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'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

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Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#31

Post by rspeele »

kinghajj wrote: post #15
bsamuels wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners technically do have seigniorage authority since they can collectively decide to change the underlying cryptocurrency. Miner's de facto control of the network is a huge problem. It's why Bitcoin will never solve its energy use issue, and why Ethereum set up a "delayed difficulty bomb" to force miners to accept changes to the network.

> Miners technically do have seigniorage authority since they can collectively decide to change the underlying cryptocurrency. The failure of the Bitcoin2x proposal and adoption of Segwit in 2017 demonstrated that miners do not have as much control as they might like to think. If node operators don't accept their blocks, they lose money.

I agree that miners don't have control if the social consensus goes against them

I think the exchanges have the most power, given the current state of the network where very, very few businesses will directly exchange goods and services for coins and most use of Bitcoin is done by converting to fiat through an exchange.

Looking back to 2017, there was the Bitcoin Cash fork. As I recall, Coinbase handled this in a fairly neutral way: if you held 1.0 BTC on the exchange, after the fork you held 1.0 BTC and 1.0 BCH, and trading was supported for both, so the market found a price for each. The only bias here is letting Bitcoin Core keep the "BTC" ticker symbol.

Suppose the top 3 exchanges had done the same thing, but treated Bitcoin Cash as the "real" one that trades under the BTC symbol (and is referred to on the exchange as just "Bitcoin"), and Bitcoin Core as the "fork" with a new symbol like BCC. Maybe even call it something lame like "Bitcoin Classic". Would that have affected which one won? Maybe a bit... but enough to make a difference, I'm not sure.

What if they really wanted Bitcoin Cash to win, and went a step further? What if they gave Bitcoin Cash the BTC ticker and didn't implement trading pairs for "Bitcoin Classic"? They'd still let you withdraw your forked "Bitcoin Classic" to your self-custody wallet, and you could send it from there to some other small-time exchange to try to dump it... but you couldn't trade it on Coinbase, Kraken, or Binance. What would have happened then?

There's no way of knowing, but if you asked me to guess, I'd say that what we call Bitcoin Cash today would've won. Bear in mind, for those who have strong opinions about BCH vs BTC... I have no opinion about which one is better or which one should be the "real bitcoin". I'm just speculating that, if they had wanted to, two or three big exchanges could have swayed that decision the other way.

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#32

Post by arcticbull »

heed wrote: post #21
arcticbull wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Balaji's take is easily the worst, least coherent take on proof of work to date. An absolute carnival of ignorance motivated by self-interest. The lengths people will do to defend the indefensible because it'll make them rich continues to disappoint.

I agree it’s a bad take, but the idea in the article he shared is, in my opinion, reasonable and doesn’t talk about BTC being a battery. It talks about crypto mining as a last resort to utilizing excess energy produced by “green” sources (wind turbine), ie energy that cannot be sold to the grid or stored in batteries.

That's not, however, what the system incentivizes. It incentivizes using the cheapest energy period. Miners are not incentivized to care even the tiniest little bit about where the energy comes from - as evidenced by them re-opening coal plants. [1]

It's literally un-doing the progress we've made towards a renewable energy market.

It's a fantasy that (a) there's actually tons of energy floating around out there in the wild that can't be stored in some way or transported in some way and (b) that co-locating miners there is more economical than throwing some coal onto the fire.

[1] https://qz.com/1250980/an-australian-coal-power-plant-will-r...

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#33

Post by arcticbull »

shawnz wrote: post #25
ziml77 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These people will justify bitcoin in such insane ways. I see one guy doesn't agree that it's a battery but still thinks mining is a good thing > Bitcoin let’s anyone with excess energy manufacture sound money. This is a better option than wasting the energy. There are times where the grid is producing more energy than is being demanded but it's not like it's that difference that's being used to mine. I also don't get…

> it's a horribly inefficient way to do that It's not "inefficient", relatively speaking, if there's no more efficient way to do it while still achieving the same risk profile.

So visa is a few hundred thousand times more efficient. Are we not able to pay people without Bitcoin? The trustlessness and decentralization isn't a value in and of itself, it's value must be measured in its utility.

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#35

Post by ineedasername »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #29
wyager wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The disadvantage compared to Bitcoin is that it’s hardly meaningfully different from using Paypal or something.

What do you mean? It's not like PayPal because the sender is actually anonymous (assuming that exact amounts are hidden by always withdrawing fixed size coins).

Bitcoin isn't quite anonymous, as a variety of criminals have found out. Cash is anonymous: there is no unique identifier associated either with the transaction or the parties to the transaction.

Bitcoin on the other hand is, at best, pseudonymous. This is particularly problematic because it gives information about true identities when the owner of coins wants to spend it in any way on anything where bitcoin is not an accepted form of payment. Then, the "off ramp" becomes much more closely associated with the owner of the coins.

Heck, even in a world where on-ramps & off-ramps to bitcoin weren't necessary because everyone used bitcoin this would still be problematic: An address suspected of holding coins obtained through illegal enterprise pays a car dealership in bitcoins for a new car, and the authorities simply go to the dealership with a warrant and say "tells us everything you possibly can about that transaction and the people involved in the purchase & delivery of that vehicle".

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#36

Post by shawnz »

arcticbull wrote: post #33
shawnz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a horribly inefficient way to do that It's not "inefficient", relatively speaking, if there's no more efficient way to do it while still achieving the same risk profile.

