321–330 of 473 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Ethereum going to be worth more than Bitcoin (market cap) when people realize how technologically superior it is?
If I could predict the future, I'd be rich already! =)
What's the carbon footprint of BTC like these days? Has any progress been made on mitigating this fundamental design issue?
The carbon footprint is estimated to be 37Mt CO2 per year, similar to New Zealand, and BTC represents close to half of the current global data centre electricity use. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
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…
Gold is something that exists IRL. It has value even in the absence of a market to buy/sell it. It can be melted down and formed into jewelry, as a simple example. The reason I won't buy into crypto is it's impossible to make informed investment decisions because, as an investment, the price is driven too highly by unknown market forces (at least unknown to me...). Perhaps it's a good investment if you truly feel you…
The informed investment decision is that crypto is entirely new asset class and bitcoin is king. There is redistribution happening between asset classes and especially this year when 30% of all USD in existence was printed, there will be large inflows into bitcoin. Of course it will be volatile for a while.
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…
This is incorrect and a common misunderstanding about Bitcoin. Hard forks require users to update, and it doesn't matter what the miners do. It also doesn't require a majority of users to upgrade, anyone who does upgrade will be on the new network, and anyone who does not upgrade will be on the old network.
Bitcoin (and other blockchains) are structured so that miners have as little power as possible. Pretty much the only thing miners can do in practice is choose to censor transactions, and that would be considered an attack. Networks have recourse like bricking all mining hardware, which typically acts as a sufficient deterrent to such attacks. Miners can also double-spend (a form of creative self-censorship), but the same network recourse applies.
In practice I don't think there are any examples of miners intentionally making a blockchain slower and more expensive. Miners pretty much always fit every possible transaction into every block, and any throughput restrictions are determined at the protocol level by protocol devs, not by miners.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The entire point of Bitcoin is that you irreversibly give up something you value in exchange for creating a Bitcoin in return. The Bitcoin now stands for that lost value, and there is now a corresponding psychological motive to replace the valuable thing that was lost (electricity, and all that goes with it including environmental impact) by mentally investing that loss in the Bitcoin token. So you protect it, you su…
"There is no "environmental mitigation" for Bitcoin's energy use, this behavior ... is an essential property of cryptocurrency, without which it would cease to exist." This is based on the false premise that energy, or anything else needs to be given up in exchange for crypto, or any other form of currency. We could create a zillion cryptos out of thin air and just hand them out. That's one way to do it. Central bank…
Let's pay tribute to the very first Hacker News thread about Bitcoin back in May, 2009 with this classic comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852 > Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Good thing its just a fad, will fail, is rat poison, is already dead, and will be the biggest scam ever, etc. etc. https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/
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…
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 the…