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Bitcoin breaks above $20k

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251–260 of 473 posts

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#251
post #94

It's kinda sad that the pricing or market capitalization is the only thing that is being talked about in the "cryptocurrency community", instead of focussing on how the technology can be useful for society. Like for example if you look at /r/Bitcoin, there's a sidebar with "Submit text/link NOT about price", yet virtually every post is about price, even if just indirectly (Paypal joins the cryptocurrency bandwagon an…

If you're looking for more substantive discussion among Bitcoiners, touching on its relation to economics, politics, and society, YouTube and Reddit are not the spots. I'd try Twitter. Start with @saifedean and go from there.

Substantive discussion on twitter?

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#252
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This chart shows the amount of BTC that's locked into the Lightning Network over time, one measure of adoption: https://embed.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/bitco... It hasn't grown much in the last year and a half. Personally I don't see Lightning Network winning the battle for high-bandwidth, low-cost transactions against all the other protocols.

A few notes on that: * This only shows public channels. Most wallet apps that people install on their phone, etc open private channels * This shows capacity, it doesn't show throughput. I work at a company that accepts payments over lightning, and our volume has grown a lot over the past year, but our channel capacity really hasn't had to grow all that much (since we withdraw funds to layer 1 regularly)

Neat! Would you mind sharing the company you work for?

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#253
post #94

It's kinda sad that the pricing or market capitalization is the only thing that is being talked about in the "cryptocurrency community", instead of focussing on how the technology can be useful for society. Like for example if you look at /r/Bitcoin, there's a sidebar with "Submit text/link NOT about price", yet virtually every post is about price, even if just indirectly (Paypal joins the cryptocurrency bandwagon an…

I think this is representative of a bigger problem within the developed world: the top problem on many people's mind is "Other people have money and I don't." This manifests in a lot of other areas as well: stock market speculation, people asking for government handouts, folks looking for get-rich-quick startup ideas, glorification of the "side hustle", etc. And I think the root cause of that is that productivity gro…

Yes it's musical chairs; through monetary policy, reserve banks keep pulling out chairs and thus inflating the value of remaining chairs... Then they'll claim that this is all to prevent global warming.

All this is actually starting to make me doubt global warming. The banks certainly never gave a damn about global warming before. Do I think that people in power suddenly became more altruistic over the past few years? No, from my experience, they became much more selfish! The whole timing with Greta Thunberg media hype followed by COVID19 then multi-trillion dollar bailouts followed by talks of 'green new deals' and the great reset (which is actually just a continuation of existing policies; not a reset by any definition of the word) is starting to all look a bit too convenient.

I've seen first hand how money can corrupt everything. So I'm wondering if it is the science which is attracting the money or the money which is attracting the 'science'. All the climate models are oversimplified and phony; it's pseudoscience... They have tens of thousands of different models and each year they cherry-pick the ones which guessed correctly... Then they keep switching to newer models which keeps proving them right claiming that they did so to keep up with technology (of course not because they were running out of correct old models to cherry pick from)... It's a joke.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asset != Currency Being in an ETF does not make something a real currency. BTC is still hobby money.

Which is why I never made either statement. GBTC has a $14B market cap. Do any Dogecoin ETFs? No? Then maybe BTC is more than a hobby. It's a serious long-term store of value people are increasingly using as a hedge. A serious currency with commercial and institutional investors. When you understand why Dogecoin doesn't have these things, you'll understand what a "hobby" actually is. > BTC is still hobby money. Can y…

Again, being an asset does not mean something is a useful currency.

You keep listing characteristics of assets, like existing in an ETF or having a market cap or having commercial investors.

Those are not characteristics of currencies, which are widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#256
post #94

It's kinda sad that the pricing or market capitalization is the only thing that is being talked about in the "cryptocurrency community", instead of focussing on how the technology can be useful for society. Like for example if you look at /r/Bitcoin, there's a sidebar with "Submit text/link NOT about price", yet virtually every post is about price, even if just indirectly (Paypal joins the cryptocurrency bandwagon an…

> It's kinda sad that the pricing or market capitalization is the only thing that is being talked about in the "cryptocurrency community" Clearly price is a big topic of conversation. Nothing wrong with that.

But you are very incorrect if you believe that is the only topic of conversation. Perhaps using /r/Bitcoin is not a valid sample size.

In my day job, I'm neck deep in blockchain and cryptocurrency use cases - and there are conferences, webinars, real-world enterprise adoption, etc.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#257
post #168
post #87

Just a question, isn't all criticism against bitcoin applicable to gold? Money/Currency/Value in general can't be reduced or derived from first principles. You always have to take into account human nature, economic activity, and most unfortunately: psychology. So all criticism about how bitcoin inherently being pointless, sounds like off-tune. I want good reasons to/NOT-to buy in. First-world country citizens kind o…

There are parallels, but gold has a 5000 year incumbency. It's outlasted not only Empires, but eras. It's valued by cultures that have no relationship with one another and no common past, totally independent. It's physical so it can't be 'cracked' and people like physical things. It's universal in how it is understood. Bitcoin is 'well understood' by basically 0.0001% of the population arguably not even most it's tra…

> It's valued by cultures that have no relationship with one another and no common past, totally independent.

Actually, not really. In historical terms, the gold standard is historically limited to cultures that existed in (direct or indirect) trading relationships with the Mediterranean culture. Notably, China (and correspondingly East and Southeast Asia) instead used a silver standard, while the New World cultures eschewed gold or silver for monetary standards.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#258
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you distinguish a proper currency from a hobby currency? I can think of these criteria on the top of my head: * trading volume * number of shops where it's accepted * whether you can pay taxes with it Did you have something like that in mind? Or something else? What would lead you to say "this is not just a hobby currency anymore"?

If you want to get into semantics, a currency something that is generally accepted or in use, meaning used by many people and organizations. For Bitcoin, transaction volume is not a good indicator of this because many of the trades (estimated >80%) these days are HFTs. Bitcoin is an asset for sure, but not a real currency.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how "uploading the information right away to the blockchain" changes anything in this situation. Arrest information is already logged somewhere, and even if it was logged in an immutable public ledger that doesn't mean that people wouldn't immediately distrust arrests depending on the circumstances regardless of a blockchain being involved. It really seems like this post is just another example of…

If a person distrusts always anything, from anyone, from anywhere then it is true that blockchain doesn't provide any solution. However blockchain can make it more difficult, for a corrupt official to change some official documents, or in some cases to make them disappear completely. The timestamp of the arrest is of the utterly most importance. When a cop that may be corrupt or not, we don't know, upload the arrest…

But how do you know that the thing that is uploaded is legitimate? You can move information into the blockchain but the actual use of that information still happens in the real world so I don't see blockchain changing things that much.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the energy consumption is my biggest criticism, so the answer is "no" (even though you try to sidestep that). buying a pack of gum with bitcoin could power a whole house for 2 months, that's awful and irresponsible.

How much energy do you think the current financial system consumes? Eg paying for a pack of gum with your Mastercard Edit: This wasn't intended to be a hypothetical- I agree BTC uses significantly more per transaction, but I'm curious how it compares to the entirety of a system like Mastercard divided by number of transactions (including all employee/office space/commute/etc energy consumption). There are clearer/few…

The total energy cost of paying a pack of gum with your Mastercard is probably on the order of running your computer for a few seconds. Maybe as much as a minute, I don't know to what degree the financial system uses replication.
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