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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

#141

Post by jasonlaramburu »

lawn wrote: post #128
jasonlaramburu wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK but are there any secure BTC or alt coin wallets (even light wallets) that will work on feature phones or SMS? Very few people in in remote villages can afford even the most basic Android smartphone. What incentive would they have to switch from M-PESA (or Alipay/wechatpay in Asia) that is already secure, cheap and widely accepted. Cryptocurrency is a fascinating technology and social experiment but so far has no…

Not that I know of. The real use-case is transferring to and from places that you cannot normally do. Smartphones are prevalent in Venezuela for example, but it's basically impossible to send money in or out unless you use cryptocurrencies. The charity eatBCH uses this to give food to Venezuelans for example: https://eatbch.org/ . I think that's a pretty unique use case.

You can already send money from US to Venezuela using Moneygram and several other services cheaply. There are relatively few countries where sanctions prohibit Americans from sending money, and cryptocurrency would not make this legal.

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

#142

Post by kainaloo »

flignats wrote: post #88
fwr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How?

How is there bikeshedding? Almost all arguments people make against bitcoin are pointless. I.e. the fees being high, transaction time being low, transactions per second, ect Blockchain is a disruptive technology on the same level as the invention of the Internet. It is the first global, transparent, immutable ledger. We are only just beginning discovery on what we can do/improve from here.

True, people debate on these little details and none of them matter, they will be solved one way or another. It's guaranteed that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. Most people don't understand that cryptos in their current form is just the base and when more and more money start building on top of it that's when we will see the real internet 3.0 and all the amazing things you can do with it. It takes some imagination to see what's possible.

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

#144

Post by arcticbull »

cloudinshape wrote: post #135
hahaxdxd123 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like what? What economic value do cryptocurrencies provide over our traditional banking system? - being deflationary is not a feature, it's a bug. An inflationary currency incentivises you to invest it, otherwise you lose real purchasing power. With a deflationary currency, you can just stuff it anywhere and see gains. You steal from tomorrow. As the material wealth of the world increases, our money supply should inc…

> An inflationary currency incentivises you to invest it, otherwise you lose real purchasing power. With a deflationary currency, you can just stuff it anywhere and see gains. You steal from tomorrow. As the material wealth of the world increases, our money supply should increase to match. You don't understand the WHY of those gains. A deflationary environment is the only real environment, that is why central banks a…

Deflation reduces the velocity of money (why spend something now when you can spend less for the same thing later). This creates a negative feedback cycle which reduces economic activity and worse it increases inequality.

This happens because the poor continue to transact hand to mouth and are unable to save while the wealthy accreted value on their idle cash. Invested cash creates economic activity. The cash in your mattress does not. The opposite is true in a deflationary environment.

Debt in an inflationary environment benefits the debtor, as the loans are denominated in the dollars at the time of loan issuance. To the extent that the economy grows faster than your debt load you do not in fact ever have to pay it off.

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

#145

Post by paulgb »

brian_cloutier wrote: post #122
paulgb wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it's not like the functions that banks currently do would become unnecessary in a Bitcoin maximalist world. It's an apples to oranges comparison.

I think both of you are misunderstanding what centimeter is trying to say. They didn't suggest that Bitcoin will replace traditional finance, or that traditional finance is a waste.

Ok, but then at best the argument is whataboutism -- it's ok to waste more energy because we already waste a lot?

The reality is that Bitcoin already objectively uses a lot of energy by design, and the problem will only get worse if its price goes up.

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

#146

Post by arcticbull »

cloudinshape wrote: post #103
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…

Bitcoin is perhaps the most important project we'll see in our lifetimes. The liberation of the most important asset in a capitalist society, money, from the tragedy that has been the current fiat system can not be over emphasized. Money touches everything and is about time the market takes control of it, takes it away from the crony-states destroying the value of our savings, hence destroying our productivity, under…

None of the social ills you identify are a function of fiat currency which is intentionally a temporary, lossy store of value. You take your fiat and you invest it and nothing you say below the first paragraph matters.

Savings are meant to be assets not currency, whether that’s stock, bonds, real estate - whatever. Even a savings account collateralizes loans. You’re not supposed to save cash. Whoever told you that has misled you. You’re supposed to keep a small stockpile to see you through a rainy few months. No more.

