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A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

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Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#561

Post by pas »

DenisM wrote: post #537
pas wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't link to it. It's just a screenshot. Or do you have something else in mind?

Suppose: I sent you the money, you call the shipping guys and notify them that it's time to ship the goods. That's all. I don't see why the shipping company needs to verify anything themselves - they just need a call from the owner of the goods directing the shipment.

I don't know either, but usual shipping is FOB - freight on board, so the seller pays half of it. And so the seller typically doesn't do shit until the money is there.

And when it comes to trade between untrusted parties, it starts slow. To build trust.

Though crypto is great to making faster payments, that's sometimes an issue, and it can save the seller from the buyer's scam, but on the other hand completely exposes the buyer to the seller's scams. (Because cryptocurrency transfers are non-reversible usually [as in ever, except with a hard fork].)

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#562

Post by creato »

DINKDINK wrote: post #544
darkpuma wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Bitcoin is successfully storing a large amount of value in a distributed manner. More than any other system that exists." No it isn't. The market cap of bitcoin, which is a bullshit number anyway as already explained, is dwarfed by other forms of distributed wealth storage such as (but certainly not limited to) old fashioned pieces of gold . Gold is distributed. If you revise your assertion to be distributed and d…

>[Bitcoin] is dwarfed by other forms of distributed wealth storage such as [S.A.] old fashioned pieces of gold Hi can you let me how I can immigrate out of my country with $10e6 without thieves at the airport taking my wealth? If we can figure this out, man bitcoin is totally KIA. Also can you let me how how I can costlessly assay gold when I accept it as payment? or make the supply of gold only dependent only on tim…

I think it's absurd to think that it should be possible to package 150 years of median US household labor into an easily transportable, easily securable form. That simply will never be possible. It's not a technology problem.

Even if you could somehow do this, you would be incredibly vulnerable to extortion, and I doubt you would actually really want to do this even if you had the capability. There are people that have significant wealth that exists outside of "official" legal capacities (drug lords, dictators of small nations, etc.). They have to spend incredible effort on maintaining security of their assets. Pretty much the only thing that works is giving an army of people a better deal than they can get from someone else to steal your wealth from you.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#563

Post by Pharmakon »

SilasX wrote: post #381
good-idea wrote: post #242

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…

No, we don't. Bitcoin is one way to use energy. There are hundreds of thousands of other ways. When you say Bitcoin "hurts the environment", what, concretely do you mean? Presumably, you mean it in a stronger sense than "using energy to produce food hurts the environment" or "using energy to run an ER hurts the environment". That is, you think that relative to the benefit provided , the use of (harmful) energy to run…

EDIT: Should probably add the disclaimer that I'm long Bitcoin.

No need, at this point it’s trivial to determine that from the industrial-strength denial of the downsides and naked proselytizing. Someone brings up a real and long term concern about environmental consequences from a truly wasteful process, and your response is the kind of equivocating about what “harm” means, and fantasies about markets which have become the hallmark of the terminal-stage cryptocurrency investor/ideologue.

Trust me, long before the edit, people understood where you were coming from, and smelled the search for new bagholders.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#564

Post by DINKDINK »

root_axis wrote: post #552
DINKDINK wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bitcoin is wasteful because the increasing energy costs does not increase the total number of transactions that can be processed. Are you saying the number of transactions the market will demand of a system is independent of the trust of the system? If I need to move $250,000[1] in one hour with ~100% certainty are you saying an IOU from a bank janitor is equivalent in value to a bitcoin transaction? An increase in…

> Are you saying the number of transactions the market will demand of a system is independent of the trust of the system No. I'm saying that if a 51% attack is practically impossible today, the increasing amount of energy consumed to secure the same amount of transactions is wasted. It's also a sign that the system is broken because the amount of energy consumed has no practical impact on security. Reasoning otherwis…

>a 51% attack is practically impossible today

It appears you think a 51% attack is when an external agent attempts to out hash the network. This is only one type of 51% attack.

A 51% attack means there is a almost equal amount of hash rate being applied to two divergent, consensus equivalent chains. This can happen in above scenario or when existing miners attempt to reorg blocks (See ETC 51% attack) There is nothing stopping this behavior from occurring at any point in time. The only check on this behavior is the cost to rewrite history, decrease this cost, and you increase the profitability of such attacks.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#565

Post by semi-extrinsic »

Sir_Substance wrote: post #337
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, but you don't need crypto to have that potential. Anyone could issue their own currency, and try to convince people to use it for actually buying and selling stuff. But that convincing part is really the key, and crypto very explicitly doesn't solve the problem that businesses will need to trust the issuing entity before they switch to using a new currency. People and companies want to have a central, stable issu…

>Anyone could issue their own currency, and try to convince people to use it for actually buying and selling stuff. But that convincing part is really the key Absolutely true, see EcoCash. It's a fascinating case study. >and crypto very explicitly doesn't solve the problem that businesses will need to trust the issuing entity before they switch to using a new currency. Trust is a relative thing. EcoCash is issued by…

> > People and companies want to have a central, stable issuing authority they can trust.

> I'd love to see a citation on that.

Didn't you just provide two examples yourself (Zimbabwe and Venezuela) that alternative currencies are being adopted precisely due to the lack of a stable central issuing authority?

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#566

Post by c22 »

MereInterest wrote: post #539
c22 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm probably way out of my element here (I don't own bitcoin or play video games). Are you telling me that the power consumption of the bitcoin network is constant and based solely on the most popular bitcoin mining hardware?

