141–150 of 530 posts
Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely: https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html.
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It's such an anti-pattern for the world to adopt this approach. Sadly most people don't care nor should have to but the decentralization is effectively moot when payment processors like Visa get involved. Sadly, I'm less and less hopeful that crypto will be what the movement conveyed over last 10 years.
> the decentralization is effectively moot when payment processors like Visa get involved It's a deflationary currency. If it has a future as a store of value, and I think it very well may, it would have a net effect of concentrating wealth. And with wealth comes power. Whether that power is exercised through how the blockchain processes transactions or via some other vector seems something of a side show to me. The…
It's not a currency, that's a misnomer to a great degree.
Which nations are supporting it as a currency? Essentially none. If something doesn't have the currency status backing of a single major economy, it plainly can't be considered a currency. It's a store of value.
Sure, we could be pretend about it (any medium of exchange), be idealistic, and say that you don't need nations to back something for it to be considered a currency, however that's repudiated by every possible aspect of how things actually work (and will continue to) both locally within an economy and internationally in trade.
Gold also is not a currency today, it's a store of value. I don't think anyone confuses gold for being a currency and there's no reason to confuse Bitcoin as being such.
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1. FOMO 2. If everyone (read: the vocal but high profile minority) is talking about it, even though we don't understand it, there must be something to it. Everyone (read: the vocal but high profile minority) cannot be wrong. 3. There is no career downside of betting on this and it fails, since everyone else was betting on it. 4. There is a career downside to not betting on it and it is successful.
> If everyone (read: the vocal but high profile minority) is talking about it, even though we don't understand it, there must be something to it. Everyone (read: the vocal but high profile minority) cannot be wrong. That sounds like the JS community.
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The anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique. The doubts that are endlessly repeated here have been addressed in detail, and are available online. Scaling and transaction throughput, energy consumption, state attacks, protocol weakness and lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree.
Please explain to me how scaling is solved in bitcoin. The lighting network requires an on-chain transaction to create and close a channel both times. Even if the world population were static it would take months to open a channel for everybody. Companies also need multiple channels each. LN also requires a constant observation of the LN network or malicious actors can just take more from a channel than allowed. This…
Not true. Cite a source.
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The anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique. The doubts that are endlessly repeated here have been addressed in detail, and are available online. Scaling and transaction throughput, energy consumption, state attacks, protocol weakness and lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree.
The core issue I've seen that goes unanswered is what problem does BTC solve? The answers I've seen so far are: 1. Avoiding Venezuelan hyper-inflation - it is a use-case, but doesn't really apply to the United States for example. 2. Store of value - volatility is way too high and there are much better alternatives (Treasury bonds) 3. Evading capital controls - it is a use-case, but not really applicable to most citiz…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique. The doubts that are endlessly repeated here have been addressed in detail, and are available online. Scaling and transaction throughput, energy consumption, state attacks, protocol weakness and lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree.
Please explain to me how scaling is solved in bitcoin. The lighting network requires an on-chain transaction to create and close a channel both times. Even if the world population were static it would take months to open a channel for everybody. Companies also need multiple channels each. LN also requires a constant observation of the LN network or malicious actors can just take more from a channel than allowed. This…
Channel factories solve this issue by being able to create and close many channels at once.
> LN also requires a constant observation of the LN network or malicious actors can just take more from a channel than allowed.
These are called watchtowers, they never have control of your funds, they are simply watching the blockchain for counterparty actions, which if they tried to steal your money, they would end up losing all theirs, so just knowing that you might be using a watchtower is a very strong deterrent to not cheat you.
The problem with using Bitcoin for payments is volatility. Bitcoin's price is volatile. Bitcoin supporters say volatility will go down "at some point". The logic is pretty silly. Bitcoin is money for the people. But when the super rich people adopt it, volatility will go down. They have more money. The Bitcoin money "tank" will be bigger. Its volatile flow will go down. Bitcoin is digital gold, God's money. When it c…
The problem with using Bitcoin for payments is volatility. Bitcoin's price is volatile. Bitcoin supporters say volatility will go down "at some point". The logic is pretty silly. Bitcoin is money for the people. But when the super rich people adopt it, volatility will go down. They have more money. The Bitcoin money "tank" will be bigger. Its volatile flow will go down. Bitcoin is digital gold, God's money. When it c…
How the heck would bitcoin volatility go down when there's no fixed reason to use it? USD has value despite fiat status because it's required to pay US taxes and oil markets are priced in USD (by force and trade agreement). Bitcoin is totally unteathered from reality (and deflationary which is another story entirely). This means Bitcoin's value is based on completely ephemeral feelings, and the size of its network --…
I understand what you mean and it's true in theory, but could never happen in reality. Even if a lot of the world stops believing in Bitcoin and the price tanks, there will always be at least two people interested in trading it with each other. If those two people run one node each, they can make it happen.
Bitcoin can no longer disappear overnight. It was true in the beginning, but the network and mind-share is too big now.
> which is not exactly high praise
The market seems to value a independent and censorship proof currency differently than you, as those are two of the main features of Bitcoin and Bitcoin is seemingly receiving a lot of high praise, at least at the moment and past 7 years.
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The core issue I've seen that goes unanswered is what problem does BTC solve? The answers I've seen so far are: 1. Avoiding Venezuelan hyper-inflation - it is a use-case, but doesn't really apply to the United States for example. 2. Store of value - volatility is way too high and there are much better alternatives (Treasury bonds) 3. Evading capital controls - it is a use-case, but not really applicable to most citiz…
The core issue that Bitcoin resolves is transferring power from MBAs to nerds.