11–20 of 83 posts
I think it's time that the government started to consider stepping in a providing support to these out of work ASICs.
If this is true, which I welcome because Chinese miner centralization has been a massive worry for us since about 2012, that still has yielded they highest hash rate (the computing power dedicated to mining Bitcoin) in the History of BTC: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html Its easy to skew this if you don't understand the underlying tech, but Bitcoin continues to work despite a supposed exodus…
Bitcoin is fundamentally not a cash alternative. Which means definitionally the alternative to holding onto $100 BTC is NOT holding onto $100 cash. In fact cash is intentionally inflationary and BTC is intentionally deflationary (over long enough time scales) so yeah, you'd win your silly bet if there's no major crash. Doesn't mean you'll come out ahead of other strategies.
Funny, I built a fintech startup on helping the cannabis Industry from their supposed 'cash' problem(s): predominately having too much of it and not having banking, or having thier cash taken indefinitely by the bank/paypal upon closure of their account(s). While also doing B2B transactions where banks/CC companies failed to lend them services, despite having Local/State laws permitting so. None of which Cash seemed to prove as useful as you think it is.
I think you're looking at this the wrong way: rather than looking at it as a paradigm shift in what programmable money can do, you are measuring Bitcoin by how it fails to function (or dysfunction) as your local Fiat currency does.
That's a very poor measure/metric, as for being able to use it day-to-day, provided you're willing to operate within a KYC/AML system, you can have Visa Credit Cards that draw from your source of BTC in real time/previously loaded, depending on what service you use.
Merchants who accept Bitcoin is a constraint, mainly a tech related one, but just like how many restaurants now take UberEats/Doordash/GrubHub that amount to a growing/large(r) percent of their revenue (moreso when States are limiting restaurant hours or outright operation to online orders only [1]) you will see new use cases appear which Bitcoin's layer 1/2 can utilize natively as a private p2p system.
I think its very telling that despite guy's like Jack Dorsey backing Bitcoin, who I think understands the fintech landscape, and has been orientating Square to be integrated and compatible with it many of you still refuse to see the shift has already happened.
Price drops happen in Bitcoin, I've been in this long enough that it doesn't phase me anymore; and is the only real antidote to the supposed 'what about the early adopter whales' issue people bring up, personally I'm using some of my discretionary budget to buy more.
I'm not here to convince you to use Bitcoin, or why it would work for you/your business: I'm just pointing out why what you said is skewed and not framed correctly. Otherwise you'll have to do what IBM did: offer a good salary for consultant fees to do so. :)
[1]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/15/corona...
Does the difficulty factor of new blocks get dropped in response to losing hash power? Is the fee / mining reward balance predictable? Does the network become non-functional for xfers below a certain value at some point?
Thank goodness. This waste of electricity and natural resources needs to go away.
What are you going to do in the post apocalypse, get a team of people with an abacus to calculate hash functions?
Thank goodness. This waste of electricity and natural resources needs to go away.
it was always funny that people with a prepper mentality touted bitcoin as some sort of rock stable currency in times of crisis when government money was going to be worthless despite the fact that it basically takes an electricity source the size of the country to keep the whole thing running. What are you going to do in the post apocalypse, get a team of people with an abacus to calculate hash functions?
If this is true, which I welcome because Chinese miner centralization has been a massive worry for us since about 2012, that still has yielded they highest hash rate (the computing power dedicated to mining Bitcoin) in the History of BTC: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html Its easy to skew this if you don't understand the underlying tech, but Bitcoin continues to work despite a supposed exodus…
Bitcoin is fundamentally not a cash alternative. Which means definitionally the alternative to holding onto $100 BTC is NOT holding onto $100 cash. In fact cash is intentionally inflationary and BTC is intentionally deflationary (over long enough time scales) so yeah, you'd win your silly bet if there's no major crash. Doesn't mean you'll come out ahead of other strategies.
You have the same issue with Bitcoin, because it is deflationary it is in the holder's interest to not spend it, because it's future buying power will be increased.
So if you look at how bitcoin was distributed you have early holders that have a tremendous amount and have been rewarded for it.
Add to that speculation and you have this whole cycle ramped up on steroids, with huge swings up, and then down, and all the while the value continues to increase because it is designed to do so.
The problem was that bitcoin tried to solve two problems, but should have only solved one.
The first problem was how to transfer value in an untrusted network which was a great success.
The second, was unneeded, which is to make it deflationary as some sort of perhaps response to the inflationary world we live in.
But the reality is that the inflationary world was designed by economists so that wealth continues to circulate. Yes, there are still issues. Yes we have imbalance. But inflation does case wealth to circulate, though not as quickly as some would hope for.
In bitcoin, you have the exact opposite, wealth gets accrued to early backers and just sits there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it was always funny that people with a prepper mentality touted bitcoin as some sort of rock stable currency in times of crisis when government money was going to be worthless despite the fact that it basically takes an electricity source the size of the country to keep the whole thing running. What are you going to do in the post apocalypse, get a team of people with an abacus to calculate hash functions?
I would expect bitcoin to work properly with as few as 3 people... And any computer can calculate hashes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it was always funny that people with a prepper mentality touted bitcoin as some sort of rock stable currency in times of crisis when government money was going to be worthless despite the fact that it basically takes an electricity source the size of the country to keep the whole thing running. What are you going to do in the post apocalypse, get a team of people with an abacus to calculate hash functions?
I would expect bitcoin to work properly with as few as 3 people... And any computer can calculate hashes.
The reason why so much electricity is being used on BTC is a result of an arms race between miners, not a necessity of the technical specification. Bitcoin would still operate correctly with less mining capacity. What is sacrificed is that the threshold for mounting a 51% attack becomes lower with less miners. But again, the network itself does not need a nation-state's worth of electricity to operate.