{"id":367283,"date":"2019-01-04T21:30:33","date_gmt":"2019-01-04T21:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uniquehot.com\/?p=367283"},"modified":"2024-06-11T07:32:23","modified_gmt":"2024-06-11T07:32:23","slug":"what-can-we-learn-from-bitcoins-birthday-bank-run","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uniquehot.com\/news\/what-can-we-learn-from-bitcoins-birthday-bank-run\/","title":{"rendered":"What Can We Learn From Bitcoin’s Birthday Bank Run?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As most of you will probably know, yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of the mining<\/a> of Bitcoin’s genesis block. Many Bitcoin<\/a> proponents mark this as the birthday of the digital asset itself.<\/p>\n

To celebrate the occasion, long-time Bitcoin advocate and successful investor Trace Mayer proposed that the community start an annual tradition of a crypto bank run on exchanges – to be known as Proof-of-Keys. The idea was to get as many cryptocurrency users and investors to withdraw all funds from wallets that they did not hold the private key to.<\/p>\n

What is Proof-of-Keys?<\/h2>\n

For many of its earliest advocates, drawn by the promise of sovereign control over wealth, the idea of storing coins on an cryptocurrency exchange is the absolute antithesis of Bitcoin. These original community members have weathered every bear<\/a> and bull market, every regulatory<\/a> rumble, and most importantly, every exchange hack<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Trace Mayer forms part of this crowd, having advocated buying and holding BTC since the price was less than a dollar. Part educational mission, part show of force to the exchanges, Trace has spent the last few weeks encouraging his Twitter followers, his podcast<\/a> listeners, and the audiences of countless crypto-focused YouTube channels he has appeared as a guest on to withdraw all their cryptocurrency from exchanges.<\/p>\n

The tradition, according to Trace, would serve two main purposes. Firstly, it would encourage Bitcoin users to exercise the monetary sovereignty made possible by the protocol – the hope being that those not knowing how to securely store Bitcoin would learn. Meanwhile, those that do know could teach.<\/p>\n

The second part of Proof-of-Keys supposedly serves to test the trustworthiness of the exchanges. If every single user requested every single coin on the same day, would the exchange be able to pay them all? If it turned out they could not then the platform in question would be not only guilty of deceiving its users but also guilty of artificially inflated the total supply of the currency.<\/p>\n

Was\u00a0Proof-of-Keys a Success?<\/h2>\n

One of the metrics Trace has used to measure the success of Bitcoin’s first annual Proof-of-Keys event is transaction fees. The billionaire early-Bitcoiner Tweeted yesterday that the mempool was slightly busier than usual, highlighting increased transaction activity on the network:<\/p>\n

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Happy birthday #Bitcoin<\/a>! 10 years & crazy magic Internet money experiment still going stronger than ever.#ProofOfKeys<\/a> is slightly impacting the network. But fees have not gone crazy. No CTO heart attacks. No CFO suicides. World has not ended. Next year will be even bigger! \ud83d\udc4d pic.twitter.com\/AkUsCV22al<\/a><\/p>\n

— Trace Mayer (@TraceMayer) January 3, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n