt. It doesn't tell me what you mean when you say "fiat money is debt based".

See above.

And it certainly didn't tell me what you're worried about if the USD is no longer "dominant". There are lots of countries with apparently non-dominant currencies.

 

[Crowbot]

I do wish the guy doing his test scans had chosen something a bit better to scan.
If it was boobies it would not have been a 6 page discussion.

But actually it is a bit shoddy quality control that random files have been circulated to millions of users for 5 years and no one noticed.

There are probably dozens of files like this that are used as example files for particular libraries. Possibly useful during beta testing. Harmless.

 

[Analog Kid]

No, it isn't. Otherwise, feel free to show me where Bitcoin the company incorporated, where their corporate headquarter are, executive structure, etc. I'll wait.

When you address my Jamaica example, we can come back to this. Otherwise if you think a stock can only be pumped and dumped by the controlling company then I'm not sure what to say...

Ok, then it's like gold.

So I can melt down crypto and forge it into a wedding ring? Or use it for bond wires in an IC? Or for dentistry?

It's rare (or more specifically finite)

Is it though? There are going to be 21*10^14 satoshis in circulation when it's fully mined out. That's about 10,000 times the number of stars in the Milky Way.

And if you run out of Bitcoin, you can always create another one. There are a finite number of goverments capable of issuing fiat currency, but there's no real bound on the number of possible cryptocurrencies.

I only work at a Fortune 50 financial company [...]

Yeah, they've never gotten it wrong...

but I'd love to hear about my lack of understanding when it comes to finance.

Here's an example:

"The single, solitary, unitary source of dollars that you were able to extract from your cryptocurrencies came from other poor suckers who put their dollars into the box."

Literally the same as the stock market.

It doesn't matter what it is, what matters is that people want it

It absolutely matters what it is. If people are buying it because they understand the true value of it, then it's a stable investment. If they're buying it because of FOMO or they're deluded into buying it because they've been razzle dazzled by technospeak then it's decidedly not stable and essentially a scam.

I have absolutely no idea what point you're trying to make here.

That how a currency is manufactured (hydraulic press, lasers, cryptographic magic) doesn't change its value or its purpose. When people try to explain why Bitcoin is so valuable they go back to talking about blockchain and proof or work, and distributed accounting, etc, etc. That's not an answer to the question, it's an implementation detail.

I'm not sure why you're arguing this, because it certainly isn't something I suggested.

Yes it is:

"Bitcoin has no intrinsic value"

[...] In fact, the potential with certain cryptocurrencies is so great, that you could literally tokenize other securities and offer them on the blockchain and you'd have far more freedom and flexibility than you have with any stocks you buy today, and of course the fees for trading them, especially if done on DEX's, would be far lower.

The value of a stock is not in any way determined by the technicals behind how the stock is traded.

Just as the value of a currency is not in any way determined by the technicals of how it is traded.

 

[Analog Kid]

Their heads are a mesh mash of anti-democratic, anarchist and gold bug ideologies and conspiracy theories.

Like censorship resistant currencies? WTF does that even mean?

The affinity fraud is deep with this...

 

[tothemoonsands]

…

We are talking in circles and I’ve given you all the time I’d like to. I hope that if Bitcoin succeeds in the future by continuing on its currency trajectory that you will use that opportunity to learn and grow and admit you were wrong. Best of luck to you!

 

[NEPOBABY]

Bernie Madoff's scam lasted from the 1990s until 2008.

Bitcoin has not "continually" increased in value since inception.

Every bubble cycle in crypto wipes out more people than the last one and transfers almost all the new money to a few people. Most of those people are unknown "whales". They let a few normies win so that they can act as recruiters to bring new people in.

 

[NEPOBABY]

About 80% of the Bitcoin supply belongs to something like 100 people most of whom are already rich and know each other and rig the market and control the prices with algorithmic trading bots.