I wouldn't say that it is constant, as the energy consumption has been increasing. However, it does not depend on the efficiency of the hardware being used. Think of bitcoin mining as a raffle. You can buy as many raffle tickets as you want, and so can everybody else. Each raffle ticket costs $1, and so people buy tickets until the prizes start getting spread out too much. The next day, though, the raffle tickets are…

Okay, I think I get it. So the power consumption of the network is based only on the power available to miners, which is probably reasonably constant since the mining pool doesn't change much? So putting aside market hype the main thing impacting the value of a bitcoin should be the cost of this power?

I agree it doesn't sound like the most efficient system and these incentives are somewhat perverse, but there weren't any systems like this before bitcoin. If cryptocurrencies do have valuable attributes that cannot be attained by conventional currencies and bitcoin introduced these concepts to the world in the first viable way and the popularity of these networks has lead to people researching more efficient analogues such as proof of stake and the techniques mentioned in the original article then can't we still say that the existence of bitcoin had a utilitarian benefit for the world? If the popularity of bitcoin goes down and these more efficient networks supplant it then the total energy-expenditure should be minuscule compared to the total energy usage of all humans over all time. Given the the rate at which these technologies seem to be maturing it will likely still be a lower expenditure than bootstrapping many other equally useless human endeavors.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#567

Post by _gx90 »

ryan_j_naughton wrote: post #311
sbenitoj wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% disagree, the central planning of money is (1) what causes inflation, and (2) greatly exacerbates (and in many cases creates) financial crises. Any supply of money will do, the idea that money should increase in supply along with population growth (or some other arbitrary metric) otherwise we’ll permanently live in a deflationary disaster is an imagined monster — we live in the here and now, therefore people h…

A low, but positive, inflation rate is of critical importance. > Any supply of money will do. That is just nonsense. If you have a fixed money supply, given that economic growth is happening, would result in a naturally deflationary currency. That is a terrible place to be for the system as a whole as no one has any incentives to spend or invest in anything as money itself will simply gain value over time just sittin…

>That is a terrible place to be for the system as a whole as no one has any incentives to spend or invest in anything as money itself will simply gain value over time just sitting as cash. Thus, that money isn't being used / circulated. Having a ideal velocity of money has significant multiplier effects and deflationary currencies are fundamentally flawed.

In what world is this true? Time preference is a real thing, and it is unrealistic to assume that 100% of the population will put off non-essential consumption and investment because the price of a Ferrari will decrease by 2.353% next year. Time is a very important factor in the consumption/investment decisions that people take, and modern mainstream economics neglect this fact both on the micro-level and on the macro-level, which is why crazy theories about the neccessity of inflation-rate targeting are able to arise. Most people put their savings in a bank account which the bank lends out to businesses to invest in projects - if anything more savings will lead to more investment than otherwise, which is more important to the bedrock of an economy than spending on consumption.

Also worth pointing out that the period during which the United States experienced its most significant economic growth (mid to late 1800s) was during a period of severe deflation of the dollar.

Keynesian economics (and more generally monetary policy) and inflation-targeting (i.e. the neccessity of having a positive inflation rate) is both theoretically disproven by the existence of time preference (a time preference of zero is literally impossible, it means starving to death) and its heterogenous distribution in a population, as well as empirically by looking at the periods of deflation in the U.S. dollar during the 1800s and the associated economic growth.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#568

Post by topmonk »

darkpuma wrote: post #547
DINKDINK wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>[Bitcoin] is dwarfed by other forms of distributed wealth storage such as [S.A.] old fashioned pieces of gold Hi can you let me how I can immigrate out of my country with $10e6 without thieves at the airport taking my wealth? If we can figure this out, man bitcoin is totally KIA. Also can you let me how how I can costlessly assay gold when I accept it as payment? or make the supply of gold only dependent only on tim…

> Hi can you let me how I can immigrate out of my country with $10e6 without thieves at the airport taking my wealth? If we can figure this out, man bitcoin is totally KIA. You're supposing that the vast majority of people using bitcoin are using it to exfiltrate money out of countries. That niche application is very far from the reality of what most bitcoin advocates are doing. But yes, digital exfiltration may be e…

> But yes, digital exfiltration may be easier than physical smuggling. That's supposing a lot about what forms of control are implemented in that country at at it's borders.

Given that some forms of cryptocurrency can be stored using only a memorized passphrase and nothing else, (ie. a brain wallet), it's pretty much guaranteed that getting cryptocurrency put of the country would be easier.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#569

Post by drexlspivey »

throwaway415415 wrote: post #527
kragen wrote: post #430

This sounds pretty similar to the benefits of MimbleWimble, the design behind Grin (and another earlier system whose name I forget). Grin recently "went live" in the sense that now there's a network that isn't the testnet.

Not true

How is that not true? In grin you only have to download the block headers and only the last 5000 blocks (called horizon) for a full sync. Bandwidth saving is even greater than 99%.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#570

Post by _gx90 »

Scarblac wrote: post #371
sbenitoj wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, any supply of money will do, no need to permanently increase the amount in circulation — this is why the market settled on gold (which has an inherently low inflation rate due to the difficulties of mining) and impossible to pass off counterfeit gold at scald.

The market has settled on gold? For money? What? The market moved on to other forms of money centuries ago.

This is categorically false. The gold standard (albeit a reduced version of it established under the Bretton-Woods monetary regime) was abolished in the United States as recently as 1971. In Switzerland this link was abolished in the early 2000's AFAIK.
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