No. Its a closed system. For every dollar that someone spent on a bitcoin, that dollar was received by someone else.
Now, you can certainly say that the money was spent on things like electricity, or GPU hardware, that has little/no value now. But thats irrelevant - the money most certainly spent, rather than "evaporate" into thin air.
> Does the FBI even consider bitcoin as something that actually has any value that requires investigating an accusation of theft?
Market cap isn't money, its an estimate of value based on a premise that is not merely flawed but outright insane -- that every unit of an asset that exists can be liquidated at the current market price of a single unit (that is, that market clearing price is not effected by supply.)
Its used because its easily calculated, and people are prone to want to believe that values that are easy to calculate are also meaningful.
Just because I can buy a bitcoin from somebody for $1000 a few months ago doesn't mean that same person is willing to buy it back from me for $1000 dollars today. The value in that bitcoin has evaporated, disappeared, gone up in smoke. Bitcoins are only worth how much people are willing to pay for them; what was spent on them in the past does not convey to them any value today.
The value hasn't evaporated - if you bought a bitcoin for $1000 a few months ago and now you can sell it for $100, then value of ~$900 (assuming that 'real worth' of USD didn't change much) was transferrend from you to the guy who sold you that bitcoin back then.
You buy at $100 and sell at $1000. Where did the value come from that compelled the new guy to buy it from you at that inflated price? In my thinking, by your example, the new guy wouldn't pay an extra $900 because the value didn't already exist in the bitcoin you are selling.
No, initially you were in possession of the value, as you could have sold the bitcoin to somebody else for that $1000 dollars. The fall of value in a bitcoin did not somehow go back in time, find the person you bought it from, and transfer value to them.
Think of it this way, I buy a nice car for $100k. The person selling it gets $100k in cash, and I get $100k worth of car. A year later, I crash the car and it is now worth $1k in scrap metal. Where did my $99k worth of value in the car go? Did the dealer somehow acquire that value? No, I simply destroyed it. I destroyed the value of the car, it wasn't taken from me. The value of the cash I gave the dealer? That is more or less still the same, but that is his business, not mine.
Value is not zero sum. Creating and destroying value is trivial.
I think its fair to say that scenarios where a service cancels a user account because his/her name was not "realistic sounding" are few and far between. (Assuming you're not entering names like "Doorknob Toothbrush")
Well, the site did generate Iva Lavallée as a French female name for me. I had never heard of someone called Iva, but it seems it's been given to exactly 100 persons in France since 1900.
Iva Lavallée sounds like He's gonna swallow it, really.
Seems safe to say that the customer support person could have surely emailed the CEO if they really wanted to, according to [1] they have a total of 8 employees as of thier recent funding last week. Also, a 2-second google search shows that it is brian@coinbase.com
It just lends more credibility to the "this is just a mgrunin sockpuppet" hypothesis elsewhere in this thread. No way in an 8 person company, you "don't have the ability" to talk to one of them.
I'm guessing it's someone just spreading FUD, for whatever reason. I don't know that it's mgrunin, but they probably just imagined the company being some monolith that is actually quite small.
That's also an incredibly unprofessional response that completely throws their company under the bus, which I have a hard time believing anyone who isn't a complete moron would do. Seems quite convenient that it fits the poster's narrative perfectly.
--
Edit: after doing a bit more digging, mcgrunin has been very respectful toward the CEO of coinbase after his mishap. So let's not go libeling people needlessly.
Surprisingly this is word for word the response I got from customer support. Rees from Coinbase reached out to me after this post and they've resolved 1 of the 2 transaction problems. I'm still missing bitcoins.
They will get you the bitcoins (I got mine yesterday afternoon after a promised Friday delivery) the question will be at what price they give them to you.
What are you guys talking about. This is my first and only YC account that I created yesterday. What is my reasoning behind creating a shill account? If you read my responses in my own thread, you'll see that I thanked Brian for resolving the issues the proper way.
