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Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

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Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#101

Post by Temasik »

zelly wrote: post #85
Animats wrote: post #25

Bitcoin has lots of uses: - Getting money out of China. Buy into a mining consortium with yuan, get a fraction of the bitcoins, sell outside China for dollars or euros. You're manufacturing and exporting, which the government of China likes. - Extortion. The ransomware extortion business depends on Bitcoin. - Drugs. Delivered to your door in a plain wrapper.

My hope is that some centimillionaires and maybe billionaires will convert all their cash to BTC when a wealth tax comes. That's one possible scenario for 100k or higher.

look who's mining bitcoin are the ones controlling the network (China)

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#102

Post by zwirbl »

zelly wrote: post #85
Animats wrote: post #25

Bitcoin has lots of uses: - Getting money out of China. Buy into a mining consortium with yuan, get a fraction of the bitcoins, sell outside China for dollars or euros. You're manufacturing and exporting, which the government of China likes. - Extortion. The ransomware extortion business depends on Bitcoin. - Drugs. Delivered to your door in a plain wrapper.

My hope is that some centimillionaires and maybe billionaires will convert all their cash to BTC when a wealth tax comes. That's one possible scenario for 100k or higher.

And what would that achieve? Leave financing of national institutions to the lower classes that are already exploited by said centimillionaires?

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#103

Post by seibelj »

peterthehacker wrote: post #87

Bitcoin has a large (100M+) user base (or at least it seems like it) but I can’t think of another blockchain app that has reached that level. Ethereum is more like a framework or platform as I understand it so I don’t think it counts in the same way. Besides bitcoin are there any other blockchain apps that have large user bases?

Ethereum has more transactions per week that bitcoin by a large margin. Most new projects are built on Ethereum.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#104

Post by rudiv »

seebetter wrote: post #60
Animats wrote: post #25

Bitcoin has lots of uses: - Getting money out of China. Buy into a mining consortium with yuan, get a fraction of the bitcoins, sell outside China for dollars or euros. You're manufacturing and exporting, which the government of China likes. - Extortion. The ransomware extortion business depends on Bitcoin. - Drugs. Delivered to your door in a plain wrapper.

For drugs you must mean Venmo or Cash App, where orders of magnitude greater numbers of drugs are ordered.

Not remotely, unless drug users have become much more trusting since I was last in the US.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#105

Post by ikt »

bjo590 wrote: post #51
jamil7 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slide side track but I never get the complaints about power usage. It’d be great if crypto used less energy obviously but doesn’t fiat also use a ridiculously high amount of energy?

I'd like to point you to this Vice article titled "One Bitcoin Transaction Consumes As Much Energy As Your House Uses in a Week". Meanwhile swiping a credit card uses slightly more electricity than a google query. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-ele...

So the first article doesn't mention Ethereum and another article doesn't mention Hydro. This is why journalism has a bad wrap.

https://news.bitcoin.com/how-big-hydro-power-partners-with-b...

China’s southwestern Sichuan province, a mountainous region that is estimated to have over 50% of the Bitcoin network’s total computing power

https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-hash-rate-rainstorms...

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#106

Post by aww_dang »

ac29 wrote: post #90
onelastjob wrote: post #74

This author is way behind the times. Bitcoin is obsolete. Nano (nano.org) is what the author should be looking at as the future of p2p digital currency. Nano transactions are feeless and take under 1 second, fully confirmed. If you send 1 Nano the recipient receives 1 Nano. There is no mining involved so it is green and it is decentralized. These features make microtransactions possible. You could use it to pay a fra…

I'm not sure a cryptocurrency that has lost ~95% of its value in the past couple years is a good counterexample to this article.

Valuation isn't necessarily a measure of utility. Usually it is correlated with hype and marketing.

Most people interested in cryptocurrencies have little to no interest in actual use cases. Investors simply want the price to go up. This is usually criticized as a "greater fool" investment strategy.

