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Miners Aren’t Friends

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Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#221

Post by keymone »

Fnoord wrote: post #202
keymone wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Transactions don't scale: they're are expensive, and not instant blockchain has limited scalability, second layer doesn't. also blockchain transactions were never supposed to be instant. in fact nothing is instant, check this thing called physics. > practically no ways to spend Bitcoins in the physical world there are plenty > electricity costs of mining are not sustainable by mankind bitcoin is not even a blip in…

First of all, perhaps you want to use proper capitalization in your posts. It adds to the readability of your post. > blockchain has limited scalability, second layer doesn't. also blockchain transactions were never supposed to be instant. Of course it wasn't supposed to be instant. That's why its a shit system to use as currency just like gold bars are a shit currency cause one has to drag them from the mine to the…

Your post is very uninformed.

Transaction speed is a function of timestamping mechanism of the consensus protocol. If that’s the only measure you decide whether the currency is shit - fair, don’t use it.

FWIW cross-bank transfers aren’t instant too, shall I give you my credentials so you could promptly dispense of all the worthless shit money you have?

Lightning network is active on mainnet, not sure what exactly batted that information from reaching you.

Revokation of debit cards had nothing to do with bitcoin and there are plenty of companies that still offer them.

That some merchants choose to drop support because low value transactions aren’t economical is unfortunate but also temporary.

> when it consumes more energy than my entire country, it is

Nope, still not a blip. So yourself a favor and spend more than 5 seconds to inform yourself on the topic.

> How about you look up the word in your dictionary, called environment?

You’re conflating energy use with energy source, nobody is burning oil to mine bitcoins - those guys are out of business.

> wake me up when

That explains everything - instead of informing yourself on the topic you just went to sleep. Bitcoin debit cards mostly cover those requirements btw.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#222

Post by keymone »

dave7 wrote: post #204
keymone wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, the fact that ethereum community was convinced is already a death sentence, because it shows that no principle is sacred. go ahead and try convincing bitcoin community to reverse a transaction, that'll be fun to watch.

Here you go: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...

yep, that is an example of platform bug, not a contract bug.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#223

Post by bfuller »

Fnoord wrote: post #202
keymone wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Transactions don't scale: they're are expensive, and not instant blockchain has limited scalability, second layer doesn't. also blockchain transactions were never supposed to be instant. in fact nothing is instant, check this thing called physics. > practically no ways to spend Bitcoins in the physical world there are plenty > electricity costs of mining are not sustainable by mankind bitcoin is not even a blip in…

First of all, perhaps you want to use proper capitalization in your posts. It adds to the readability of your post. > blockchain has limited scalability, second layer doesn't. also blockchain transactions were never supposed to be instant. Of course it wasn't supposed to be instant. That's why its a shit system to use as currency just like gold bars are a shit currency cause one has to drag them from the mine to the…

If you live in a tech hub there are plenty of restaurants etc that will take crypto. There are dentists and doctors that take it now.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#224

Post by bfuller »

ConnorLeet wrote: post #68
corford wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get it :( That's 108 days before you _start_ to make a profit and future returns are guaranteed to diminish as difficulty goes up. Versus £5,200 capital to invest immediately in a basket of safe (as much as crypto currencies can be), liquid coins that will likely x3 to x8 over a 12 month period. To each their own I guess but it's not the bet for me.

If the whole crypto ecosystem crashes (unlikely in my opinion) graphics cards can be resold and recoup losses.

What could cause such an event? Would coinbase going insolvent cause everything to crash beyond repair?

What if satoshi appeared and dumped his entire stake? That is probably the worst case scenario I can think of.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#225

Post by Zpalmtree »

yorwba wrote: post #214
jancsika wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an easy one: the ability to receive a payment for a service without relying on a third party to deliver that payment. New: state-level actor(s) cannot stop an organization from receiving payment merely by forcing your third-party payment processor to freeze funds/stop payments. Example: sci-hub. If they were receiving payments through Mastercard/Visa it would have almost certainly been frozen long ago. However…

> a state level actor cannot just stop the contract from being executed simply by putting pressure on a third party. They just haven't gotten around to it yet. The decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies increases the number of entities that need to be pressured, but doesn't make state-level actors completely powerless.

