151–160 of 530 posts
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> Don't be surprised if they also gladly pay a ridiculous fee to buy a coffee. I would be very surprised if people started deliberately picking the much more expensive option for no benefit whatsoever.
Sure they will. Saks Fifth Avenue sells a $1500 plastic tic-tac-toe board. Plenty of upscale market for absurdly expensive things that do the same thing the cheap version does. https://www.saksfifthavenue.com/product/edie-parker-tic-tac-...
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I assume this is a bad-faith question, given how much it begs the question, but: there is no known solution to the double-spend problem that achieves the same security properties as proof-of-work without consuming energy.
Dumb out-of-the-loop question: then what's this talk of Ethereum moving to proof of stake? Whenever someone brings up that PoW is bad, people say Ethereum; whenever someone says why PoW, someone says because PoS isn't safe.
The second is that PoS has significantly worse security properties than PoW.
The core reason is that "changing your mind" (rolling back the blockchain) is free with PoS, except for possible loss of value of the cryptocurrency, whereas it's extremely expensive with PoW. There are all sorts of band-aids you can slap on like ignoring block reorgs of a certain depth, but then you lose properties like network partition tolerance.
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 --…
Yet here we are in 2021. The ephemeral feelings to me are the memes that keep things like culture going as well as Bitcoin, and thanks to the Lindy Effect [1], everyday Bitcoin doesn't die, it grows stronger. If ever there was a time for Bitcoin to die, it would've been in its infancy days in 2009 -- yet here we are in 2021.
Full disclosure. I am the CEO of carbon payment, a global payment solution leveraging stablecoins for global payments.
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Why use an outdated planet-killing tech such as butcoin underneath your level 2 bolted on solution when you can use something modern and do it directly on-chain?
I assume this is a bad-faith question, given how much it begs the question, but: there is no known solution to the double-spend problem that achieves the same security properties as proof-of-work without consuming energy.
Edit: I suppose what you said is a fair statement; PoS security is different in that it relies on weak subjectivity. In particular, users can maintain security by syncing every X days, where X is based on the staker bonding period, and not accepting long forks beyond X. It's not equivalent to PoS security, but there's nothing really problematic about it IMO. Several years ago, one could make the case that this security model was untested, but not so much today.
The most sophisticated pyramid scheme ever, hidden in plain sight; so obvious that everyone second guesses themselves. “They all seem to be going along, I guess I must be wrong.” Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely: https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html .
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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…
Money is ultimately a reflection of power, and decentralization is merely a tool for when those power structures limit the market.
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Institutional and retail investors are just starting to pile on and there will be potentially massive gains to be had in the near to mid term before the bottom falls out. Long term? Probably not smart. Safe to get in now? Debatable, pretty high risk. But if you have a bunch of coins laying around and you're willing to gamble a bit longer...
Wow, that is pretty basic economic fallacy. Whether you hold coins today or not should not impact an investment decision. If the BTC you bought 10 years ago for $100 is worth $100,000 today, and a couple of weeks from now the price collapses and is worth $100 again, you have still lost $100,000. Just the same as if you paid $100,000 for your BTC today. Only difference would be tax liability.
Can you explain further, because it sounds weird to me?
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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.
I mean... what do you expect with a currency with an annualized volatility of 100%. The risk is way too damn high.