You're not missing anything. The coins are literally worthless other than to those who trade them on crypto exchanges, to steal each other's lunch money. Plus, launching an attack isn't just a case of paying $30 per hour. You need to have a client able to perform whatever your aim is for the attack, which requires a level of coding knowledge. And dev's at that level of knowledge are probably earning real money for their time.
It's listed on several exchanges [0], so assuming you can carry out the attack, you could pretty easily profit. Not a ton of volume, but you could make some money.
51% attacks are quite possibly wire fraud so I would refrain from bragging about them. More accurately, trying to double spend the coins is wire fraud.
Not if you have the consent of the counter-parties (or are the counter-parties.) It might be against some other law to manipulate the price like that, though.
The person they are swindling can go through their own authorities, and if the authorities in the criminal's country are alerted to his activities, they can go after them as well.
Theft and fraud don't take on different meanings just because the currency is digital.
We've just published a blog post listing then many changes we're pushing up tomorrow to address concerns in this thread and on Twitter; https://brave.com/rewards-update/
As it says in the post, we're definitely planning to talk about whether to block attempts to tip unverified creators altogether.
I would love an analysis on who is moving the market today. In the last month there have been three occurrences where the price of BTC jumped 10% in a single moment (followed by equal sell-offs hours/days later).
Stranger still, all coins seem highly correlated. BTC goes up, all coins go up.
I realize this behavior is not new and the market has been highly correlated since the beginning, ...but why?
In a stock market, some companies outperform others by being more valuable at one moment than another. The difference in value results from differences in the companies’ expected future cash flows.
Crypto coins, despite ICO promises, have not historically been revenue generating assets, so there is no future cash flows generated by them. Thus they can be considered fungible, retaining the same value despite their different symbols and nominal prices. With the level of distrust in the ecosystem, only “bad” news affects a given ICO, sending its value to zero. Neutral news, or good news, does not increase a given coin’s price, so they all settle around the same “value”, and all their “values” move together.
When anyone or their pet monkey can clone a Git repo, change some variables, and launch their own ICO with zbsolutely zero proprietary innovation, it is to be expected that all crypto coins will approach the same value.
(I put “value” in quotes because different coins have wildly different prices, being a function of some variables in the coin’s software determining e.g. how many were “issued”, but you have to ignore those prices and instead think about the underlying “value” represented by the coin. It’s really not much at all — perhaps only the sunk cost of electricity, but likely less than even that.)
I would also love an analysis on what is moving the market. It has to be more than Tether at this point.
Most exchanges that have coins other than Bitcoin use Altcoin/Bitcoin pairs. So you're not trading in relation to the US Dollar, you're trading in relation to Bitcoin.
For a trader, that means that to them 1 ETH is currently worth 0.02678663 BTC. The USD price of Bitcoin doesn't come into play here. So, if Bitcoin goes down, the relation to ETH means that it follows, since 1 ETH is still worth 0.02678663 BTC.
Edit: Why would they do this? A number of reasons, the biggest two being habit and volume.
Most coins are traded on networks that don't have fiat currencies, so they had to choose a cryptocurrency base. Also, many traders in the realm started out with Bitcoin, and love Bitcoin, and want more Bitcoin. So they don't care if a trade gets them USD, they just want to grow their BTC holdings.
Finally, with trading, volume is very important - you want as much being offered for sale as possible. If you split up every order book (btc/eth, xrp/eth, ltc/eth, usd/eth, xrp/ltc, xrp/usd, ltc/btc, etc etc) then the volume of each 'book' is divided amongst the options, making it harder to move larger amounts from one to the other.
> Stranger still, all coins seem highly correlated. BTC goes up, all coins go up.
My current theory is that Bitcoin is the "reserve currency" of all these coins. That is, their price is better understood as being expressed in Bitcoins, not in USD or other currency.
I'm confused by your first comment; the transactional throughput of Bitcoin is completely unrelated to money creation.
On the latter - I think it's more up to you to show that it would be. The value of most things is unlinked from their cost of production. A really obvious example would be a five pound note.
That said, yes, in the stable state, miners should only expend 1BTC-epsilon of 'effort' to produce 1BTC. So if a block contains 1BTC of transaction fees, you'd expect them to spend a maximum of 1BTC (currently ~$6000 USD) to produce a block.
In reality it's a bit more complicated than that because the value fluctuates far more quickly than mining operations can or will scale up or down.
So really, it's the opposite - 1BTC isn't worth the amount of effort miners put in, the amount of effort miners put in should be approximately 1BTC worth. Sort of.
Imagine that I am trying to convince you to buy some cookies I baked. Are you going to care about the effort I put into making the cookies when I ask you to pay me for them?
