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Thought I'd check how much in donations they've gotten. And I saw this massive 10 Bitcoin donation from back in 2023 (worth $800,000 now...)
From the activity history, neovim last sent bitcoin out of the address in 2019 so it's been max 7 years since they've definitely had access.
Does anyone from the neovim project know about this? Seems like a pretty significant amount of funding to have sitting there. Hope it can come to good use as I use neovim daily.
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/1Evu6wPrzjsjrNPdCYbHy3HT6ry2EzXFyQ
I imagine they might wait, to make sure it’s legally obtained Bitcoin.
In which country would waiting help?
In Germany at least if you've held the coin(s) for 7 years before selling you don't need to pay tax on the profit.
Not sure how this applies to donations though, and of course this will almost certainly be changed in the future, .nl is leading the way in taxing _unrealised_ gains; we are sure to follow!
It's one year, unless something changed recently.
1 year
One year yes, and politics wants to change it..
Something that takes 5 seconds with bitcoin, faster than any other property type, is something you rationalize as taking 7 years
Why does HN collectively tolerate this level of understanding when it comes to crypto
Well that's really funny. Because the 7 years are about tax liabilities not the speed of bitcoin transactions.
So maybe you made a statement about crypto advocates here...
Legally obtained bitcoin is what the person I responded to said, suggesting anti money laundering concerns which are the concerns I responded to
And the tax liability sister comments all disagree with each other
Notably, the parent commenter hasn’t replied at all yet
hodl
I know you're joking but keeping bitcoin now really does feel like a poor investment given it's showing no signs of ever being revived.
Bitcoin died *again*? hehe :P
oh i dont think its 'dead' in the way people often describe. More...done. Like, the period of obscene growth is over and its now seemingly settled into a fairly dull investment with mediocre returns.
Well, that’s what people have said all the way to $70k+ price.
It's underperformed the S&P500 over the last 5 years, but you know what they say about past performance not predicting future returns. Maybe AI will unlock an untapped reservoir of ever-greater fools.
Isn't that a good thing? The main argument I've heard against using bitcoin as currency is that it's too volatile.
But the volatility hasn’t gone away. Compared to previous periods of broader interest in it (rife with the awful FOMO habits of people) sure it’s not as bad, but it still fluctuates wildly and without warning. In the past 12mo it has gone as high as 120k and as low as 60k, currently around 76k. You cannot reasonably use a currency like that. Your wealth can’t be doubling or halving over months with 10pt swings over a single day being a common occurrence. How much mental energy and planning would have to go into timing any and all purchases and earning?
Better odds than a casino, but still basically a casino.
It would be, except when the primary value proposition is capturing the upside of that volatility. In the case of BTC a sustained lack of volatility is going to create significant downward pricing pressure. At some point that will trigger a run and as stakeholders have condensed the rut will get deeper and deeper as the upside of the volatility swings continually lower.
Also the transaction cost. Is it any better?
https://bitcoincalculator.tools/calculators/lightning
Its about 2 cents for a coffee(10k sats ~= 7.6 usd), or 0.2%.
Versus 1.5-3.5% that visa typically charges.
Depends on the actor.
From western perspective, maybe, but there are many people in the world who don't trust neither their government, nor western ones: Iranians, Russians, some Chinese, etc.
BTC is a nice safe place for money, which can't be touched by neither of state adversaries. Underperforming some other asset classes is totally acceptable, when your expectation for the brokerage account is effectively zero after arrest/freeze/sanctions.
I would buy your argument, if bitcoin were the only cryptocurrency.
For most of the people you mention, a fiduciary cryptocurrency like these 'stable coins' is the better product.
(If you don't trust the value of the USD, and thus don't want a stable coin linked to that, you could use one that's linked to Swiss Franks or the Singapore dollar.)
Well, if only we had something like that with a proper liquidity!
USDT/USDC are useful for the exchange to fiat, but have freeze function in their contract, thus posing a risk for big longterm savings, and they rot under the inflation (which btc generally beats).
There are indeed a couple of unfreezable stablecoins, but they don't have mainstream adoption and proper liquidity. USDT kind of captured the market by being first, and USDC is heavily pushed by the major institutional players, so here we are.
But that's true, it's more about crypto in general.
People found a new way to turn electricity into money at the expense of the atmosphere: AI.
Ethereum, for all its other faults, has shown that burning lots of electricity is not necessary for cryptocurrencies.
https://bitcoindeaths.com/
what is dead may never die
The log scale is awfully misleading, especially since money doesn't really work like that.
