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Bitcoin is a disaster

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Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#821

Post by biolurker1 »

newbie789 wrote: post #198
sunshinerag wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you might be one of a small handful of people that I've heard from that continue to use BTC as a currency for goods over the past few years. It's good to know that this still happens! Out of curiosity, you mention depreciating value for fiat being a liability, which is absolutely true. That being said, doesn't appreciation also create a different sort of liability? For example, let's say I buy a 1TB SSD for $…

Actually there is a big wave of people using Bitcoin powered Visa cards right now to buy stuff

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#822

Post by IshKebab »

syshum wrote: post #570
ineedasername wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking solely at that criterial, ACH transfers work.

ACH is US Banking only. You can not do Direct person to person transfers, you must go through a US Bank for ACH ACH is also SLOW and painfully insecure relaying on the banking institutions to stop gap the security and its built in slowness to allow for reversals of fraud or error transfers ACH is not a model people should be promoting as good method to do money transfer

Bank transfers don't have to be slow. Within the UK they are almost always instant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#823

Post by NicoJuicy »

sunshinerag wrote: post #8

I have no idea what he is talking about. I use bitcoin to buy things both onchain and via lightning and the experience is so smooth and much much better than the circa 2017 period when fees were high. Don't keep it on exchange. The real thing that is stopping adoption is countries trying to classify it as a commodity and insist to pay capital gains on every microtransaction. Some countries are backwards (US, UK) than…

> 2017 period when fees were high

Current fees are 8$. That's still too high

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#824

Post by wpietri »

nfin wrote: post #410
wpietri wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

The new coins aren't handed out generally. They are rewards to the "miners". They're relevant only for people going into the mining business. I'm talking about price speculation.

For people speculating, there's always a buyer and a seller. If I buy $100 of Bitcoin from person A and then later sell that for $101 to person B, then I have gained a dollar. A dollar that A would have gotten had they held on, or B would have gotten had they bought in earlier. It's a zero sum game. Except that everybody involved is paying transaction fees, putting in otherwise-valuable time, and taking risk (e.g., of theft), so in reality it's a negative sum game.

That's very different than actual investing. If I put $100 into a friend's company, then they will hopefully use that money to create something more valuable than the total investment. I'll come out ahead, but so will my friend and my friend's customers. That's a positive-sum game.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#826

Post by ButtSpark69 »

Taek wrote: post #709
rthomas6 wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but, why BTC specifically? Why not ETH or ETH tokens, or any of the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies that are faster and have lower fees?

Bitcoin has the most infrastructure surrounding it. And Bitcoin is the most careful to make life easy for infrastructure providers. Eth is very challenging to operate securely. Breaking updates are frequent, often with little warning. Bitcoin hasn't changed in many years, and new software updates are optional, and don't require you to write any new code or change how you operate. Most other cryptos suffer from the sa…

Care to give some examples? I use eth on a regular basis for ~3yrs now and have never encountered any updates that broke basic functionality, or any updates at all for that mater that weren't broadcasted for months ahead of time.

Are you perhaps referring to some specific dapp built on Eth that you don't like?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#827

Post by wpietri »

cambalache wrote: post #439
wpietri wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is ironic because the economy in Venezuela is fucked, but almost every crypto-service or novel online pay modality is a huge hit in Venezuela.There are many FOREIGN apps where the customer base is +70% Venezuelan. Some links: https://cointelegraph.com/news/venezuela-sets-new-bitcoin-vo... https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-adoption-venezuela-research

Taking that first one and looking at current graphs, it looks like we're talking volumes of less than 500 BTC/week for the last year or so: https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VES/BTC

If we call it a rough average of $10k per BTC, that's $5m/week, or $250m/year. That sounds like a lot, but it's still only ~0.1% of GDP. In contrast, if we look at M-Pesa in Kenya, they report for 2017 doing $62.6 billion in transaction volume, or about 80% of GDP.

So it's not clear to me that Bitcoin is a major player even in Venezuela.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#828

Post by sunshinerag »

rualca wrote: post #149
hombre_fatal wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Bitcoin where ever possible, so your opening claim is wrong. I've been banned from Paypal. I've run into many verification issues over the last decade with banks because I have no proof of residency once my driver's license expired. Like physical cash, it doesn't need to be superior in all ways to be useful at all.

> I use Bitcoin where ever possible, so your opening claim is wrong. Just because a random guy barters bitcoins for goods/services, that by no means implies that bitcoin is anything close to money. There is a very specific definition of what money is, and bitcoin's volatility alone rules it completely out.

oh what is this very specific definition of what money is does the non-random guy on internet have?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#829

Post by yarcob »

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…

Did you actually try multiple banks? Is the banking ststem really that broken in Indonesia?

My experience is that bank fees vary greatly.

My (limited) experience with US banks is that they have huge hidden fees and you get really bad currency exchange rates. I'm talking about 8% of funds miraculously disappearing during currency exchange. I don't understand why anybody would bother going via USD.

My Austrian bank on the other hand has much better rates and low fees. I think it was less than 1% for transfers of a few thousand USD last time I checked.

And finally, there are services like Transferwise; I just checked and they show rates of 1.5 - 2% for converting IDR to RUB.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#830

Post by mareko »

xur17 wrote: post #752
mareko wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about cash that you can send like an SMS on a network that offsets its CO2? Celo is proof of stake based and also issues part of its block rewards to Project Wren. It has a native stablecoin and a decentralized phone verification protocol that lets you send money to any phone number. Check out celo.org and ValoraApp.com

Is this vulnerable to sim swap attacks?

No. Funds are still protected by a private key once you create an account, so stealing a phone number doesn't help you spend someone's money.
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