Talking about mining: Has the "mining death spiral" already an entry?
It does now. I'd missed it, and it's a better entry than most because it came with a mechanism instead of just a mood: price falls, miners quit, blocks slow, panic, price falls further. So it can be checked against the time it was actually tested, which wasn't the 2018 bear market. It was summer 2021, when the China ban took roughly half the hash rate off the network in a few weeks. Blocks slowed, difficulty dropped by the largest amount in its history, and that was the end of it. Your framing works and I'll use it. Thanks for digging out the Spiegel column too. Even if it isn't the one you remembered, Hashgraph in the headline next to Bitcoin in 2017 does the job.
By the way, I'm a bit surprised the late Charlie Munger doesn't have an entry here. The man could easily spew a continuous stream of vitriol against Bitcoin in one sitting.
He should have had one from the start, since the rat poison line was his before it was Buffett's. Munger gets his own run of dated quotes next to Buffett's, and the two you gave with the CNBC and meeting links are the core of it. One note on how he'll be filed: "disgusting" and "contrary to the interests of civilization" are opinions, so the chapter reports them without scoring them. "Very likely to go to zero" is a prediction and gets treated as one. No rush on Medalla, and thanks for looking.
Government didn't change change their mind because of Bitcoin alone, instead there were pressure from different angles that they just couldn't resist all of them. Bitcoin only pave way for the protest when there was no way, when government restricted normal financial system.
That's an important correction and I'll write it that way. The claim the chapter can support is the narrow one: when the bank accounts were frozen, the donations kept moving. It won't say bitcoin won the protest or reversed the ban.
Bitcoin is still banned in my country and is considered a source of payment for illegal transactions.
This needs to be in there too, and thank you for saying it. A list like this can make it sound as if every ban ended the way Nigeria's did. Some haven't ended. The chapter will say plainly that "governments will ban it" was wrong about bitcoin stopping and right about plenty of people still not being allowed to use it.
It should be classified more under partly right than entirely wrong.
If you find a primary source from the 2010-2013 time frame that makes the same point. It might be well suited to the partly right box.
Agreed on both counts, it's partly right, and there's a source older than 2010. The very first reply Satoshi got when he posted the whitepaper to the cryptography list in November 2008 was James A. Donald saying that it didn't seem to scale to the required size. So the scaling objection is as old as Bitcoin, and the base layer still doesn't handle everyday payments on its own. That goes in the partly right section with Lightning as what happened next.
How about "anarchic new toy" OP, from reuters
I don't know that one. Do you have the link or the year? If it's Reuters and it's early I'd like it.
so far I observed people in my locality do think bitcoin price is influenced by some government or political bodies
"It's manipulated" will be its own label. The dated version is Roubini in December 2020, saying the price was totally manipulated by a bunch of whales.
Great stuff, please keep it coming!
