bitcoin
Bitcoin is hard to grok for most folks. The best explanation may be this.
The Canadian Crypto Exchange QuadrigaCX CEO who died with sole crypto keys (password) making it impossible for customers to access bitcoins is a recent example of unregulated bitcoin interests. It’s also been reported that he got married and then filed a will 12 days before his death during his honeymoon trip in India. The wife is the sole benefitiary. Some people suspect he faked his death. Some say that there is fake death mafia working in the area where he died. It sounds far fetched. But faking deaths might have occurred in the past in Bitcoin community. Crowd funding assassinations may have transpired as well.
Bitcoin community has been marred by the unusal history of recent deaths of young people in foreign lands. Here are some of them:
Philipines has been described as a black hole for money laundering. It is also where you can buy fake deaths. Same is true of india.
None of these circumstantial tidbits can be used to conclude purposeful scams. But they indicate certain troubles inherent in the ecosystem.
More relevant may be questions regarding what happens to bitcoin when you die. It isn’t very clear dying while holding bitcoins is a safe thing to do. Nor is it commonly understood and agreed by larger groups of people outside the bitcoin community. Trust requires understanding. Understanding requires simplicity. Most people understand banks, wills, trust funds, loans, etc. Very few in the general public understand bitcoin. Looking at the bitcoin obituaries, the community seems to disregard opinions of those who criticize bitcoin, or blockchain in general. It is telling that the first entry is dated December, 2010 when a bitcoin was priced at $0.23. It then shot up to $17,163.38 on January 7th, 2017, only to come down to around $3,500 around January, 2019. The observers notice the wild fluctuations of bitcoin prices that defy legitimacy or any logic.
Maybe this is the inevitable outcome of the system created by person(s) who can’t figure out whether to remain anonymous. The irresponsiblity is baked into the design.
Recent comments by Bruce Schneier claimed Bitcoin is essentially useless. Fighting words. But the responses to this article from the bitcoin community has been vehement personal attacks. The points raised by Schneier are quite valid.
JP Morgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon famously called bitcoin as a “fraud”. Yet, JP Morgan will be creating its own crypto currency. This is both greedy and cynical. After all we are talking about the John Pierpoint Morgan.
Vladimir Putin met Vitalik Buterin to endorse Ethereum. How seemingly innocent innovations like ethereum gets entangled in geo politics and economy, manned by the very same Stalin-esque cast of characters.
The confusions and hand waving behind Proof of Work vs. Proof of Stakes is telling enough. Someone announces a hard fork. Enormous sums of money appear and disappear into black holes. People probably will die sudden strange deaths. Are we to naively believe that the code base with more than 600 open issues can be basis to replace the global banking system which can be automated without regulating institutions and people who manage them. People with hopefully at least minimal sense of ethics? Why release ethereum with “Proof of Work” in the first place? It’s predictably easy to claim that was intentional and temporary. There are different kinds of “Proof of Stakes” designs. Each different one has own compromises and trade-offs.
Various “initial coin offerings” have amassed huge sums of money with very little to show for it. The flawed ICO of filecoin which netted record $257,000,000 in a month has been suspected as a Ponzi scheme. Tron is disavowed by original creator of bittorrent and past employees. Most of the ICO’s are clearly scams. But examples like filecoin which is based on ipfs are very troubling. The people behind ipfs, like Juan Benet, start by writing code and proving their interest and intellect to the community. But once the ICO money is available, they seem to disappear. Look at the coding history of ipfs before and after ICO. Juan has not done anything since the ICO. Perhaps he has faked death?
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