Anything but a log scale would be misleading. When showing long term growth of something that has grown so drastically, it is imperative to use a log scale so that 10% gains look consistent over time. Especially in finance.
you can press the "linear" button if you'd like.
but i think the primary point of the comment was to highlight the "Bitcoin has been declared dead 478 times" part
yeah I mean it just depends on time horizons, if you bought at 117k you are hurting now if you need the money ASAP.
Also, I gotta say I do not think Bitcoin is a bubble or whatever (IMO a real value there), but really this sort of site makes it seem like it is a bubble with the sort of "blind to history" boosterism.
Go read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, or Market Wizards series, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, or any number of books about financial history and there are endless people saying 'it will never die and all the doubters are just wrong' before any big market crash.
It's worth saying something with real value can still have a bubble - both bicycles and the internet were huge market bubbles at one time, but they're also undeniably valuable.
To play Devil's advocate:
Let's assume bitcoin has a tiny but positive probability of running the world economy in, say, 50 years. Ie bitcoin is a lottery ticket.
The fair value for a lottery ticket is some positive number. In 99.99..% of cases, the ticket will expire worthless. (In 0.00..1% of cases it will be worth quadrillions.)
The fair value of a lottery ticket is not a bubble, even if most lottery tickets expire worthless.
---
Now, of course, it's still possible to overpay for lottery tickets. Eg if you buy an actual lottery ticket in retail, the whole transaction usually loses you at least 50 cents on the dollar for lottery taxes alone.
But that's a separate issue.
You argument is that it could have some long term value, which is different than a lottery ticket (which has a calculable minimum expected value at time of purchase).
Slightly more abstract: my argument is that assets with a very skewed probability distribution of future value will have a positive current value, even if in the vast majority of cases, they'll be worthless in the future.
Lottery tickets were only an example.
to be fair the majority of the statements that site mocks are not about bitcoin being dead but being a ponzi scheme, evil, hard to use by normal people, silly, a risky investment etc.
All are criticism that can be evaluated on their own but it's irrelevant how much bitcoin grew since they were made.
Buy signal
They've hodled from the original ~$200,000 donation to $1.2 million, now down to $800,000.
If they haven't accidentally done this, they've definitely got some balls
I hope they still have the private key.
Really hope so too. Would be devastating
It is an interesting fact about Bitcoin in general. There are 21M tokens in total AND some percentage are lost every year. Run this simulation long enough and there will be very few active Bitcoins remaining.
Seems pretty silly to build in deflation into a currency. It incentivises putting your money in a mattress for 100 years.
I like the alternative even less, as it incentivises spending more than you would and taking on debt you don't really need.
Well, countries have experienced moderate inflation and moderate deflation, ask the ones who lived through both which one they preferred.
Moderate deflation is fine, it's good even. But only as long as nominal GDP stays stable.
See the so called 'Long Depression' in the 19th century. Which was only a depression of the price level, everything else did well.
For a more sectoral example, see how computer hardware used to get cheaper and cheaper all the time, but total spending on hardware went up.
How does that work? When inflation goes to 18%, borrowing rates go to 23%.
It's not silly, it harnesses some of the mechanics behind ponzi schemes to encourage viral spread. Early entrants are incentivized to evangelize it to newer ones
Deflation is a good thing, it rewards delayed gratification. Those evil Keynesians have convinced the world a little bit of inflation is good. It isn’t. Losing purchasing power on your money is a bug.
Nothing wrong with putting money under a mattress for 100y if the value of money is not evaporating.
For most of human history the money was stable. It’s the disasters of 20th century wars that eroded the value, and 21st century lack of monetary discipline that keeps driving it down now.
"Delayed gratification" is also provided by investments producing returns. An economy with lots of investors will outperform one where people stuff their cash into their mattress, and deflation makes it very hard for potential investments to beat that strategy.
[citation needed]
The Spanish empire was driven to collapse by hyperinflation. Even in the US, there were financial collapses in the 19th and 18th century. Bank runs have been a thing for as long as banks have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run
Your premise is based on faulty assumptions. The existence of credit itself is what causes monetary instability, and without credit the world would look very different.
Indeed. Credit is money; ultimately anyone can expand the money supply with an IOU.
Money is destroyed when a loan is paid back. Private credit does not expand the monetary supply permanently. Only the state can increase the money supply.
