321–330 of 555 posts
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So it's ok if your currency becomes unreliable for many hours? It would immediately negate the trust of what happened during that period of time, affecting the trust of any balance in participating addresses.
Bitcoin hasn't been useful as a currency for a long time. I don't think that's a good measure for determining how an event might affect bitcoin price.
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So it's not a complete waste of natural resources because it helps secure "the chain"?
How much energy is spent securing conventional financial systems? You have to include everything: banks, minting, enforcement, physical security, even military and intelligence action.
Cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, have energy use as a feature, not cost. Unlike conventional financial systems, cryptocurrencies try not to minimize energy expenditure, but maximize it, as a core function ensuring their integrity.
(Also, military and intelligence action count to stability of both conventional and cryptocurrency-based systems. After all, you can't run a crypto economy without stable and secure nation states with rule of law that allow for development and availability of advanced microelectronics (for mining), electricity and the Internet. Crypto is much more dependent on that than conventional systems.)
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A tangentially related analogy that comes to mind: cryptocurrencies are like trying to build a city on a big hovering platform, kept aloft by great fans or jets. In order to keep the whole thing airborne, you'd find yourself constantly burning fuel just to counter gravity. Now we find this idea stupid because we can just build city on the ground and not waste any fuel at all - the surface of the Earth counters gravity for free. This is cryptocurrencies' relationship with trust. Trust works 99% of the time for free. Cryptocurrencies try to replace it with burning energy.
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Those are both activities which use up trivial quantities of those natural resources. Bitcoin uses up nontrivial quantities of electricity.
There's a hidden cost of trust there, though, which vanishes with bitcoin (or at least reduces its cost). Maybe the value of bitcoin is more apparent from the perspective of venezuela at the moment, where the risk involved with traditional banks, currency, and security is more apparent. I am emphatically not taking a stance on which I prefer here, I might add, just pointing out that there are more variables here than…
Yes, except the trust is free. Bitcoin replaces that trust with burning electricity.
It's kind of like standing on the ground. The surface of the Earth stops you from accelerating under gravity for free. But if you want to hover just above it, you have to burn ungodly amounts of energy, because you're now replacing surface with active propulsion. This is the same relationship as Bitcoin has with trust.
And yes, flying is occasionally useful. So are trustless systems. But both the ground and trust are features that cut out a lot of unnecessary energy usage from our lives.
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You are not wrong to argue that state level actors are a serious threat. But fortunately, these state actors seem to have no interest in attacking crypto. It seems like the governments that matters IE the 1st world, are perfectly happy to allow people to have access to a censorship resistant method of financial transactions. This makes a certain amount of sense. The governments of the 1st world claim to care a lot ab…
Or you know, they love the idea of an immutable record that’s far from anonymous. Cash is hard to trace, a Bitcoin is easy to trace for something like the NSA. It’s a giant digital paper trail by design! Besides, Bitcoin is as likely to become a dominant currency as shells or promises. No one outside or BTC fanatics honestly entertain that idea, and only a few who do espouse it do so because they really think it’s li…
I don't see any of these privacy coins being banned yet, so.....
But anyways that is besides the point.
The argument that the OP was making was that governments are areal threat to crypto. And MY point was that these governments are NOT actually attacking cryoptocurrencies so I guess things are going to work out fine for cryptocurrencies.
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Those are both activities which use up trivial quantities of those natural resources. Bitcoin uses up nontrivial quantities of electricity.
You forgot to calculate how much (in resources) it costed to build all those banks and vaults and how much it costs to run and maintain, globally.
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You know all that sunlight that hits the Earth that we don't convert into energy. Wasted natural resource. Loads of it.
No, it isn't. It's what lets you, and everything else, live, instead of freezing to death.
I think you may be missing my point and sarcasm.
How is the price not crashing? It's down 10%, which is pretty much like the rest of the market.
The second and more disturbing possibility being it is still good for money laundering cycles even if the actual suckers have cashed out. If money launders say maintain storefronts that give out digital goods of some sort the costs to themselves are minimal so they don't particularly care if someone gets a few megs downloaded for now invalid bitcoin.
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Why? Why does a new system need to be just as bad as the old one?
It doesn't. But if the new system is better than the old one, why would comparing it to the old one imply that anyone using the new one should be ashamed of doing so?
But it turns out that the new system is significantly worse than the old one, for little to no practical benefit. That's why people are comparing and complaining.
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> Pretty weak line of reasoning. Hardly. What, exactly, does bitcoin add to our world? Near as I can tell it's only use case is Making Money Fast (for the folks at the top of the pyramid, anyway) and scamming the bejesus out of all the rubes who fall for the con. > How much energy do you and everyone else waste doing things that don't add value to my life or society? Bitcoin is estimated to consume more than 0.5% of…
Funny you are arguing about the lack of value of security in a thread of a coin that just had its security broken.
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The spooky thing that this made me realize, is that if anyone did find a vulnerability in bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) is that they would have a greater incentive to only slowly leech off the system, because they will be able to siphon out much more over time than if everyone panics over security. The weapon is no good unless it's secret.
Nah, you could short-sell Bitcoin. Take out a sell option, crash the value, buy cheap, then exercise the option. Information is valuable, no matter which direction it predicts the market to go.