Apparently the inventors of bitcoin were friends of Epstein. I read on a forum their names are allegedly Castrounis (lead), Wexler, Rustow (advisor), Xu (advisor) and maybe some others connected to internet gambling and dark funds. This isn’t even a secret to insiders. The news just don’t want to talk about it because the editors are sore bagholders so editors shut investigations down.

Spent 3 days checking this and it really lines up. It seems over the years several red herrings have been promoted in media and discussions to distract from what was right under everyone's noses.

These people were in right location (UK and HK), the right time, with the right qualifications, and right connections. They appear to be in financial engineering, algo trading pioneers, trading currencies and commodities, and pitching volatility as an asset class.

"Satoshi" wrote his posts in Canadian English and we see it here too.

The connections to Epstein (who had written about his fondness for bitcoin) are clear. They appear to be close friends with the Tether guys who were connected to the controversial online poker casinos that were blocked from banks in 2006-2007.

There was also gang rape case against one of them. So if they are behind bitcoin the need for anonymity and red herrings was essential.

 

[ninethirty]

When you address my Jamaica example, we can come back to this. Otherwise if you think a stock can only be pumped and dumped by the controlling company then I'm not sure what to say...


So I can melt down crypto and forge it into a wedding ring? Or use it for bond wires in an IC? Or for dentistry?



Is it though? There are going to be 21*10^14 satoshis in circulation when it's fully mined out. That's about 10,000 times the number of stars in the Milky Way.

And if you run out of Bitcoin, you can always create another one. There are a finite number of goverments capable of issuing fiat currency, but there's no real bound on the number of possible cryptocurrencies.


Yeah, they've never gotten it wrong...


Here's an example:



It absolutely matters what it is. If people are buying it because they understand the true value of it, then it's a stable investment. If they're buying it because of FOMO or they're deluded into buying it because they've been razzle dazzled by technospeak then it's decidedly not stable and essentially a scam.


That how a currency is manufactured (hydraulic press, lasers, cryptographic magic) doesn't change its value or its purpose. When people try to explain why Bitcoin is so valuable they go back to talking about blockchain and proof or work, and distributed accounting, etc, etc. That's not an answer to the question, it's an implementation detail.


Yes it is:



Just as the value of a currency is not in any way determined by the technicals of how it is traded.

"When you address my Jamaica example, we can come back to this."

No, you can address it now. I don't need to respond to your Jamaica example because they're not even remotely related. Bitcoin is not a company. There is no marketing department. There's no CEO, there's no executive structure, compensation instructions, etc.

"So I can melt down crypto and forge it into a wedding ring? Or use it for bond wires in an IC? Or for dentistry?"

No, I suppose not but I can use it for all sorts of other things. Like gold, it's desirable for a number of reasons. People like the way it looks, they want to use it for something, they feel it's likely to appreciate over time, etc.

"Is it though?"

Yes. 21 million bitcoin. No more.

"And if you run out of Bitcoin, you can always create another one."

Sure, you could, but if it isn't a network people are using, or have any interest in, then it won't be worth anything. Funny how that works, hey? Because there are plenty of networks out there that nobody uses, and those tokens are worth nothing. Then there are networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum which get plenty of usage, and those tokens are worth much more to people.

"Yeah, they've never gotten it wrong..."

What an amazing lazy response.

"Here's an example:"

I'm aware of what I wrote. There's nothing about that quote of mine that's wrong. Stocks don't just appreciate in value because a company made money. They appreciate in value because people holding the stocks who want to sell them set the price, and if there's people who want those stocks bad enough, they'll pay that price. Since there's no guarantee that a company will continue to grow or be successful, it's entirely possible that I could sell stock to some "sucker" who then loses money on their investment. Or maybe they don't. In the entire history of crypto, from it's inception until Nov of '21, if you bought Bitcoin or ETH at their then ATH's, you'd have still made money by holding long term, like most do with stocks. I'd bet also that anyone who bought at highs in '21 will also make money if they don't react to short term noise and just play the long game.

