Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 257 posts

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#221

Post by gnaritas »

oelmekki wrote: post #218
gnaritas wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think no, it's theft whether you do it once or many times; you are stealing money from investors who cannot make a decision fairly because they don't have the "private" information you do. Insider trading is theft.

Ok, I see. Well, I agree with you there. But I have an other problem here : it's theft as well when people who keep buying and selling property keep profiting on people who actually keep companies running, who keep losing. Trump, Lepen, what is called populism (I hate that word) feed on that. People feel that what they produce is being stolen. I, for one, don't want to think that finance is a problem. I think it's go…

> it's theft as well when people who keep buying and selling property keep profiting on people who actually keep companies running, who keep losing.

I still don't understand what your complaint actually is? How are people who buy and sell stock being unfair to those who work at the company? The company got it's fair deal when it IPO'd and sold shares in exchange for money to operate. That investors later trade that stock back and forth between themselves doesn't affect the company who already got paid. If an investor makes money off a stock going up or down, it has no affect at all on the employees of the company so how exactly do you figure they're being treated unfairly?

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#222

Post by iopq »

oelmekki wrote: post #151
iopq wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time, if all employees knew bad news and dumped all of their stock at the same time, the rest of us would be left holding bags.

And then, they would be asked to work longer hours and accept salary cuts to make market confident again :) Not sure it would work in that direction, I don't think most people would intentionally deteriorate the company they work for.

No, they would execute their options/sell their stock and then get laid off.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#223

Post by flashmob »

Taek wrote: post #206
danielpatrick wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider the good parts of PoW to be? (serious question)

Considering the core algorithms behind proof of stake have been around since the 80's, and that Bitcoin's core contribution is usually cited as PoW, there are probably some good parts. It's a weird concept to accept but actually the really interesting and useful property of PoW is that you can provide a proof that you destroyed physical resources (provably wasting electricity) which are committed to one and exactly o…

> useful property of PoW is that you can provide a proof that you destroyed physical resources

Thought experiment:

Say there's a PoW currency A, and PoS currency B.

Alice mines A.

Now Bob wants currency A, but he can't afford to mine currency A, because he needs special hardware.

So Bob exchanges currency B for currency A with Alice. Alice now holds some currency B, and Bob is happy with A. Now the question is, would Alice see that she "destroyed physical resources" for currency B? (Yes, to Alice she had to destroy physical resources)

Later, Alice wants to transact with Charlie, who also holds currency B. She transfers her B to Charlie, that was bought using A. Would Charlie care that Alice had to "destroy physical resources" to get B? (No, that information is useless in a PoS system)

Some time in the future, currency B becomes very popular (as it's just as secure and not wasting resources like currency A). Alice wants more B too, so she exchanges her B with the masses. Eventually, currency B takes over A in popularity, and by that time, Alice has exchanged all her A for B. The question is, would Alice now view that to get B, she had to "destroy physical resources"? Would that fact matter if she continues to transact with Charlie?

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#224

Post by edpichler »

hybridsole wrote: post #204
edpichler wrote: post #166

Why should I use litecoin for transfer money when there is bitcoin with more liquidity? I really don't get this yet. Anyone could explain? PS: I am a Bitcoin enthusiast, and I am not criticizing Litecoin, I just want to understand the possible advantages it could have.

Litecoin has a fraction of the transaction fees of bitcoin, so instead of buying something that costs $10 and paying about $1 in miners fees, with LTC you would pay a few pennies at most. Granted, most retailers only accept Bitcoin if they accept cryptocurrency at all, but this may change as more people use LTC for smaller payments.

What transaction fees you mean? I can transfer between wallets with no cost using BTC right?

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#225

Post by NeutronBoy »

edpichler wrote: post #224
hybridsole wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Litecoin has a fraction of the transaction fees of bitcoin, so instead of buying something that costs $10 and paying about $1 in miners fees, with LTC you would pay a few pennies at most. Granted, most retailers only accept Bitcoin if they accept cryptocurrency at all, but this may change as more people use LTC for smaller payments.

What transaction fees you mean? I can transfer between wallets with no cost using BTC right?

They're "optional", but the miners can pick and chose which transactions they include in a block, and the larger the fee they get from the transaction, the more likely it is to make it into the block.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#226

Post by hammock »

kordless wrote: post #192
pyabo wrote: post #173

Litecoin is now back because of Segwit. It's Bitcoin's hope to push a final acceptance of Segwit on Bitcoin. But, it doesn't have a real value in my opinion. About cryptocurrencies in general I can say that I use them to get payments and to pay employees and I find them very useful and the user experience is much better than normal banking (fast international transfers and complete tracking) and no need for KYC.

