Kari Lake's crazy world of fun latest. She says 375,000 votes to be counted of which she expects 60 to 80% and a clear win.
IFFFFFF this were the case and carried down ticket, Masters overhauls Kelly on high 60s% of the remaining
Do your own snort and dismiss........
Id suggest if the next dump is 65% plus GOP then a bet on Masters is reasonable. If its not then obviously its Lake being Lake and carry on regardless
I recommend nothing and am posting purely for reference
WTF is happening in Arizona? They've been stuck on "70% votes counted" for 36 hours. American elections are bonkers. Have they just given up?
You can begin to see why voters (of all stripes) get suspicious. Just count all the frigging votes within 12 hours, like almost every other democracy on the planet
Votes that arrive until Saturday still have to be counted, apparently, provided that they are date stamped for election day. It really is absurd. Normally, when there is a clear winner, we just ignore the actual counting but for several cycles in a row now the TCTC results have been critical to power and the deficiencies of the system laid bare for all to see.
It’s bizarre that the US sticks with the “postmark before Election Day” system rather than “arrived by Election Day”.
Long ago, the football pools used to accept entries that arrived late, but were postmarked before the matches took place, until that attempted fraud involving Post Office insiders was uncovered, their pre-stamping a winning entry after the results were known with a postmark the day earlier.
I'm quite interested as a spectator to watch the wild gyrations of Bitcoin and it's fellows.
I have no financial interest, nor will I ever in it. I think it's worth precisely zero.
I wonder though if anyone would care to explain Bitcoin settlement regulations to me? If all the exchanges/banks/sharabangs break down then perhaps a negative number of bitcoins might 'exist'. What happens then?
The actual number of Bitcoin stored on the blockchain won’t change, except for ticking up slowly as it always does.
Whether any random exchange holding “Bitcoin” on behalf of their customers, actually has any in the first place, is the question to which we might be about to find out the answer.
Basically, if you don’t have your own Bitcoin wallet address, then you’re relying on someone else’s systems, servers, and honesty.
Suppose though that nobody can access their Bitcoins, and suppose further that I have sold one bitcoin short - covered by some sort of repo type deal. How does that play out?
I'll tell you how I think it might - BC goes nearly to zero, then to nearly infinity and then firmly to zero.
It doesn’t work like that. Most of the Bitcoin transactions are not actually on the blockchain itself, but rather through the exchange. The price (in US$) might wildly jump on your exchange (FTX, for example) but that won’t affect the wider currency. Remember that only Bitcoin are traded on the blockchain, and 1BTC is always worth 1BTC.
Thanks for the explanations. I'm not sure you have adressed my question though. It could be the case that bitcoin totally fails; it ceases to exist. To understand what happens then you need to understand how short positions are maintained. It's that detail that I can't find.
Bitcoin is decentralised, and can’t fail unless every miner in the world is offline. There are no ‘positions’ on the blockchain directly, only the ledger of transfers.
In theory, an exchange and traders should manage risk in the usual way, but remember there’s none of the regulation that forces actual banks in the real world to do these things. Your short position is held with the trader or exchange, who will process the contracts. We could well see the Emperor is naked.
For a laugh google this: "What will bitcoin be worth in 2030?".
It will either be worth $100,000ish (in today's dollars) or it will be worth nothing, i.e. it becomes a failed experiment in private (i.e. non state issued) money.
People struggle to understand a $100k bitcoin because of unit bias - there are a maximum 21,000,000 btc in circulation. There are 2,100,000,000,000 dollars in circulation - therefore if there were only 21m dollars in circulation, the value of a dollar would be $100,000.
The astronomical theoretical value of "a bitcoin" is predicated on its success as a medium of exchange and its relative scarcity.
Do you trust the owners/founders of Bitcoin to stick with the 21,000,000 limit? It would be tempting to "print" themselves a few extra Bitcoin on the side.
And once the limit is reached, who pays for Bitcoin transactions, since there won't be any miners doing the calculations?
Transaction fees.
Absolutely astronomical transaction fees.
Also - there are no "owners" or "founders" of bitcoin. No CEO you can complain to, no marketing department, no advertising budget.
It's a bit of code that was written by a man now presumed dead (most likely Hal Finney) that can't be changed without the majority consensus of the network. If someone tries to create a "few extra bitcoin on the side" then what they are doing is "forking" the main chain, and the majority of the userbase will stick with the original 21m formula. It can't be changed, only forked.
The hard 21m limit is literally the point of it - the creator was devising a monetary system that protected wealth against inflation, i.e. central banks printing more money.
Comments
Long ago, the football pools used to accept entries that arrived late, but were postmarked before the matches took place, until that attempted fraud involving Post Office insiders was uncovered, their pre-stamping a winning entry after the results were known with a postmark the day earlier.
It's a bit of code that was written by a man now presumed dead (most likely Hal Finney) that can't be changed without the majority consensus of the network. If someone tries to create a "few extra bitcoin on the side" then what they are doing is "forking" the main chain, and the majority of the userbase will stick with the original 21m formula. It can't be changed, only forked.
The hard 21m limit is literally the point of it - the creator was devising a monetary system that protected wealth against inflation, i.e. central banks printing more money.