"It absolutely matters what it is. If people are buying it because they understand the true value of it, then it's a stable investment. If they're buying it because of FOMO or they're deluded into buying it because they've been razzle dazzled by technospeak then it's decidedly not stable and essentially a scam."

If ever I read someone's uninformed opinion about something they felt they were an authority on, that's it. Good lord.

"Yes it is:"

I never one claimed that a stock would be worth more if it was tokenized on the blockchain. I laughed that the entire stock market could be tokenized on the blockchain, work more efficiently, be cheaper, and it would still be one of a million different use cases blockchain can address. All of that remains true.

Like the other guy, I think I'm also done. It's not because you've made some point I can't address, it's because you have an opinion first, and you'll fight facts to protect your opinion. That's not how I live my life, and I'm always happy to learn, be corrected, etc. I've spent a lot of time learning about blockchain tech, cryptocurrencies, and as I've mentioned, I've speculated quite successfully on crypto. If you aren't interested in that, that's fine. But I'll never understand why someone would spend so much time arguing against something they aren't interested in at all.

Anyway, peace!

 

[Nugget]

But I'll never understand why someone would spend so much time arguing against something they aren't interested in at all.

I can help with this. I am actively opposed to the cryptocurrency market because:

• I genuinely don't like to see people getting sucked up into what I consider to be a huge scam that will inevitably end in pain, tears, and financial losses for most of the people involved.
• When cryptocurrencies do finally implode, the blast radius is likely to extend wide enough to damage the real economy that I participate in. The larger the Ponzi grows, the more it's going to hurt me personally when it does finally implode.
• There's very good reason to think that the shady lack of regulation is allowing billions of dollars to evade sanctions and fund the Russian war effort in Ukraine and fund North Korea's nuclear program. I'm in favor of those economic sanctions and I don't like seeing them subverted.

Cheers, but I honestly believe that what you're advocating is harming the world I live in and I hope you have no success at recruiting new victims to the scam.

I understand you disagree with this perspective, but I also understand why you would. I'm not arguing with you, I'm arguing for the benefit of people who are susceptible to the loathsome marketing job you're doing for a wasteful, dangerous, economic perpetual motion scam.

I don't mean to drag you back into a conversation you're done with, but now maybe you can leave having learned something. Now you understand why one person is invested in the topic without being invested in the scam.

 

[ArrayDecay]

I have one Bitcoin and it's stupid.

 

[Analog Kid]

Spent 3 days checking this and it really lines up. It seems over the years several red herrings have been promoted in media and discussions to distract from what was right under everyone's noses.

Any chance your research led to some legitimately sourced links for the rest of us? I have to say I'm a bit hesitant to swallow "the biggest financial scam in history is known to be run by a handful of people linked to a notorious but dead pedophile and nobody talks about it because all the news editors are in thrall."

 

[Analog Kid]

I'll never understand why someone would spend so much time arguing against something they aren't interested in at all.

I recognize you want to walk away from the discussion, so I'll start with a response to this and you can read it and the rest or ignore it as you choose. I've got follow up on your other comments that I also won't take offense if you ignore.

First, I'm not sure what gives you the impression that I'm not interested. I'm actually quite interested. I think the idea of and potential for a decentralized ledger system are incredibly interesting. I also think the idea of a decentralized extra-national currency is interesting-- I'm not sure that idea is a particularly good one, but I see the allure of it and enjoy thinking through its consequences.

Easy transmission of remittances and safe harbor from bad government policy are in the pro column. Some of the concerns raised by @Nugget and additional vulnerability to bad government policy are in the con column.

So, I'm interested in the technology but greatly concerned about the first instances of deployment and the hype surrounding them. It's queueing up a lot of future victims of a collapse, and I'm not convinced they're coming into this clearly informed. I believe unbridled exuberance about crypto should be met with reasoned skepticism.



I share all the concerns expressed by @Nugget. You'll notice that those are cryptocurrency concerns, not blockchain concerns.

