341–350 of 992 posts
I agree with most of the points raised by the author but as a Venezuelan Bitcoin is a godsend. If you live abroad and want to send remittances to your friends and family it can be pretty easy in a normal country , with wire transfers,western union and so on. If your family lives in Venezuela your options are extremely more limited. These are some of the options Venezuelans have had to use: 1. Ask the money to be sent…
if you don't mind the usury-level fees
The author is Ray Dillinger, who has an axe to grind, having been involved with BTC since early days, and losing out hugely.
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> What kind of things do you buy with it and where? Drugs, CP, cryptotrojan ransom, other crime related transactions. Bitcoin value is directly related to relevant criminal activity.
These are all terrible uses of Bitcoin, as mentioned in the OP. All transactions are publicly visible in an immutable database. With a little investigation, law enforcement can find out who owns certain accounts and trace transactions very easily from there. If you are a criminal, you want no paper trail whatsoever, which is why they use paper money.
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It's volatile, but the overwhelming trend has been upwards. Historically it's a great investment if you can weather volatility
> overwhelming trend has been upwards You’re cherry picking your price analysis time period. Last year I could have said “BTC has trended down tremendously the last 2 years” and I’d have been right as well.
>The scarcity of block chain space has led people to re-invent every last feature of the banks they thought they were going to be escaping. This is a pretty funny point because every time I go on twitter and see people talk about crypto, what they're essentially having is a discussion about public policy, and often they seem to try to reinvent institutions that already exist without even knowing it. From market-maker…
Yes, I see the irony. So much talk about the benefit of crypto currencies seems - in my eyes at least - based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how societies work. And most of all: you can’t replace trust with tech.
I'd say, you can (Bitcoin is one of many recent exercises of replacing trust with math). But it's not worth the price. Or, put another way, trust is a ridiculously powerful optimization that enabled humanity to form societies in the first place. It's very similar to how introducing a central node into a network reduces communication costs from O(n^2) to O(n). In the general case, it's stupid to not take advantage of it.
I consider Bitcoin to be the closest we've came so far to expressing trust in units of energy. POW shows us how much computation has to happen to achieve mathematical guarantees in lieu of trust. Somebody could probably derive some upper and lower bounds on the energy costs of trust in terms of information theory. I'd love to read such a paper.
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I don't see the irony. The point is that Bitcoin has introduced an actual "digital cash" currency without institutional/governmental middlemen. That institutions can be built on top of that, and that some people want such institutions, doesn't change the novel utility of finally having a currency that functions like digital cash. It's like saying it's ironic that people use physical USD for anonymous p2p transactions…
No one treats Bitcoin as a currency. It’s treated as an investment vehicle. And the reason behind that is obvious. Something whose value may double in a month or whose value may halve within weeks is a terrible currency. If I expect it’s value to increase then I would be a fool to spend it. If I expect it’s value to drop I would be a fool to accept it. Cryptocurrencies are anything but currencies.
Ask the people who bought hundreds of millions of dollars (without inflation) of drugs on Silk Road, Empire Market, White House Market etc since 2013 until now. I am making up hundreds of millions based on the seized Bitcoins by the FBI, the real number probably exceeded Billions a long time ago already.
The WannaCry and other ransomware folks don't sit on their millions of dollars of extorted Monero/Bitcoin either. They buy cars and fancy things with them, and that's one reason many of them got arrested.
Few real world examples of scams against everyday folks:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=canada+bitcoin+...
Safeway now has BTC ATMs and we we'll be able to drop "canada" from the query and get good results from the US soon.
Bitcoin has demonstrated the existence of a deep, pent-up need for a financial instrument that: - can preserves value over the long term (implemented in this case via demonstrably finite supply) - isn't easily manipulated by governments trying to finance their mismanagement of public money In this by itself, it is already not a disaster.
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It isn't as simple as that. Not only have you got to change that line of code, you need to convince all users of bitcoin to run that version of the code including miners. Otherwise you have forked the coin and you might be the only user of it (your version is incompatible with the rest).
You don’t need most to agree. Just the basic majority (50%+). And of course that’s exactly what the major mining consortiums will do: Collude to increase the limit when it’s reached. After all, the rewards are in the mining, not the transaction fee.
I was following along until this bit which seems to hold up the entire argument: > [BTC mining] is often done using electricity which is effectively stolen from taxpayers with the help of government officials Can somebody elaborate on the stolen/corruption angle?
Not 100% sure but there was some news a few years back about miners setting up shop in towns which had really low energy costs because they bought a fixed block of power from a nearby source and thus it was super cheap... as long as they didn't have to go over that initial purchase, after that it became more expensive than normal for everyone.