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What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

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Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#111

Post by noch »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #29
formalsystem wrote: post #24

It's important to remember that the main thing Bitcoin needs to maintain is it's monetary policy and you can find it at any time right here https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/validatio... Anyone can query at any time the total amount of Bitcoin that have been issued without relying on anyone. After downloading the Bitcoin client just run gettxoutsetinfo You can try to guess how many dollars have been…

> if you view it as a savings technology then it's the best one that's ever been created Bitcoin is a terrible savings vehicle for the same reason cash in checking accounts or collectibles are: there is no basis for its value. Baseless assets other than gold have been numerously proposed, usually about once every generation in every cultural sphere going back to Republican Roman times, but unvaryingly fall out of fav…

> Bitcoin is a terrible savings vehicle for the same reason cash in checking accounts or collectibles are: there is no basis for its value.

10 years is a long time to hold an erroneous belief based on a misunderstanding of what money and assets are. I had the same wrong beliefs as you do now for a long time and misallocated capital at a crucial moment. Parker Lewis explains[0]:

> [Bitcoin] is backed by the only thing that backs any form of money: the credibility of its monetary properties. Money is not a collective hallucination nor merely a belief system.

An interpretation:

Money is an emergent property of human cooperation to allocate capital, labour, and limited resources. (i.e. economics). Productivity is the use of time and energy in the satisfaction of human preferences.

What are the properties a money, be it gold, cowrie shells, baseball cards, nudes, exploits, fiat currency (legal tender), must strive to meet for humans to recognise it as "a money": durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply (scarcity), and acceptability. [1]

Incidentally, if you pick up a US dollar bill, you'll see the inscription: "this note is legal tender, for all debts public and private." Therefore, that note derives its value from the implicit debt underlying it. That debt is based on some person's labour in the creation of a product or delivery of a service.

[0] https://unchained-capital.com/blog/bitcoin-is-not-backed-by-... [1]: https://www.stlouisfed.org/education/economic-lowdown-podcas...

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#112

Post by JumpCrisscross »

pingec wrote: post #108
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what bank in the world would charge only $23.46 for transferring $166 M? I have never paid for a wire. I’ve also overseen multibillion-dollar wires for which there were zero transfer fees. If you send and receive wires, get a bank account that doesn’t charge for them. (This is almost every account at e.g. Fidelity or First Republic.) Consumer accounts usually optimise for a different basket of needs than large inst…

Please tell me how to send a 10k USD from US bank account to EU bank account for $23.46 or less. Transferwise is one of the cheapest and it costs $50 USD in fees.

> tell me how to send a 10k USD from US bank account to EU bank account for $23.46 or less

Sent a few thousand dollars from my Fidelity account to a Frankfurt-based friend’s UBS account last week. Zero fees. Note that I sent, and they received U.S. dollars. I believe they incurred about a dollar of slippage in the FX conversion to Euros.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#113

Post by lreeves »

andrewjl wrote: post #109
lmohseni wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You're also assuming that telecommunications networks, physical infrastructure, particularly power, are in good working order the same is true of bitcoin, right? I mean gold will continue to be gold in the absence of power, but will bitcoin even exist? The most damning critique of bitcoin is that it requires power to be free and infinite.

Not necessarily if you are in possession of your own keys. Which admittedly most people today are not. A hardware wallet can be physically transported in the same way gold can.

The TSA will seize your phone if you don't hand over passwords and passcodes in many cases, you're saying you think it'd be a good idea to cross the US border with any amount of bitcoin on a hardware wallet? That's... optimistic.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#114

Post by JumpCrisscross »

noch wrote: post #111
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you view it as a savings technology then it's the best one that's ever been created Bitcoin is a terrible savings vehicle for the same reason cash in checking accounts or collectibles are: there is no basis for its value. Baseless assets other than gold have been numerously proposed, usually about once every generation in every cultural sphere going back to Republican Roman times, but unvaryingly fall out of fav…

> Bitcoin is a terrible savings vehicle for the same reason cash in checking accounts or collectibles are: there is no basis for its value. 10 years is a long time to hold an erroneous belief based on a misunderstanding of what money and assets are. I had the same wrong beliefs as you do now for a long time and misallocated capital at a crucial moment. Parker Lewis explains[0]: > [Bitcoin] is backed by the only thing…

> Therefore, that note derives its value from the implicit debt underlying it

That is not what legal tender and “for all debts public and private” mean [1]. That language refers to dollars being currency “courts of law are required to recognize as satisfactory payment for any monetary debt”.

