71–80 of 173 posts
Is anyone worried about that unsustainable bitcoin energy usage article on HN a few days ago? Would Litecoin have those same problems?
Wouldn't that happen to any general crypto currency that got popular?
Is anyone worried about that unsustainable bitcoin energy usage article on HN a few days ago? Would Litecoin have those same problems?
Wouldn't that happen to any general crypto currency that got popular?
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Doesn't make them wrong. I find the idea of crypto currency, especially bitcoin, very interesting. I just have a very hard time seeing how it's actually useful. It can't handle very many transactions per minute. And the thing that supposed to make it so great is that no one controls it. But if bitcoin becomes really important then people will want to control a lot of the mining power. Pretty soon you end up with a gr…
>I just have a very hard time seeing how it's actually useful Why is it so hard to see? Whenever you send money somewhere electronically, a middleman takes a cut. With Bitcoin there is no middleman. It's that easy.
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I got one better... I traded 30 bitcoins for Diablo 3 gold when Diablo 3 launched, 1m gold was about $5 and bitcoins were about $7. Was just after linode wallets got hacked. I'll let you do the over/under on that one.
I threw away hundreds of Bitcoin on formatting a drive many years ago. never thought they would be worth more than a few cents. I revisited in 2014 and have been accumulating ever since.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't make them wrong. I find the idea of crypto currency, especially bitcoin, very interesting. I just have a very hard time seeing how it's actually useful. It can't handle very many transactions per minute. And the thing that supposed to make it so great is that no one controls it. But if bitcoin becomes really important then people will want to control a lot of the mining power. Pretty soon you end up with a gr…
why is it useful? you can store and instantly send any arbitrary amount of money anywhere on the planet and it is the hardest (impossible?) for a government to steal it from you
Will it hold up when 10 million people want to do that per day? 100 million? Half 1 billion? I know it can work at niche scales (relative to total global financial transactions) but can it actually be scaled up to be a real player?
Even if the block size was massively larger, say 100 MB, would enough transactions be able to be broadcasted around fast enough to be able to be collected in giant blocks to keep up with demand?
As to hardest/impossible for a government to steal from you: this is the mining pool problem. What if China decided to do something about all of the mining pools they have in their country and try and manipulate bitcoin? What if in addition to the pools that they could get/force to cooperate they added a bunch more miners with government computers?
What if the US government just decided to throw computer power at trying to make the dominant hashrate mining pool?
I'm guessing there are number of governments in the world it would be capable of doing that TODAY. They could certainly do it if they cooperated. Even if they can't take over they could throw enough uncertainty into the process to cause the price to crash.
If they all competed against each other we could end up in a situation where even know if theoretically no one controls bit coin realistically it's controlled by a bunch of giant governments and no one else is capable of competing. Oops, that sort of like the current banking system.
Like I said it's a fascinating idea, but I don't think it works at planet scale or if people can independently buy additional hashing capacity. It seems like it would have to have some sort of agreement to limit everyone to be roughly equal for it to work out almost anywhere.
I'd love to see history prove me wrong. I don't remember seening a solution to the problems that worry me yet. If they exist I'm not smart enough to think of them.
We'll see what happens.
For all the people out there saying, "I cant find a use case", my question to you is, have you ever used it?!
If you have, did you notice that there wasn't a middleman taking a cut when you sent the money? I mean, do you have any fucking idea how much money businesses pay to the credit card companies?
Get on board guys.
It's kinda cool to be living in a tulip era like this. I wish there was some way I could make a long term bet against the the price of bitcoin, say it's price 10 years from now. Of course, this is impossible. If there is anything we have learned, and I can demonstrate that I predicted 5 years ago, it's that the definition of bitcoin is infinitely divisible. I could claim a bitcoin fork in 2027 is the true bitcoin, an…
I've been into Bitcoin since 2011, and it's interesting that people are still making tulip comparisons 6 years later. Tulip mania itself only lasted about 9 months. I wonder how long Bitcoin will have to hold out before the tulip argument could no longer be made.
It's 100% bubble. It could go up to $6,000, $50,000, or even $1M. It's not localized like tulips, and it's connected to the internet, so the universe of people available to fuel the speculation is enormous. That the Chinese are highly speculative is what's mainly driving the current price. It has no intrinsic value. It's like gold in that it's not a productive asset. It doesn't yield anything like stocks or bonds. Th…
It's funny how thick HNers are about Bitcoin. I believe it's evidence of the sort of passive conservatism of the tech community. Bitcoin is some utopian shit, the decentralized technology dream that has a ton of traction, yet many of you just can't seem to get behind it. Is it because YC is an ultra capitalistic investment fund and Bitcoin is just too anarchist for its fanboys? For all the people out there saying, "I…
HN is certainly "on board" as ycombinator and affiliates invests in various blockchain retailed companies
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I was skeptical of Bitcoin for a long time, but the other day I was on a (legal) website and they had it listed as a payment method, right next to Visa. Seeing it there really showed me how far it's come.
Are you for real? I feel like we're being trolled by Bitcoin holders who want to keep the value propped up.