I would modify that slightly and say Litecoin is back because of the Lightning Network, which benefits greatly from features provided by Segwit, and which itself leverages payment channels backed by multi-sig addresses. While Lightning can be enabled without Segwit, it's far more trustworthy with it, than without it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpfvhiqFw7A

WTF is any of this, and where do I learn about it. Like, where did you find that video?

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#227

Post by kang »

Taek wrote: post #19
lend000 wrote: post #10

It will take significant time and effort to overtake Bitcoin's name recognition and first mover advantage. However, there's also an advantage to being a second mover that can adapt quickly to a changing environment... I doubt Bitcoin will be the supreme crypto-currency in a few years. It's just too implausible that Bitcoin is perfect enough as is, and/or the community will be able to implement any needed changes befo…

Bitcoin has by far the greatest amount of research and intellectual effort driving it, and it's far from a static protocol. It doesn't need to have gotten everything perfect, it needs to change just quickly (or slowly) enough to retain its core value proposition vs. other cryptocurrencies. Maybe it will get replaced, maybe not. But there's no question to me that Bitcoin is by far the most decentralized, most secure,…

> Ethereum offers a lot that Bitcoin does not

Myth. There is not even a single thing you can do with ethereum that you cannot with bitcoin. OTOH, you can do money with bitcoin, but you can't do it on ethereum because neither is it a true blockchain nor is it immutable ledger or decentralised either.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#228

Post by kang »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #220
Taek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin has by far the greatest amount of research and intellectual effort driving it, and it's far from a static protocol. It doesn't need to have gotten everything perfect, it needs to change just quickly (or slowly) enough to retain its core value proposition vs. other cryptocurrencies. Maybe it will get replaced, maybe not. But there's no question to me that Bitcoin is by far the most decentralized, most secure,…

> Ethereum offers a lot that Bitcoin does not, but if the valuation were to pass Bitcoin's I think it would be fair to state that it's because the market has chosen to prefer low security, low decentralisation, high (yet unrealized) innovation potential over a decentralized payment system. It's kind of weird to compare Bitcoin to Ethereum. They are both blockchain-based, but they're in completely different categories…

Ethereum's ecosystem cannot optimize for running dapps because the true value of its token is dynamically determined byt he blockchain network, for whatever value the minimum of its token provides. For eg, a gas is worth whatever the world wants to pay for it to use it as a unit of calculation on the world computer. To accurately measure the effort spent by the network to ensure the unit value of its token , we need a DMMS algorithm(as described in the sidechains paper) & which is nothing but a proof-of-work blockchain.

Each primitive operation needs its own blockchain for its value to be determined accurately. When multiple token are implemented over a single blockchain, for eg colored/custom coins, it cannot accurately measure the value of a unit.

In case of functional language, one could perhaps imagine a lisp blockchain with paul graham's 7 primitives implemented as an opcode (stack based interpretor is irrelevant), which would be turing complete but will suffer from the problem of determining the true value of each opcode; the cheapest one will always be abused as evident on ethereum (suicide function's cheapness was spammed).

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#229

Post by kang »

danielpatrick wrote: post #147
Taek wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example sha256 proved not to be a good hashing algo because the reliance on ASICs, which centralizes mining. Another important area in research is the development of other greener forms of blockchain security such as Proof of Stake, which will most likely replace Proof Of Work once perfected. Theoretically speaking all algorithms are able to be optimized by ASICs. ASIC resistance is not about making ASICs impos…

Or use PoS to avoid the situation entirely.

And introduce multiple other problems instead. There is no PoS system existing that is proven to be secure.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#230

Post by kang »

flashmob wrote: post #223
Taek wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the core algorithms behind proof of stake have been around since the 80's, and that Bitcoin's core contribution is usually cited as PoW, there are probably some good parts. It's a weird concept to accept but actually the really interesting and useful property of PoW is that you can provide a proof that you destroyed physical resources (provably wasting electricity) which are committed to one and exactly o…

> useful property of PoW is that you can provide a proof that you destroyed physical resources Thought experiment: Say there's a PoW currency A, and PoS currency B. Alice mines A. Now Bob wants currency A, but he can't afford to mine currency A, because he needs special hardware. So Bob exchanges currency B for currency A with Alice. Alice now holds some currency B, and Bob is happy with A. Now the question is, would…

>Bob exchanges currency B for currency A with Alice. Alice now holds some currency B

There is no reason for Alice to want B, a less secure money than A which they already hold. If Alice were perfect mathematician, this exchange would never occur.

Post reply on HN