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Sleeping beauty Bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2B

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191 points aorloff | 1 comments | 04 Jul 25 18:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.317s | source
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Synaesthesia ◴[05 Jul 25 05:50 UTC] No.44470362[source]▶
I was also around when bitcoin just started out. Many people wanted it to be a global revolution in finance.

But instead it turned into a game of "hodl" to get rich.

Scams were openly perpetrated in the forums.

I became completely disillusioned. What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?

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Spacecosmonaut ◴[05 Jul 25 11:14 UTC] No.44471894[source]▶
Bitcoin is the only immutable peer to peer system ever created (barring advances in quantum computing, and even then the protocol can be updated). In a world headed toward web 3.0, generative AI content & virtual reality, I think there is tremendous value in a trustless and immutable peer to peer system. In fact, I think we NEED it, and should as a society happily bear the power consumption that underpins the security of the network.

Controversial, I know. However, already we cannot trust that a digital picture is genuine. There is currently no solution to this problem. In the near future, I imagine that the raw data of your camera will be associated with a token on a blockchain (not bitcoin, but a dedicated high-capacity blockchain). Such a system would allow us to determine that a picture was indeed taken with a physical device, and thus that the events depicted have a bearing in the real world.

My bet is that we are headed toward a future where blockchain is ubiquitous. Where everything of value is underpinned by a specialized blockchain. When you order groceries, the origin of the produce and raw ingredients are all embedded in blockchain. In virtual reality, every digital product has a specialized blockchain. Every kind of transaction; compute, assets, AI, will all be underpinned by trustless peer to peer systems.

All these specialized blockchains trade security for throughput. My bet is that Bitcoin will act as a security guarantor in our future digital society, where the state of every blockchain is periodically validated on the Bitcoin network. Thus, I bet that every transaction in the future will have an associated Bitcoin cost. Thats why I own a small amount of Bitcoin.

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1. MattRix ◴[05 Jul 25 11:25 UTC] No.44471964[source]▶
It’s not clear to me that most of those use cases will be served better by a blockchain rather than a regular centralized service… but also examples like the camera don’t really work, because someone could still use the camera to photograph a generated image (for example), or hack the camera itself.

On top of that, up until this point in time, Bitcoin has been the opposite of secure. The entire history of it is filled with people constantly losing money and being scammed with no real recourse.