On the Parker Lewis article, it’s cute but contrived. A straw man. Bitcoin is backed by nothing. U.S. dollars are, similarly, backed by nothing. Saying they’re suspended by shared perceptions is technically true, but implicitly re-defines backing to a meaningless word.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#115

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

ChomskyNormal4m wrote: post #39
formalsystem wrote: post #24

It's important to remember that the main thing Bitcoin needs to maintain is it's monetary policy and you can find it at any time right here https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/validatio... Anyone can query at any time the total amount of Bitcoin that have been issued without relying on anyone. After downloading the Bitcoin client just run gettxoutsetinfo You can try to guess how many dollars have been…

> inflation protection and avoiding capital controls are arguably the most impactful innovation since the internet Inflation protection? Bitcoin lost one third of its value in the past three years. How is that inflation protection? You would have done better to hold most commodities or most currencies in that time period to protect from inflation, other than Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has had a higher value than the current price only 6 weeks in nearly 12 years of existence.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#116

Post by andrewjl »

lreeves wrote: post #113
andrewjl wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily if you are in possession of your own keys. Which admittedly most people today are not. A hardware wallet can be physically transported in the same way gold can.

The TSA will seize your phone if you don't hand over passwords and passcodes in many cases, you're saying you think it'd be a good idea to cross the US border with any amount of bitcoin on a hardware wallet? That's... optimistic.

You don't need a hardware wallet if you use the mnemonic phrase feature.[1]

https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Mnemonic_phrase

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#117

Post by uniqueid »

kneel wrote: post #83
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Otherwise it's just numbers hopping around anonymously on a ledger That’s tax evasion. I know it’s chic to be callous about tax fraud in some cryptocurrency circles. But the same has been true of cash, art and bearer bonds for centuries.

It's not tax evasion if the hops are non taxable events, and the privacy of wallets enable anyone to deny it. This is why Bitcoin is an existential threat to government power. I personally think it's empowering and great for the individual, however if you tend towards more statist views then this would seem like anarchy.

Many of our governments are liberal democracies. It sounds less positive when you rephrase it like that; ie: "Bitcoin is a threat to liberal democracy"

I don't want some drug lord to pump/dump/coerce/tax-evade their way into being the richest person on my continent, and then hire an army to take my nation over. That is easier with crypto currency than it is with fiat.

The tech community dropped the ball in the '90s by being panglossian about the potential problems with the web. It would be nice if, this time, we could get ahead of the ball with crypto currencies.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#118

Post by anonymousab »

pingec wrote: post #108
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what bank in the world would charge only $23.46 for transferring $166 M? I have never paid for a wire. I’ve also overseen multibillion-dollar wires for which there were zero transfer fees. If you send and receive wires, get a bank account that doesn’t charge for them. (This is almost every account at e.g. Fidelity or First Republic.) Consumer accounts usually optimise for a different basket of needs than large inst…

Please tell me how to send a 10k USD from US bank account to EU bank account for $23.46 or less. Transferwise is one of the cheapest and it costs $50 USD in fees.

Buy having an account where that's one of the options. This may not be the default type of account advertised by your bank to the average person.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#119

Post by tromp »

dane-pgp wrote: post #99
tromp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others don't so much eliminate this restriction as they shift the problem to creating so much transaction history that it becomes impractical to run a node that fully verifies said history. In other words, they're significantly less decentralized.

Out of interest, what would you say is a reasonable minimum amount of disk space for a user to have to devote to their bitcoin node, such that the number of nodes does not cause significant extra centralisation (over and above the centralisation of mining pools and development teams)?

Only an archive node needs to keep a copy of the entire chain. But every full node needs to download and verify all of it, so it's more a question of bandwidth and time. It would be nice to be able to so within a day.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#120

Post by jhoechtl »

DennisP wrote: post #70
formalsystem wrote: post #24

It's important to remember that the main thing Bitcoin needs to maintain is it's monetary policy and you can find it at any time right here https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/validatio... Anyone can query at any time the total amount of Bitcoin that have been issued without relying on anyone. After downloading the Bitcoin client just run gettxoutsetinfo You can try to guess how many dollars have been…

The fact that bitcoins can be transferred is the only reason they have value at all. You have to be able to exchange them for something else or they're worthless. The question then is whether 7 tx/sec really is sufficient to support broad global adoption, even if it's just for savings. Dollars and physical gold have no such limits. Other blockchains are vastly expanding scalability, as well as eliminating the energy…

> Other blockchains are vastly expanding scalability, as well as eliminating the energy usage.

The energy usage combined with proof of work is the backing. If you break that for Bitcoin als is left is trust. The energy used and consumed is like the USD tied to gold (which it is no longer since quite some time)

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