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by smoldesu 1619 days ago
> This concentration not only risks to threaten blockchain's own premises, but also exposes minor investors to risk of whales who lead the market and can easily speculate on prices since they can influence the price trends

The problem is that you can only associate value with a wallet, not an individual, and even that doesn't really make the market any safer; it just further exposes how terrible cryptocurrency is as an investment asset. Gold is valuable due to it's scarcity. Diamonds are popular due to their demand. Cryptographic hashes are valuable because of their transient demand and abundant supply.
2 comments
imtringued 1619 days ago
Gold is expensive because of scarcity, that does not make it valuable. In fact, people are wasting their time on this planet, digging up gold which is merely supposed to represent wealth but not be wealth in itself.

If you think of gold as a speculative accounting system then it really is just a very resource inefficient way of book keeping. Digging up gold and going to war for gold mines makes you poorer, not richer. Yet people believe that this system is infallible.

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chrisco255 1619 days ago
Price is a function of supply and demand, so trying to isolate one or the other doesn't make sense.

Why does it matter how many people are associated with a particular wallet? The wallet with $150 worth of Bitcoin has the same amount of security as the wallet with $15M, and it's considerable. The protocol itself has never been hacked, despite holding nearly $1 trillion of value.

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ArnoVW 1619 days ago
Arguably, if someone would hack BTC, he or she would have to make sure no-one found out.

Because if people knew that BTC was hacked, the bottom would fall out under it, and all your stolen coins would become worthless.

Not to say that I think it's been hacked....

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