That only makes sense if money is a durable good destroyed by use. But money is improved by use and lost when put under a mattress. In economics terms, MV=PQ, and your proposal sets V low, which harms Q (goods available for sale)
No, no. The issuer of your money is really, really happy when you don't use the money. Because that means they can issue more money, without causing inflation to spike.
..and, you think that covers both individual and collective good?
..balance in all things. Neither being completely stingy, individually, nor being excessively spendy will benefit us, individually or collectively. ..but there are times for either.
I wonder if there's a way to quantify that and put a variable on the conditions, and have an inflationary/deflationary currencynthat is dynamically stable depending on conditions.
..i mean, individually, most people will eventually spend, if they have much saved and it benefits them to do so. but occasionally, we do need a kick in the pants. whenever the economynis in gridlock, that's the time for inflation. ..but when people are spending excessively, it's a time for deflation, which discourages taking on debt, and pushes the economy towards real wealth. rewarding long-term thinkers is valuable, and has a very broad effect on society.
The point of money is not to reward delayed gratification. The point of money is to efficiently tabulate human preferences, and deflation directly counteracts this by introducing potentially unbounded latency at every step. That's why it destroys economies, as it has throughout history.
Can you provide an example of deflation destroying an economy in history? There are many more examples of inflation destroying economies.
Japan in living memory, I believe? I'm not a history buff. Google should have many examples.
Are you kidding me? Have you heard of a tiny event called the Great Depression?
The Japanese Lost Decade?
Greece Debt Crisis?
They're a cryptocurrency fan, of course they haven't heard of those. Nobody reasonable would try to transition to cryptocurrency if they knew actual financial history.
The problems with using physical gold as currency are very well known. When population would increase, or when someone would hoard it, it would cause deflation. Likewise, when a new deposit of gold was found, it would cause inflation.
This is, in part, why there were expeditions to find gold.
It's nice when I do it. Not so nice when everyone else does it. If sitting on the money has better returns than running a supermarket, why run a supermarket? Any investment has to beat deflation. Why hire people? In fact maybe I should fire everyone to hold on to more capital and spend as little as possible...
Yep, exactly why Bitcoin people dont understand their own system.
First of all, because not everyone starts with inherited wealth. Also because ideally running a supermarket should give you more money even in a deflationary world. Worst thing is that you gain less money on day N+100 vs day N, but it does not mean you lose money or stop gaining it.
Historically, as far as I am aware, there was never a situation when deflation coincided with good things happening.
A healthy amount of inflation keeps the economy going.
The idea that you can put away an amount of money under your bed that buys 1,000 loaves of bread or one GPU, leave it there for decades, and then have it buy exactly the same number of loaves of bread or GPUs is a fantasy. You can hold onto the shiny rock but you cannot stop the world rotating around you and changing all its relative prices.
Achieved by a combination of restrictions on trade, price stability laws, occasional crippling shortages, and quietly shaving bits off old coins. A much poorer world.
If you have a brilliant technical solution that requires throwing out all conventional economics, you don't have a brilliant technical solution. Bitcoin is rotten to its core and every excuse you make for it proves the point.
Absolutely ridiculous. People have been counterfeiting and debasing money for as long as there has been money.
I think deflation-based economy could produce some interesting capital-allocation environemnt. Investment offering a 2% real return becomes unattractive if cash itself earns 2% real purchasing-power yearly. You could argue this raises the hurdle rate for investment and eliminates low-quality projects. And the counterargument is exactly the same: it raises the hurdle rate for investment and therefore some potentially good projects would never receive funding. And thats probably where the intellectually interesting argument really lives, rather than in inflation good deflation bad
The right thing would be to have 0 change in the value of money as long as the right amount of money exists.
The right maount of money is the amount of money we as normal humans need to work with (buying and selling stuff).
Inflation and deflation are results of too much money or too little money in comparision to the production capability of a society.
If i save today for my retirement and money gets less valuable when i'm retired, i have to give more 'saved' capacity back to get the real capacity (people taking care of me) and if i have more value, the others have to do more for me.
Controlling this is 'work' from experts and is not solved by bitcoin btw.
I suspect it was a deliberate strategy to create scarcity, allowing the original creators to massively cash out. If you make an inflationary distributed currency, it may work better but it's a bit harder to get rich on it.
During much of the industrial revolution, gold also rose in real price. But people still did business in gold standard countries.
(Hint: the gold might be under a mattress or in a vault, but you can still an almost arbitrary amount of gold denominated debts and loans and deposits.)
There is zero evidence that deflation has any effect on spending.
