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Bitcoin is a disaster

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Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#461

Post by ZguideZ »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #13

Completely agreeable, albeit it misses a point: Governments can't print more of it. That's it really, everything else is noise. I can sympathize with btc (I wish we still had a gold standard, or a standard based on the price of common goods) but I don't see much the other benefits. On top of this, governments could ban btc.

Perhaps the most powerful thing about Bitcoin is that the guy who created it is unknown (if Satoshi was a guy or a lone person at all) and that it mostly runs on autopilot and at this point is not governed by a single body. It can't be sued. The creator of it can't be sued. And yes, more of it can't be made and there is deflation built into it. Genius.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#462

Post by briatx »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #345
louwrentius wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

Bitcoin doesn't solve any trust problem outside of how many bitcoins are in each wallet.

Even in the very basic ecommerce use case: buyer purchases item online with bitcoin. The buyer must necessarily trust the vendor to deliver.

There's no recourse outside of the good graces of the vendor. There's no chargebacks or third party mediation.

Thus Bitcoin actually reverses the risk assumed by online purchases from the vendor to the buyer.

This is the reason why Bitcoin is a failure outside of niche grey and black market concerns. It is far worse for the consumer than existing solutions that isolate them from transaction risk, and will usually kick back a small percentage in cash back.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#463

Post by nootropicat »

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…

Why are they using bitcoin rather than dollar stablecoins? Too new?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#464

Post by ur-whale »

1-6 wrote: post #438
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…

Why aren’t there any mention of highly popular alt-coins like Litecoin? It’s less volatile for real use as a fiat alternative and transaction speeds are a lot faster because of the low service fee to speed things up. I kinda regretted keeping funds in Litecoin but it was one of the first to fix Bitcoin’s shortcomings.

Litecoin is extremely similar to Bitcoin.

The fact that some of the currency's "fundamental constants" have been tweaked to make it slightly better for certain situations does not change the fundamentals.

It's kind of like the multiplicative constants in algorithm complexity theory.

And while there are many other alt-coins that claim to have solved the scalability problem while remaining truly decentralized, I have yet to see one actually deliver.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#465

Post by ineedasername »

sunshinerag wrote: post #117
svara wrote: post #54

There does seem to be a fundamental design issue in bitcoin and proof of work in general: Mining has economies of scale and therefore winner takes all mechanics leading to centralization. At that point the mechanism that ensures ledger integrity is the calculation that if the miner tampers with the ledger, that would destroy trust in the coin and hurt the miner in that way. But 1) that's exactly how conventional curr…

Re: 1, I don't see conventional currencies working that way. Has any government promised how and why they will maintain their currency. They supposedly claim they help people why screwing up the very same people. Case in point, the 2008 crisis and the various modern monetary based crises.

I agree that governments can manipulate their monetary policy in ways that are not in the best interests of their people. But I also don't see how widespread crypto currency would 1) have prevented the '08/'09 financial collapse, and 2) it appears that fiat monetary policy has more flexibility in responding to such crisis by inserting liquidity, facilitating the controlled dissolution of defunct financial institutions, etc.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#466

Post by LatteLazy »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #441
LatteLazy wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 origi…

> 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? In this kind of setting, where the transaction is illicit, you wouldn't go through an exchange, you'd publish the transaction directly to the bitcoin network, and organizations like chainalytics do track the origin IP addresses.

That makes sense.

Not to criticise but... Isn't the IP of a transaction initiator being public a bit of a design flaw? Is it just assumed that users will obscure their own IPs (vpn, tor, etc)? Otherwise my isp/government can see my transactions and infer wallet ownership and I'm suddenly very un-anonymous...

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#467

Post by [deleted] »

nootropicat wrote: post #463
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…

Why are they using bitcoin rather than dollar stablecoins? Too new?

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#468

Post by nwienert »

StavrosK wrote: post #147
nwienert wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the reality of cash as cash doesn’t change value like Bitcoin (in either direction), it’s also usually not scarce, and always much easier to use.

The dollar doesn't change value like Bitcoin, not cash as a whole.

What we define as a good currency doesn’t. A currency that inflates or deflates dramatically is foundering.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#469

Post by NicoJuicy »

brokencode wrote: post #105
corty wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Never heard of crypto mixing obviously

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#470

Post by thegjp210 »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #400
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…

Personal experience: not only bitcoin was the only practical way I was able to receive funds in Russia from an Indonesian client, it was cheaper than just one leg of converting Indonesian currency (to USD). Think of it. Buying bitcoin, sending and selling resulted being cheaper than just buying USD. The spread was that much lower. (It was in a relatively static price period in summer 2016) And regular banks just didn…

how much counterparty risk does the rapid price fluctuation result in? Can't imagine pricing a contract in bitcoin, as someone's getting screwed at payment if the BTC/fiat rate has changed during the lifetime of the contract
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