Bitcoin is a disaster • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#641

Post by DennisP » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 1:56 AM UTC

> ultimately a "scalable" cryptocurrency would be doing things exactly the same way as a credit card processor

That seems to be true of Bitcoin, but several others are working hard on scaling. The one I'm most familiar with is Ethereum, where:

- Zkrollups store transactions on-chain in a highly compressed format without loss of security. For simple value transfers, a zkrollup system in production now can handle up to 9000 per second, if the network isn't doing anything else.

- Data sharding, coming in about a year, multiplies that by 64X initially. Rollups have minimal reliance on computation on chain, so just scaling the data is enough.

- Replacing merkle trees with more efficient data witnesses like polynomial commitments could multiply data capacity by another factor of ten.

= All of this is subject to quadratic scaling. As individual nodes get more powerful, it multiplies both the capacity of individual shards and the number of shards.

Of course several chains are doing away with mining, and several others have fixed the anonymity issue.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#642

Post by xapata » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 1:56 AM UTC

bconnorwhite wrote: post #543

josalhor wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Governments can't print more of it. I never really understood that line of reasoning. Why would one person want to reduce the ability to apply economic policy in their country? Certainly, you could use Gold instead of Bitcoin as a similar investment tool, right?

"Why would one person want to reduce the ability to apply economic policy in their country?" What do you think happens to your currency when they print more of it? One problem with gold though is that we know where plenty of gold is, its just too expensive to mine. Once the price of gold rises, more gold becomes profitable to mine, supply increases, and the price goes back down.

"They" print more every day. In the US, I think the economic stimulus has been a success this year. Trump should have spent his campaign talking about all the efforts to boost unemployment insurance benefits. He might have fared a bit better in the election.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#643

Post by lumost » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 1:57 AM UTC

1-6 wrote: post #511

lumost wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alt-coins don't have the market depth of Bitcoin. Moving money in LTC will move the market, BTC is approaching institutional market depth.

I still question the early bag-holders of Bitcoin. Where are they and what do they do now? I think Litecoin came at a time when more people had an awareness of cryptocurrency, it's more democratized during the initial phases because of Scrypt and GPU's being the dominant mining tool at the time. ASICs shifted that balance again but I still have my doubts about who owns the majority of Bitcoin.

I would bet a lot of folks have been selling it over time. My wallet once held ~10 BTC for a few transactions back in the early days. I ended up with 5 btc left over that I rode the bull market with, selling half the position post bull run each time.

I kick myself for loosing the BTC my friend and I mined back in '09 on CPU time when it truly was worthless. But I was a dumb college student at the time and was simply playing around with it for a few days. I wonder how many BTC were permanently lost in this period.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#644

Post by louwrentius » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 1:58 AM UTC

xapata wrote: post #323

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.

> fundamental understanding From the tone of your statement, I think you meant mis-understanding. I'll add also a misunderstanding of macroeconomics and a rejection of empiricism. The cryptocurrency folks read a bit too much of von Mises.

Yes, sorry.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#645

Post by dleslie » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC

OOPMan wrote: post #631

People here talking about Venezuela seem to be ignoring the fact that maybe if that country wasn't such a disaster politically bottom-of-barrel solutions like Bitcoin wouldn't be needed. If the best excuse for Bitcoin is that it's the only thing that works when a governed society has broken down almost completely then maybe it's better to think about how we can avoid that kind of breakdown than it is to invest energy…

> the best excuse for Bitcoin is that it's the only thing that works when a governed society has broken down almost completely

It's no coincidence that the loudest voices supporting Bitcoin are very often stubbornly zealous libertarians.

The total collapse of functioning Government is kind of a libertarian folk dream. They want the proverbial barrel to be empty, and to have basic services paid for through user fees alone.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#646

Post by brokenkebab » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #593

doopy1 wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bag-holder usually has the connotation of holding a worthless asset, bitcoin is currently at an all time high.

The underlying asset is utterly worthless, for all the reasons posited here in the article and more — that people are willing to pay you for it doesn’t change that.

>that people are willing to pay you for it doesn’t change that.

I dare to insist it most certainly does. Anything is economically wothless unless there are people willing to participate in exchanging it.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#647

Post by hedora » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC

thewarrior wrote: post #589

hedora wrote: post #557

I wish the crypto currency described in the second half of Applied Cryptography had caught on. Basically, the bank issues a signed secret coin, and you (recursively) spend the money by using the secret to generate another signed secret. As with onion routing, you can only “look back” one step of the signature chain unless you collude. It’s anonymous and supports offline spending. Anonymity can be broken via collusion…

How does this scheme support offline spending and also prevent double spending ?

When you double spend, someone eventually cashes the money in at a bank, and the bank notices. With their authorization, their wallet decrypts and divulges the person that gave them the double spent currency to the authorities. This continues recursively until the double spender is discovered.

One problem with this scheme is that you could lose your wallet, then be found to be complicit in double spending years later (when you refuse to / can’t divulge the identity of the upstream spender).

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#648

Post by brokencode » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC

NicoJuicy wrote: post #469

brokencode wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What happens when the NSA hacks the mixing services or congress passes a law forcing them to store information for law enforcement? Surely the mixing services know at least for a certain amount of time where the coin is coming from and going to.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#649

Post by corty » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:02 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #349

glitchc wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The miners aren't the only ones enforcing the limit, so is every other bitcoin node out there. Just because you have 51% of the mining capacity doesn't mean everyone else (merchants, users, exchanges)[1] will agree. If they decide to unilaterally change the block reward all that would do is cause them to mine worthless blocks. [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority

No, miners are far more powerful than all the other stakeholders. While acceptance by merchants is a relevant factor, miners also have to facilitate any transaction. Any fork without miners is instantly unable to transact, making the coins useless and therefore worthless.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#650

Post by bconnorwhite » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:02 AM UTC

xapata wrote: post #642

bconnorwhite wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why would one person want to reduce the ability to apply economic policy in their country?" What do you think happens to your currency when they print more of it? One problem with gold though is that we know where plenty of gold is, its just too expensive to mine. Once the price of gold rises, more gold becomes profitable to mine, supply increases, and the price goes back down.

"They" print more every day. In the US, I think the economic stimulus has been a success this year. Trump should have spent his campaign talking about all the efforts to boost unemployment insurance benefits. He might have fared a bit better in the election.

The economic stimulus has certainly been a success for asset prices, in dollars...