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Bitcoin Is Time

dergigi.com

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Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#131

Post by casi »

gt565k wrote: post #66

Why are we still talking about bitcoin and first gen blockchain tech. Yes it's old, yes it's slow, yes it wastes resources. It is legacy software after all. PoS solves the problem of mining and wasted energy. Cardano's Ouroboros is a provable and secure Proof-of-Stake blockchain protocol. https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/relevant-...

pretty weird seeing this recent trend of hn going from crypto-resistant, to cardano pumping. out of all the blockchains cardano? thats where you see the future? really?

bizarre.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#132

Post by DennisP »

Dzugaru wrote: post #11

Good read. Is there a similar take on how proof-of-stake can work (for example current sketch of Ethereum Casper protocol)?

Here are the two papers on Casper:

Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437

Combining GHOST and Casper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052

A very simple summary is that it's a fairly traditional consensus protocol, in which if anyone breaks the rules it's possible to prove who did it and penalize them by burning their stake. It achieves scale by using aggregated signatures.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#133

Post by thrwaway2day »

doomroot wrote: post #108
user-the-name wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing baseless in saying that using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous, and an environmental disaster of massive proportions.

Here me out. What if it was the only way to defund the US military? Would you be interested then? Why do we waste so much energy building killing machines? Why is there not a daily hackernews thread complaining about the energy consumption of the US military? Because it’s a necessary to ensure you can buy and sell things when you want to.

Why would we need to do that, Trump lost and the good guy won. Surely the good guy who is friends with the guy who won the peace prize wouldn't be out there starting wars. No way. Our fair and independent media would tell us if that was the case surely. If not them it's not like views against that administration are removed from social media, no way.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#134

Post by derethanhausen »

arbawk wrote: post #106
user-the-name wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing baseless in saying that using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous, and an environmental disaster of massive proportions.

Now do the gold mining industry, and then how USD is backed by armies. And then you can research Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin and how it can process an unlimited number of transactions.

This is just whataboutism. Gold isn't used as a currency. Seems a stretch to claim the armies exist solely for the USD. And until the Lightning Network is actually implemented it will remain theoretical.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#135

Post by zitterbewegung »

keiferski wrote: post #55

Nothing is less material than money. . . . Money is abstract, I repeated, money is future time. It can be an evening in the suburbs, it can be the music of Brahms, it can be maps, it can be chess, it can be coffee, it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold. Money is a Proteus more versatile than the one on the island of Pharos. —Jorge Luis Borges, “The Zahir” https://longreads.com/2016/06/14/borges…

Nearly any currency when used in commerce is primarily used as an IOU for time. Due how the POW is designed to ensure immutability of the blockchain it also is dependent on how cheap it is to generate energy for the people who mine.

Comparing it to a bank with fiat a bank usually ensures the consistency of transactions so miners perform this action (and also developers of bitcoin if there are security holes) and your wallet is an account and bitcoin have a transaction cost which is like using a debit card associated with an account.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#136

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

toto444 wrote: post #127
olah_1 wrote: post #69

This is the article that made things finally click with me. Thinking about the pre-WWI gold standard and the issues that existed there and the improvements that Bitcoin brings around time, consensus, etc. The baseless negative comments with no interaction with the article content confirms for me that Bitcoin is on to something. Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think.

> Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think. Or maybe it comes from people who have read an Econo101 textbook and who have spent a lot of time trying to explain a crowd of Bitcoin enthusiasts why their reasoning is wrong but no one has been listening to them so far so they are bored. Back in the time I used to spend my days on a forum about Economics. Every other week there was a random guy who signed up jus…

> That does not make it less true that money does not have magical properties and bitcoin will not create a new world order.

Is anyone really claiming that? The OP's post doesn't seem to be in this spirit anyway. It's more like "Bitcoin has true usefulness, it will keep some meaningful value for a long time, enable other use cases that didn't even exist before.". Nobody is saying that it is going to replace all other forms of money.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#137

Post by thewarrior »

olah_1 wrote: post #69

This is the article that made things finally click with me. Thinking about the pre-WWI gold standard and the issues that existed there and the improvements that Bitcoin brings around time, consensus, etc. The baseless negative comments with no interaction with the article content confirms for me that Bitcoin is on to something. Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think.

I recently decided to think deeply about Bitcoin and I think my initial skepticism about Bitcoin was wrong. Most of the criticisms of Bitcoin are centered around the fact that Bitcoin has a very low throughput. However this is not necessarily a problem. And here is one hypothetical example of how we can overcome this issue:

When countries owe each other money they used to transfer gold back and forth or trust someone else to do it for them. So all transactions within a country would happen in a local currency and then once in a while "settlement" would happen.

Bitcoin is digital gold for settlements among digital currencies. For eg I could start a new Stable coin called MyDogeCoin HQed in Switzerland and each MyDogeCoin is backed by 1 Bitcoin. Anyone who trusts me can transact in MyDogeCoins and can convert their MyDogeCoins into Bitcoins if they are willing to wait and pay a sizable fee to account for Bitcoins slowness. However most people don't need this it just needs to be possible. Now anyone using MyDogeCoin can send money to each other quickly as long as they trust me. This isn't any different to how you trust a country. And many countries like Zimbabwe aren't trust worthy at all. This has BTC behind it.

Now suppose you want to send MyDogeCoin to MyMemeCoin HQed in Singapore and is similar. We trust each other and hence we do the transfer. Once in a while we do a "settlement" on the BTC blockchain. This way we don't need that many TPS. And large untrusted nodes can use the BTC blockchain as a trustless settlement layer.

Since BTC is the final trustless layer its a foundation. Now I realized how BTC can have long term value and it could be around even a 100 years from now. Doesn't mean its not over priced now but it will have a non zero value over the long term and is revolutionary. Unless the government goes to war against it. The US government used to use gold and then basically defaulted and forced everyone to accept dollars by force. Thats not sustainable.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#139

Post by ben_w »

olah_1 wrote: post #104
user-the-name wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing baseless in saying that using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous, and an environmental disaster of massive proportions.

> using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous In comparison to what? What do we get in return? Many consider the benefits to be worth it.

What benefits? Bitcoin isn’t fundamentally better than a database running on a fraction of the power (i.e. every modern bank).

The claimed benefits of BTC are (1) to remove government control of money, and (2) to eliminate the need for trust, but (1) ignores why we have chosen to give governments control of money in the first place when gold still exists (and can be traded electronically), while (2) requires you to ignore the other half of the transaction where you buy something with the money rather than just putting it in someone else’s account — reports of being ripped off by a vendor goes back to Akkadian cuneiform, and things like chargebacks and courts are there to deal with this, putting rules on what was once anonymous shiny rock that anyone could mine in a literal rather than metaphorical sense.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#140

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

ben_w wrote: post #119
doomroot wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here me out. What if it was the only way to defund the US military? Would you be interested then? Why do we waste so much energy building killing machines? Why is there not a daily hackernews thread complaining about the energy consumption of the US military? Because it’s a necessary to ensure you can buy and sell things when you want to.

If that was the argument, I would ask in response: if it could do that, why would the combined vested interests of the US military-industrial lot allow Bitcoin to succeed ? It’s not beyond the reach of governments to ban unwanted trade, and even though bans are not magic, even a half-arsed enforcement of such a ban is enough to prevent a currency becoming endemic.

> It’s not beyond the reach of governments to ban unwanted trade

Yeah, right, it worked so well for alcohol... It DOES (/s) work so well for drugs in the US right now... And hey imagine whether it's easier or harder to ban something that doesn't take any physical space in your suitcase and can be transacted with only internet connection.

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