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A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

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Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#761

Post by naasking »

Nursie wrote: post #721
naasking wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the amount of energy being used to mine bitcoin is a real problem - it's not just a technical challenge (like the problems above). This is something that literally affects every human being. How much energy was used to establish and perpetuate the existing fiat currency infrastructure? Has any such comparative analysis been done? Without such an analysis, it seems a little premature to unilaterally declare that…

This canard is tiresome. The exiting infrastructure does far, far more than cryptocurrencies do, including credit, investment, protection of funds and all sorts of stuff.

And you think the existing infrastructure for Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies cannot support such services? The smart contract languages were designed for such things as far as I understand.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#762

Post by tim333 »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #239
DenisM wrote: post #87

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…

The original use case for cryptocurrency (eg digital sound money, not world computers and the like) is as a long-term (and hopefully independent and uncorrrelated enough) hedge against mis-management and failure of national currency regimes. That remains a legit use case but will take years or decades to materialize. Given that the tech is still in the early stages of its maturity curve and needs more time to robusti…

>hedge against mis-management and failure of national currency regimes

At the moment cryptocurrencies seem a good be worse than fiat. Imagine your salary or mortgage was a set number of bitcoins.

There were probably a number of initial uses imagined but if you look as Szabo's twitter pretty much the first link is The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto about circumventing government and libertarian freedom which I think was a big part of the inspiration.

(https://mobile.twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/107401811082955... )

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#763

Post by tim333 »

_gx90 wrote: post #576
woah wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't the original use case for crypto. In the bitcoin white paper he mostly talks about micropayments, which bitcoin has ironically failed at.

This is wrong. Satoshi Nakamoto was incredibly well-read in the Austrian school and mentions central bank controlled credit bubbles in his whitepaper as well as in many of his online posts on forums. The genesis block is even dedicated to this goal: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block "The coinbase parameter (seen above in hex) contains, along with the normal data, the following text: The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chanc…

I don't see any mention of credit bubbles in https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#764

Post by JoeAltmaier »

keymone wrote: post #745
Nursie wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that’s the whole point - bitcoin manages to do that without trust. Well that's nonsense for a start. Bitcoin simply shifts trust from a middleman to a vendor I am interacting with. A middleman that is highly regulated, with all sorts of protections and restrictions in place to protect me. A vendor who has a financial incentive to rip me off, and thousands of years of history to show us just how much they do when gi…

nope, you're the one talking nonsense. when your bank tells you you have $100 on your account - it's a lie, all you have is a record in a database and never actual $100 in a safe to back that up. all you have is trust that the bank will provide you $100 when you ask for it. when you have 100BTC, you actually have 100BTC. how is that hard to understand?

Missed the 'vendor' part. Most folks dealing in bitcoin, don't trade a whole coin at a time (which is what, $20K?) They use an exchange. Which is the same as now, except without any federal safeguards. In fact bitcoin exchanges have infamously been hijacked and abscond with everybody's coins.

So where's the safety there? Its imaginary.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#765

Post by jki275 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #764
keymone wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nope, you're the one talking nonsense. when your bank tells you you have $100 on your account - it's a lie, all you have is a record in a database and never actual $100 in a safe to back that up. all you have is trust that the bank will provide you $100 when you ask for it. when you have 100BTC, you actually have 100BTC. how is that hard to understand?

Missed the 'vendor' part. Most folks dealing in bitcoin, don't trade a whole coin at a time (which is what, $20K?) They use an exchange. Which is the same as now, except without any federal safeguards. In fact bitcoin exchanges have infamously been hijacked and abscond with everybody's coins. So where's the safety there? Its imaginary.

Not how it works.

You can trade any fraction of a coin with or without an exchange. Exchanges facilitate trading, but they aren't required.

