Ending Bitcoin Support • Hacker News Board

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#481

Post by nol13 » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 11:18 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #408

lelandbatey wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that people can still use it for things, and the various dark net markets that exist prove that there's at least some kind of use for unofficial (pseudo?)-anonymous currency. Though, by no means are darknets the only way of getting some use out of unofficial currencies. There will always be desire and utility for such systems.

Those darknet markets are only used to buy illegal things, or circumvent currency controls. I understand using a darknet to buy heroin and assassinations, but why on earth would I want to use a darknet market to buy a car? To pay my rent?

So all the spammers/scammers can't see what car you just bought and how much you paid for it and use it for spear phishing?

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#482

Post by VarFarYonder » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 11:24 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #280

freeone3000 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the problem with regulating anonymous transactions is you don't know who's doing them.

That's not a problem at all; just ban them. For example, I would predict that Coinbase and Gemini will never support Monero or ZCash.

It's irrelevant whether exchanges accept privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, because people could always use atomic swaps: https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/what-are-atomic-s...

I don't think they're going to be able to ban atomic swaps.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#483

Post by m3kw9 » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 11:24 PM UTC

What did you expect? They are in the business of making transactions, bitcoin isn’t anymore.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#484

Post by skywhopper » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 11:25 PM UTC

I'd just like to gripe a bit about the use of "fiat currency" as an antonym of "cryptocurrency". Bitcoin may not be similar in all respects to typical government-issued money, but it is far more similar to fiat currency than to hard currency: its supply is artificially controlled, and Bitcoin itself has no intrinsic value. Bitcoin is administered by a de facto government in the form of the miners that run the network. That this government does not have a direct correlation to a UN-recognized nation-state does not make Bitcoin any less artificial or more real.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#485

Post by jugchock » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 11:27 PM UTC

stanmancan wrote: post #426

bparsons wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Bitcoin is the AOL of blockchain technology. It was a first mover, it had huge uptake and valuation, but in a few years (or perhaps already) someone is going to build a protocol that is capable of hundreds of thousands of secure transactions a second, and it will make Bitcoin look archaic.

There's a few different ones that have made huge jumps forward; RaiBlocks can apparently do around 7,000tx/s.

Steem regularly processes 1.5 million transactions per day and is at 0.13% capacity[1]. If my math is right, that comes out to the ability to process 14k tx/s.

[1]: http://www.blocktivity.info

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#486

Post by tedunangst » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 11:31 PM UTC

ujal wrote: post #455

tptacek wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck buying a slice of pizza with bitcoin.

In Zimbabwe you can.

Sometimes I wonder what percentage of the people talking about all the things one can do with bitcoin in Zimbabwe have been to Zimbabwe and done those things.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#487

Post by viach » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 11:32 PM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #361

viach wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy Bitcoin worth 50k USD in one country, cross the border and sell it in another, with no documents required . This is useful for a subset of people .

Not sure exactly what you mean by no documents required. You need to find some way to get money to the seller when you are in country A and the buyer needs to the same for you in country B. There is no reason that same pair of transactions could not have occurred with British bonds.

I mean one of the main cryptocurrencies attraction points - it's unregulated and you can move money cross borders freely. And guys from localbitcoin don't ask many questions. There are other ways also, I suspect.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#488

Post by csomar » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 11:33 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #49

vec wrote: post #18

For what it's worth, we just spent two weeks trying and failing to get Stripe's Bitcoin integration working on our site. The short version is that Stripe guaranteed a USD BTC exchange rate for an hour, after which they would automatically cancel the transaction. Given that most transactions now take well over an hour to be verified on the blockchain, that means basically every transaction fails.

I honestly don't know what use-case remains for Bitcoin. If you have large value transactions you'd probably choose something with privacy like Monero, and if you want something cheap and fast, maybe Bitcoin Cash. In both use-cases, you have a few competing alternatives. In no circumstance is Bitcoin preferable to one of the mature alternatives. ...and if no one is using it as a transaction medium, then acting as a s…

The reason is that life is not really that simple. People pick people/assets/things based on reputation and popularity and not technical or practical merit.

Gold is used as a store of value despite the fact that it is 1. volatile 2. hard to store 3. hard to buy/sell and 4. hard to transport.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#489

Post by stevenwoo » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 11:34 PM UTC

selimthegrim wrote: post #342

stevenwoo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a recent bit on NPR (Planet Money?) where they interviewed young people in Seoul - they had so little faith in their ability to earn a living and save money by working a regular job in Korea they were putting all their savings into Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and hoping to hit the jackpot. It was alarming.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-01-23/why-some-young-south-...

Thanks - same print source it seems, maybe different radio story - that's dated today! South Korea now sounds like Japan of a few years ago before China got in the WTO, Japan was the "big threat" to US manufacturing/exports of that time, so Japan got a close examination for things the US could learn to copy. But it also sounds a bit like US today or maybe it's all around the world - the college grads not seeing a lot of opportunity for the average or even superior college experience from those examples. It feels like the world is in a lot of trouble if this is true for most college grads everywhere.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#490

Post by deevolution » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 11:34 PM UTC

mh- wrote: post #463

kraftman wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed] A quick google says Visa peaks at 4k txs/sec

[0]: VisaNet handles an average of 150 million transactions every day and is capable of handling more than 24,000 transactions per second. [1]: 65,000 Transaction messages per second [0] https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/... [1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/about-visa/documents/vi... Also, consider there are other networks like MasterCard: [2]: MasterCard’s 2012 annual report asserts…

Id like to also add that there are an order of magnitude more transaction options provided by cryptocurrencies than there are for fiat payment systems. Id bet money that, collectively, the cryptocurrency ecosystem is able to process more transactions per second than all of the leading fiat processors combined.