By far the biggest of my concerns is the impact the collapse of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are going to have on ordinary people and potentially on the global economy. The problem is growing because it is being heavily marketed based on specious claims and what looks a lot like affinity fraud, it's pulling in a lot of vulnerable people on false pretenses.

So a significant part of the reason for my engagement is because I don't want people seeing all the "crypto changed my life" claims without also seeing the concerns brought to light. I would hope that when the people advocating for Bitcoin can't give basic explanations for what inflation is or what the difference is between BTC and a stock and the only justification for the growing price of something is "because someone else will pay you more for it than you did", it will give them pause.



I don't think there's anything about my comments and questions so far that show a lack of interest-- quite the opposite I would have thought. What I notice though as a common theme is that whenever anyone asks skeptical questions about crytpocurrencies, the cryptofans start by throwing up a smokescreen consisting of implementation details followed by a series of poetic contradictions. "It's not a stock or a currency, but you can think of it as a stock and a currency, but it shouldn't be regulated like a stock or a currency because it's more like gold and bubblegum if gold bubblegum tasted like clouds."

When the inevitable follow up questions come, the cryptocommunity circles it's wagons and declares the questioner as either too stupid or lacking in imagination to see the revolution in progress.

Never though are the questions ever really answered with specificity.

 

[tothemoonsands]

• I genuinely don't like to see people getting sucked up into what I consider to be a huge scam that will inevitably end in pain, tears, and financial losses for most of the people involved.
• When cryptocurrencies do finally implode, the blast radius is likely to extend wide enough to damage the real economy that I participate in. The larger the Ponzi grows, the more it's going to hurt me personally when it does finally implode.
• There's very good reason to think that the shady lack of regulation is allowing billions of dollars to evade sanctions and fund the Russian war effort in Ukraine and fund North Korea's nuclear program. I'm in favor of those economic sanctions and I don't like seeing them subverted.

It's interesting to me that you say "when" it finally implodes and not "if". Please keep an open mind that you may in fact be wrong. I understand your points though - you are voicing your view just as Bitcoin supporters voice their own.

At the end of the day, it is up to the individual to do their own research and come to their own conclusion. It appears your thesis is that the entire segment including Bitcoin is all a Ponzi that will implode at some point. Perhaps you are right, perhaps you are wrong. I'd be curious to know if there is a time threshold that would affect your outlook? For example, Bitcoin has outperformed financial markets 7 out of the last 10 years. Would it take another 10 years? 20 years? 30 years? 50 years?

It is simple to understand what it would take for a Bitcoin supporter to be proven wrong - a complete crash to $0, network failure rendering a stop to transactions, etc. But less certain, at least in my mind, is what does it take to prove a Bitcoin skeptic wrong?

 

[imikem]

I suspect it was used for regression testing of PDF rendering.

 

[_Spinn_]

Tim Apple is Satoshi Nakamoto 🤣🤣🤣

 

[Analog Kid]

I'll leave aside the other nonsense and focus on two important items:

What an amazing lazy response.

It's really not. It's rather hard to find an adverse economic event in the developed world that wasn't driven by bad behavior in the finance sector.

The Great Depression was triggered by the stock market crash which came after nearly a decade of highly leveraged speculation. The crash triggered a massive collapse in the money supply which was exacerbated by the inflexibility that came from adherence to the gold standard.

The Savings and Loan crisis was driven by over investment by newly deregulated smaller banks chasing returns in risky real estate along with a heavy dose of fraud and shady dealing.

The dot com boom and bust was driven by massive financial speculation in internet stocks among cries that the old rules no longer applied to the new economy and it's no longer about stock price fundamentals.

Then there was the housing bubble and Great Recession when financial wizards undermined the mortgage lending standards and then packaged up a bunch of bad loans, hiding them behind layers and layers of bookkeeping and issued both the CDOs and the swaps against them. Once again we were told that the old rules didn't apply, that this was "financial innovation" putting people in houses who wouldn't have had them.

