131–140 of 161 posts
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> Google has a computer that can hack the encryption Citation needed
I think this is a roundabout way of saying Google has a quantum computer. Bitcoin does not involve encryption, and it's a common mistake by journalists to toss that buzzword in there.
To the people who really want to learn: you won't get quality advice here. BTC has been hated on HN since it's creation. Even over 10 years later, the crypto luddites keep coming at it. Learn by yourself instead of listening to the doomsayers: some people thought independently, like this person in 2011 who was ridiculed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2596475 Check the discussion from 2017: https://news.yc…
This is super common on HN. Just look at threads on Tesla. Fortunately betting against someone with a closed mind is super profitable, because they'll always mis-price the risk/reward.
Someone else said, if god had wanted to help the geeks, it couldn't have been done better - anyone could mine, at the cost of $0 on a CPU back then.
I was bitten by the HN naysayers and didn't. Fortunately, I quickly realized my mistake and just worked in the field.
It's sad so many people want to double down and triple down on their past errors. As long as they can live with the consequences of their actions, I guess it's their problem, not mine. That doesn't make it any less sad.
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Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Genuinely not my intent. This topic is bound to be controversial, but it also seems to be worth discussing for the people who are willing to take a little heat for their opinions.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
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A single bitcoin transaction (that is, literally one) uses as much electricity as a house consumes in several weeks. The entire system uses roughly the same amount of electricity as the country of Ireland, or Denmark. For ~300k transactions per day. No, the "huge energy waste" is so vast as to be nearly inconceivable. It cannot reasonably be compared to anything else. Even shipping literal gold around by helicopter m…
I had to source check you on that. To be honest, I never really looked into it and thought the numbers were sensationalized: "Bitcoin uses as much energy as the whole of Switzerland, a new online tool from the University of Cambridge shows." https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48853230 Anyway, the BTC-enthusiast argument to that is "Well, if BTC replace banks, imagine how much money that would save." That argument ho…
> That argument holds some ground - think of all the armored cars, shipping containers, and facilities that serve to move and store cash and gold, as well as all the labor involved in maintaining the system.
There are very good counterarguments to that as well.
The idea that the "banking system" functions primarily by shipping cash and gold around is nonsense. 99.9% of traditional banking nowadays happens on computer networks. The Visa network for example handles 150 million transactions per day (that is, 500x more than bitcoin) while using a tiny fraction of the electricity. When a bank in London wants to send money to a bank in New York, they don't ship a container full of gold, they send the money electronically using the SWIFT network. To the extent that cash is still physically shipped around, it's only because people still sometimes use cash to pay for things, and banks collect and distribute this cash and replace damaged bills.
And your estimate of labor is similarly flawed. To begin with, the "banking system" includes an enormous amount of services that Bitcoin doesn't provide (loans, mortgages, securities), and retail banks are part of that as well. The transactional parts of banking can be (and are being) largely replaced with mobile apps and ATMs. The other aforementioned parts of banking aren't replaced by Bitcoin, so all of that labor still needs to exist.
So the efficiency argument shouldn't be "what if BTC replaced banks", it should be "what if BTC replaced SWIFT, ACH, BACS, Visa network, etc." there is a value proposition here but it is much smaller than the one originally proposed.
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There is no particular negative interactions with the hash functions and quantum cryptography. Bitcoin is designed so that different asymmetric crypto governing controlling coins can be compatibility introduced-- as has been done a couple times in the past (to introduce revisions to the script system). PQ crypto could be introduced in that way. Unfortunately existing PQ signature schemes don't have a great mix of mat…
This includes seamlessly migrating wallet keys to a quantum resistant scheme without end user intervention? Seems that users would need to do a kind of transaction using existing keys to new wallet/key pair?
We know how to construct kinds of forward compatibility that could allow being spent with a new scheme but the specific scheme would have to be set in advance so they users could generate the future keys at the same time the generate the current ones. And, as mentioned, the existing choices aren't that great (for this application).
