161–170 of 530 posts
One of the reasons I'm bullish on Bitcoin over the next decade is precisely because of the anti-BTC sentiment on this board.
Tether will get clobbered in the next few years. This ought to affect the bitcoin price, but won't.
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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…
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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.
I don't understand how this viewpoint can persist now that we have quite a few PoS chains humming along in production: Cosmos, Tezos, Polkadot, Mina, Solana, Avalanche, Cardano, Eth2. 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…
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That sounds like they are in favor of not using bitcoin.
They are in favor of not using the L1 Bitcoin blockchain for small payments. L2 solutions, both decentralized ones like the lightning network and centralized ones like Visa are still "using Bitcoin" as a currency, even though they are not using the L1 blockchain.
Similarly, BTC will just be a transmission mechanism between multiple large, centralized, highly regulated, trusted entities, which will perform all of the work.
Maybe I don't understand it correctly, but after having recently done my taxes, it seems to me you'd generate a capital gain or loss that has to be captured on IRS Form 8949 every time such a thing triggered bitcoin to be converted to USD, goods or services. Or is it some nudge-nudge-wink-wink situation where everyone, including the IRS, ignores such a thing unless the sums involved are large.
Because of the open nature of the blockchain, the IRS knows all your exact movements, so there's no nudge-nudge-wink-wink especially if you have tied your real identity to a Bitcoin address using a centralized exchange. Presumably, tools like cointracker (maybe even Visa themselves), etc, will take care of reporting these taxes for you, still a pita, but doable.
Only some are open. Take a look at Monero. There's a bounty out to make transactions on it traceable [1].
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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…
Misleading Title. Visa says it will allow for Bitcoin to be converted to fiat, and the fiat can be spent using a Visa Card in the same way debit cards already work. This is already done with the Coinbase card, Gemini card, etc The statement is very vague in terms of who is covering the conversion.
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Lightning, technically speaking, is garbage. 10k transactions per second ETH2 layer 1 + zk roll-ups providing throughout multiplication threatens VISA.
I will cheer for the success of ETH2 as well. The reason I like Lightning better is because the engineer in me wants to freeze the base layer and do the experimental layers in isolation. Internet infra is all layered for good reason.
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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...
GBTC was trading at 15% discount to spot today... The institutional thesis is massively overblown. And retail isn’t piling in like in 2017.
So professionals were making money while it was >BTC, until they overdid it and the premium went away.
It seems reasonable to be patient because there's just a lot of lag in the system as it's currently set up.
If you've ever paid attention to closed-end funds, you might have noticed how they can trade substantially over or under asset value for quite a while, but not forever.
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> 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…
The only people I see campaigning for the return of the gold standard are populists.
Many of the current crop "populists" don't really have a program that would actually help the people whose support they've gained through emotional appeals. They're mainly just trying to harness dissatisfaction with the current order to fuel personal ambition.
IIRC, the original populists actually opposed the gold standard, when it was still actually a thing, and supported silver because it was more inflationary. They understood deflationary money helps the people who already have money, and inflationary money helps the people who are in debt to them.