The article speaks to this. If there is any value in an cryptocurrency, it is up to the developers to divine it. Investors will eventually find a price equilibrium, but for now the ecosystem seems driven by hype, buzzwords, pozi-dapps and bubbles. NANO doesn't have any of that.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#107

Post by gonehome »

fourstar wrote: post #91
malikNF wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at cardano. They have implemented a blockchain that is backed by peer reviewed [1] research, the article here talks about how the blockchain takes a huge amount of resources to run. The people at the cardano project has managed to enable people to even run a full block producing node on something as small as a pi[2][3]. So far from all the blockchain projects I am interested in, this is my favorite one so…

Why is being peer-reviewed what Cardano fans always lede with? That doesn’t automatically make something “better”, IMO. Also, what even uses Cardano? Project has been “in progress” for years and all I’ve seen are photos of Hoskinson with his mouth open taking selfies in various parts of the world. Algorand is probably the best project right now in crypto aside from ZCash that’s an actual contender against ETH (discla…

Zcash had this which wasn't great: https://bitcoinist.com/zcash-inflation-bug-infinite-tokens/

You also only get privacy with transactions between two z-addresses, and those require a fair amount of resources to generate (I think HW wallets can't sign those transactions due to computational limitations). Most zcash transactions are between t-addresses which don't have any benefits over BTC (they're public).

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/49115/whats-the-...

As far as cardano, I'm skeptical of proof-of-stake compared to proof-of-work (though I might just not understand it fully). Proof-of-work seems like the main BTC innovation against abuse and a lot of the coins that use stake (stellar lumens, tezos) seem like they drop the defining characteristic of BTC decentralization in order to get faster transactions. Without proof of work you don't really get true decentralized protection from the system itself, you have to put trust somewhere. At least the tezos putting coins at risk approach is interesting. The cardano website also really sets off my bullshit alarms: https://cardano.org/

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#108

Post by TylerE »

gonehome wrote: post #93
Skunkleton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the problems that they're trying to solve, decentralization, censorship resistance, sound money, true democratic governance, etc. Noble goals. Still, blockchains are inherently limited to the digital world. No amount of digital freedom or security stops you from being oppressed by an unjust government, or robbed at gunpoint. Taking Bitcoin as an example, there have been many cases of bitcoins being seized or st…

I'm somewhat of a cautiously optimistic skeptic that finds the blockchain stuff really interesting and potentially important (I've been playing with it since 2010), but not super useful at the moment. I think these are some of things people think about it: - Your country's financial system is unreliable or run by tyrants and the currency is bad. It might be hard to get a stable currency. Moving income into bitcoin co…

> - Your country's financial system is unreliable or run by tyrants and the currency is bad. It might be hard to get a stable currency. Moving income into bitcoin could help you (people were doing this in Venezuela).

You know what unstable governments in the middle of a revolution don't have? Reliable power and internet.

> Your country was invaded and crossing the border requires you to interact with corrupt guards that steal anything of value you try and get out. Putting your wealth into a bitcoin wallet can allow you to escape with it intact if you memorize your seed words (there was a story about someone in Ukraine that did this crossing the border patrolled by Russian guards).

Sounds like a great way to get rubber hosed to death.

> Bitcoin is deflationary, the coins are limited and scarce, but the currency is divisible. This means they should hold value over time. Fiat currencies are vulnerable to monetary policy of governments, bitcoin is less so. Bitcoin may increase in value in part because other currencies are decreasing in value.

Deflationary, for consumers, is bad. I am also not convinced bitcoin in nearly divisible enough to actually be world currency. (And that's ignoring the fact that it would need something like 7 orders of magnitude improvement in throughput)

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#109

Post by ikt »

Skunkleton wrote: post #94
tehranifar wrote: post #65

It's been a good solution for authentic digital arts! Check out https://knownorigin.io/ https://superrare.co/ There are also virtual worlds to see the art in https://www.cryptovoxels.com/

What is authentic digital art? Does that mean that I own it, and no one else can claim to own it? How is that different from a bill of sale?

> How is that different from a bill of sale?

Ctrl+c and ctrl+v

Take Gods Unchained for example: https://godsunchained.com/

It's as close to a real trading card game as possible, simply because when they produce 5 cards there are only 5 cards.

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