Earlier quoted context omitted.
Math has everything to do with nature.
Endlessly re-calculating SHA-256 over and over is not some beautiful mathematical principle.
Find a better way of guaranteeing trust-less asynchronous consensus then talk.
A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
811–820 of 839 posts
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#812Earlier quoted context omitted.
Deflation, which given a growing population would always be a given. In turn deflation makes the entire debt system collapse , which is the backbone of economic growth especially in the developed world.
Why should debt support an economy? Without such massive inflation people wouldn’t need to take on much debt to make large purchases such as cars/houses because the prices of cars/houses would be much, much lower. It only makes sense to take on debt if you have a productive way to put that money to use (Eg a business) that has a higher rate of return than the interest rate.
Debt is the backbone of US GDP growth, money enters the economy as debt, is used to purchase something like a car or a house, subsequently it then reenters the banking system as the person who is being paid deposits their check, and then gets re-loaned out only to often immediately end back up in another domestic bank account that then loans out even more money.
This cycle can continue forever, and the faster this cycle occurs the higher our GDP.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#813Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always have been excited about Bitcoin because allows me as a developer to do things with money in the internet. I could create a service like PayPal without the need of having deals with hundreds of banks all over the world. A homeless can have a btc wallet but probably not a bank account. I could automate transfers and payments. In countries like Argentina there are a few banks and they're really bad quality, bot…
> I always have been excited about Bitcoin because allows me as a developer to do things with money in the internet. I could create a service like PayPal without the need of having deals with hundreds of banks all over the world. A homeless can have a btc wallet but probably not a bank account. I could automate transfers and payments. In countries like Argentina there are a few banks and they're really bad quality, b…
It's also the technology, currently outside of crypto you're always going to be connecting to some company's servers using their API after you get their authorization.
There's no way the current system can have a stable and uniform API that works globally.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#814Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, as one other commenter mentioned, with regard to Bitcoin miners have essentially become a centralized authority, and their decisions on block-size have made Bitcoin less liquid, and less useful as a currency while making transactions more profitable to them. Another example would be exchanges: a vast majority of people do not use cryptocurrency in a peer-to-peer fashion, but instead go through a small number of…
> , with regard to Bitcoin miners have essentially become a centralized authority, and their decisions on block-size have made Bitcoin less liquid, and less useful as a currency while making transactions more profitable to them. >Another example would be exchanges Interestingly enough, with regards to bitcoin, there was a huge powerplay that happened a couple years ago. And this debate proved who had the real power.…
> But, this change didn't pass, because the 4 or 5 people who controlled the bitcoin core github repository, and reference client disagreed with the changes, it prevented it from happening.
This is blatant re-writing of history.
A fork was written, Bitcoin Cash, but most people/miners/companies didn't want to use it. It was widely known and the differences/advantages/disadvantages were discussed ad nauseum for months/years.
A Github repo can't force people to run it's code instead of another.
> And this was in spite of the fact that almost every single major player in the space wanted this change.
So why did they keep running Bitcoin Core instead of the fork?
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#815I have long wondered how cryptocurrency fans would answer the question: ‘Would you be happy if the crypto-utopia you bring up happens in the next 10 years, and all value is stored/transacted through a cryptocurrency, but it was a coin that you do not possess now, nor could you transfer any of you current currencies into it?’ Say tomorrow someone releases the one true coin, but no one notices. All other cryptocurrenci…
You don't have to ask that question. If they really cared about the tech, they would make sure their tokens are not deflationary. Deflationary tokens are not much good as a currency but they are good as a Ponzi scheme.
People need to stop misusing "Ponzi scheme" for anything they think is a scam. A Ponzi scheme is quite specific, if you're just thinking of people trying to sell something to "the next idiot", call it a Pyramid scheme (although I still disagree that it applies to Bitcoin).
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#816Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want a cryptocurrency which is egalitarian - evenly distributed among people in the world, rather than one in which a few people own the majority and profit hugely.
What happens on Day Two?
The people with businesses get a lot of the new currency from the people that need to work for a living and we're back on track to be right where we started.
A currency is just a measurement device, it's not a replacement for resources, I don't know why people forget that so often.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#817Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also doesn't use as much energy as the country of Iceland (living in Iceland here). You what we use the MOST electricity for here? Aluminum smelting. No one seems to care a lot about that waste, it seems.
Making aluminum isn't a waste! You can build airplanes out of aluminum. You can also relatively easily recycle aluminum into more aluminum things, so it's not like you have to pay that smelting cost every single time you want to purchase anything.
It's still subjective. We can argue all night about what does or doesn't deserve to have energy used on it, that doesn't change the fact that Bitcoin is a rounding error in terms of global warming.
If the purpose is to limit environmental impact, why are we choosing by subjective value instead of actual impact?
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#818Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it increases the trust of the system. Is it the best solution? Perhaps not, but it is not without utility.
Run that one by me again? If tomorrow, a manufacturer announced the new Super Duper Quantum ASIC for Bitcoin that can perform hashes at 10 times less energy cost, everybody would switch over to it, and the total hashrate would increase 10x. Neither the number of miners, the proportion of mining held by each person, the distribution of mining rewards accumulated, or the total power consumption would be affected at all…
The trust in the system doesn't scale with hashrate, it scales with required cost to attack it.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#819Earlier quoted context omitted.
@root_axis (since I can't reply directly): > PoW systems are the only ones where "higher value transactions" need security proportional to their size. Every other currency is either backed by men with guns and transactions are reversible (fiat) or you have to spend a roughly proportional amount of resources securing it (e.g. gold). I didn't look at the data, but judging by US military spending I'd guess that the stro…
> Every other currency is either backed by men with guns ? So what? Men with guns are also the foundation of property rights, law and order, and national sovereignty; they are not an extra cost of fiat currency, they underpin the government's ability to maintain order and structure within society. I shouldn't have to explicitly point this out. > transactions are reversible (fiat) Cash payments are not reversible. Rev…
> Gold is not a currency.
It was for millennia.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#820Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the American military wasteful because it provides too much security? How much should it be reduced to provide sufficient security? This is a legitimate question/ I don't have an opinion either way - but it seems to be a fair corollary.
Unlike bitcoin, every person in the US has an (more or less) equal vote to help decide that. Congress's job is literally to decide whether to spend more money on military, among other things. And also unlike bitcoin, when you pay the salary of 450k+ soldiers, among other jobs and such created, that's likely a lot better for the economy than random people converting electricity into crypto tokens. What does bitcoin pr…
> And also unlike bitcoin, when you pay the salary of 450k+ soldiers, among other jobs and such created, that's likely a lot better for the economy than random people converting electricity into crypto tokens.
Jobs are only useful if they waste people's time? Mining is a job. Mining can also become green much faster than constantly moving around millions of tons of vehicles can.
> Additionally, you can argue that the US army does not provide too much security, because it doesn't take someone more than a few seconds to look at the world and see the world is not 100% safe.
I would argue it decreases security, with all the wars and disruption it caused in the last decades.