651–660 of 862 posts
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How so? Seems correct to me. Just this morning I had the choice of paying for groceries either with Bitcoin or by launching a violent invasion of the store.
You forget about the violent invasions that allowed the USD to maintain its value while you were paying for groceries lol
Silly idea maybe, and will disappear in the ocean of other comments here, but hear out my silly idea: Since the complaint tends to be "A huge amount of energy is wasted for a single transaction", why don't we try to inflate the value of Bitcoin as much as possible, so one Bitcoin is worth $10 million or something like that, then we can fit more USD value in one transaction, and the energy impact is now lower of that…
There are so many better crypto-currencies. Better for the environment because they use proof-of-stake, and not proof-of-work. Better for users because transactions are confirmed in seconds, not hours, and without the ridiculous fees that Bitcoin has. I think this shows how truly powerful the network effect, and being first to market is. Because without those things, Bitcoin would be nothing.
You know what actually bothers me the most about all crypto-currencies? None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all ledgers. The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone . Possession of the money is possession of the money and third parties don't need to get involved in every transaction. I can hand someone dollars and take a sandwich and walk away, transaction done. T…
Historically the events that caused this mode of exchange to be locked in were out of the hands of anyone but key economic players - world leaders and top advisors and the like. Some of them are still alive and have vested stake in the continuance of their own power.
The reset away from this depends on the incompetence and failure of institutions that otherwise permeate every aspect of modern civilization. Financial capitalism's fall will be a very big problem in its own right.
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Another armchair cryptographer on HN who has no idea what they're talking about... somehow this is acceptable when it comes to Bitcoin. I feel like I'm being charitable here but what exists are other cryptocurrencies which trade-off security and/or decentralization in favor of some other properties. Regarding proof-of-stake for example, I'll defer to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25007874
This attitude that people who disagree with you are stupid or don't know cryptography about is part of the problem, and why people still buy into BTC when there are technologically far-superior coins out there. So you just demonstrated the problem that the OP was talking about.
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I do think Ethereum will overtake Bitcoin eventually in usage. In some ways it already has. Ethereum's transaction fees are set to drop like a rock over the next few years, and so many useful things are built on it already.
What usage? Isn't bitcoin used only for speculation, and a bit of crime on the side? I'm not aware of any usage for bitcoin that isn't purely commodity trading (with zero actual underlying value) or scams.
That's its usage.
Every one of those "apps" is usage on Ethereum, everything from trading (Uniswap, think of it as a Coinbase competitor), loans (Maker), to mutual fund like assets (Yearn).
It's hard to convey in a few words how much better buying a house using Maker/Eth was compared to going to a bank. Everything about the process smashes the traditional system.
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"Thin out" is this another word for dying?
If you have lived a good life, is dying a problem?
How happy are we who have never experienced that! How would our ancestors envy us!
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Sure, but Bitcoin's wealth and access is also very concentrated. If you replace USD with BTC, you still have a power imbalance, just a slightly different one.
The real power imbalance is the Central Bank's power to confiscate wealth by inflating it away aka money printing, and not to forget the confiscation of physical gold by the US in 1933 (thanks FDR). There is a reason why countries decoupled from the gold standard to fund WW1. They got near infinite access to the nation's wealth. The loser of WW1 ie Germany eventually suffered hyperinflation, as have countries like Zi…
There are so many better crypto-currencies. Better for the environment because they use proof-of-stake, and not proof-of-work. Better for users because transactions are confirmed in seconds, not hours, and without the ridiculous fees that Bitcoin has. I think this shows how truly powerful the network effect, and being first to market is. Because without those things, Bitcoin would be nothing.
Yeah, I think bitcoin has been completely surpassed technologically speaking. Monero in particular solved almost all of bitcoin's problems yet still can't compete with it in popularity.
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This is actually something that Bjarne Stroustrup addressed when talking about C++: There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses. In the case of cryptocurrencies, as soon as a cryptocurrency has any important percentage of use, these transactions are not confirmed in seconds anymore, and transaction fees starts to grow up. No one is really using PoS right now, so let'…
You're spot on. The ETH fans love to wax poetic about PoS and how it's always around the corner and coming soon. It's been that way for ages. Lightning Network is similar. It's been perpetually 6 months away for years. Frankly, I'll be impressed if the current power structure within PoW cryptos doesn't find any way to hamstring PoS, mostly because they have a vested interest in keeping everything the way it is now.