161–162 of 162 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What good are your altcoins when the developers/miners give up on the project? A bar of gold is always a bar of gold, no matter what the price of gold is.
you dont have a clue. do you.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
It's a bit sad that cryptocurrencies tend to encourage concentration and centralisation. It's very hard for an individual to take part and earn if you "miss the time". And the negative side effects are large, like energy expense, or selling out of GPUs. I think this is a general shortcoming of proof-of-work. I wonder if this could be fixed with a different scheme, e.g. reputation-based, or proof-of-(something sociall…
You seem to assume that mining is the point of a cryptocurrency, and I don't think it is. Even Satoshi, when he was still around, predicted that mining would eventually be out of reach of the normal user. But you can still "take part" by using it for what it actually is - a currency.
- Turning my "being good with computers" / learning about it early on the internet into money
- Buying illegal stuff on the darknet (which I didn't do yet)
- Speculating / Gambling
- Transferring wealth across borders while avoiding high conversion fees
While these are typical money functions, they are all fringe activities. I don't see myself ever using bitcoin as a replacement for Euros - that is for receiving my salary, for buying things (that I can get legally), for investing or saving.
One reason is I don't share the crypto-idealists idea of an anarcho-capitalist utopia...