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Bitcoin's Golden Future

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Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#91

Post by googletazer »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #21
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental value of $1 is the full faith and credit of the United States Government and the economy of America. The fundamental value of cryptocurrencies is a shared agreement of value amongst investors. I imagine some snotty 14-year old would argue that there is no fundamental distinction between the two but that's not being economically serious.

Yep. This has been my problem with it since the beginning. A dollar isn't just a dollar. It's a monetary unit that is intrinsically tied into the power and faith of hundreds of millions of people in the idea of a country. If people stopped believing in America, the dollar would go. How little would have to fail for Bitcoin to have the same problem. I've heard that if the person who owns the large stake in Bitcoin wer…

>If people stopped believing in America, the dollar would go.

Interesting, considering that the purchasing power of the dollar has been long in decline. It holds its place against other currencies, but with dollars you can't buy as much stuff/assets today as you could yesterday.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#92

Post by rugffgbv »

gruez wrote: post #62
rugffgbv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only it's slow, but transaction fees are ridiculously high. $4.3 currently. I go to shop and pay $0.5 for 2kg of potatoes (or a bottle of beer), and pay $4.3 fee, and wait 1 hour for confirmations?

>Not only it's slow, but transaction fees are ridiculously high. $4.3 currently. Why is this meme constantly getting repeated? As I said yesterday ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15176214 ), paying 10+ satoshis per kB gets your transaction in the next block most of the time. It's still true as of today https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#8h .

I took this number ($4.3) from https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees... and similar number is on bitmarket.pl BTC withdrawal (0.0008 BTC, $3.74), bank account withdrawal is $0

But thanks, if real fees are smaller i need to try it.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#93

Post by simias »

kristineberth wrote: post #82
simias wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having satellites broadcasting the blockchain is a good step to make the network resilient but it doesn't prevent governments messing with miners. A great disturbance would occur should china decide to unilaterally shutdown the miners on its territory for instance. Furthermore unless I'm missing something these satellites broadcast the blockchain but don't relay new transactions. That means that if I'm stuck in some…

> Disconnect a country from the Internet (or filter the traffic) and you're forking the chain. Is this necessarily true? Forgive my ignorance but if we're talking Bitcoin, wouldn't the rest of the remaining miners around the world be able to account for this? And would the situation be meaningfully different in the country in question were China (or another of similar size/mining power)?

I think you're replying to the wrong comment but to try and answer your question if a region is completely isolated from the rest of the bitcoin network one of two things can happen:

- If the region doesn't have a significant hash power (the case in most places in the world really) then the block rate will effectively go to zero, meaning that bitcoin will effectively "pause" here and be unusable until fresh blocks can be retrieved from the outside and new transactions broadcasted to the external miners.

- If the region has enough hash power to mine new blocks regularly the region will fork its chain. If it has more than 50% of the global hash rate this new chain will be the "real" one and will take over as soon as it's reunited with the rest of the network (invalidating the "outside" blockchain and all its transactions since the fork). If it has less than 50% hashrate then the opposite happens, as soon as the longer outside chain is received it'll invalidate the fork.

In both these situations bitcoin is effectively unusable in the minority fork since you know for a fact that the chain will be erased as soon as the network is reunited.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#94

Post by gruez »

rugffgbv wrote: post #92
gruez wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not only it's slow, but transaction fees are ridiculously high. $4.3 currently. Why is this meme constantly getting repeated? As I said yesterday ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15176214 ), paying 10+ satoshis per kB gets your transaction in the next block most of the time. It's still true as of today https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#8h .

I took this number ($4.3) from https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees... and similar number is on bitmarket.pl BTC withdrawal (0.0008 BTC, $3.74), bank account withdrawal is $0 But thanks, if real fees are smaller i need to try it.

>I took this number ($4.3) from https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees....

probably a combination of bad fee estimation (which will be be fixed in 0.15), a general skew towards high fees (the median is $2), and a general acclimation to high fees due to blockchain spam in the last few months.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#95

Post by sbenitoj »

polotics wrote: post #88
sbenitoj wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - for an article in MSM, I was surprised it wasn't completely terrible! But I'm tired of the BS line that "gold has no value" continues to be repeated as nauseam. If people value it, then it has value. If people don't, then it doesn't. End of story. Things don't have value because some Minister of Value makes a proclamation about what has value and what doesn't (USSR tried that, didn't work!)

