Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin is a disaster

metzdowd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 992 posts

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#401

Post by pjlegato »

pojzon wrote: post #367
pjlegato wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire BTC market cap is minuscule -- about 600bn as of this writing. That seems like a lot, but compare it to Apple -- the market cap of just this one company's stock is currently ~2,238bn. The market cap of gold, US dollars, Euros, etc. are all many times more than Apple. The value of all BTC is a tiny microscopic speck compared to the amount of USD or gold in the world. This means (among other things) a few sm…

To give an another view: 600bn is more than gdp of majority of countries.

Correct, and those countries' economies also give us little to no signal about US dollar inflation. The proposition was that BTC prices somehow inform us about that.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#402

Post by yunesj »

Bitcoin's value prop isn't in its anonymity.

Early adopters weren't enthusiastic about bitcoin because they hoped it would end fractional reserve banking or any other financial product. Rather, it was incredible to see the entire financial industry quickly rebuilt on top of sound money.

I agree that small transactions and mining can be (and are being) improved, but not for the same reasons. It's silly to blame bitcoin for government corruption and people taking advantage of government subsidies. Bitcoin is simply doing what was always done more efficiently.

I would expect that an individual like Bear would be more in tune with what bitcoin was trying to accomplish.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#403

Post by majewsky »

gruez wrote: post #233
xapata wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since Bitcoin transactions are enabled only by spending electricity, isn't the whole system dependent on utility companies, which are either in part or in whole extensions of the government?

If you want to be reductionist, you can argue that since almost all of the world's land, people, resources, and equipment are under the control of some government, it's hard for anything to be independent of them.

Well, yeah. Why else would Elon want a Mars colony so badly?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#404

Post by bob33212 »

rkagerer wrote: post #324

I bought my smartphone from Hong Kong, in part because I wanted a specific variant that would be more likely to work with open-source ROM's. The seller initially requested payment via Transferwise, who sought crazy amounts of personal information and bullied me into a privacy-hostile customer agreement. Days went by and they still hadn't activated my account. Growing frustrated, I convinced the seller to accept Bitco…

Western Union is also very useful, but the vast majority of transactions are not made by Western Union because it has tradeoffs that make other things like credit/debit cards and checks a better option.

Bitcoin Evangelists are trying to pump up the price by advocating that bitcoin will be the best method of making payments for a huge variety of use cases.

I'm not going to call it a pump and dump scam because I think that a lot of these people truly think that it is going to 500k and beyond and that they will never need to dump it all.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#405

Post by gruez »

vulturalcptlst wrote: post #274
stevefrench93 wrote: post #239

Bitcoin is more accurately referred to as Bitcoin Core. The philosophical successor to the original Bitcoin is Bitcoin Cash. You can see the difference for yourself here: https://bitcoinfees.cash/ Bitcoin, at least according to Satoshi's original white paper, is supposed to be a peer to peer electronic cash system. Let's pay for a Bay Area cup of coffee with Bitcoin. That'll be $13 ($5 + $8 in network fees). If we us…

I'm sorry for your loss and inability to learn. I don't know how many times people will just choose to not look at how block size increase is a throughout increase and nothing to do with scaling. Literally, it will do 'jack' to raise it to 8mb.. I’d love to see the Bcash network with our volume but it will never happen because it’s a joke and a clear sign that the devs aren’t CS centric for Bcash. You've been hoodwin…

>[...] he thinks of the blockchain as an efficient payment network. It's not. Just look at the electricity expenses that are going into making transactions on the blockchain possible. Right now the network is consuming as much energy as the country Ireland?

It's inefficient, but not because mining uses a lot of energy. From a transaction point of view, the energy spent on mining is a sunk cost. It's the same whether a block has 1 transaction or 10000 transactions.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#406

Post by amelius »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #39
Barrin92 wrote: post #3

>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…

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…

You missed the last part of TFA:

> The more scalable the network becomes, the more centralized it becomes, until ultimately a "scalable" cryptocurrency would be doing things exactly the same way as a credit card processor.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#407

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

Anon1096 wrote: post #99
oblio wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's "digital cash" in this context? What does it offer extra compared to regular cash and online payments?

Theoretically companies like Mindgeek who have been kicked off of the VISA/Mastercard duopoly, would be able to use Bitcoin as a censorship-resistant way to accept online payment. There's additional benefits as mentioned earlier like not needing to comply with KYC laws. Of course, as Bitcoin currently stands, it's difficult for this to come to fruition because most holders are speculators rather than people intereste…

>like not needing to comply with KYC laws

You can also not comply with KYC laws in the traditional banking system; you're just going to get roflstomp'd by the financial authorities, c.f. $200mm fine for Deutsche Bank for insufficient AML/KYC controls in 2012-2015 time period.

Why would you imagine the result will be any different for crypto-banking? FinCEN is already promoting KYC for exchange-hosted wallets.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#408

Post by LatteLazy »

wpietri wrote: post #352
cambalache wrote: post #304

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…

Is this from personal experience? And is there any data available to show that it's doing significant volume in Venezuela versus other options?

I'm not OP.

I looked and Chainalytics claim Venezuela is world number 3 in bitcoin use. But it's not clear what they're basing that on. My (very limited) understanding is that they can't directly see the country of origin of a bitcoin transaction. So they must be relying on figures from exchanges or apps?

https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/venezuela-cryptocurrenc...

Does anyone know if you can tell country of origin of a transaction request? Maybe the IP sending the request is public to the network?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#409

Post by ur-whale »

colinmhayes wrote: post #348
ur-whale wrote: post #326

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.

Fiat currency is one the most beneficial economic developments ever. Goldbuggery is idiotic.

>Fiat currency is one the most beneficial economic developments ever.

Currency certainly is.

Fiat most certainly not [1]

[1] https://ginifoundation.org/kb/fiat-currency-graveyard-a-hist...

>Goldbuggery is idiotic.

Whenever something is being thought of as useful by a sizable portion of the population over large swaths of time, calling it idiotic is pretty much guaranteed to be a boomerang.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#410

Post by nfin »

wpietri wrote: post #368
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically speaking, it's also a terrible investment vehicle for those same reasons. It's a fantastic parlor game of speculation though, where the point is the volatility.

Exactly. It frustrates me that the term "investment" has been stretched to include raw speculation. People are welcome to do either one, but it's dangerous when people confuse zero-sum and positive-sum games. Buying any currency, crypto- or otherwise, is like playing the ponies: for every dollar won, there's (at least) a dollar lost. That's very different than investing in a company, which hopefully uses the money to…

that‘s not true.

Would be true if bitcoin was full premined, but it wasn‘t.

There are still 900 new bitcoins mined per day, and with an open source / patent free environment the space is a competitive market, the cost to produce one should tend towards the price of selling it (less so when the price rises quickly).

So how is at least a dollar lost (for every dollar won)?

Post reply on HN