Bitcoin breaks above $20k • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#311

Post by kharak » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

three_seagrass wrote: post #272

quattrofan wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 probl…

I don't follow Bitcoin, but after first hearing abort how it would be a decentralised network, all I could think was "have you ever heard of the power law?".

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#312

Post by cwkoss » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #71

boh wrote: post #9

The real test is if this is still true by mid-Jan. The 2017-18 peak had a similar trajectory--Oct to Dec spike then fell by Jan--suggesting some weird tax related activity. I'm curious to see if things play out the same way.

It's still very early if you are comparing this to the 2017 bubble. Bitcoin moved from the old all-time high to around x20 higher. That would put bitcoin price around $400.000. A really frightening amount of money has to be moved into the ecosystem to make bitcoin worth that much.

If Bitcoin's price increases by just 4x, it will have a larger market cap than any company in the world.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#313

Post by keymone » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 6:48 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #114

arithma wrote: 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…

>Just a question, isn't all criticism against bitcoin applicable to gold? Gold fluctuates a lot less. Its hard to swallow "ok ok bitcoin is useless but it can still be a stable currency/safe asset" when the price is booming and crashing every year.

Bitcoin isn’t useless, it’s useful for storing or transferring Bitcoin in a permissionless way.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#314

Post by WanderPanda » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 6:48 PM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #253

nostrademons wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Very divisive territory you are getting into here :D

Just wanted to add that the track record of predictions about the environment doesn‘t shine a bright light on the (popular) science in the ways you mentioned. Just have a look at the club of rome report. When a part of science gets overly politicised you should get wary.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#315

Post by xwdv » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 6:48 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #228

_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…

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…

No, I believe the root cause is that there is so much more stuff to buy in today’s world, and advertising has grown so powerful and visibility of products has increased so much that people can’t resist urges to buy things. So we need more and more money.

I look back at things you could buy 30,40,50 years ago, much of it sucks and doesn’t compare to what you find today. Back then you didn’t need much money because there wasn’t much to buy. I look at the ads and they’re garbage, not engaging at all and doesn’t convince me to want the product. And because people weren’t posting pics of things they purchased to some social media, seeing something cool that I might want to buy usually only happened when going over to a friends house, or seeing a random passerby in the streets. And that meant those people were usually close to your own economic class, so the items weren’t out of your league.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#316

Post by thebean11 » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

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?

In the end, this is software used to reach consensus in a distributed manner. I don't see it much differently than any other hard fork; the stakeholders reached consensus.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#317

Post by jjk166 » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

nikolay wrote: post #136

It's always goes how around the end of the year and crashes in the beginning of the next. Where's the news?

Bitcoin hit relative lows in late 2018 and late 2019. The only years with a statistically significant increase at the end of the year were 2013 and 2017.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#318

Post by jcranmer » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

phoinix wrote: post #210

wait_a_minute wrote: post #159

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…

From what I've seen of police misconduct, the general form of misconduct is that the police officers generally just blatantly lie. The problem isn't that they're editing records of things that happened, the problem is that they're lying about the records in the first place--and I think the George Floyd protests make perfectly clear that they are more than willing to lie even when they know that hard evidence (in the form of other people recording the scene) contradicting them will exist.

That's the basic problem with blockchain: it only really provides nonrepudiation (someone can't back away from a statement they made previously). It doesn't have a solution for people willing to commit perjury, and when you look at all of the social situations where official records are distrusted, the main reason for that is that officials are known to be committing perjury and face no repercussions for it.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#319

Post by mywittyname » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

NoOneNew wrote: post #266

_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…

While I do agree that crypto needs to step away from the current "investment vehicle" mentality and be treated more like a "currency"... I'm still lost how yet another currency is going to help society. Im not trying to be an ass, I'm being serious on figuring this out. I constantly see this argument with no real logic other than trying to essentially use Marxist ideals of "redistribution of wealth" to a disenfranchi…

It's useful for moving money from countries with capital restrictions into USA dollars. I know a few people from SEA who use BTC for exactly this purpose.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#320

Post by WanderPanda » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #274

SCUSKU wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

„Don‘t ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity“ (stupidity and short term, well intentioned, but in the end egoistic thinking, I would add)