341–350 of 839 posts
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That’s not a bug, it’s a feature — if it were easy to extract (like aluminum), it would have been much more inflationary and thus not a “good” choice for money.
I didn't claim it was a bug. I was trying to make the point that all the tree huggers that scream bloody murder because of Bitcoin mining costs never look at the actual environmental cost of existing systems.
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> Why would I pay middlemen (banks) when there is no need to? Also why would I trust them, when there is no need to? Payments are only relative small function of financial sector. Much more important is to act in credit markets, i.e take deposits and issue loans. How did you think that crypto removes need for fees (interest rate) and trust in those applications?
I see this as a disadvantage of using banks. They act as if you can freely access your money in your account, but actually you can't. That money is loaned out for the most part, and it's a trick that keeps the current system going. But once you have a bank run, reality will kick in on how banks really work. At least the cryptocurrency that you own is really yours today. The numbers on your bank account are yours some…
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(I work for Algorand) This is false. The BFT protocol that Algorand uses guarantees that each round may have exactly one block (up to our security assumptions with regard to honest stake); this is one of the protocol’s “safety” guarantees. In the case that a large number of participating nodes crash, the network will refuse to produce a block until a sufficient amount of stake begins participating again. Nodes that f…
Calling the case of the network halting "safety" doesn't help things. To walk through a plausible example: let's say 3 Chinese services control 35% of the stake of Algorand. Without warning or any public announcement, the Chinese government steps in and forces them to turn off their servers. The Algorand network will now stop functioning as it can't reach 2/3rds. Hours go by and no one is able to transact. At this po…
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In the second case, the money didn't move, and the government didn't get it. Meanwhile, the Technological Singularity people are working on the other half of the problem you describe.
Ok, so how is it any different than having your money in a numbered account in Panama or Switzerland, which the government can't seize? And what's this Singularity nonsense of which you speak?
And if you want to have a discussion whether there are alternative ways to achieve specific valuable outcomes, count me out. This thread is about whether cryptocurrencies have any potential valuable outcomes besides the potential of lottery-style winnings for early adopters.
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How do you think bitcoin started ? You'd had to be crazy to believe in it 9 years ago, and spend time and energy in the community, nlt to lention monney, to foster the project. My family and friends said i was stupid, utopist, being conned, wasting my time, and so lany things. Btc was banana money at first, and only people believing it would be a great thing as a concept made it work. We didn't expect to make banks,…
Bitcoin doesn't work in any meaningful sense. It can't be used for purchases in most contexts and you can't use it as a stable store of value. It is also controlled by dubious actors and mining is a horribly destructive practice, both in terms of environmental waste and the constant nuisance of people stealing CPU time. But you were saying?
Generally though, merchants wouldn't bother accepting it. Alongside the fees and whatnot, adoption is too low, fees are too high, time to confirm is too high, and it can complicate some legal stuff (like issuing VAT invoices).
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> I would gladly trade all my gains for a world where governments have no control over the creation and regulation of money. In that world, there would also be nothing to stop anyone else from just taking your money by force and without any consequences. The loudest voices against government regulation of finance usually belong to those with the least understanding of it. Most of the regulation is just there to prote…
Why do governments have to simultaneously be in the business of (1) securing people’s property and (2) creating money and regulating the monetary supply?
This gets asked often, but in case something changed recently - what are the use cases of cryptocurrencies that are not: - Attempts to side-step the law (however misguided the law is) - Trivial to do using a typical centralized database (e.g. Federal Reserver or VISA) - Tantamount to waiting for a greater fool to buy out the current players I am not looking for answers of the form "well whenever you want to avoid a t…
Course, you could just use Visa gift cards for these kinds of usages. It's probably a bit more convenient to do it this way, rather than keep topping up a card.
Some other use cases noting that cryptocurrencies tend to have public ledgers.
>In experiments, Vault reduced the bandwidth for joining its network by 99 percent compared to Bitcoin and 90 percent compared to Ethereum, which is considered one of today’s most efficient cryptocurrencies. Ethereum is not considered one of today’s most efficient cryptocurrencies, not remotely. One of the most full-featured perhaps, but not efficient. Not even Bitcoin is since the invention of the MimbleWimble proto…
This is true. I would be interested in knowing the difference in approaches between vault and coda.
In Coda we use zero knowledge proofs to stand in for downloading / checking the blockchain. This means you get the identical computation to normal blockchain syncing, but in only the size of the zero knowledge proof and your account, which ends up being both constant and ~20kb. Which makes a big difference if you want to use Coda from a phone or browser.
Check out this video if you want to understand more of the tech behind it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWVGATxEB6M
And feel free to ask any other questions as well!
I'm shocked and disheartened by how infrequently environmental concerns are brought up when discussing crypto. Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake, security, storage size - these are problems for the network and those that want to see it become a real part of our economy. (I am one of those) But the amount of energy being used to mine bitcoin is a real problem - it's not just a technical challenge (like the problems abov…
I'm not sure whether this is true, but I expect that electricity-from-coal for Bitcoins isn't a massive problem because doing so is simply unprofitable: the electricity costs more than the value of the Bitcoins, so it would be irrational to do. I would expect that mining has become an arbitrage market that narrows in on the cheapest possible electricity anywhere in the world, and as such is dominated by excess "free"…
Green energy is not necessarily the cheapest form of energy. If it were, it wouldn't even be _hard_ to stop burning fossil fuels and prevent climate change.
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>actually banks have failed in the past, this infrastructure not yet Man, what are you talking about? There's a new "$100 million in coins go missing" story every 6 months.
Crypto 101: never let anyone have your private key. No-one who religiously followed that rule has ever had their crypto stolen. Coins go missing from exchanges, which break the basic private key rule. People use exchanges for convenience because as clever as cryptocurrency is, it has no answer to the exchange problem.
Actually, there are smart contracts which act as exchanges. Not for all currency pairs yet, but it's on the way.