201–210 of 239 posts
You can have a bird's eye view of most common platforms on this infographic:
https://medium.com/world-of-blockchains/the-history-of-block...
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Lets say we agree that this timestampting service is trustless (I don't, but for the sake of the argument lets say I do). Care to explain how you go from that to "few cents per bitcoin"? I'm asking for an actual calculation.
You're asking for "an actual calculation" to back up a Fermi estimate of the true value of an irrationally-priced good? Of course there isn't one. It's a Fermi estimate. The main points were that the value is greater than 0 but the use is exceptionally niche. Pick any other Fermi estimate you feel is appropriate for those conditions. It doesn't change my point.
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You are comparing oranges and apples. But let us assume that all those thousands of financial institutions and their associated infrastructure are just there to handle transactions. Bitcoin is doing about 20 tx/s and Bitcoin mining uses as much energy as the nation of Denmark. Visa is doing about 1700 tx/s. > Renewables! Almost free, unlimited energy! Oh man, I should have been reading your last sentence a bit better…
> Bitcoin is doing about 20 tx/s > Visa is doing about 1700 tx/s combine the tx/s of all the cryptocurrencies out there right now and I assure you it exceeds Visa's 1700 tx/s. NOT ALL TRANSACTIONS HAVE TO HAPPEN ON THE BITCOIN NETWORK! There are thousands of coins!
Also Visa is only just one company, there are also Master, American Express, Paypal, SEPA transactions and a lot more.
So I don't understand what you try to tell me and how screaming improves your argumentation.
The benefits of blockchain outweigh the initial costs involved in kickstarting the ecosystem. The same initial flurry of investment happened when the internet was created. Look how that turned out.
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>Get angry at banks? I've found in many fields that are as complex as finance, that when I think something in that field is stupid, unnecessary, or onerous, it is I that am wrong because I simply didn't understand the why of how that thing came about. So I find it fascinating how many people/groups in history have gotten mad at banks/finance, tried to make a "better" product, gotten stung or robbed others, only to ev…
This is true of a lot of Silicon Valley startups I've seen lately as well. They make a big show of how they can do things better, faster, more efficiently, and cheaper than existing incumbents, until the government comes in and says "Did you buy your insurance? Are you paying your employees (or treating them as employees in the first place)? Are you providing benefits? Are you certified?" Then suddenly, the SV compan…
The hotel experience needed improvement. So did the taxi experience. Incumbents were preventing competition through monopoly and regulatory capture. They won, and in doing so they lost their edge.
Some of the regulations Airbnb and Uber skirted have good reasons. Others had good reasons, but new ideas and technologies made these reasons less important. And some were just bad and anti-competitive. The same is true in financial services.
'You shouldn't do that because it is illegal' argument is actually not an argument, it's an appeal to authority. Opening the Overton window to consider why we have the regulations we do, how we got there, and what makes sense moving forward is key to progress. And it often takes unreasonable people (eg: Kalanick) to make that happen.
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>Have you factored in the energy costs of running the thousands of financial institutions and associated infrastructure required to maintain them? I don't like this argument. It's garbage. Bitcoin does not replace the functions of the entire financial system. I can't take out a loan using the blockchain. Banks do far more then act as a ledger. Bitcoin's utility today is a little more than P2P value transfer. A centra…
> A centralized solution - something like Transferwise - does not use as much energy as Bitcoin. Then your choice comes down to this: Use a centralized system for less energy consuming transaction but greater centralization of wealth -- or -- Use a distributed system that requires more energy but distributes wealth amongst network participants. Personally, I would choose the system that distributes wealth at the expe…
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I'm genuinely curious about why you say that. Isn't proof of work proving itself to be a bad way to guarantee trust? Aren't the alternatives worth working on? Does that statement belie a fundamental misunderstanding of blockchain somehow (if so, I'd really like to understand why)?
AFAIK it has not been formally proven yet, but the general consensus I see among crypto fans is that you can't achieve the goals of decentralized, trustless currency without involving some kind of huge energy waste somewhere. (It's saddening me that people think this is a feature .)
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> It’s a new technology because it enables a new human behavior. And what is that? Most of what it’s credited with seems shakey at best. E.g. it’s not really decentralized is the vast majority of the mining is done by two or three large groups.
Anonymous trustless peer to peer exchange of value.
You have to trust the other peers aren’t secretly working together to use a 51% attack.
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You're asking for "an actual calculation" to back up a Fermi estimate of the true value of an irrationally-priced good? Of course there isn't one. It's a Fermi estimate. The main points were that the value is greater than 0 but the use is exceptionally niche. Pick any other Fermi estimate you feel is appropriate for those conditions. It doesn't change my point.
"Fermi estimate"? You know that Fermi was known for backing up his talk with numbers, right? How can you say that then "surely it's a few cents"?
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Anonymous trustless peer to peer exchange of value.
Bitcoin (which as far as I know is the largest blockchain project) has been de-anonymized. You have to trust the other peers aren’t secretly working together to use a 51% attack.
Bitcoin hasn’t been “deanonymized”. It’s never been anonymous. Some of its value actually comes from its extreme transparency.
That said, privacy is important when it comes to money and there are various ways people implement privacy. Both on top of bitcoin and outside of bitcoin.
I don’t know what 51% attack has to do with anonymity though.