As far as I'm aware, the financial sector wasn't responsible for the global pandemic and the ensuing economic swings. =D

But it seems every 20 years or so there's an effort to avoid regulations in one area or another and then the industry sticks a fork in the socket. So when someone says, "trust me to understand finance, I work for a major financial institution", I don't give them a pass. There's too many examples of finance institutions chasing short term gains without any understanding of the underlying financials knowing they can either be first to the exits when they see signs of trouble, or rely on the government and taxpayer to cover their losses.

I'm aware of what I wrote. There's nothing about that quote of mine that's wrong. Stocks don't just appreciate in value because a company made money. They appreciate in value because people holding the stocks who want to sell them set the price, and if there's people who want those stocks bad enough, they'll pay that price. Since there's no guarantee that a company will continue to grow or be successful, it's entirely possible that I could sell stock to some "sucker" who then loses money on their investment. Or maybe they don't. In the entire history of crypto, from it's inception until Nov of '21, if you bought Bitcoin or ETH at their then ATH's, you'd have still made money by holding long term, like most do with stocks. I'd bet also that anyone who bought at highs in '21 will also make money if they don't react to short term noise and just play the long game.

No. You can think of a company's market cap as the sum of two numbers: its intrinsic value + froth. The share price is that divided by the number of shares.

The intrinsic value can be thought of as the value of all the company's physical assets, the value of all its IP, the value of its brand, and the net present value of all its future earnings. Some of those are hard to know, and some are highly dependent on unknown future events, so the market must estimate that value. This is why public earnings and financial reporting from companies is so important and so regulated-- it helps the market track that underlying value.

When you own a share of stock, you own a fraction of that company. You have the right to vote on corporate governance. When the company is sold, you have a right to a fraction of those proceeds. When the company makes profits you have a right to a share of those profits (or, through your vote, may encourage the company to reinvest those profits into growth with the intention of increasing the sale value of the company or increasing future profits leading to higher future dividends).


Here's the takeaway: "The single, solitary, unitary source of dollars that you were able to extract from" a stock is absolutely not money contributed by other investors. The company is a the dominant contributor of value to the stock. The fact that you believe differently is the reason I question your understanding of finance.


Now to the froth.

Because the best we can do is estimate a company's intrinsic value, each estimate will be a little high or a little low. At any given moment a stock is, with a probability vanishingly close to 1, either undervalued or overvalued. Risk appetite in the market and incomplete information can lead investors to become more optimistic or pessimistic about the value of a particular company and certain stocks can become more or less volatile over time.

There are investors that will try to profit from that froth. That's not a bad thing, that's what generally keeps the market efficient. There are investors that will try to pump up the value of a stock through marketing and then dump it when they think they've swung market opinion as far as they can-- that is a bad thing and generally considered fraud because the profits taken aren't tied to rational estimates of the underlying value, but are tied to irrational beliefs inspired by the marketing campaign. Enron aside, most pump and dump schemes are limited in scope and potential damage though.

When market opinion of an asset becomes sufficiently far detached from the underlying value (for some reason it almost always seems to happen in the positive direction) we call that froth a bubble and then it can start to present a lot of the same problems that Bitcoin has right now. Those bubbles are often further inflated by similar techniques to what I see in cryptocurrencies-- lots of advertising focused on past returns, FOMO, arguments that old rules no longer apply to this new economic model. There's also some important differences, not least of which being that it's rare for a company to be truly worth nothing so the lower bound on the value of a stock is rarely zero and stocks are much more carefully regulated.


That's the reason I keep trying to get to the fundamental value of a Bitcoin and why I get worried when nobody can give me a clear definition. It has no intrinsic use beyond converting it back to what it was converted from. All I can assume is that its intrinsic value is zero and all of the volatility we see represents froth.

