Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

laanwj.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 229 posts

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#101

Post by gorgoiler »

ur-whale wrote: post #59
gorgoiler wrote: post #38

I don’t understand Bitcoin. If I make bread and you grow potatoes, we can barter, but it’s much easier to use some intermediary to track the value that we exchanged. The intermediary facilitates this with tokens (coins, notes, cards.) Bitcoin seems perverse. It puts all the value in the tokens themselves and at the same time I can’t even use it to buy bread or potatoes. About the only thing I hear that you can buy wi…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHjYt6Jm5j8

Very good, but — in good faith — it’s hard to tell if this is for or against Bitcoin!

At least gold has intrinsic value. Aerospace, electronics, it’s pretty.

For me, this skit would make a better illustrative point if the customer showed up wanting to buy tepid lemonade using dodo heads as currency.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#102

Post by crumbshot »

leadingthenet wrote: post #90
Quanttek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vegetarianism outside such regions might be more wasteful, but it is still mich less wasteful and has a much smaller environmental impact than an omnivore diet

Citation needed. It’s not entirely clear to me how that could possibly be the case, when pasture raised animals often graze land that is completely unsuitable for agriculture. They also eat tons of byproducts of agriculture that are not suitable for human consumption. This thing about how vegetarianism is sooooo much better for the environment is such a meme. Especially when you take into account what a tragedy moder…

This is a decent, well-cited article on the subject: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

It summarises the differences in global greenhouse emissions between various types of food, and the contributions of the different sources of these emissions - farming, transport, land use change, and so on.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#103

Post by arisAlexis »

gorgoiler wrote: post #38

I don’t understand Bitcoin. If I make bread and you grow potatoes, we can barter, but it’s much easier to use some intermediary to track the value that we exchanged. The intermediary facilitates this with tokens (coins, notes, cards.) Bitcoin seems perverse. It puts all the value in the tokens themselves and at the same time I can’t even use it to buy bread or potatoes. About the only thing I hear that you can buy wi…

we invented something else than barter long time ago and that's money. Lately money isn't backed by anything else than belief and guns, Bitcoin is backed by belief and hash power that's all.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#104

Post by wcoenen »

skohan wrote: post #58
wcoenen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dream of using bitcoin as p2p digital cash does seem to be dead for now, the fees are too high for that[1]. Lightning hasn't really taken off for that use case either, the number of bitcoins in Lightning channels appears to have stopped growing.[2] But it looks like bitcoin can still be very useful as an alternative settlement layer for international payments. Either directly for large payments, or under the hood…

As someone who lives my life in two currencies, my main hope for Bitcoin circa 2014 was that it would make for simpler and cheaper international transactions and currency conversions. I don't know if the situation has gotten any better, but around 2015/2016 this seemed untenable due to high transaction costs, and volatility. I'm not sure I understand what would be the value of using cryptocurrency under the hood for…

> I'm not sure I understand what would be the value of using cryptocurrency under the hood for something like Strike. If they are settling the payments themselves, why not just use a simple database to reconcile their transactions?

A multi-country payment service can indeed just update their database. But If there is a net flow of value between countries, then they will still have to move that value over slower and more expensive traditional systems. If they implement fast transfers for their users on top of those slow systems, then that means they need idle capital waiting in each destination country so that they can front the money to the receiver. This adds cost and complexity: interface with traditional systems, capital opportunity cost, need to forecast demand, need to do currency hedging, ...

Transfering via bitcoin and converting via exchanges on both ends eliminates that problem. It also makes it easy to partner with other payment services that do the same, while minimizing the need for trust.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#105

Post by pharmakom »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #94
esimov wrote: post #37

I cannot recommend enough for everyone who has a minimal sensibility towards the climate impact to read this thread: https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350869944888664064 . Since we are inevitable heading over to a climate catastrophe it's really the time to advocate against bitcoin.

Or just move over to Ethereum which is actually moving forward on proof of stake, which solves this problem in an elegant way. It also has major plans for scaling, which Bitcoin has ignorantly refused to budge on.

Proof of Work is a simple algorithm that has worked for over 10 years. Proof of Stake is incredibly complex and might be broken in implementation or from a game theory perspective. It also might be a huge improvement over PoW... it’s just too early to say.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#106

Post by meheleventyone »

disruptalot wrote: post #74
esimov wrote: post #37

I cannot recommend enough for everyone who has a minimal sensibility towards the climate impact to read this thread: https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350869944888664064 . Since we are inevitable heading over to a climate catastrophe it's really the time to advocate against bitcoin.

This thread is nothing new. This exact sentiment has been repeated over and over for the last 10 years. From the angle that bitcoin is useless, it's easy to dismiss it as waste. The reality is that you live in world where people have different understandings and values than you may have. So advocating against Bitcoin is no different than advocating against air travel. You see no issue in the huge amounts of energy co…

The last sentence is the entire problem. It ignores the externalities of whatever it is you’re doing. Which in turn (amongst other things) makes the claim of efficient distribution questionable.

Huge energy consumption would be much less of an issue if it wasn’t also causing huge long term problems.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#107

Post by pharmakom »

gorgoiler wrote: post #38

I don’t understand Bitcoin. If I make bread and you grow potatoes, we can barter, but it’s much easier to use some intermediary to track the value that we exchanged. The intermediary facilitates this with tokens (coins, notes, cards.) Bitcoin seems perverse. It puts all the value in the tokens themselves and at the same time I can’t even use it to buy bread or potatoes. About the only thing I hear that you can buy wi…

Bitcoin is just a token, but with scarcity controlled by cryptography rather than alchemy.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#108

Post by alexmingoia »

gioscarab wrote: post #78

> We need a decentralized web. For us, one option would be IPFS, which is starting to catch on. For the binaries themselves there’s already the option of downloading through torrents. I agree with the OP Bitcoin should run over a network protocol like PJON https://github.com/gioblu/PJON and a private network infrastructure made by people. The point is, if you switch just the protocol, and keep the same infrastructure…

Bitcoin has satellite-connectivity, no need for Internet connectivity: https://blockstream.com/satellite/

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#109

Post by 317070 »

gorgoiler wrote: post #92
317070 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With barter is meant (in the context of Graeber's book) trading tit for tat, without having a currency to go between. E.g. a farmer buying a book and paying with apples. The book says that this barter method is almost never used, and instead people tend to keep track of favors and things they owe in a more vague way. And every now and then, these debts are settled in a communal fashion. But barter is not used. So the…

Right. I feel like that’s nit picking (your parent; not you.) Of course I (teacher) don’t buy potatoes by teaching the farmer’s children Dijkstra. Instead of bartering we chooses to track our debts. Using Bitcoin as a cryptographically secure distributed debt tracker sounds great. But Bitcoin right now feels like a bunch of technology enthusiasts have blessed the world with such a debt tracker while also saying ”btw…

Also, this digital debt tracker uses numbers, which most of these communal debt systems do not do. Because different people put different value to things, tracking debt in numbers is not how it is done (the book goes in a lot of detail how this works). This is what makes bitcoin a currency, a way to track debts rather than having them implicit.

I'm not sure where on the globe you are at, but where I am from, groups of friends buy rounds of beers at the bar. You do not keep track of whose turn it is to pay the round or whether someone is buying more expensive stuff, but since you are friends you make sure things are fair over time. But implicitly, not tracking numbers and accounts.

And Graeber argues that that is actually the method that predates currency. Not barter.

I fully agree on the hilariously large "primordial" debt we somehow owe the early miners.

Post reply on HN