At the micro level, the change in price is too small for every day purchases. Would you starve yourself for one day because the pizza will be one cent cheaper tomorrow?
At the macro level, every interest rate will be adjusted based on the base inflation/deflation rate, so the net effect is zero. Banks will offer a higher profit rate for their savings account to entice people to deposit their money in the bank instead of their mattress.
The other option is to make everyone gamblers, either speculate on properties or stocks. Pick your poison.
Tail emissions and infinite divisibility are proposals to address this.
Well, they are infinitely divisible in principle, so it doesn't matter too much.
(At the moment, there's a smallest fraction you can send on the network, but they can change that.)
No they are not. There are only 8 decimal places, not infinite.
AFAIK it can be changed later.
Can't the change the 21M?
Yes, they could change that, too.
However I expect that adding more decimal places will actually happen, but adding extra bitcoins won't.
Worth pointing out that the monetary policy of bitcoin is not written in stone; all you need to change it is a majority of hashpower. The current chain of bitcoin mainnet includes hard forks, like this one due to miners' manual intervention over a software bug that was exploited: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...
21M is the theoretical cap. At the moment there are 20M and more are constantly being mined. Miners have to convert bitcoin into real currency to pay for their electricity both for mining and transaction fees. This means that there is always a supply of bitcoin for sale. Which is fine if there is still demand for new bitcoin, but who's buying bitcoin these days? It has underperformed both the S&P 500 and gold over the last 5 years. I expect bitcoin inflation to continue. (AKA the bitcoin price to continue to go down).
Eventually with quantum computing we will be able to recover those wallets right? (Technically)
at this point bitcoin will be worthless
That depends on whether the public key has been exposed.
Bitcoin addresses encode the ripemd160 hash of the public key, so by default when payments are made to new addresses they are not quantum crackable.
But when someone spends from an address they publish the public key to the chain as part of the spend. From then on, any new deposits sent to the same address are at risk of quantum attack
The hash is merely a convenience, the _actual_ public key used in transactions is present in the ledger and available to anybody who wants it.
Technically it might be more profitable to mine extraterrestrial diamonds.
The project no longer uses that Bitcoin wallet for bounties.
What does that mean for that donation, and why is the wallet still listed on the website?
I think that a large part of the priced in "value" of Bitcoin is just lots and lots of Bitcoin that nobody can access anymore.
Bitcoin's supposed to be "liquid" but I'm wondering what happens when there's a forced liquidity event.
I mean, it's the opposite of that; it's forced illiquidity when people lose access to their keys. There is no way to gain access to those coins and you cannot "force" liquidity on the bitcoin protocol.
What do you mean by forced liquidity event?
Bitcoin really isn't money.
They should send it to a dead wallet instead.
True and its also not compareable to gold.
But as long as others giving you real money for this garbage, it would be better to use it for a project like neovim :)
To never have experienced a usefulness of cryptocurrency is a privileged position to be in.
Ah yes lets ignore the tons of co2 which has direct impact of primarily poor people around the whole globe and the energy stealing which also is happening through bitcoin to make the case for alll of this for a handful of techsavy people in a handful of countries who are apparently now able to get their money through crypto but also have to now find people taking this?
Yeah no.
You know what happened in el salvador? A Lot of people got their initial crypto stolen.
And you know what real people do? They use euros and dollars as hard cash. Like i have seen in Iran.
“Yeah no.”
Ah yes let’s ignore the tons of energy being used in giant data centers run by visa and Mastercard to operate the payment cards used by billions of people around the world.
“Yeah no.”
You know what happened in USA? A lot of people got their cash stolen.
Your arguments are as coherent as the dissonant “Yeah no.”
"Yeah no" have had these arguments for ages and nothing has changed.
Bitcoin uses a massive amount of energy and has neither the transaction amount, nor the transaction speed and a LOT of features missing which visa/mastercard and a normal bank provide.
Losing your key to a wallet? BTC gone
Fraud? Yeah and now what?
Seller or buyer protection? hahaha no
Lets not compare apples with stones okay?
That's true for bitcoin, but not for cryptocurrencies in general. Especially those that moved to proof-of-stake.
A dead wallet has better use for Bitcoin though.
We don't know where the Bitcoin has come from, so it needs to go through extensive anti money laundering checks.
Save the hassle of all of that taxes, accountancy and just send everything to a dead wallet.
In what country does a bitcoin donation need to go through an "anti money laundering check"? Also, you could pay a lawyer 100k to handle the taxes and accounting and you would still have 700k left over.
