Bitcoin is a disaster • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#711

Post by mrh0057 » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:49 AM UTC

sunshinerag wrote: post #66

raziel2701 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of things do you buy with it and where? I remember seeing some adoption back when steam started accepting it, but sometime later they stopped because it was too volatile. I thought paying fees for the transaction made bitcoin very unappealing as well. It's not anonymous either, so I just couldn't find a reason to use it as it didn't solve anything that I couldn't do with my credit card. And my credit card o…

I buy computer hardware (SSDs, network switches etc.), recently bought t-shirts and etsy like stuff on gethaven.app Bitcoin has always been pseudoanonymous and its perma history is something that I am aware off and not that bothered off. Though looks like the bitcoin devs are working towards something to improve privacy called taproot and schnorr. The thing that it solves for me compared to traditional fiat currencie…

Go lookup currency deflation and what happens at the end. The transaction rate is to low and the energy use is to high to be useful. We are near the end stage when people and institutions start hoarding it.

The current problem in fiat money is what the new money is funding. This is a society/government policy choice and isn't an inherent flaw in fiat money. In the west the money is primary used to boost asset prices instead of used for production.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#712

Post by acover » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:49 AM UTC

wcoenen wrote: post #536

acover wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A central bank implements quantitative easing by buying financial assets from commercial banks and other financial institutions, thus raising the prices of those financial assets and lowering their yield, while simultaneously increasing the money supply. Quantitative easing increases the money supply. They've injected trillions. Who got it is a separate question.

Quantitative easing only increases "bank reserves" in the accounts at the fed, not the money supply. The accounts at the fed are an isolated system. To increase the money supply, commercial banks need to create money via loans.

The reserve requirement is 0%, increasing a bank's reserves doesn't allow them to lend more. There are mechanisms that allow an increase in bank reserves to be spent in the economy without loans [0].

[0] https://positivemoney.org/how-money-works/advanced/how-quant...

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#713

Post by deegles » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:50 AM UTC

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.

I mean... "can't" is a pretty strong word. Sure, they probably can't break SHA256 or elliptic cryptography, but you really think a government couldn't sanction every single [random crypto coin] developer, seize every obtainable asset, and generally strong-arm them into changing the rules? I think people are not being imaginative enough with the tools state entities have at their disposal to coerce whatever result they want.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#714

Post by nootropicat » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:51 AM UTC

baby wrote: post #31

That’s nonsense. Bitcoin is as good a store of value as gold due to one unique feature: scarcity. Actually, it’s even less power consuming than the gold industry and is much more transparent. I wouldn’t really advise bitcoin for anything else, like day to day transactions, although I and many of my friends have used bitcoin to transact on dark markets and it works. The only argument I’ve heard about gold being better…

Bitcoin doesn't store anything, you can only get real wealth back for it if someone decides to trade. Then they are in the position of holding a worthless token that they have to dump on somebody else, ideally higher - and people only buy if they expect that to happen. Theoretically pumps and dumps could continue indefinitely, but in reality people are going to get bored of it and move to newer and more shiny ponzis.

Real wealth has value regardless of what other people think about it and has it by itself. A profitable company is a form of wealth even if nobody wants to buy it - because it generates profits. Same for farmland. Things with direct utility have value in that utility. Utility is ultimately defined by physical needs, which makes it an objective metric of value that can only be estimated better or worse by humans. Value isn't subjective - people and societies that are too wrong about valuations for too long wither and die (possibly conquered). The West as a whole is definitely on that path.

Gold was a store of value when governments forced people to pay taxes in it - selling what they had for gold - for thousands of years. It's not a store of value as that ended. Some people just didn't get the memo yet, but new generations are visibly unenthusiastic about gold, so it's only cultural inertia. It has some utility in itself, so it's better than bitcoin, but its price based on that demand alone would be much lower.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#715

Post by chris_wot » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:53 AM UTC

xapata wrote: post #611

syshum wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government is a monolith, the goals of the individuals that make up the government are irrelevant. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the most terrifying phrase in the English language is "We must do _____ for the greater good" Government is not reason, it is not eloquence,it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible ac…

You're spouting platitudes, which I enjoy sometimes for a dramatic turn of phrase, but they aren't helpful for rational discussion. They're best used for introducing a topic, but then we need a little more structure behind the facade. Going back to the monolith question, the other day someone at the public utility helped me fix a mistake with my bill. That individual was not irrelevant to my experience with governmen…

I’ve been noticing this sort of comment a lot in discussions of cryptocurrencies.

