The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 60 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Hearn: Reaching Bitcoin capacity limits will kick users out of the system
“At worst, things break quite badly, but even at best, even if things don't break, some users won't be able to use Bitcoin, right? They will be kicked out of the system, effectively. There won't be enough capacity to handle them.”
Felten: Bitcoin's 21 million supply cap is changeable by community consensus
“Right now the monetary policy is grow asymptotically to twenty-one million Bitcoins, but that could change by consensus of the community. That twenty-one million limit is not inherent mathematically. It's just a number that is hardwired into the currently used…”
Choi: Hamas stopped accepting Bitcoin donations because the blockchain is traceable
“And, you know, even Hamas, like, I think in like, 20, 22, 23 announced that they were no longer gonna be accepting Bitcoin because it was too traceable.”
Horowitz: Bitcoin reached a $1 trillion market cap without a corporate structure
“Bitcoin started in 2008 and it's, you know, a piece of software and there's probably four engineers working on it at this point and there's no company and it's worth a trillion dollars.”
Ludwin: Chinese investors buying Bitcoin to bypass capital controls caused 2015 rally
“The demand in this case is coming from the Chinese, who are anticipating a currency devaluation, which has been announced and in China, and are using Bitcoin as a means to circumvent capital controls.”
Back: Lightning Network could scale Bitcoin capacity up to 10,000x
“There's also right now quite active work on this sort of Bitcoin enhancement called lightning, which is a best described as a kind of right caching layer for Bitcoin, which might scale Bitcoin by a factor of a thousand or 10,000.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin-native applications will create multi-billion dollar companies
“So, these are very small today, but I think in the future some of these will end up being many multi-billion dollar companies and systems.”
Darknet Bitcoin transactions dropped from 30% in 2012 to under 1%
“In 2012, 30% of Bitcoin transaction value was associated with dark net markets like Alphabay or Silk Road, but by 2018, that number is down to less than one percent.”
Dixon: 18% of Argentinians own stablecoins and 50 million Americans own crypto
“Like Argentina, something like last number I saw was 18% of Argentinians have owned a stable coin. In America, fifty million people have crypto and mostly Bitcoin.”
Dixon: Sub-second transaction finality is impossible in proof-of-work systems
“You just simply can't have, ah, like sub-second transaction finality in a proof of work system. Like, so Bitcoin, like you really need to wait, you know, each block is 10 minutes, and it has to do with the coordination among the network, and the network propag…”
Weisman: CFTC ruled Bitcoin is a commodity under its jurisdiction
“And it's been, one of their rulings said that Bitcoin is a commodity, so it falls under their jurisdiction.”
Carlson-Wee: Ethereum enables features simply not possible on Bitcoin
“So you can build all sorts of more advanced features in Ethereum that are simply not possible with Bitcoin.”
Buterin: Building fair lotteries on Bitcoin requires O(N³) collateral versus O(N) on Ethereum
“Like, one of them was they published this at the Financial Cryptography, in the workshop, that they were trying to create a provably fair lottery on top of Bitcoin, and it turns out that if you have N players in the lottery, Then you basically have to have O o…”
Paulus: One-third of all Bitcoin ever mined is lost
“Something like one third of every Bitcoin ever mind is, is now lost.”
Boneh: Functional quantum computers would break modern internet cryptography and Bitcoin
“All the world of crypto that we use on the internet today, and for Bitcoin as well, ah, would be well, would be broken if someone was able to build a quantum computer.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin GitHub repositories outpace traditional payment systems like PayPal
“There's about 6000 total to date, which is outpacing the number of GitHub repositories for other common payment systems like PayPal.”
Hearn: Bitcoin will hit its 1MB block size limit next year
“And we're now at more like half of that block size, and it, you know, as traffic is growing, it looks like we might start hitting that limit sometime next year.”
Popper: Bitcoin is not ready to serve as a mainstream currency
“It's pretty clear that at this point, Bitcoin is not ready for prime time in that way. There are sort of basic problems with the protocol, with the number of transactions that can go through the system, and significant improvements that need to be made before …”
Goldman Sachs estimated Bitcoin could save consumers $200 billion
“For example, even as like 12 months ago, even 18 months ago, people were calling Bitcoin an imaginary currency for crazy people on the internet. And now Goldman Sachs is saying it can save people two hundred billion dollars.”
Balaji: Worldwide Bitcoin users total three to five million
“Probably the number of worldwide users of Bitcoin is on the order of, like, three million-ish, maybe five million.”
Robert Mueller traced Bitcoin payments to Russian GRU operatives
“In fact, even special counsel Robert Mueller traced Bitcoin payments to Russian GRU operatives in the election interference case.”
Katie Haun argues Bitcoin price volatility is lessening over time
“I think now what we're seeing is the price is, the volatility is lessening, and I grant you, there's still a lot of volatility.”
Krugman: Bitcoin transactions are expensive and difficult to execute
“And it is in fact expensive to make transactions. It's, ah, the, ah, the actual implementation of the blockchain is, ah, ah, is one that is hard. It's hard to do transactions in Bitcoin.”
