BItcoin as Retirement Savings

The volatility of bitcoin has effects that we don't yet fully understand. It can be scary and exciting which temps many people to speculation in the short term, but in the long term this tends to fade out. The hodler perspective is long term.

For me I treat my stash of sats like retirement savings.  In a way over the long term the investment performance is more certain and when compared to my regular retirment savings plan, it out performs and has many benifits. in some ways it is more secure. For example in NZ the goverments controls when you can withdraw from your Kiwi Saver scheme, Ie; only to buy your first home, in an emergency or when you retire. These rules can be changed. In addition to this the funds are actually held by banks, who charge fees and have some counterparty risk. This makes two trusted parties.    

Overtime counter party risk with traditional retirement investments adds up and gains from long term investment in bitcoin become more predictable. I think it could become the worlds retirment plan for the new 2020 decade.

Paypal says Nope to Libra

There goes one 10 million dollar partner. Its not looking so easy or so good for Facebooks endeavor into crypto currency, Libra.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-04/paypal-pulls-out-of-facebook-led-libra-cryptocurrency-group?srnd=cryptocurrencies

Bloomberg is Trying to Stir or Joining the Debate

It's Ether huffers and matrix purple pills all around. Go Ashleigh Schap!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-10-05/crypto-rebels-trip-over-each-other-en-route-to-financial-utopia

You can never meet all the requirements of all countries and jurisdictions. They are overlapping and contradictory. The founders of MakerDoa seem to be corrupted by money in New York and are not thinking big enough. It seems like a great service though and proof that crypto finance is growing strongly. There are more and more options to make interest on your crypto savings.

Casascius Coin - Advanced Cash

Backed by bullion and the blockchain, what once was security is now just novel and practical for such sums.


We have some big holders here to keep on the radar. You can see the stats and the movements here. I think having the ability to see when these coins are transferred off of the coin is quite revolutionary.

Stories from a Wizzard

Gold Bugs are Getting Shilled

So many gold bugs feel they have to rebut the #dropgold buy bitcoin campaign. They don't realise they have been shilled. Greyscales add is a great example of Bitcoiners mastery of online tactics. Do we really care, most of us like gold, but it gets lots of attention, #Dropgold is the ultimate shill, gold bugs should stop fighting and jump on board.

credit image GrabCad

Power Behind Bitcoin Will Reduce

When people talk about bitcoin mining they often bring up the energy costs. They are not however considering how bitcoin is set up over time. The reward for miners is reducing over time to near zero.

In the beginning the mining reward was a high number of bitcoin, say 250 bitcoins, but the price of bitcoin was very low, say 1c.  This meant that you only got rewarded $2.50 worth for each block you mined, so not so many people felt it was worth mining. Bitcoin needed enough people to mine so that some other people who didn't like bitcoin, with more computer power, couldn't get in and mine and effectively kill it. It needed to be strong enough so that a government super computer couldn't hack it.

Now bitcoin computer power is way beyond what any one bad actor can harness. This security challenge is surpassed, likely by more than a 1000x at the moment and the mining reward has halved to 12.5 bitcoins. That reward comes to around $120,000 per ten minute block.

People are complaining that it has gone too far, and they might be right.  It uses as much power as a decent size country, but I would argue that this is short sighted. Next year the reward will be 6.125 bitcoins and if the price does not go up we will see less bitcoin mining happening and do we really know what amount of mining is enough to keep a potentially world changing technology safe? We are high now, but the percentage of bitcoin resource being allocated to this reduces and is only counteracted by price.

This counteracting effect only works so much, eventually (in something like 100 years) the mining reward is programmed to go to zero which will make $0 per block. We can expect the mining to be much less power intensive as compared with the whole bitcoin economy at this point. At this stage mining will still happen though as voluntary transaction fees also go to miners. This type of payment needs to counteract the block reward completely at this stage to make sure that bitcoin has enough computer power.

When the block reward is zero, bitcoin mining power consumption will be directly proportional to how much value we place on security and transactions. I would argue at this point it is nearly 100% efficient.