Take for instance the following response to the Ray Dillinger’s email:

Internet also became a disaster. We're very far from original ideas: Uncensored, decentralized ideals are forgotten.

I remember, in the beginning, governments were really afraid of people's reactions, even to make small regulations. Today, we don't even discuss before accepting any regulation about Internet. Infrastructure is almost completely controlled/owned by governments or cartels. [1]

That is so far beyond reality that it’s hard to believe this person was there “at the beginning”. The Internet, after all, started as a DARPA project...

1. https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2020-Decembe...

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#716

Post by nmlnn » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:54 AM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #429

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…

Can we have "cash you can email" that doesn't consume as much electricity as several nation states combined?

Sure, you just need to trust people.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#717

Post by chris_wot » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:55 AM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #602

stale2002 wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the government can't "just shut down the internet". If any government did that, then the country would suffer extreme economic damages, if such a policy was maintained for a long time. Your argument would be like if someone were to say "actually, the government can stop all theft, now and forever. All it has to do is launch 1 thousand nukes, start world war 3, and kill off 99% of the population". Like, sure. The…

Have you met North Korea?

That bastion of great economic management and economic growth...

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#718

Post by kmeisthax » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:56 AM UTC

We know. Hell, Bitcoin Core developers have known for years, that's why they never endorsed a base block increase. That's why they've put all their energy into adding upper layers with transactions secured by flimsy game theory rather than flimsy hashcash. That's why they pushed for SegWit, purely because it would make the complicated transactions necessary to run those upper layers not more expensive than direct transfers. That's why they added a bunch of ways to tack on fees to unconfirmed transactions, and talked a bunch about a "fee market" (even though that's not how Bitcoin transactions work) because it was obvious someone had to pay for all this stolen electricity.

I'd also argue that Bitcoin hasn't just failed to meet it's goals, but that it's goals aren't something the average person should want. The explicit goal of Bitcoin was untraceable payments you can't cancel. In practice this means fraudulent payments cannot be reversed, and stealing Bitcoin is so cheap and easy to do we've literally caught Ruby packages designed to slip into developers' computers and steal Bitcoin. Cryptominers have also plagued the web to the point where browser vendors have to actively restrict what you can do in JavaScript.

(I'd also ALSO argue that anonymous payments are bad for society, and that financial privacy shouldn't be a thing.)

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#719

Post by dane-pgp » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:57 AM UTC

mindcandy wrote: post #187

rjurney wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this what Bitcoin Cash is? I’m really asking, but I thought so.

Bitcoin Cash is about trying to make transactions faster and cheaper by increasing the block size (and rate?). Upside: Might be able to use it directly to buy coffee with a reasonable UX. Downside: would likely lead to a small number of huge machines managing the world's blockchain. The Bitcoin Core group really wants people in poor nations to be able to run their own Bitcoin nodes on their cell phones eventually. Th…

I'm not sure why every user needs to run a full node. Satoshi himself said that SPV clients would be enough for most users:

"Simplified Payment Verification is for lightweight client-only users who only do transactions and don't generate and don't participate in the node network. They wouldn't need to download blocks, just the hash chain, which is currently about 2MB and very quick to verify (less than a second to verify the whole chain)."[0]

It's not clear what benefit the user or the currency gains from having 90% of users running full nodes instead of, say, 50% or 10% doing so. In any case, when people in poor nations have phones that can manage uninterrupted 24/7 connections to the bitcoin network, they'll probably also be able to afford 2 TB of storage (currently costing about $50) which would be enough to store 10 years of 4 MB blocks.

[0] https://blockchain.news/wiki/satoshi-quote-on-trust

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#720

Post by kmeisthax » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 2:58 AM UTC

syshum wrote: post #583

cool_dude85 wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When confronted with relatively concrete studies on Bitcoin's wasteful energy use, are you going to point to the fact that physical money printer energy use has not been studied to muddy the waters? The reason it hasn't been studied is that it doesn't use a huge amount of electricity. Anyway, as another way of answering your question, physical money printing and transfers require no electricity at all, predating the…

Pretty sure the modern machines that 1. Print the money 2. Harvest the Cotton and other raw materials 3. Transport the money 4. Secure the money (even in electronic form) 5. and about 100 other things All use "energy" the point of the OP's comment was about "wasted energy" which i would image is tied to climate change The idea that "printed money uses no energy because it is old tech" is just ignorant

The vast majority of dollars in circulation exist only in accounting records and do not exist as actual physical tokens. Printed money uses no energy because we do not print money anymore, we write it in a SQL database (or, god forbid, an Excel spreadsheet).