So visa is a few hundred thousand times more efficient. Are we not able to pay people without Bitcoin? The trustlessness and decentralization isn't a value in and of itself, it's value must be measured in its utility.

The efficiency of Visa isn't comparable because it solves a completely different problem than Bitcoin.

And yes, in most cases we can pay each other just fine without Bitcoin. That doesn't negate its specific usefulness.

It's already well documented that you don't see the trustlessness and decentralization to be a value for you personally. If that's the case then simply don't buy any. Those who do get value from those properties will use it, as is the case now.

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#37

Post by whytaka »

_Microft wrote: post #3

Side note: "Minting" sounds so much nicer than "mining". Minting evokes connotations of gold and kings and craftsmen doing skilled work. Mining on the other hand is dirty. I associate digging, holes in the ground, mining waste, depths and darkness with that. Maybe crypto [0] currencies would have had it a tiny bit easier to not look like an environmentally bad idea (this is purely about the looks of it , not reality)…

Maybe the transition to Proof of Stake is the time to change terminology. Proof of Work is really a lot like mining, digging around to see if a nugget is there, while Proof of Stake is a community of self-interested institutions sharing the same signature.

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#38

Post by ineedasername »

rogueSkib wrote: post #27
1e-9 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it requires no trusted 3rd party Or, at least not the same 3rd parties. Instead, it requires trusting a much larger host of other 3rd parties, many of which are anonymous, and likely none of which will provide recourse if you lose your bitcoin due to their failure or malicious intent.[1] Bitcoin represents a shifting of trust; not an elimination of trust. That's not to say there is no value. It's just that there ar…

I don't believe this is accurate. As trust is spread across the network to an increasing number of people running nodes, the trust assigned to any individual participant approaches zero. This can be observed in the resilience of the network, as it self-heals against any attacker or alternative fork from the consensus. Bitcoin has democratically ossified into a store-of-value with absolute scarcity, deterministic mone…

Trust approaches, but never reaches, zero. In practice though, so few people run full nodes relative to the whole that trust is still not nearly as decentralized as it might appear. A few rough estimates from simple searches indicates that only 10% of about 1 million miners actually run a full node.

Further, while this article is about 2 years old, it indicates that many miners use outdated software that may have vulnerabilities. [0] Even assuming those expressed in the article have resolved, it may very well be the case that similar proportions of miners today aren't running the most recent software & are vulnerable to newer attacks.

Finally, while bitcoin may have ossified, I don't think that is has done so as a store of value (at least not year). A solid store of value should not fluctuate in value by 5%, 10%, 15% on a fairly regular basis.

If I wanted a good store of value, I would still be looking at the traditional option of gold or, at least over the long-term, real estate. Though I suppose if the world economic system every goes belly up, neither bitcoin, gold, or real estate will be of much use. In that case, the best store of value would be long-term shelf-stable food.

[0] https://thenextweb.com/news/bitcoin-100000-nodes-vulnerable-...

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#39

Post by ineedasername »

shawnz wrote: post #26
1e-9 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it requires no trusted 3rd party Or, at least not the same 3rd parties. Instead, it requires trusting a much larger host of other 3rd parties, many of which are anonymous, and likely none of which will provide recourse if you lose your bitcoin due to their failure or malicious intent.[1] Bitcoin represents a shifting of trust; not an elimination of trust. That's not to say there is no value. It's just that there ar…

I wouldn't say those risks are overlooked by most holders, rather that risk profile is exactly the reason why anyone would want to use cryptocurrency to begin with. Perhaps some hype artists would claim otherwise, but they shouldn't be defining how you view the technology itself.

Yes, I think it's important to distinguish between the technology & its current use case. The technology is promising (though in bitcoin, stagnant). The primary use case right now seems to be financial speculation. That would have to change in order for any crypto currency to really gain any sort of mainstream traction as an alternative to traditional cash or credit (banks).

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#40

Post by arcticbull »

shawnz wrote: post #36
arcticbull wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So visa is a few hundred thousand times more efficient. Are we not able to pay people without Bitcoin? The trustlessness and decentralization isn't a value in and of itself, it's value must be measured in its utility.

The efficiency of Visa isn't comparable because it solves a completely different problem than Bitcoin. And yes, in most cases we can pay each other just fine without Bitcoin. That doesn't negate its specific usefulness. It's already well documented that you don't see the trustlessness and decentralization to be a value for you personally. If that's the case then simply don't buy any. Those who do get value from those…

Sorry its no longer that simple. It's wasting as much power as all of Switzerland and all of Austria combined. 52MT of CO2 emitted annually. 10kT of e-waste. And growing like grey goo. [1] Dormant coal facilities are now being re-activated to hash noise as fast as they can. [2]

This is literally everyone's problem now and we should all do everything we can, tell everyone we can, to shut this down before it's too late.

Your game of pass-the-spreadsheet-cell is now actively threatening the lives of people on the planet at probably the most critical time in human history re: global warming. I have general distaste for the MLM nature of most coins in this frothy climate - but those $SAFEMOON and $CUMMIES folks are just going to lose money, not ruin Earth. I mostly do everything I can to end Bitcoin by raising awareness. You should too.

I'd be just as vocal if your coin was based on proof-of-killing-elephants or proof-of-having-a-tire-fire-on-your-lawn.

[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

[2] https://www.newsbtc.com/news/bitcoin/australian-power-compan...

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