Bloomberg is "MSM" now? Are you sure?

Ha, well, more mainstream than Reddit, Twitter, and HN!

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#96

Post by sbenitoj »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #58
sbenitoj wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - for an article in MSM, I was surprised it wasn't completely terrible! But I'm tired of the BS line that "gold has no value" continues to be repeated as nauseam. If people value it, then it has value. If people don't, then it doesn't. End of story. Things don't have value because some Minister of Value makes a proclamation about what has value and what doesn't (USSR tried that, didn't work!)

that's not quite the case. There is such a thing as objective value. Stocks have objective value because they pay dividends. Real estate in warm climates has objective value because it's pleasant to be in a warm place in winter. BMW costs more than a honda civic because it is objectively a better driving experience. Etc. Etc. So, no, it's not true that there is no objective value

Price is what people pay, value is what they get, and it's completely subjective.

The only reason people pay more for a BMW than a Honda is because they perceive they're getting more value with a BMW than with a Honda. There is no such thing as an "objectively better driving experience" -- all value is derived from perception, and perception is individual.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#97

Post by sbenitoj »

ktta wrote: post #89
vasilipupkin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's not quite the case. There is such a thing as objective value. Stocks have objective value because they pay dividends. Real estate in warm climates has objective value because it's pleasant to be in a warm place in winter. BMW costs more than a honda civic because it is objectively a better driving experience. Etc. Etc. So, no, it's not true that there is no objective value

Each one of your cases can be debunked. Stocks only have value when SEC deems that it can have value. There are people who would love to live in a cold climate for whom land in a warm climate has no value. BMW costs more than Honda because people are willing to pay that much for it, which is how BMW sets the price. All of your cases are about subjective value. Take out the buyer with personal interests on the other s…

Bingo!

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#98

Post by kbody »

cesarb wrote: post #87
kbody wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll focus on one thing that's fitting and haven't been mentioned. It's about Opendime ( https://opendime.com/ ) which brands itself as a Bitcoin credit stick. It's like a USB stick but it stores inside a Bitcoin private key that's not revealed to the user unless they visibly break a part of the stick. This basically allows you to "load" bitcoins on the stick and give to others while being relatively certain of the "…

So, it's a real life version of Shadowrun's Credsticks? ( http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/Credstick )

Indeed, iirc that was the idea/inspiration.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#99

Post by decentralised »

delegate wrote: post #6

Bitcoin and other crypto require a well functioning internet infrastructure, otherwise it's just data on a hard-drive. Disconnect a country from the Internet (or filter the traffic) and you're forking the chain. Spend on both networks by buying other (unfiltered) crypto. There are states (even large ISPs) that can do that. Also, the first thing to go in case of global conflict is the global Internet. Countries will t…

> a well functioning internet infrastructure

Not that much. Most refugee camps have cell coverage and people there use btc as it's the only money they have access to.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#100

Post by sbenitoj »

trgv wrote: post #83
sbenitoj wrote: post #31

"There are two main reasons to doubt bitcoin's viability as an investment....Another is more philosophical: Digital currencies have no fundamental value, so have no place in a portfolio." There is no such thing as an objective theory of value. ALL value is subjective (meaning each person values the same thing differently). The more you learn about what money is, the more you realize that there are qualities of money…

I agree with you that there's no such thing as objective value. But my feeling is that there is still something important that differentiates "real" currencies (fiat or not) from bitcoin/gold/etc. Namely, there is a government backing the "real" currencies. Dollars are "guaranteed" to have value because they are "legal tender," ie you can pay your taxes and buy things with them. As long as the US government has power…

Have to pick a bone here: dollars do not have value because they are "legal tender" -- see Zimbabwe hyperinflation [0]. Zimbabweans stopped valuing their national currency years before Zimbabwe recognized any other currencies as legal tender.

Dollars (and all fiat for that matter) have value because once upon a time paper money was tied to a specific weight of gold / silver stored in a bank vault. Over the past 100-ish years that link was slowly eroded until the point where there was no backing whatsoever. Inertia is the only thing keeping fiat currencies going, and it's not going to last forever now that alternatives (like cryptocurrency) exist and governments can't shut them down (like they did with the Liberty Dollar [1]).

After a couple more financial crises in the West and bank bailouts I suspect ALL governments will have limited power in this domain, people aren't going to let their savings be inflated into oblivion for the rest of eternity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_dollar_(private_curren...

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