Posts like these make it clear to me that the author does not really understand money, not Bitcoin. It's hard to reason about what Bitcoin's advantages are without first considering what the purpose of money is and the analysis from this article is mostly just sniping at the edges about some of the perceived flaws and not the actual usefulness which is the good part of the trade-off. For a better understanding of mon…
> Beyond the financial case for Bitcoin, its rise as a non-sovereign store of value will have profound geopolitical consequences. A global, non-inflationary reserve currency will force nation-states to alter their primary funding mechanism from inflation to direct taxation, which is far less politically palatable.
Isn't this all backwards? In the past, when it was politically inconvenient not to be able to inflate money, governments abandoned gold-backed money and went to fiat. Wouldn't one assume then that the possibility of such profound geopolitical consequences is precisely the reason why governments will not let it become so important?
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This includes seamlessly migrating wallet keys to a quantum resistant scheme without end user intervention? Seems that users would need to do a kind of transaction using existing keys to new wallet/key pair?
Yes, users would need to take some action-- otherwise how would you know if your coins were being moved to your new key vs my new key. :) We know how to construct kinds of forward compatibility that could allow being spent with a new scheme but the specific scheme would have to be set in advance so they users could generate the future keys at the same time the generate the current ones. And, as mentioned, the existin…
If Satoshi Nakamoto did lose his keys to those treasure trove wallets, those will be up for grabs, as will anyone who lost keys.
Perhaps hoarded encrypted PCAP's aren't the only motivator for quantum opportunists.
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> The second one is that it makes illegal activities easier, and at a larger scale. It's quite common right now for companies to be coerced pay millions of dollars to anonymous criminals, all enabled with cryptocurrencies. For the vast majority of businesses/individuals, it is governments and banking cartels the ones stealing your money (via inflation and fractional reserve respectively) without recourse. Switching t…
Re: Money transfer - it's not clear why money going to criminal organization is better than the government. Also, since most people actually have negligible savings, it's not clear that inflation actually "steals" money from the people. Re: Energy use - A single Bitcoin transaction is around $8 today. If you assume an efficient market, where the cost to compute Bitcoin is roughly equivalent to the energy cost, that's…
Depends on how quickly you need that transaction to hit the blockchain.
Anything over 30 minutes is currently 1 sat/vByte and 1 sat = $0.00019230 dollars. The average bitcoin transaction is about 250 bytes. That's $0.048075 or almost 5 cents.
some hobbyist observations, please correct me if I'm wrong: >I’m still trying to piece together what exactly how much control governments really lose under Bitcoin, whether I can see that as a positive or a negative, and whether I agree with Dalio that governments would (or could) take action to prevent it. I don't think they could control it at all, as I will get into in the next post >The enforcement of debt and th…
>you can today exchange btc for monero, ethereum or whatever and back again and it's virtually untrackable who owns it or where it came from. I don't get why people buy into this idea that BTC is super-hacker-cash that can't be traced. BTC can be traced. That's the point of an open ledger. If you want 'untraceable' BTC, you have an big burden to do so (buy it for cash in a parking lot with no cameras and using an ali…
How about a decentralized peer-to-peer exchange that runs over Tor? There's an app for that: https://bisq.network
some hobbyist observations, please correct me if I'm wrong: >I’m still trying to piece together what exactly how much control governments really lose under Bitcoin, whether I can see that as a positive or a negative, and whether I agree with Dalio that governments would (or could) take action to prevent it. I don't think they could control it at all, as I will get into in the next post >The enforcement of debt and th…
Yes, it would be fixed. Each bitcoin is currently divisible to 100 million satoshis and it could be further subdivided if necessary.
Regarding not knowing how much exists, at least with Bitcoin, that's not true. Anyone running a full node has a complete copy of every transaction going back to 2009. And the generation of each and every block that contains newly created bitcoin.
We would know exactly how much money exists if we were on a Bitcoin standard.