 

[Analog Kid]

I'd be curious to know if there is a time threshold that would affect your outlook? For example, Bitcoin has outperformed financial markets

For me it will require two things: stability and utility. The way a currency "outperforms" another is for its value to remain predictable, and Bitcoin has failed that test spectacularly. The whole purpose of a currency is to be used as a means of exchange, so it would need a large majority of its transactions to be for legitimate purposes beyond converting back to fiat currencies.

 

[NEPOBABY]

Their disregard for the environment and energy security is mad. These people are all nuts and reckless. At one point they came up with an idiotic theory that bitcoin is a battery that stores energy.

They just keep doubling down on insanity.

 

[NEPOBABY]

Any chance your research led to some legitimately sourced links for the rest of us? I have to say I'm a bit hesitant to swallow "the biggest financial scam in history is known to be run by a handful of people linked to a notorious but dead pedophile and nobody talks about it because all the news editors are in thrall."

Yes I did a deep search on those names and where they worked and their activities going back to year 2000.

They're very close to that bitfinex/tether group of people and were also involved in Brock Pierce's EOS project. Pierce held a seminar with Epstein about bitcoin about 9 years ago.

One of the names mentioned by Purple Rain is indeed in the infamous black book and has been in some kind of cult that groomed girls who visit or brought to him in Ibiza and then Indonesia.

I can't post because it gets political and that's not allowed on this section of the forum. It's really easy to search though with the names and obvious keywords.

 

[VulchR]

Most likely it’s just a very royalty-free non-copyright-able example document

Think bitcoin logo, etc. are creative commons or otherwise very permissively licensed

In some countries copyright is automatic, so I am waiting for the lawsuits.

 

[enterthemerdaverse]

Spent 3 days checking this and it really lines up. It seems over the years several red herrings have been promoted in media and discussions to distract from what was right under everyone's noses.

These people were in right location (UK and HK), the right time, with the right qualifications, and right connections. They appear to be in financial engineering, algo trading pioneers, trading currencies and commodities, and pitching volatility as an asset class.

"Satoshi" wrote his posts in Canadian English and we see it here too.

The connections to Epstein (who had written about his fondness for bitcoin) are clear. They appear to be close friends with the Tether guys who were connected to the controversial online poker casinos that were blocked from banks in 2006-2007.

There was also gang rape case against one of them. So if they are behind bitcoin the need for anonymity and red herrings was essential.

Human trafficking runs deep in bitcoin.

It was there from the early days of backpage dot com and the dark web.

It makes little bag holders feel uncomfortable so don’t like to admit that human trafficking is a source of money into the bitcoin ecosystem but along with narcotics and money laundering it has been a major part.

Bitcoin whales have a love for medieval style dictators who love crime, bragging about wealth, corruption and human trafficking. People who are newly brainwashed and recruited into bitcoin get frustrated when it is pointed out but they can’t ignore that they are part of it.

In recent times Andrew ‘the puppet’ Tate and the Dubai elite also use human trafficking and crypto schemes.

This stuff that goes on in Dubai only scratches the surface.

 

[droplink]

There are probably dozens of files like this that are used as example files for particular libraries. Possibly useful during beta testing. Harmless.

I know these are harmless JPG and PDFs (as in they are just leftover files that do nothing) but, as this discussion shows,, they are not "completely" harmless
Plus, what if someone had added something inappropriate as a test shot. Apple would be dragged through the media dirt if someone discovered that.

 

[Crowbot]

I know these are harmless JPG and PDFs (as in they are just leftover files that do nothing) but, as this discussion shows,, they are not "completely" harmless
Plus, what if someone had added something inappropriate as a test shot. Apple would be dragged through the media dirt if someone discovered that.

I guess that's possible. Actually, I'm surprised this is coming to the surface now since the file has been there for years. Probably means there isn't much else there. One could do a file search for every media file (PDF, TXT, and video) on the system to check for baddies.

 

[bogdanw]

Is it still included in Sonoma?

 

[User 6502]

Is it still included in Sonoma?

No.