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Bitcoin breaks above $20k

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Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#271

Post by rodiger »

ogogmad wrote: post #262
a1369209993 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a exception; in fact it's probably the most blatant supporting evidence available for "Inflation is good for [...] anything that's meant to be used.". Computers have been undergoing borderline hyperinflation (factor of two every year-and-a-half or so) for decades, and this is extremely good for anyone who wants to use a computer.

You got it the wrong way round. Deflation means when prices are dropping. The price of computers has fallen over time predictably and exponentially, and yet that hasn't stopped people from buying them. The Keynesian argument against deflation is that it disincentivizes people from spending money as they expect prices to drop. This disincentive hasn't prevented the computer industry from being a huge success. The fact…

Kinda unintuitive, but if you look at processing power as a currency, it is actually undergoing hyperinflation (number of computers + processing power increases every year). Meaning you buy a computer, assuming its value will drop (due to the inflationary nature).

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#272

Post by three_seagrass »

quattrofan wrote: post #215
three_seagrass wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold isn't controlled by a handful of miners in China, the way Bitcoin is. The whole decentralization-as-design principle of Bitcoin has shown that, given few constraints, anything of value naturally centralizes on the select few with the means to control it anyways. The block size debate, and the tragedy of the commons that it shines a light on, is a prime example of that.

How do they "control it" exactly?

By design, any changes to update the Bitcoin protocol need to be accepted by the miners with the majority of computing power - a.k.a. a hard fork.

For many reasons, such as stealing electricity and having access to chip manufacturers, there are a handful of miners in China who have the majority of the computing power for Bitcoin. They can mine bitcoins at a cost that is less than for everyone else.

This creates problems because there are updates to Bitcoin that are needed, such as allowing the Bitcoin network to process more than 7 transactions a second (for reference, Visa does 40,000 a second). Unfortunately, this small block size rate means people have to pay extra fees to prioritize their bitcoin transactions to happen in the next 20 minutes.

The miners get to keep these additional fees, so they are incentivized to keep the network slow and people paying more. This is why the Chinese miners have rejected any updates to improve Bitcoin transaction rate, meaning bitcoin is slower and more expensive for everyone but the miners extract more money from the network. It's tragedy of the commons.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#273

Post by [deleted] »

a1369209993 wrote: post #249
spurgu wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One exception to this that pops to mind is computers, which have gradually gotten cheaper. Even though you always get a better one if you wait, it hasn't deterred consumers.

That's not a exception; in fact it's probably the most blatant supporting evidence available for "Inflation is good for [...] anything that's meant to be used.". Computers have been undergoing borderline hyperinflation (factor of two every year-and-a-half or so) for decades, and this is extremely good for anyone who wants to use a computer.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#274

Post by cryptica »

SCUSKU wrote: post #268
cryptica wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure I follow your logic here. You're saying that central banks are keeping interest rates low in order to prevent global warming? Generally speaking, I would assume low interest rates = higher economic activity = increased CO2 emissions; not the other way around.

They're using man-made global warming as story to justify their unjust inflationary policies which are in fact all about control and centralization of wealth and power. Global warming could just be rhetoric to convince those people who can see the injustice of what's happening to justify why it needs to happen in this unjust way.

It's a way to justify why we should all be playing the game of musical chairs instead of the game of 'make more chairs' or even 'make more chairs, but each person should only have one chair'.

It all stinks like corruption. If you really wanted to solve global warming, the best solution would be to limit population growth, you could just give people tax incentives to have fewer children. Could be implemented as UBI: You get less basic income if you have more children. That is a much simpler and fairer solution and doesn't require deceiving billions of people with an epic global monetary ponzi scheme. Also we could get rid of useless bureaucratic jobs which are making the lives of billions of people miserable.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#275

Post by blurpesec »

anonymousDan wrote: post #239
drcross wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DAO rollback made them untrustable for me. You do you but a key required feature of my cryptocurrency should be sovereignty.

I hear this criticism a lot. And I don't disagree with it fundamentally, but I would be interested to hear how its advocates justify the decision. How do the Ethereum founders attempt to rebut it? Are there any good counterarguments?

Some rebuttal:

1) There wasn't a rollback of the blockchain - the method to fix this was an irregular state change (I.e - at block z, change balance at address x to address y). This was only possible because the nature of the attack left all of the compromised funds locked in place for 30 days. Arguably, if it required a rollback of the blockchain, people probably wouldn't have gone along with it. (Though node operators and miners may still have as evidenced by the bitcoin supply bug and rollback in 2010)

2) The funds in the DAO at the time were roughly 14% of the total supply at the time. This is ~1.5x the amount of ether currently custodied by the largest ether custodians today.

