661–670 of 862 posts
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Stepping on a sea urchin is no beuno. I remember one time snorkelling and I was being pulled by a rip tide and I was like no big deal, I can just slowly head a different direction until I started being pulled barely past sea urchins on corals and then I was freaked out. They are dastardly.
I heard they taste pretty good though.
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Crypto is 'backed' by the sunk cost of the energy used to mine it.
I think it's backed by the hope that on a couple of years it will be worth lot more (instead of looking backwards, people look forward and hope to get rich).
The irony is that the exact society destabilizing grand visions of the future billionaires advocate for are some of the main drivers behind people embracing Bitcoin. If you push a "you own nothing" WEF approved dystopian tech oligarch reality don't be surprised when people adopt an asset that cannot be confiscated by the government.
I find it really cute that people think that a fully transparent public ledger, where every transaction is written for all to see, is the way to escape government control.
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…
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> the cause of many of humanity's biggest problems is humans As opposed to elephants or sea urchins? How can humans not be the cause humanity's biggest problems? The Buddha taught there are three kinds of dukkha [usually translated as “suffering”]. The first kind is physical and mental pain from the inevitable stresses of life like old age, sickness, and death. The second is the distress we feel as a result of imperm…
As opposed to external non-human controlled factors, such as meteorites, I suppose.
Because I would like to believe that this capability will only ever be used to protect the Earth from them, but our history says otherwise. Anything that can be used as a weapon will ... well, at least enter the arsenals, and only fear of devastating retaliation will stop people from actually using it. Or has, so far.
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> Honestly don’t know if you’re trolling or just old. No need to be ageist. It's a fair perspective. There is a quality of independence and agency that comes from being able to purchase things with cash. Ironically, your weed transaction is a perfect example of that. I am a little confused by your argument though. Are you saying that you used cash because you couldn't pay legally with a debit/credit card or something…
Cash’s no. 1 use case in the 21st century is tax evasion. Most people just refuse to acknowledge that because they like evading taxes. I’m sure there are ways to use cryptocurrency to do the same.
The fact that lots of people in India have had serious issues because they were unbanked does seem to indicate that there's a sizable population of people using cash for everything*. I'm curious if there's any research into whether that's for tax-evasion reasons or for some other reason.
My personal belief is that the number one use is for money laundering, and that people who are using it that way would be willing to pay taxes on the money they are laundering from some other illegal activity. For instance, there are all-cash drug dealers who pay taxes on their drug money. I'm sure Al Capone wishes in retrospect that he'd paid taxes...
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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.
Isn't litecoin also better than bitcoin on the technical side, with very few changes? I think Monero failed at the name. Bitcoin's name is self defining to some degree which I think helped make it gain a lot of popularity. It's also impersonal, bits and coins, there's no real branding there to get twisted up with. When people first hear "bitcoin" they already have constructs in their head about bits and coins and it…
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Just because something else is bad already doesn't mean you should introduce more of the same. Also Bill Gate's opinion is based on Bitcoin offering almost no utilitarian value but consumes a ton of energy, nothing to do with monetary policies.
The value is providing the ownership of a digital scarce fixed-supply item that can be transferred and traded. That's the product. And the market gives it a price. Also, it has everything to do with monetary policy.
Nobody accepts it as payment, because its value is too volatile, speculation-driven, and nobody wants to spend it, because it is deflationary.
And that's not even considering the fact that it can only be transferred at around 6 transactions per second, less than 1/10,000th of the transaction volume of Visa.
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What benefit does it supply to humanity? I can think of plenty of uses for a distributed ledger, but what is the use of Bitcoin that can't be done some other way?
Is there another way to send money over the internet that doesn't involve a third party?
Furthermore, all bitcoin transactions involve many 3rd parties. The key feature is that you don't have to trust the third parties, not that they don't exist.