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Bitcoin breaks above $20k

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Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#391

Post by whoisninja »

drcross wrote: post #186
Entwickler wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd suggest following ethereum and it's founder Vitalik. He's explicitly said things like, "If all that we accomplish is lambo memes and immature puns about "sharting", then I WILL leave. Though I still have a lot of hope that the community can steer in the right direction." He has worked with the UN world food program, and posts a lot of material on voting, economic fairness, and social aspects of blockchain in gene…

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

not just DAO rollback, they're basically changing every key protocol rule at whim. most of their nodes run on aws. I was interested earlier but now i'm big skeptic of Ethereum quite centralized IMO

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#392

Post by zepolen »

ordinaryradical wrote: post #294
Aaronstotle wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware that USD is the currency most frequently used for both fraud and crime?

There's a world of difference between "used for" and "designed to facilitate." For instance, if USD had features designed to make life easier for counterfeiters, money launderers, and other kinds of financial criminals we would probably say that it has been designed for fundamentally the wrong ends.

Wait how do those arguments apply to crypto, it's literally uncounterfeitable and isn't easy to launder since the blockchain is public. Cash on the other hand is a criminals dream.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#393

Post by whoisninja »

Entwickler wrote: post #128
dontTango wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum removed the 100M soft cap on EIP 669. This was quietly slipped through with no debate. ETH shouldn't be trusted.

Can you provide evidence of no debate, and reasons on why the soft cap is a bad idea when transactions burn eth anyways and the eth inflation rate is around 4% per year, and slated to drop to 0.5%-2.0% with the transition to ETH 2.0?

typical monetary policy issue, if it is easy to change - they will keep changing

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#394

Post by 93po »

three_seagrass wrote: post #243
ryanlol wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are vast amounts of professional drug dealers making their living from transactions using this “hobby currency”.

Are you up to speed on the dark net markets? Most have closed. The last one in use, Empire, had an exit scam this summer. Before that, Wall Street Market was taken over by feds and used as a honey pot - where they used traced bitcoin transactions to arrest dealers/people involved. Any drug dealers still doing online trading prefer Monero, and even then, I would still say that using a currency solely to buy drugs onli…

I buy stuff constantly using regular old bitcoin off of coinbase. Not drugs, but other things that don't lend themselves to tradtional payment providers. Market is alive and well for a lot of stuff outside drugs.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#395

Post by koonsolo »

three_seagrass wrote: post #376
koonsolo wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go compare the market cap of bitcoin with the money supply of some countries. Is it still a hobby currency then?

Assets != Currencies APPL's market cap is $2 trillion and so by that logic it should be an excellent currency.

APPL is probably a hobby company ;)

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#396

Post by 93po »

three_seagrass wrote: post #119
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…

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.

Gold is controlled by small handful of nations, which are in turns controlled by a small handful of people.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#397

Post by DINKDINK »

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…

Producers are subservient to consumer demand. No amount of production can force a consumer who refuses to change their consumption into buying an alternate good. If a town demands exclusively kosher bread, bakers cannot survive by baking non-kosher bread to sell to them.

Block producers (miners) must find buyers for the blocks they produce, if they don't find buyers, they go bankrupt.

>changes to update the Bitcoin protocol need to be accepted by the miners

You've got it backwards, changes to Bitcoin need to be accepted by block consumers (node operators). If they don't demand those changes, blocks with those changes don't get produced.

Demand and supply are fundamental components to economic action. The steal man version of your argument is: "While consumers induce production, some consumers' demands might be flippant -- They signal they will only buy kosher bread but they'll accept an alternate good. Though production switching costs are practically zero in SHA256 PoW, and entry into production is non excludable, an adversary has enough funding to pay premiums to producers to forego market demand, for the good they produce, longer than consumers are willing to refrain from consumption -- inducing a consumer-demand shift."

In game theory and economics its not a dominating strategy which is indicative of the many failed attempts to cartelize SHA256 PoW

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#398

Post by woah »

_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…

You need to make a distinction between Bitcoin and other cryptos. For the past 6-7 years, bitcoin has defined itself as being a “store of value”, rather than doing anything technically new. With this being the only goal, nothing matters except for the price. Other cryptos such as Ethereum, Cosmos, and Ava have more of a technical focus.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#399

Post by 627467 »

webinvest wrote: post #296
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…

Gold doesn’t become more expensive to transport as the price goes up.

Only if you don't care to insure for transporting your gold. If you do care, it definitely would be more expensive to insure a more valuable cargo.

But more crucially, if you need to use extraordinary quantities of gold to settle a transaction (ie. When nation states buy something with their gold reserves) the gold likely won't even move: most of it are stored in "trusted" first world nation central banks like the bank of england.

But then again, with bitcoin you don't need "trusted" central banks.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#400

Post by SI_Rob »

intotheabyss wrote: post #381
SI_Rob wrote: post #58

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…

I mean, I can make the same argument for any tech stock shares. All they give me is "governance rights" but at the end of the day, I'm trying to convince the next guy that TSLA is worth 500B in marketcap and that the TSLA stock will capture that value... somehow.

Sure, I mean it is increasingly apparent that Bitcoin has, as they say these days, "said the quiet part out loud" with respect to what kinds of motives really drive the stock market, and what signals its participants actually respond to. "Gainz" are swallowing "value" everywhere. Doesn't hurt that the crypto casino is open 24/7 as well.

The difference with stocks, however, is that stocks don't make a big show of pretending to be decentralized. Everyone knows and acknowledges that a relative handful of well-connected actors have enough leverage to wash everyone else out of TSLA if they so chose, but for the Bitcoin cultists it's anathema to even suggest the same inexorably centralizing forces are at work. A lot of collective effort is spent on propping up the "decentralization" meme (and its accomplice, the "anonymity" meme), effort which ironically makes the proponents value their Bitcoin all the more; they want to realize a return on that work.

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