3) The common argument of this event being a slippery slope and that it would lead to frequent recovery of hacked funds has turned out to be false.

4) Since the state change was introduced as a software upgrade, node operators (mining pools & infrastructure providers) all had to opt into the change - which a large majority did. This would indicate that most organizations and individuals were either in favor of this solution or were apathetic to the solution

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#276

Post by Taek »

Lammy wrote: post #263
_sm6n wrote: 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…

> how the technology can be useful for society I think it's important to separate Bitcoin itself from the general concept of blockchains as a new type of data structure. Personally I think the real benefits to society will be had by applying Bitcoin's concepts to brand new unrelated things, and hopefully Bitcoin mindshare can help spark that creativity in people. To me, someone saying "The Blockchain" is like someone…

A blockchain is a lot more than just a data structure, it's an entire governance system that needs a community around it and active maintenance, continually running nodes, etc.

It is more like a discord server than it is like a data structure.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#277

Post by doggosphere »

anonymousDan wrote: post #239
drcross wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DAO rollback made them untrustable for me. You do you but a key required feature of my cryptocurrency should be sovereignty.

I hear this criticism a lot. And I don't disagree with it fundamentally, but I would be interested to hear how its advocates justify the decision. How do the Ethereum founders attempt to rebut it? Are there any good counterarguments?

I wasn't involved in Ethereum that early. But in retrospect I find it allowable/acceptable.

The reasoning is Ethereum is an early project, its design is highly centralized like a startup because very few people have the convictions and breadth of knowledge that Vitalik and co. possess. It's aspirations are not the same as Bitcoin: Bitcoin wants to provide value by being irrefutable property. Ethereum wants to be the world computer.

Ethereum's technical complexity makes Bitcoin look like a Ford Model T, while Ethereum is trying to be a space ship with warp speed capability. Obviously it is not the within the spirit of blockchains to conduct a rollback to save people's funds from hackers. But at that early stage, it might hurt adoption more than help if people get burned so badly. If we look at the tradeoffs, I think its worth it. If people prefer absolute immutability, they can use Ethereum Classic.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#278

Post by lawn »

albntomat0 wrote: post #3

What's the current thoughts on Tether, and how its speculated potential collapse will affect the rest of the ecosystem? Also, what's the latest on scaling? The last time I looked into it, Lightening was a thing, but I don't follow it closely.

The latest on scaling is that not much has happened for years.

Lightning cannot scale on it's own as Bitcoin will be the bottleneck, and when fees rise Lightning will stop being efficient for small transactions (since you need to pay an expensive Bitcoin fee to open a channel). Even the Lightning Network whitepaper says it needs much larger blocks.

Yet the Bitcoin devs are focusing on Segwit and Schnorr, which are woefully inadequate for any sort of scale. At this point it seems clear if you're looking for Bitcoin scaling, best look at other cryptocurrencies.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#279

Post by jjnoakes »

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #269
federicobond wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most transactions will have two outputs. One is the actual destination and the other is change that goes back to the spender wallet. There is nothing unusual going on here.

The description says change is described as yellow nodes though, also all three addresses are different

The change address is usually different from the other two.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#280

Post by guidovranken »

You can't conveniently pay with it so after the "digital cash" idea didn't pan out people settled on it being "store of value". But if that was what people really wanted, they'd be cheering for less volatility, not more; people really want it to be a get rich quick scheme (and I get that).

There is no decentralized social network in spite of people being dissatisfied with the centralized alternatives. The last time I tried an IPFS website it didn't load. The last time I tried Scuttlebutt it couldn't connect. It's been 12 years now and everything in crypto feels perpetually broken, unusable, beta-grade and stagnant, and it's very disappointing because I really wanted these solutions to exist.

Ironically, I think "crypto" would have fared better if it was without monetary value, and its development was optimized for utility (like most other computer programs) instead of buying Lambo's. The way I see it, BitTorrent is still the most successful and useful decentralized tech of the last few decades. It's useful, ubiquitous, safe, clients can be maintained by a lone hobbyist out in Nebraska, and it requires no propaganda whatsoever to prosper because its value proposition is evident to anyone. With crypto, the perpetual funding of technologies that are never going to work ironically makes it a very un-libertarian economy.

That said, I like having it around as an emergency payment system, and with the devaluation of fiat money and general downturn, BTC provides an attractive asset class next to stocks, gold and real estate.

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