Mgrunin, don't take some of these comments too seriously. I know it's really frustrating to read comments that jump to absurd conclusions about yourself without having done any research. Especially when they're firing at someone they don't know. Not all of us on HN are like this though.
I think the comment by `seobeaver` on the other thread is what threw off a lot of people because it seemed like a needless hero-worship (of sorts). And you explained in the other thread that possibly that user came from one of the forums that you frequent that you posted a link to this discussion on.
I appreciate your comment. I just wanted to clear the air and put an end to that assumption. I know there are a few members here that are annoyed that I utilized HN as a means to my end, but it was my last option before contacting lawyers.
I am happy that Brian was able to resolve my case, but it is frustrating to see others dealing with similar issues here.
This is precisely why I was shocked at this response. Half of my transactional issues have now been resolved with Coinbase, now waiting on the second transaction.
> I can (and will) contest them and get a new card, so really the bank is taking on risk.
No, they company you are purchasing from is taking the risk (hence why they are asking for the additional info). The company that you purchase from is almost always the one who covers the loss in cases of a chargeback caused by CC fraud, not the bank/CC company.
I'm confused. If I give my card to company A, but somehow along the line someone gets the details and uses it buy something at company B. And there was no way to link it to company A. How is company A having any risk whatsover?
I believe it's company B, the one who accepted a fraudulent order the one at risk. The company I have no relationship whatsover. My only risk is to check if I have charges I didn't make.
company A to you is company B to someone else. The point is that the risk is not to the bank but to merchants.
For any given transaction the company does not know if they're "company A" and you're a genuine customer, or if they're "company B" being defrauded out of product with stolen details, so all merchants are taking on risk.
I usually end up fiddling around in Excel, planning out time and costs for many different ways to get from A to B..
EWR -> MIA
EWR -> FLL
JFK -> MIA
FJK -> FLL
... etc ..
What are you talking about? Every major travel website has an option along the lines of 'New York City - All airports', which includes JFK, LGA, EWR
They two links are for the same company.
The first link is for an injection MOLD. The mold can produce a few thousand parts at ~$1-$3/each.
For 1,000-10,000 parts, ProtoMold is an great option.
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear in the original post. I'm interested in one-off pieces that I can design to solve problems around the house and if it takes a month to wait for that, no big deal. I don't need thousands of pieces.
The parent to my original post suggested there was something akin to 3D printing out there in terms of cost and versatility that was just slower to produce. Something designed for mass production certainly isn't it.
I'm interested in one-off pieces that I can design to solve problems around the house and if it takes a month to wait for that, no big deal
This does not seem like a big market, though. Exlcuding perhaps interior decoration. The engineering properties of 3d printed items for DIY are still TBD (lots of plastic cracking complaints, glued paper doesn't seem much better in terms of field-use). Also, in practice waiting 30 days for a DIY prototype is unlikely to be acceptable (serial project workflows & all that). small batch CNC will get you access to metal. Access to ABS does not seem all that special. Is there something in mind you have (like a project?) or is this all just theoretical?
Like I said, I was just interested to know what other technologies are directly competing with 3D for one-off builds that can produce the same result (in terms of cost, function, etc.), but have the downside of being slower to produce as suggested by the poster before me.
The slower/faster thing is really more an issue about iteration and time to market for projects. Project costs are a function of overhead--in addition to piece-cost. Overhead is a function of speed and thus project cost is a function of speed. This cost is/can be an order of magnitude larger than the unit-piece-cost. In other words, if you relax the speed constraint you implicitly relax the cost constraint, at least in a normal context. But these tradeoffs (and choices) depend on understanding a project's scope/spec. You are high-light at least one edge case, though: the home DIY, where time is no value but unit cost is paramount. In this case 3D printing might be a good idea, provided your project is suited to such an ouput.
Now, you can certainly say that the money was spent on things like electricity, or GPU hardware, that has little/no value now. But thats irrelevant - the money most certainly spent, rather than "evaporate" into thin air.