Silent_Water
Tribune
When bitcoin sets new records...
On August 10, 2010, a pseudonymous BitcoinTalk forum user called “Stone Man” reported that he accidentally lost 8,999 Bitcoin (BTC) due to a technical mistake. Today, the coins would be worth over $180 million.
The incident had occurred a day earlier after Stone Man had amassed 9,000 BTC, purchased from the first ever exchange, and then tried to send one coin from his wallet to a different address. The transaction, which can be viewed here, shows that Stone Man achieved this objective. What it doesn’t show is what happened next. The pseudonymous forum user outlined the sequence of events:
1) Bought 9,000 BTC on one of the exchanges over time.
2) Transferred them to my client running on a Linux live CD distro of Debian.
3) Backed up the wallet file to a flash drive.
4) Sent 1 BTC to myself
5) Closed client before any confirmations
6) Shut down system (wiped system disk loaded into memory and therefore the ./bitcoin folder
7) Loaded system back up
8) Copied old wallet.dat file into ./bitcoin folder
9) After some confirmations appeared the balance was 1 BTC and there was a transaction saying I spent 8,900 BTC to an address I did not recognize
Because I am obviously too old to understand "economy of today", on the one hand I obviously spared a lot of money in my life because I only bought "things" or shares at the stock exchanges of which I understood how they worked or earned money with, for example "Coca Cola" is something I easily understood, "Wirecard" was something I never understood, because how should this "German" company ever have made millions with Far-Eastern porn companies and their payments?
On the other hand, maybe I lost "billions and billions" already in our modern "virtual" economy" because "Bitcoin" is for me and for almost a decade now something I never really understood and which I never bought because I always expected from a "currency" an equivalent in value on the other side of the currency's "publisher": a state with a "good" ecnomy or an equivalent in gold or something else in values.
So, what is now the real value behind all these "Bitcoins"? Anything else than the expectancy of the Bitcoin buyers that it will rise and rise or keep its value for a long time?
This rather reminds me of the great "Tulip Mania" which was the first economic bulb implosions in modern European history.
Tulip mania - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Up to now, I did not really understand what might be the difference between "Bitcoins" in the 21st century and "Tulips" in the 17th century.
Could someone please tell me the difference in so simple words that an extremely old "Methusalem" of 57 years like me could understand it?
Thank you very much in advance!