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Bitcoin breaks above $20k

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Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#401

Post by apta »

JoshTko wrote: post #265
mrlala wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. I 100% understand what you are saying but I also 100% disagree with it. This is all greed with no substance. Wealthy people and those who desire to be wealthy are doing everything they can to arbitrarily prop up something which does not really have value. And they seem to be winning- which is everything that is wrong with the world right now.

Definitely 100% about greed. The core thesis of "will the price go up" is dependent on if greedy people will continue to be greedy. All of human history (and perhaps biology) has always been about continually trying to accumulate more even at expense of others. Bitcoin doesn't detract or contribute to this human nature.

Bitcoin is an investment, just like any other, it can go up or down.

If you really want to talk about profiting off the backs of others, look no further than interest bearing loans. It isn't for no reason that parasitic and immoral practice had been declared prohibited in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Most, if not all of the economy today is based off of interest, and the sooner we get rid of it the better.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#402

Post by microtherion »

spurgu wrote: post #347
xur17 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cash on the internet. Basically, the ability to send money to someone else without any intermediary, in the same way that you can hand cash to someone else when selling something on craigslist, etc. This is particularly helpful in cases like gift cards where fraud is a problem, and margins are thin, and industries that are blocked by other payment processors [0]. We can argue about whether or not all of the opportuni…

Prime example with Pornhub right there, along with all other things Visa/Mastercard has decided to block over the years (Wikileaks comes first to mind). > We can argue about whether or not all of the opportunities are a good thing for society or not, but crypto does solve a problem for them. Agreed. I'd argue that being able to buy drugs online is a great solution, but there are good arguments against it as well. Cry…

And yet, in the same week that Bitcoin hit an all time high, Pornhub

(a) changed its policies radically within days, spurred by the threat of being dropped by credit card processors (thus demonstrating that they had no faith in cryptocurrency picking up nearly sufficient slack).

(b) those changes were almost universally considered to be for the better (a crackdown on non-consensual porn), so if cryptocurrency HAD succeeded in stepping in, it arguably would not have been a social good.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#403

Post by keymone »

jariel wrote: post #357
keymone wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go create me a zillion of bitcoin and let’s see how much energy it’ll take.

You are missing my point, which is, there's no material reason to 'use energy' to 'create currency' of any kind. It's just a peculiarity of bitcoin and the way some cryptos are generated. There is no theoretical generalization to the notion of energy->currency so the OPs premise of energy->value doesn't make any practical sense ... other than for BTC.

No, I think you are missing the point. It’s not the need to use energy, it’s a security feature that you can’t create it without using energy. It’s defense mechanism against debasement.

Gold has that mechanism by being a rare metal - there’s only so much of it in our vicinity. Bitcoin gets that mechanism from universal law of physics - you can’t create energy from nothing.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#404

Post by xtracto »

three_seagrass wrote: post #359
keymone wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is decade a lot? How long did it take gold to settle as universal currency?

A decade is a lot for a new technology to miss the mass market boat. It's less like the iPhone/PDA tech and more like the Segway.

I don´t agree with you. I see it more like SABRE, SAGE in the 1960´s and ARPANET in the 1970s, Compuserve in the 80s and the Internet in the 90s.

Hashcash, eGold and other similar pioneered the "dark ages" of digital money/value-transfer. Now we are in the ARPANET/Compuserve stage. Cryptocats and crypto-games is akin to "90s" internet. Next 10 years will bring really interesting thinks.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#405

Post by itsdsmurrell »

three_seagrass wrote: post #373
itsdsmurrell wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a large fee and with a lot of uncertainty on if it will make it into a block. Try the fork of Bitcoin that still operates like Bitcoin used to up until 2016: Bitcoin Cash.

Bitcoin cash is just another alt coin at this point. Transactions have been dwindling and it hasn't even had a reason to flex it's larger block size yet (which is why it was created).

Yes, it's a pity people are so easily manipulated.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#406

Post by varajelle »

nwah1 wrote: post #389
nwah1 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a payment channel is still open, then the blockchain hasn't confirmed anything yet, the only speedup is to reduce roundtrips to the blockchain in the case of a series of transactions. So you are still limited by the speed of the blockchain, unless you decide to trust parties in the Lightning Network.

Onion routing also requires trust that there is no collusion between nodes

You seem to dislike lightning network, but the reason given are not accurate.

What would happen if there was collusion between nodes?

And while it is true that you are still limited by the Blockchain speed if the nodes don't cooperate, all the incentives are made so they do cooperate and that transactions happen near instantly.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#407

Post by cwkoss »

mrlala wrote: post #386
agumonkey wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think "bitcoin as an inflation resistant storage" is a good theory ?

Not at all, you know why? Because everyone talks about BTC relative to some other currency. The very topic of this post "Bitcoin breaks above $20k or $20,000 USD / BTC". How can something that can only be quoted in terms of another currency be inflation resistant?

Can't USD only be quoted in terms of other currencies/assets? (At least since we left the gold standard?)

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#408

Post by three_seagrass »

koonsolo wrote: post #395
three_seagrass wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

Nobody is saying that it is, but by your logic APPL is a great currency.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#409

Post by three_seagrass »

lifty wrote: post #374
three_seagrass wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semantics. Any hard fork that majority of miners do not accept and support becomes it's own branch and a separate crypto. This is why I reference the bitcoin block size debacle. Bitcoin Cash was created as a hard fork that miners ultimately did not accept and is now just a dwindling alt coin.

As far as I remember miners favored the block increase while a critical mass of validating users didn’t.

The distribution and difference in hash power speaks otherwise.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#410

Post by Mc_Big_G »

_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…

Nobody talks about anything but price and manipulation in gold bug forums. Bitcoin in digital gold, not digital money.
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