The issue is that people don’t have money, and they don’t have wealth. This is strictly a social problem. This is not true in all countries but it certainly is true in the US which has a worse wealth and income distribution than your average banana republic. However there’s zero political will to change it. By anyone, on either side of the political spectrum (with the possible exception of the centre-left Bernie Sanders). Social policy is the only and I do mean only way to make real meaningful progress here.

Replacing one inflationary currency with a worse distribution than a banana republic, with a different deflationary currency with a worse distribution than a banana republic changes nothing.

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

#147

Post by brian_cloutier »

paulgb wrote: post #123
brian_cloutier wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 B…

Energy use in equilibrium is proportional to the value of the block rewards plus transaction rewards. In a world where Bitcoin replaces gold or visa, it would be significantly worse for the environment than it is today, since the value of each unit would have to increase to satisfy the demand.

> Energy use in equilibrium is proportional to the value of the block rewards plus transaction rewards.

Good point, you're right, I was forgetting this.

> since the value of each unit would have to increase to satisfy the demand.

I didn't follow this though, what do you mean?

> In a world where Bitcoin replaces gold or visa

It doesn't seem very meaningful to me to talk about energy usage in this world because Bitcoin can't replace visa. To replace visa we would have to make enough changes to it that I don't have much of an idea of what the energy usage of the modified system will look like.

Though let's consider Nervos' NC-Max, which gets a lot closer to replacing visa than an unmodified Bitcoin can. It works by, effectively, massively increasing the block size limit. In a NC-Max world energy usage would still be proportional to the coinbase but the coinbase might stay small because there's so much room in each block that transaction fees stay low.

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

#148

Post by gruez »

mrlala wrote: post #97
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…

>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,…

>it's not going to show up as "1 BTC" on the checkout.. it will probably be like 1.05 BTC.

In my experience the spread is usually under 1% of the 24 avg.

>[...] 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.

But how are you going to get scammed accepting bitcoin? It's not like it's easy to forge a bitcoin.

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

#149

Post by cloudinshape »

arcticbull wrote: post #144
cloudinshape wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An inflationary currency incentivises you to invest it, otherwise you lose real purchasing power. With a deflationary currency, you can just stuff it anywhere and see gains. You steal from tomorrow. As the material wealth of the world increases, our money supply should increase to match. You don't understand the WHY of those gains. A deflationary environment is the only real environment, that is why central banks a…

Deflation reduces the velocity of money (why spend something now when you can spend less for the same thing later). This creates a negative feedback cycle which reduces economic activity and worse it increases inequality. This happens because the poor continue to transact hand to mouth and are unable to save while the wealthy accreted value on their idle cash. Invested cash creates economic activity. The cash in your…

> why spend something now when you can spend less for the same thing later

That is nonsense. Sadly by repeating it enough people have started to actually believe it, and repeat it without looking at the evidence of the real world.

A cheap pair of jeans, adjusted for inflation was ~$150 in 1980. Now you can get one for $10. Did no one wore jeans for 40 years? Meat, it has never been so cheap IN HISTORY to buy meat, and if the trend continues, next year you could buy even more meat with the same money! (adjusting for inflation of course) Are you not gonna eat for a year?

That is not even talking about tech, were a cheap laptop 20 years ago adjusted for inflation was over $1000 and now is $300.

People prefer things now not later, that is why if you offer them $50 today instead of $100 in 10 $10 monthly payments most people pick the $50. The same thing happens when buying stuff. Sadly evidence is not as marketable as propaganda.

So as I said, nonsense.

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

#150

Post by brian_cloutier »

arcticbull wrote: post #119
brian_cloutier wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't shown that it's physically impossible though. Scaling doesn't work that way, not even in the physical world does it work that way. As the side length of a cube increases the surface area increases with the square of the side length, and volume increases with the cube of the side length. When considering the effects of scaling a system it makes no sense to just multiply all numbers by some constant. The qu…

You misunderstand. I’m not saying it’s physically impossible for Bitcoin to scale (which I do believe, separately), but that it’s physically impossible for Bitcoin to be more efficient on a per transaction basis as specced today even if you take into account all externalities.

Okay, I might be misunderstanding you. What is your argument though? I can't find anywhere in this thread where you showed it's impossible for bitcoin to be more efficient on a per-txn basis.
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