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Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

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Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#181

Post by dpatru »

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.

Before you criticize bitcoin you should understand the problem it is solving. Bitcoin is a technological solution to a government-created problem: the creation of money from nothing because politicians and government leaders want to spend more than they can collect in taxes.

Other solutions to this problem include owning gold and stocks, both of which are also costly, but in ways that are harder to quantify.

If you want to avoid the waste caused by government money printing, lobby your government to stop confiscating wealth by allowing gold-backed money and reducing taxes.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#182

Post by imtringued »

Wh1zz wrote: post #34
skohan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even that is an extremely charitable interpretation. From what I can tell, Bitcoin seems largely to be an engine for fraud: fake value is injected into the system via dollar-pegged tokens like Tether, retail "investors" pile in to chase rising asset prices, and then the bottom drops out, amidst "liquidity issues" at major exchanges which prevent people from pulling out at the top. Or at least that is what happened in…

PayPal will be supporting BTC payments soon. BlackRock just announced providing exposure to BTC in some of their funds very soon.

Why would I want to pay capital gains taxes on things I order online? There is also the obvious problem that spending your Bitcoin is foolish because it is deflationary. Remember the Bitcoin pizza?

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#183

Post by imtringued »

saberience wrote: post #127
yamrzou wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it should seen as more similar to gold than to money. We don't use gold to buy goods either, but it has a value, because people believe it has. The value of Bitcoin is disputed because not everyone believes in it yet. So it's either a gold in the making or nothing, depending on whether those who believe in it will succeed at convincing the others of its merits.

Gold has a value because it can also be used for legitimate industrial applications, plus it has the other physical qualities of being attractive to look at and doesn't corrode (i.e. useful for making jewellery). So yes, while it does have value because people believes it has value. Even if no person wanted gold for its "imagined" value, it would still have value because it's used by many actual companies in actual p…

>and doesn't corrode

Actually that is what makes it attractive as a store of value. It's going to last millions of years. Bitcoin is data on HDDs and SSDs and we know that those eventually corrode or simply become obsolete.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#184

Post by libertine »

joshxyz wrote: post #176
libertine wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about the subject, and I'm one of those that misses the entire point of bitcoin itself and other mined cryptos... but if 1 BTC = 1 BTC, why is it being always indexed to USD? I doesn't seem to make sense to say 1BTC = 1BTC, when people reference it's value to regular currency.

By 1 BTC = 1 BTC I mean humans can print USD, which inherently decreases the buying power of all existing USD. Can't do that with BTC.

I understand that, but my doubt still hasn't been cleared - if BTC is referenced to USD, then if you print more USD then doesn't it also decrease the buying power of all existing BTC?

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#185

Post by imtringued »

ilammy wrote: post #139
saberience wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold has a value because it can also be used for legitimate industrial applications, plus it has the other physical qualities of being attractive to look at and doesn't corrode (i.e. useful for making jewellery). So yes, while it does have value because people believes it has value. Even if no person wanted gold for its "imagined" value, it would still have value because it's used by many actual companies in actual p…

Bitcoin can be used for making transactions on the Bitcoin network, and to store information permanently on the Bitcoin blockchain. Here are examples of applications. Industrial applications of gold as imaginary as those applications of Bitcoin are. You can use other metals as conductors, and the whole notion of a specific arrangement of molecules being called “an appliance” or “a jewellery piece” is just human imagi…

> Bitcoin can be used for making transactions on the Bitcoin network, and to store information permanently on the Bitcoin blockchain. Here are examples of applications.

Why would I want to do this on Bitcoin specifically? There are thousands of cryptocurrencies that offer this and an entire banking system that specializes in financial transactions.

>You can use other metals as conductors, and the whole notion of a specific arrangement of molecules being called “an appliance” or “a jewellery piece” is just human imagination.

The difference is that it is a form of human imagination shared by most humans. The golden appearance has a certain appeal to it. If humans want it regardless of its value on the financial markets that is a reason to agree that gold is THE store of value instead of silver or Bitcoin being THE store of value. This is a popularity contest and being able to wear and see your gold gives you a massive head start in the popularity contest.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#186

Post by imtringued »

alexmingoia wrote: post #86
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…

People use Bitcoin to protect their wealth from inflation/debasement. It’s easier to own and protect than gold and real estate, easier to transact, etc. Whether it’s widely used as a currency is irrelevant to whether it can be.

>Whether it’s widely used as a currency is irrelevant to whether it can be.

It's not used as a currency because of transaction fees. I still remember Steam pulling support for bitpay because people couldn't get their transactions through fast enough because the fees exceeded the value of the transaction. By the time the transaction went through the value of the Bitcoin has changed and you had to send the missing amount in a separate transaction.

You pay $5 transaction fees to pay for a $50 dollar game and then get told that you are missing $1.25. Sending the missing money costs $6.25. A refund costs $5 in transaction fees. On some days the transaction fees were well above the value of the game so you could not do a refund even if you wanted to. Paying $55 to refund a $50 transaction doesn't make sense. Paying $56.25 to transfer the missing amount doesn't make sense either. Your money is just gone and you didn't even get a game.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#187

Post by runeks »

ericb wrote: post #134
runeks wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The only asset that falls into this category is credit. And credit is not a good -- it's a promise that someone will deliver a good to you when you demand it. And this type of promise tends to be broken just when you need it the most.

Proof of stake coins exist and work just fine. Tezos. Ethereum.

Proof-of-stake has different properties than proof-of-work.

For example, given n different chains, proof-of-work (PoW) reaches consensus simply by choosing the chain with the most work — irrespective of block contents. Proof-of-stake (PoS), on the other hand, requires granting special meaning to a particular public key (in the first block) in order to reach consensus.

So PoW reaches consensus without granting special meaning to any public key while PoS requires this in order to work.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#188

Post by runeks »

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…

> About the only thing I hear that you can buy with Bitcoin is USD, and even the liquidity of that seems questionable beyond a certain amount — the millions maybe but probably not billions.

The order books of Bitcoin exchanges are publicly available.

Last time I checked, Bitfinex had around $100MM in liquidity at 0.1% slippage.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#189

Post by cloudhead »

yunohn wrote: post #117
cloudhead wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about unfortunately. There is no evidence of any environmental impact.

What do you mean by “no evidence”? Could you expand your argument further, or are you just dismissing the reality of large amounts of energy being used to run Bitcoin?

Large amounts of energy used is not the same as environmental impact. There is evidence of the former, but not the latter.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#190

Post by mtrycz2 »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #160
127 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to be a server farm to prune past 1 week, Bitcoin will no longer be decentralized and censorship resistant, losing its main point in the first place.

A single modern consumer-grade PC can validate 100X larger blocks in real time. The average web page these days is over 1 MB. The idea that you need to limit every once-in-every-10-minute block to 1 or 1.6 MB is not, from everything I can see, close to approaching a sound balancing of competing priorities.

My RPi4 can handle 256MB blocks on BCH's scalenet, just fine.

There never was a scaling issue.

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