201–210 of 313 posts
Adding the words blockchain and cryptocurrency to this new Facebook initiative gives it an air of "innovation", the sort that reacts to criticism with "this is too new and innovative for you to understand", and "stogy governments don't like to innovate like we do, so they want to stop us with old timey regulation (and consumer protections)". Libra is essentially an ETF. It's a vehicle that will take deposits from cus…
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>Yannis Varoufakis said it best.... Any links to support your last two assertions ? I'm interested in checking them out.
I saw him in person in london and he was asked about Bitcoin. As the last sentence of his answer he said and I’m paraphrasing: “If you’re asking about the idea of apolitical money [in relation to Bitcoin] I think that’s a fantasy”. I’ll try and see if he ever said something similar in other settings but I remember connecting it to what I was reading around the same time which was David Graeber’s Debt: a History book…
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Bitcoin uses proof of work [1] to verify transactions on the network. For someone to effectively rewrite the network they would need to control 51% of the total computing power (in hashes/sec) on the bitcoin network. [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work
I see so I was mistaken about that. I still don’t understand why people don’t see that it would be trivial for a major bank (or now that Bitcoin has grown, a government) to look into making enough computational power they would destroy it.
So yes, 51% control could be usurped by a dedicated attacker - but the resources are no longer trivial. And as noted, this "control" doesn't buy you a great deal unless you keep it going for eternity, and for the time period you do have control all you can do is basically stop it working properly by preventing new transactions - rewriting history is exponentially more expensive the farther back you try to go.
This article seems to be making the claim that the Libra blockchain will not be viewable by anyone other the validators. This is counterintuitive - even if only validators can confirm new blocks I expected the chain would be public, there would be explorers, etc. Does anyone know if this question has been answered somewhere definitively?
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This is one of the reasons I dropped out of crypto for years, most of its supporters were completely delusional and tragically uninformed about actual banks. I always considered two datapoints to be fulcral A) ease of use, which Bitcoin has never had and B) potential to be overtaken by an actual bank and twisted into whatever purposes it wanted due to the 51% error. That is, how hard would be it for JPMorgan or Deust…
I think you are misinformed about how bitcoin works. Bitcoin doesn't care how much of it you have, as it uses Proof-of-Work not Proof-of-Stake. The only thing that matters is you computational power. Now it is true that large banks could just buy lots of ASICs and try to beat the network, but that would mean a continued investment: As soon as they stop mining, the network would return to normal. They can hurt bitcoin…
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/feb/01/iraq.suzannego...
> The largest leap will come last: Libra as a genuine currency, not simply a medium for transaction. This will be function of volume in the previous two use cases, and is understandably concerning to governments all over the world. Well that's certainly an understatement. This is literally the only mention of government through-out the entire article. The only mention of banks is in the previous paragraph stating the…
Any history books you would recommend?
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>>"Why? Well assuming all things being equal (convenience as medium of exchange etc.), an individual is always going to prefer holding currency that isn’t subject to inflation." And why should they spend a so wonderful asset? And what is the point of a currency that is always appreciating and nobody want to spend? >>"The problem for governments is: the genie is out of the bottle regarding fixed supply." Central banks…
> what is the point of a currency that is always appreciating and nobody want to spend Fixed supply doesn't mean it will always appreciate. It just seems like it today because the first fixed supply currency that can be transferred over the internet was only invented 10 years ago. It (or an equivalent, or a mix of equivalents) has to rise from 0 USD to X USD over time where X is "the value of global, fixed supply cur…
It seems to me that you believe that when the economy stay the same and the supply of money grows, money loss value.
Then, the other side of the coin ;-) is that when the economy grows and the currency don't, it increases value.
>>"[--] And if everyone does this, government no longer controls the money supply."
Governments already don't control the money supply. If a bank gives a credit, it's creating money in the system.
After giving a credit (and creating money in the process), it needs to increase its reserves. If the government don't give it enough reserves it have to go to the inter-bank market, that will create demand for reserves, and that increase the interest rate.
If the government want to control the interest rate it can't control the quantity of money.
>>"Just because I pay taxes in USD/EUR doesn't mean I can't store my cash in a fixed supply currency, "
You can do it already, for instance, buying gold. Note that the price of gold also move up and down. You can lost money buying gold and it will be not different with any other asset.
Other than that, I can't think of a use case.