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Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

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Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#91

Post by [deleted] »

str33t_punk wrote: post #38
crumbshot wrote: post #29

Bitcoin and other compute-intensive cryptocurrencies should be banned or taxed so heavily that it's financially infeasible to use them. The amount of energy being wasted (reportedly more than seven nuclear power plants worth) on what is essentially an unproductive project is quite absurd. In a world where we should all be increasingly concerned about the looming climate catastrophe, it's wholly irresponsible for Bitc…

You would love Eth 2.0 then! The idea of proof of stake is to remove waste from the equation

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#92

Post by safog »

arcticbull wrote: post #47
jakupovic wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem of exchanging value between parties without intermediary or third-parties.

Yeah that’s not a problem though, it’s a feature.

Tell that to the Iranians or to the people in Venezuela. Countries can be mis managed, currencies can be mis managed, people can be targeted (financial sanctions), traditional financial services are just not available in a lot of places.

To top it off, It's Gold vs BTC for store of value and Gold has many, many downsides as well that we just chose to ignore because it's a shiny metal and has been in use longer.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#93

Post by olalonde »

sgarman wrote: post #69
centimeter wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of stake does not have the same security properties as proof of work. The arguments are too complicated for me to usefully communicate them in a short HN post, but as a heuristic just keep in mind that most cryptocurrencies haven't adopted PoS despite it facially seeming better/"less wasteful".

My favorite argument: "it's too complicated for me to explain!"

See this comment by Gregory Maxwell (a core Bitcoin developer): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25007874

Saying that PoS offers zero security seems a bit extreme but there's definitely a trade-off.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#95

Post by arcticbull »

seibelj wrote: post #60
headmelted wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Tether has never been redeemed, and even if it could be redeemed, there is no possible way that they could cover the balance of issued tethers. It’s the mother of all Ponzi schemes, clearly, and is definitely going to implode in the next big pullback.

You have no idea what you are talking about and are just spreading more FUD. https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/48857/former-head-of-cir... I worked with Dan, I worked at Circle, we redeemed / minted billions and billions with Tether.

Oh I didn’t realize Dan was an auditor. Which of the big ones does he work at? KPMG? Deloitte? PwC?

This is a classic strategy employed by scammers to legitimize a scam. You pick a prominent individual and you make the fraud work for them, so they can tell other people it’s legit.

Their last auditor quit, half way through the audit. No audit, no legitimacy, period.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#96

Post by safog »

ISL wrote: post #12
TuringNYC wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that BTC isnt based on any NPV or earnings multiple or industrial use value but is rather based on scarcity value, I dont see why gaining 10-50x returns are any more or less likely than, say, losing 90% of the value. Could anyone provide a more methodical way of thinking about this?

Not suggesting that this is correct in this case (edit: indeed, one can argue that it is not), but if you think of it as a store of value, whenever the USD money supply is increased (or people think it might be in the future), one might expect the fixed-quantity BTC to be exchangeable for more USD. See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1 . Relative to the early days of Bitcoin, the room to fluctuate upward is much…

A govt ban on exchanges would do it as well, but the US response thankfully has been pretty moderate.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#97

Post by mrlala »

ISL wrote: post #56
crumbshot wrote: post #29

Bitcoin and other compute-intensive cryptocurrencies should be banned or taxed so heavily that it's financially infeasible to use them. The amount of energy being wasted (reportedly more than seven nuclear power plants worth) on what is essentially an unproductive project is quite absurd. In a world where we should all be increasingly concerned about the looming climate catastrophe, it's wholly irresponsible for Bitc…

The resources consumed by Bitcoin should be compared with those consumed by other transaction-clearing and store-of-value methods. Credit-card companies consume a few percent of revenue for a large chunk of consumer transactions. Gold mining is an environmental catastrophe [1]. Bitcoin is far from perfect, but it is important to place it in context with other systems that achieve the same ends. As bitcoin-mining tech…

>Credit-card companies consume a few percent of revenue

And anyone that "accepts" bitcoin as payment probably takes more than that due to Bitcoin's volatility.

If at the moment of a transaction, 1 BTC = 20k USD and I go to buy something that is $20k USD, it's not going to show up as "1 BTC" on the checkout.. it will probably be like 1.05 BTC.

Also, credit-card companies give guarantees to both the buyers and sellers, so they are providing a service. Buyers get extra protection with extra warranties, ability to reverse fraudulent/deceptive sellers. Sellers get extra revenue with people buying stuff they don't have cash for, and don't have to worry about fraudulent cash/checks etc. Yeah sellers overall take a bit of a hit, but the argument can be made the couple percent is worth it to never have to worry about getting scammed by a buyer.

Anyway.. crypto offers absolutely NONE of that. So comparing it to credit card companies is honestly quite laughable.

The only thing you can try to argue is crypto offers anonymity to a degree? Although it sure seems like you have to jump through a lot of hoops for this to even be true since it's a public ledger...

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#98

Post by brian_cloutier »

arcticbull wrote: post #64
ISL wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The resources consumed by Bitcoin should be compared with those consumed by other transaction-clearing and store-of-value methods. Credit-card companies consume a few percent of revenue for a large chunk of consumer transactions. Gold mining is an environmental catastrophe [1]. Bitcoin is far from perfect, but it is important to place it in context with other systems that achieve the same ends. As bitcoin-mining tech…

Energy consumption in the classical model is substantially lower because if you scaled up Bitcoin to the size of Visa alone it would exceed the amount of energy generated on earth a few times over and the amount of ewaste generated on earth too. This is a classic pro Bitcoin argument that’s trivially falsifiable. The fact folks here think their transactions in the online economy should heat their homes is so bananas…

You're making two mistakes.

The first is that scaling Bitcoin up to the size of visa is not particularly possible. You might be able to match visa's throughput by greatly increasing the block interval (e.x. one block every week) but the protocol cannot reasonably scale past a couple hundred transactions per second without taking a massive hit to transaction latency. So, in this sense the question of how much energy Bitcoin would consume if you scaled it up is meaningless, it cannot be scaled up.

The second mistake is that Bitcoin's energy consumption has no relationship with its scale. Say you built a hypothetical MiniBitcoin which was exactly the same except each block was so small they could fit just one transaction, MiniBitcoin would consume almost exactly the same amount of energy as Bitcoin does now. The energy usage goes up as competition between miners increases. The energy usage does not go up as more transactions are processed.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#99

Post by johnyzee »

crumbshot wrote: post #29

Bitcoin and other compute-intensive cryptocurrencies should be banned or taxed so heavily that it's financially infeasible to use them. The amount of energy being wasted (reportedly more than seven nuclear power plants worth) on what is essentially an unproductive project is quite absurd. In a world where we should all be increasingly concerned about the looming climate catastrophe, it's wholly irresponsible for Bitc…

> essentially an unproductive project

Who are you to judge? There are lots of things that I find useless that the world uses a lot more energy on.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#100

Post by zzbzq »

jakupovic wrote: post #39
arcticbull wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is not a single use case better solved by cryptocurrencies or blockchain than by a classical solution. Name one, I’ll wait. When there is I’ll eat my, err, hat.

The problem of exchanging value between parties without intermediary or third-parties.

> than by a classical solution

cash

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