And btc hasn't been 20k for over a year -- in fact it never got there as I recall. It's been trading around 3k for the last few months.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#766

Post by [deleted] »

scartracs wrote: post #686
naveedi wrote: post #38

Full disclosure: I work on the cryptocurrency in this article, Algorand. There are a lot of questions and speculation here about this paper and Algorand. I would be happy to try an answer them to your satisfaction. Some context may be helpful first, though. This paper is an innovation about one aspect of our technology. Algorand has a very fast consensus mechanism and can add blocks as quickly as the network can deli…

OK I'll bite. Nothing about the article or YT video is innovative, some of it is laughable. Algorand's consensus per the YT video you linked is step 1. 1 user is randomly chosen to propagate a new block (can user make up a fake block? let's assume not) step 2. 1000 users randomly selected vote on that block and if they agree, it's DONE. (what if 1000 users are in the same country/company, etc. how do you prevent coll…

[deleted]

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#767

Post by JoeAltmaier »

antidesitter wrote: post #694
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the other 'whole point' is, its ridiculously expensive to the planet. Its playing mind-games with the ecosystem, burning terawatt-hours to enable imaginary points to be traded without imaginary safeguards.

Why do you say “imaginary points”? Do you consider your bank account balance to be “imaginary points”?

Of course they are just like religion, law, right and wrong and on and on. You can tell what is real, and what is all in Sapiens' heads - ask your dog. They know what real is.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#768

Post by JoeAltmaier »

keymone wrote: post #716
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the other 'whole point' is, its ridiculously expensive to the planet. Its playing mind-games with the ecosystem, burning terawatt-hours to enable imaginary points to be traded without imaginary safeguards.

It costs way less than current financial system costs even normalized for market cap or transaction volume because it involves politics and military.

The internet depends on politics and the military too. Don't be fooled.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#769

Post by ericol »

tim333 wrote: post #756
ericol wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transferwise does £ to pesos, to where. As stated, bank accounts in the country do not have a SWIFT code assigned. You have to triangulate the money (Please check my other comments below). Re: Kraken, the 2% I'm talking about is in the local broker I'm using to convert BTC to pesos. I doubt Kraken can help me there. Not to mention that that Kraken is an exchange. A completelly different bussiness model to Localbitcoi…

To Argentina https://transferwise.com/gb/send-money/send-money-to-argenti... I'm not sure you need a swift code, probably just a bank account number/sort code. >The recipient gets money in their currency directly from TransferWise''s local bank account. I have not tried Argentina as I have no business there but have sent money to Indonesia which is another tricky place and it worked fine. Fair enough re Kraken - they…

> probably just a bank account number/sort code.

Dude. Each country has their own way to sort stuff internally. For instance "sort code" is not something you find in countries like Spain (I have a bank account there; sort code is something found in the UK).

Nor are they found in this country. Here, we have what it's called CBU (Uniform bank key).

Again, when you go to a bank branch, _IF_ there's any relation between your bank account and a SWIFT account, they never tell you that information

And, considering that even in the cases you agree to do the transfer, you do not do that to a bank account in the SWIFT system that belongs to the branch but to a bank account in another country, I doubt we are integrated.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#770

Post by koonsolo »

School-Cotton wrote: post #759
koonsolo wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, there would be 1 big difference: payments are made in cryptocurrency, not in bank credits. And this difference has an impact on all the rest. We use bank money now because it's more convenient than paying with gold. But imagine that paying with gold was more convenient and preferred. In that case, we would see money in the bank as an investment, not as a wallet. Your employer does not wire transfers mone…

Basically everything you just said is already possible with USD instead of Bitcoin. You could demand your employer pay you real cash instead of bank credit, and so on. The reason nobody does this is because there is no good reason to -- banks in the US are extremely reliable and trustworthy.

I live in Europe, so no, I do not have USD in my bank account.

What if my real employer doesn't live close to me because he's in a different country? Should he send cash in an envelope? Which cash? The one from my country? From his country?

What if you live in Venezuela, would you still trust the government money?

So no, this is not possible with USD bills.

> banks in the US are extremely reliable and trustworthy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banking_crises#21st_ce...

"Massive bail-outs of financial institutions and other palliative monetary and fiscal policies were employed to prevent a possible collapse of the world financial system."

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