471–480 of 530 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin is not anonymous. it's pseudonymous at best. It's a public ledger.
Is there an alternative that is fully anonymous?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By which I mean to say: the greedy rich wanting to preserve or increase their wealth at all costs is what got us into this mess. Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency pyramid scheme is going to do bugger all to improve that. No amount of wealth or technology will turn vice into virtue because: “If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're gonna get selfish, ignorant leaders.” —George Carlin Prosperity boils down to g…
To add to this, crypto communities _appear_ (I’d be pleased to be wrong here if anyone has examples) to be filled with people who are absolutely opposed to any kind of economic governance, if it’s not “let the magic hand of the market decide” they’re seemingly not interested.
There's def crypto communities that dream of paying everyone a basic income in their currency, identifying each individual and not completing devaluing the coin are big problems though
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN isn’t wrong about everything. It was extremely bearing on Groupon in 2011. It was another thing where true believers would say that skeptics “just don’t get it”, but the HN critics had extremely cogent critiques that went without response. Google “Groupon Stock”, HN was very correct. VERY different from the anti-Dropbox sentiment of the famous Dropbox comment. You also have Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Charlie Mung…
> The token backing BTC, Tether, is founded by con artists and was just revealed to not have had the backing they claim. USDT doesn't back BTC. It's just a stable coin people use. There are other coins tracking the dollar. Binance created their own BUSD and it seems to be as legit as it gets with frequent audits of reserves and everything. There's also USDC. BTC is actually backed by the eletricity used to power the…
I'm not sure what "backed" means in this context. My electric bill is "backed" by the municipality I live in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Visa would be providing 0 value if it exposed these drawbacks of Bitcoin's transaction network to users. Making cheap, fast transactions with fraud protections is exactly what a company like Visa has to offer.
So Bitcoin, without the Bitcoin. Brilliant, why didn’t anyone think of this before.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we don’t need a completely trustless financial system outside of some libertarian ideal Who's "we" ? I certainly do need it.
Okay then let's compare Bitcoin to Monero. One of those is actively used as a trustless financial system because drug dealers absolutely need it to be trustless and private. The other one is a speculative bubble that is growing faster because there is no anchor to gauge the value by so people can do whatever they want with it even if it is stupid or unsustainable. Before you say that drug dealers ceasing to use Bitco…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s missing the point. You could have said the same thing about the internet. But we are not collectively making this decision based on politics, the market has decided that crypto is valuable.
With the internet its easy to extrapolate value from most tasks. Cheaper, faster, easier, always available, available at a distance etc. Why do I need a fully trustless system that is worse in every other category? Slow, more expensive, less consumer protection, etc. At the very least its not obvious and the market has not spoken. Even people speculating use off chain exchanges, not the chain itself.
Have you ever had your entire bank account confiscated by the government? That's what happened in my country in the 90s:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Brazil#Col...
Inflation was out of control and the president decided to freeze everything in some kind of desperate attempt to control it. They took away everyone's money.
People who say they don't need cryptocurrencies are way too comfortable with their banks and governments holding all the power. I don't really care how much energy it uses, I still want it to continue existing just in case my government starts getting funny ideas again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts This seems obvious to me. Many people have bitcoin wallets with only a little invested. In my case, I have a few wallets just to play around with. I assume all of those wallets count as "accounts" in the above, which would really drive down the amount of money the average account controls. However few people actually have wallets with large amounts of…
To expand on this, quite a few wallet apps nowadays default to using a fresh wallet per transaction as a privacy measure, further inflating the number of wallets relative to the monetary supply.
I've got no interest in digging into their methodology, but feel pretty comfortable assuming that they've grossly misrepresented all of the above as "accounts".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not really that decentralized now. The largest miner pools can be seen here[1]. All of the larger ones are from China. I would be more worried about authoritarian action over there than some by the book payment processor processing transactions in the US. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/731416/market-share-of-m...
Why would a book payment processor use Bitcoin when the average Bitcoin transaction fee is about the same price as many new books? With Bitcoin, you're looking at spending about $50 if you buy a $25 book.
> by the book:
> strictly according to the rules.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts Bitcoin doesn't have accounts. It was txouts, which have addresses attached. AFAICT they're counting this by address, which is silly: most wallets use each address once. So in practice, this means an average person who uses Bitcoin regularly will have lots of small value txouts as coins get split up. There is no reliable way to associate addresses to i…
> There is no reliable way to associate addresses to individual people. That may be true in general, however in the US there are several large companies that manage Bitcoin wallets for consumers that are public or trying to get public. So the US regulators will likely have been able to get aggregate statistics like this for some time. The more nexus crypto has with the traditional regulated finance system, the more a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bitcoin can no longer disappear overnight. It was true in the beginning, but the network and mind-share is too big now. This is what they said about the housing market in 2008. The question isn't whether bitcoin would operate at least 1 transaction, it's whether it is usable as a stable store of value or a large useful network. > The market seems to value a independent and censorship proof currency differently than…
The argument you made was (Bitcoin's value is based on...): - completely ephemeral feelings - the size of its network And that both of those can disappear overnight. Now you're changing the argument to if Bitcoin can be used for "a stable store of value" and if it's a "large useful network". Then no, Bitcoin is currently not stable, it's pretty easy to see if you look at the fluctuation of the price. And yes, it is a…
The point of Bitcoin is to serve those purposes. My critique is that it cannot because it is based mostly on ephemeralities.
> The housing market in 2008 is hardly relevant to Bitcoin,
The housing market collapsed because of government inaction, not action. People valued CDOs as AAA rated when the actual underlying reality was worthless. Eventually reality caught up with us.
> That Bitcoin set that as a goal, and still is achieving it after many years of attempts of being taken down
This is agreed, incredibly technically successful. I do not agree that violating democratic rules is always a good thing, but I do see it as a good thing for countries that come under the gun of US imperialism such as Iran or Venezuela. However, in general, I am not a fan as the people that will use it the most are likely to be large corporate actors to escape any kind of accountability.
Censorship resistance is the only thing I can see in Bitcoin that is not ephemera.