This is why some cryptocurrency communities like monero push for people to use smaller mining pools so the miners are more decentralized.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#226

Post by Zpalmtree »

paulmd wrote: post #216
MrBingley wrote: post #66

Can someone explain to me how on earth Ethereum is still a thing? People have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the Ethereum ecosystem, many due to basic flaws in the "Solidity" language. For example, last November $280 million was frozen in Parity wallets because function visibility defaults to external rather than internal (see the previous HN discussion here[0]). Just for fun, I was looking through the Secur…

> Can someone explain to me how on earth Ethereum is still a thing? Network effect and name recognition, the same reasons that Bitcoin hasn't been supplanted by Monero or Zcash or any of the other dozens of coins that do virtually everything better than Bitcoin. The really interesting thing is that the original plan for Bitcoin included many of the same programmable-money features as Ethereum. The instructions are st…

While monero is very cool, it has the same scalibility issues as bitcoin i believe, but to a worse extent as the transactions are much larger due to how the ring signatures work. I know they're working on this but it's not a straight upgrade, and last time I checked monero fees were quite high compared to other alt-coins with similar use.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#227

Post by ncallaway »

corford wrote: post #88
kmkemp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the "invest in ETH" example, you're taking the appreciation of ETH into account, but in the case of mining crypto, you're ignoring it. Still, you're right in the overall point that just investing is more profitable. If you are going to gain value from the GPU, though, mining is a great way to make some extra cash.

Sorry, I just assumed ETH was out of reach of personal mining now. Sure, you could hold "shitcoins" that are currently easier to mine but that's a lot more risky than long term holding something like ETH, LTC, XMR (at least I think it is anyway).

Pretty much any coin that you mine could be exchanged into the coin that you would prefer to hold for the appreciation.

So: * Mine whatever is most profitable to mine at that time. * On mining that coin, convert to whichever investment vehicle gives you the risk/return that you want (BTC, ETH, XLM, VFIFX, US T-bonds, etc).

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#228

Post by Fnoord »

bfuller wrote: post #223
Fnoord wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, perhaps you want to use proper capitalization in your posts. It adds to the readability of your post. > blockchain has limited scalability, second layer doesn't. also blockchain transactions were never supposed to be instant. Of course it wasn't supposed to be instant. That's why its a shit system to use as currency just like gold bars are a shit currency cause one has to drag them from the mine to the…

If you live in a tech hub there are plenty of restaurants etc that will take crypto. There are dentists and doctors that take it now.

World-wide? Can you state 10 of these tech hubs where Bitcoin is widespread?

I haven't seen any place in Amsterdam Area (where I live, throughout Europe considered a tech hub) accepting Bitcoin. When I was in Berlin, saw zero Bitcoin as well. C-Base didn't accept it either. They did accept this currency called EUR, though.

Bitcoin's slow transaction speed wouldn't be an issue for something like dentist/doctor. Those have your PII including your SSN (or well, the Dutch equiv here), and you got physical contact with them. The payment here even goes via insurance company. Have never heard of any Dutch insurance company accepting Bitcoin though.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#229

Post by dullgiulio »

Zpalmtree wrote: post #225
yorwba wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a state level actor cannot just stop the contract from being executed simply by putting pressure on a third party. They just haven't gotten around to it yet. The decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies increases the number of entities that need to be pressured, but doesn't make state-level actors completely powerless.

This is why some cryptocurrency communities like monero push for people to use smaller mining pools so the miners are more decentralized.

So we need some guidance. Oh that's what governments are for, definitely not a private company, which is not accountable by voters (with a wide voters base; if the voter base is not wide, made it so, don't discard democracy.)

Finally, there are a lot of good reasons why in democracy we vote per-head and not per-share. It's a big thing, but that is also being dismissed by cryptocurrencies.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#230

Post by zaat »

xucheng wrote: post #215
zaat wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can solve that with additional step: 1. Alice send the challenge. 2. You submit the answered, encrypted. 3. After you verify that your answer was included in a block, you post the private key you used for the encrypted answer. 4. Profit

I think the miner can cheat in step 3. After you submit your private key as a transaction, the miner can delay it to be included in the blockchain for arbitrary time. During which, the miner can use your private key to decrypt your answer submit in step 2. And resubmit their version of the answer.

That won't help him much, since my answer is already published in the blockchain when he will publish his answer.It is trivial to see that my answer was published first.
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