lmao I hope he gets desperate the next time bitcoin spikes & pays some cryptology firm to ‘crack’ it and they wipe it by accident.
In 2011, when he was living in Switzerland, he was given the 7,002 bitcoins by an early Bitcoin fanatic as a reward for making an animated video, “What is Bitcoin?,” which introduced many people to the technology.
That year, he lost the digital keys to the wallet holding the Bitcoin. Since then, as Bitcoin’s value has soared and fallen and he could not get his hands on the money, Thomas has soured on the idea that people should be their own bank and hold their own money.
“This whole idea of being your own bank — let me put it this way: Do you make your own shoes?” Thomas said. “The reason we have banks is that we don’t want to deal with all those things that banks do.”
Guy seems pretty down to earth. He didn’t do any trading for those bitcoins, he was given them as payment for labor.
For reference, 7,002 BTC in 2011 was anywhere from $3500-$7000 depending on what month he was paid.
Also “reward for making an animated video” is a weird way of saying “payment for labor”. Guess wages are going to start being considered rewards now…
I don’t really get why people here are antagonizing this person, even if it wasn’t payment and he traded for it. I get that most people that are into bitcoin are libertarian weirdos, but if you bought into it and made a lot of money that’s not really unethical, at least it’s not any more unethical than investing in the stock market which is actually propped up by systemic reaproppriation of surplus value.
The dude even says “fuck bitcoin” in the article…
I’m glad I used all the bitcoins I’ve ever owned to purchase drugs online, no need to stress about imaginary value I might have stored on some hard drive.
and you were able to convert that “value” into something useful and rewarding!
You know, this brings up a really interesting point about bitcoin that I’d never thought of before. As far as I remember, the number of bitcoins that can be generated is finite, as the mining algorithm becomes more complex until it is impossible to solve. It makes sense in theory; you don’t want bitcoins to be generated forever because they would constantly be depreciating in value.
But, on the other side of the coin (heh), bitcoins can be permanently lost. Again, as far as I know, once a Bitcoin has been lost on a physical drive, it can never be recovered. which would mean, that at some point not only will the number of bitcoins in the world stop increasing, it will actually begin to decrease, because there will always be accidents where people lose hard drives, forget passwords, etc.
So doesn’t that mean that bitcoin won’t exist forever? Unless they divide them into smaller and smaller pieces, which I think also has a limit, at some point the number of bitcoins will decrease until there aren’t enough left.
It’s estimated that ~20% of bitcoins are lost forever- worth around $140 billion at the current exchange rate. It’s a brilliant lesson on artificially induced scarcity and its effect on market prices. I’m just blown away the more I think about it. Some anonymous programmer decided to code digital money that is inherently deflationary solely on the basis of the algorithm that it’s built on- and the whole world decided these tokens have value! One of these days, we’re gonna see this spill out into real world wars.
He didn’t even code it. Dude just wrote a fucking white paper bad got a bunch of other people to help with the work
Yeah, and that makes it even more astounding. He published a paper about a theoretical currency and got thousands of computer scientists to dedicate their lives to it. Not even Jesus could attract such devoted followers.
CompSci is still in the humors phase of its development as a science or engineering discipline and I’m a software dev.