Any country which bans Monero and their mixers being sent to exchanges which are then flagged by OFAC on tainted cryptocurrencies.
Nah, you would have a lot more to pay in taxes.
Might as well send it to a dead wallet, it's not real money anyway in many countries as legal tender.
Fair enough
How about they use the bitcoin to donate?
Well the "non comparability" to gold has to do with the fact you need a functioning network to spend (good luck verifying a key by hand with a calculator). You can spend gold even when you're transacting with the last person on earth.
However the value is as much as people agree to value it and for a typical person both have little utility. Maybe BTC has even more utility because it facilitates remote transfers of value very easily.
So as long as the network exists there is intristic value in BTC. I believe more than one can say about gold.
Still, a good portfolio will contain both gold (in small coins likely as a kind of "war hedge") and BTC as a kind of hyperinflation hedge.
BTC has less facility in an emergency because energy is gone, internet is gone, bitcoin miners are gone and nodes are gone.
Your gold might give you food, your btc is rotting on some hard disk on a computer you can't / wont use.
BTC as a hyperinflation hedge? We have seen already what happens to btc when money gets tide: BTC drops.
Not really. Try using gold in retail.
Goldbacks have entered the chat. [0]
[0] https://www.goldback.com/
My local coffee shop only takes long government currency.
My bank already allows me to keep my bank account money in stocks and sells units whenever I spend. (We have no capital gains tax here, so this is less insane than it sounds.)
Exactly this! It was rendered money by some minds.
Unlike that paper money. That paper money was created by the Gods!
It is even more useless than fiat.
It doesn't have to be useful as money to be useful as a donation.
You just have to be able to sell it for money.
You should lead by example. Could you please purchase $800k of bitcoin and then send to a dead wallet for all of us to see?
Neovim first.
I've never "purchased" Bitcoin or any cryptocurrencies ever because it is not money or legal tender and never will.
Bitcoin isn't really money same way as US dollar isn't really money.
This could become the premise of a near-cyberpunk heist movie..
Similar to Swordfish? :)
I checked their official donation channel is OpenCollective. I think the Bitcoin address is no longer being used and they just forgot to update the footer
Yeah, someone probably deposited an amount a long time ago and it's sat there earning interest.
Bitcoin doesn’t pay interest. And that’s a good thing.
I’ve read so many news stories of people gone missing who had been know to have sole access to bitcoin wallets with large amount of bitcoins in them.
I wonder how people at large crypto exchanges handle that. Perhaps shamir share the access to the pkey password and store parts at secure places like a bank? And make official access protocol akin to dnssec, but simplified?
Large exchanges handle this very simply: If they have the keys, it goes to the inheritor(s) once they get a court order. If they do not, it goes nowhere
but what sort of people keep their bitcoins on the exchange ? the whole point is about not being seizable by dirty governments...
Hype vibe investors, probably.
Traders; low information investors; people who are not 100% confident in their personal infosec and not willing to lose their bitcoins on their own.
"Not being seizable" hasn't really worked out for bitcoiners who've been arrested. Or for that matter robbed at gunpoint.
People who want to be scammed.
"Number go up" people
Pretty much everyone. There's a reason people lost money with ftx, Mt gox and other scams.
Managing your private keys is cumbersome, error prone, requires some computer literacy, the list goes on.
Tbh I have been kind of impressed by how L2 businesses brought back centralisation in every possible way. I guess it's more efficient for them.
In the same way, the internet was supposed to be decentralised, everyone being in charge of their own servers. But in practice nobody has the time to set up their own MX servers.
Worse if crypto exchange bosses go missing https://archive.is/lPpRz
I worked at a crypto exchange, yes we used shamir shares. But probably not as sophisticated as you're thinking, there was basically one big "break glass" text document with all the keys. And then a hand-rolled software on each person's laptop to distribute the plain text and run / practice the 3/5 recovery ceremony. So anyone losing their device would be equivalent to someone quitting and require its own ceremony to reissue a key, but I don't think that ever actually happened.
We explored using smart contracts to have logic perform the 3/5 consensus rather than a cryptosystem, but that was never rolled out while I was there. Social recovery wallets in general did not take off, which was a big learning moment for me that very few people actually cared about the technology and what they really wanted was an app with as many gambling features as possible that uploaded their keys to google drive.
What happens if some of those tax the unrealized gains bills pass in some country where they have obligations?
They would have to either pay the tax on gains or write off losses.