411–420 of 473 posts
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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?
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Again, being an asset does not mean something is a useful currency. You keep listing characteristics of assets , like existing in an ETF or having a market cap or having commercial investors. Those are not characteristics of currencies , which are widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce.
Why is why I never said that > currencies, which are widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce So billions of dollars of institutional trading means BTC is widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce. So, you said it's a currency. That makes no mention of the consumer space, where I bought my widescreen monitor with BTC and pay my friends i…
This is a straw man. USD is a good currency because it is widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce.
BTC is not a good currency because it is not widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce. Even in your paypal example, they first convert your hobby money to USD (a real currency) before commencing the transaction.
Having billions traded or invested in it is a characteristic of an asset, which you keep repeating, and not a currency. You're failing to understand this distinction.
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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.
Bitcoin has been consistently "around the corner" from mass market for a decade now, while other technologies have been released and adopted.
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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.
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you can say the same thing about gold - it’s just a shiny rock. it’s an inflation protected asset, perhaps even more so than gold since there’s a known quantity of it that will never change.
You can't actually. Gold holds a unique spot on the periodic table. Another element isn't going to come into existence and compete with it here. Bitcoin on the other hand is in the fight for its life with the rest of the cryptocurrencies. I think that the one that's most useful will win out in the end... not the one that was most popular first (think myspace).
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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 p…
In a buyers market. With the small block size, bitcoin is a seller's (miner's) market and refusing to upgrade preserves their market power - hence the tragedy of the commons.
>You've got it backwards, changes to Bitcoin need to be accepted by block consumers (node operators).
The number of bitcoin nodes has been dropping for years. The rational actors who are incentivized to support the network are making the decisions right now by choosing which forks to support.
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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.
The 'security feature' of BTC, which happens to be related to energy has nothing to do with currency, or necessarily even crypto-currenices in the general sense.
The OP was trying to imply some kind of theoretical implication between 'energy used + value creation' (and you're also tying that to energy 'secure' usage).
Yes - we know BTC is 'tied to energy' - but that's irrelevant in the bigger picture, it's a specific feature of BTC - it's not a 'fundamental' problem.
There are myriad ways if distributing currency, even 'security' that don't involve arbitrary amounts of energy usage.
BTC/Crypto is kind of infuriating space of very smart technical people who have almost no financial knowledge 'discover' what they think of as new, but in reality, most of this has been known since the dawn of classical economics. BTC is a novel thing, that's about it.
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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.
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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.
Well what I find ironic is you are against the concept of interest but consider a cool technology like blockchain an "investment". If you were really so righteous about economics you would realize turning cryptos into "investing" is a total scam.
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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.
No, again, you're confusing the issue. The 'security feature' of BTC, which happens to be related to energy has nothing to do with currency , or necessarily even crypto-currenices in the general sense. The OP was trying to imply some kind of theoretical implication between 'energy used + value creation' (and you're also tying that to energy 'secure' usage). Yes - we know BTC is 'tied to energy' - but that's irrelevan…
it's literally the mechanism that solves double spend problem, which i'm pretty sure is quite important for a currency and to my knowledge wasn't solvable in trustless manner prior to bitcoin.