Haun: Darknet share of Bitcoin transactions dropped from 30% to 1%
“At its peak in 2012, 30% of bitcoin transaction volume, 30%, was associated with dark net markets. Marketplaces like Silk Road or Alpha Bay. And we typically, of course, associate dark net markets with criminal activity. But by 2018, that number is down to one…”
Horowitz: Bitcoin uniquely commits to a hard-coded 21 million token supply cap
“That's the strong commitment that Bitcoin makes that other blockchains don't make as strongly, which is twenty one million. That's it. You know, Ethereum's not making that claim.”
Narula: Bitcoin has operated reliably for 10 years without protocol compromise
“So proof of work has been, though it consumes a lot of electricity, it requires a lot of electricity to run the specialized hardware, has been working pretty reliably for 10 years. It's very impressive, actually. A lot of people never thought that it would wor…”
Narula: Bitcoin was the first intermediary-free digital payment system
“It took me a little while to realize this, but this was actually the first time that this had ever happened. This was the first time we could make online digital payments without a bank or another financial institution in the middle.”
Narula: Bitcoin's seven TPS throughput limit is an easily modified parameter
“Bitcoin doing seven transactions per second is a choice based on two numbers in the code. One could change these two numbers very easily.”
Tomaino: Hundreds of millions are spent externally securing Bitcoin
“So, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent external to the network of Bitcoin just to secure the network.”
Benet: Bitcoin mining energy consumption exceeded Slovenia's total power expenditure
“Yeah, last we calculated it was more power expenditure than all of Slovenia and so, I think it's much more now because of the recent spike, a lot of miners came in in the last couple of months, so it's a lot of power,”
Dixon: Ethereum proved multiple scaled blockchain networks can coexist
“One, it showed that you could just simply have another Scaled network, right? I think a lot of people just assumed it was gonna be one network to rule them all, network effects, et cetera. So it showed just like an existence proof that you could do another net…”
Buterin: Bitcoin's Protocol Lacks Native State Persistence Across Transactions
“But with Bitcoin itself, you can't do that because the protocol has a kind of inherent Statelessness to it. Like, you can't remember the notion of, well, this guy already withdrew 500 ETH six hours ago, and another 500 ETH two hours ago, so he can't withdraw a…”
Adam Ludwin: Bitcoin was the first fully functioning digital asset
“Well, Bitcoin was the first fully functioning digital asset the world has ever seen.”
Back: Bitcoin blocks are half full, half under one dollar
“The blocks are maybe a third to a half full on average, and if you look at, if you analyze the transactions in the block, about half of them are under a dollar.”
Back: Bitcoin soft forks require 95% miner consensus to activate
“These things don't activate until 95% of the miners are upgraded, so, and there's a long window of warning that the upgrade is happening, six months or so.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin volatility decreased every year for three years
“We've seen volatility drop every year for the last three years.”
Felten: Bitcoin volatility will decrease as adoption and liquidity grow
“I think the exchange rate of Bitcoin will settle down if it grows. You get more liquidity in the market, and you get more sophisticated economic modeling of what the fair price is. And then I think the volatility goes down somewhat.”
Dixon: Non-speculative Bitcoin payment transaction growth is linear, not exponential
“The best data I've seen is the transaction volume has gone up, the non-speculative, like, the payment transaction volume, it's not exponential, though, it's linear.”
Paul Krugman notes Bitcoin daily transaction volume peaked in early 2018
“As best we can tell, the dollar value of bitcoin transactions peaked at the beginning of this year, and that's actually fallen substantially since then.”
Paul Krugman estimates daily Bitcoin transaction volume is under $1 billion
“It looks like there's something like five hundred million to a billion dollars worth of transactions, ah, a day in Bitcoin.”
Katie Haun cites study claiming one in three millennials prefers cryptocurrency
“There was a study I saw and I can't cite you the source, but it said that one out of three And this is in the United States. One out of three millennials would rather own Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies than stocks.”
Krugman: Bitcoin consumes real resources like computing power and electricity
“The striking thing about Bitcoin is that it sets up a system in which, ah, first of all, ah, the creation of this currency involves a lot of real resources. We're actually spending a lot of resources now computing power or electricity to generate this, much as…”
Haun: The DOJ asked her to prepare a case against Bitcoin
“And I was a federal prosecutor with the United States Department of Justice at that time. And I was asked to prepare a case against Bitcoin.”
Rampell: Bitcoin transactions are fully traceable on-chain in perpetuity
“Whereas Bitcoin, you can actually track every subsequent transaction from a Bitcoin wallet and when Bitcoin is sent. And it's really remarkable because if I put ten million dollars over here in Bitcoin, I can see where all of those coins end up in perpetuity.”
Rampell: Bitcoin and Ethereum energy use ranks 71st among countries
“So if you were to graph every country on Earth by energy usage, the 71st most energy-using country, so this is ahead of a 120 other ones, Is the two largest blockchain efforts of Bitcoin and Ethereum.”