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

851–860 of 992 posts

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#851

Post by tromp »

ur-whale wrote: post #703
jiofih wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An unsuspecting onlooker would be easily convinced that this comment is random babble generated by a bot.

To be fair, neither of you are providing any tangible, verifiable fact one way or the other. Is there a Mimblewimble / Litecoin integration effort? If so, I'd sure love to learn more about it. And if there isn't can you offer something in the way of a proof?

You can see the progress of the MWEB (MimbleWimble Extension Block) project here [1], headed by Grin++ [2] developer David Burkett.

[1] https://litecoindotcom.medium.com/litecoin-mimblewimble-nove...

[2] https://grinplusplus.github.io/

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#852

Post by ric2b »

arcticbull wrote: post #607
shawnz wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that wrong? What other new asset class was developed this rapidly?

Think about what other technology is 12 years old you’d call “nascent” - 12 years is an eternity in tech. The iPhone is 12 years old and bears only a passing semblance to what was launched. Bitcoin is practically identical. The first ETF launched in 1993, and 12 years later they had 400 billion in net asset value - 533 adjusted for inflation. Your argument that the growth is unprecedented is specious.

> Think about what other technology is 12 years old you’d call “nascent”

Cars, Steam engines, Airplanes, Trains, the Internet, Radio, Phones, Mobile phones, Smart phones, Cinema, TV's, basically anything that is actually new technology?

I actually can't think of any new technology that reached maturity within 12 years of it's original prototype.

> The first ETF launched in 1993,

ETF's are a contract, they're not technology. By the way, BTC currently has 450 billion in net asset value, so...

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#853

Post by chapelierfou »

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…

Stop shilling, please.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#854

Post by nahuel0x »

Maybe future historians will grab his heads when they find out we consumed the energy of a mid sized country during a climate change global existential threat just to run a big speculation digital game. In some sense, bitcoin seems to be the epitome of human irrationality.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#855

Post by ric2b »

davidgerard wrote: post #662
syshum wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Zero bitcoiners going "BUT WHAT ABOUT CONVENTIONAL MONEY HUH" provide numbers. Since you're too lazy to, I will: * Bitcoin: 0.1% of all electricity in the world, 7tps. * THE ENTIRE REST OF HUMAN CIVILISATION, EVERYONE IN IT AND EVERYTHING THEY DO: 99.9% of electricity, a hell of a lot more than 6,993tps. Bitcoin is the most inefficient payment system in history. Bitcoiners' usual objection at this point is to claim t…

> Bitcoiners' usual objection at this point is to claim that transactions per second is a bad measure, for some reason

You've probably been told before but I'll tell you the why again. Bitcoin's energy consumption is not proportional to the number of transactions it's processing.

The energy used is proportional to the block reward, the reward that miners get from mining a new block roughly every 10 minutes. They won't spend more money on energy than they get from mining, or they would go out of business. That mining reward goes up with price, (because it's paid out as a fixed amount of BTC) and goes down with each halving event (every ~4 years the block reward is cut in half in BTC terms).

The network can be doing 7tps or 7 million tps, doesn’t really matter for energy use, although higher usage can have indirect effects on price or other things.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#856

Post by sparkie »

xapata wrote: post #581
sunshinerag wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

2008 is a great example of why fiat currency is helpful. The government can simply create more to stimulate cash flow and/or prevent a crisis of confidence in a non-government institution.

But when the government 'simply create more', they are not creating any more wealth. They are creating more units of currency to represent the same wealth as before, which eventually makes every unit of currency worth slightly less.

The people who have assets in cash end up paying for it. That includes the poor who have most of their net worth in cash as they live paycheck to paycheck, and whose purchasing power has been stagnant for decades.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#857

Post by Jenda_ »

ineedasername wrote: post #436
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…

It wasn't so much Bitcoin that saved the day, but a choice of payment processor by the seller that caused the problem to begin with. Heck, PayPal works in HongKong. Ultimately bitcoin made your transaction much smoother, but it was a sufficient, not a necessary condition in making it smoother.

You can find lots of stories about PayPal freezing accounts for random reasons. With well-known projects this usually resolves by public shaming, but I guess this can be impossible to solve for a small seller in a non-US/non-West-Europe country.

Example: https://neo900.org/news/paypal-trouble-delays-project

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#858

Post by ric2b »

TheReveller wrote: post #802
dsterry wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no theoretical limit to it's divisibility. The total supply is known ahead of time but the world will never run out of Bitcoin to transact.

All currencies are infinitely dividable I've never understood this supposed advantage of Bitcoin.

How do I pay 0.005 USD to my friend?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#859

Post by ric2b »

xapata wrote: post #613
stale2002 wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government can do whatever inflation adjustments that it wants. What it can't do, though, is force people to accept them. If you want your money to inflate, you are free to use any infatuation currency that you want. But other people, who prefer to not be subject to inflation, are now free to not be subject to it.

Can't the government force taxes to be paid in the currency of its choice, thereby making taxpayers (residents, visitors, and their counter-parties) subject to its currency?

I can make my whole life in some other currency and then purchase some national currency just for the purpose of paying taxes once a year.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#860

Post by wcoenen »

acover wrote: post #712
wcoenen wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I read the post you linked, and was surprised by the description of money being created when a UK bank buys a government bond from a pension fund. I thought commercial banks were only allowed to create money when creating loan assets. Is creation of money when banks buy assets a unique feature of the UK banking system, or does it also happen elsewhere?

If banks would buy financial assets and create money in the process as described in the post, then that would certainly be inflationary. (e.g. I can imagine hypothetical legislation that forces banks to buy government bonds, that would be the time to run for inflation protection.) As far as I understand, this has not happened, or at least not to the degree that it caused inflation. The effect of QE has been to increase bank reserves but not the money supply, which is why we haven't seen inflation since the financial crisis.

Post reply on HN