71–80 of 164 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This legitimately covered my keyboard in Pepsi. Kudos! edit: removed burn in all caps as this is not a Wendy's restaurant.
I’m sad to see HN become a place where people pat each other on the back for “burns”. (And I think GP makes a good point.) edit for context: parent originally started with “BURN!” before edit
Bitcoin can't die soon enough. The initial idea and the ideology behind it is really admirable, but it was done as a proof of concept and failed terribly. But instead of "alright, PoC done, does not scale, let's move on to something better", too many people can't or don't want to move on because there's too much money on the line. I find it personally exhausting - I had a coworker until recently (he left) who was a s…
It's a lazer-eyed religion now, and I can't help but thinking the value of it's strongest adherents holdings is already zero - they'll never sell, under any circumstances, so any perceived value can never be realised.
(If it goes up, why would they sell? If it crashes, "it'll recover").
Under that logic, at no point is any amount of value stored in the scheme available to you in the future.
The market cap of all of these tokens is also incredibly misleading. Having no underlying value also means the market cap you're looking at is only a projection of the current point in time if there were indeterminate demand at the current trading price - meaning that in real terms the supposed money tied up in Bitcoin does not exist.
If stocks crash, you still have entitlement to profits from the company. If bonds crash, you still have entitlement to payments from the issuer. If a token crashes, you have a long alphanumeric number.
That's why if there's even a small amount of consolidation the market crashes by half or more.
Bitcoin can't die soon enough. The initial idea and the ideology behind it is really admirable, but it was done as a proof of concept and failed terribly. But instead of "alright, PoC done, does not scale, let's move on to something better", too many people can't or don't want to move on because there's too much money on the line. I find it personally exhausting - I had a coworker until recently (he left) who was a s…
I still don't understand this mindset of Bitcoin becoming the future of money. It isn't. It never was meant to be, and it never advertised itself as such. Bitcoin solves the issue of trust. Bitocin itself will never work as a currency that governments can rely. First reason for that is that governments want control over their money. There has to be a central authority for multiple reasons. Banks need bailing out? As…
It was getting there. I remember Bitcoin was getting a wider adoption for payment back in 2013ish. I paid for my domain from namecheap in Bitcoin back then. But it then blew up and everyone treated it more as a store of value and it made all the shops stop accepting it as payment due to its volatility.
I'm finding it to be used a hell of a lot more in countries with precarious economies like where I've been spending most of my adult life. In brazil especially I've seen a lot of facilitation of adoption of crypto. I know because I've developed the systems myself, from everything to paying your phone bill to bus tickets, although bitcoin is hardly the only or best option for these things
It was getting there. I remember Bitcoin was getting a wider adoption for payment back in 2013ish. I paid for my domain from namecheap in Bitcoin back then. But it then blew up and everyone treated it more as a store of value and it made all the shops stop accepting it as payment due to its volatility.
One whose value fluctuates wildly over time, one that is lost if you lose your keys, one that is susceptible to a hacker stealing your keys, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not binary, both of these things are problems. When a some one points out a problem, if it turns out person is a hypocrite, that does not make the problem vanish in a puff of smoke.
True. It also points out a new problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The very clear and main thing it brings is getting rid of the middleman, at least for transactions, whether it be governments or businesses. This is a bigger deal than it sounds, as the middle man defines most policy around transactions, whether it be who can trade, when, and how, which creates huge imbalances in fairness and accessibility, and also can be enforced at nation state borders. These may be seen as cons b…
Well, it doesn't. It replaces a fuzzy set of middleman with another. And there isn't enough attention to the Bitcoin governance to make it better than the government-based system. Cryptocoin people don't even want to discuss governance, because they like to believe there's nothing to govern and nobody governing.
No middle man can stop you from sending BTC to someone in Asia. No middleman can force your transaction to take 5 days. No middleman can stop your transaction. No middleman can stop transactions at night and weekends. No middleman can trade afterhours while you are stuck waiting until the next day.
Bitcoin is popular with the types who hold gold and are mad that the bag of cash under their mattress loses value every year.
Deflation is bad for economies, it incentives hoarding instead of spending. And oh look, bitcoin is primary hoarded, and at 10 TPS is definitely not optimized for spending.
Maybe Bitcoin is Netscape and we're still waiting for Chrome. It's still so, so early.
I recently used this analogy to describe why I’m bearish on crypto. When Netscape Navigator was released, it was clear and obvious this was the future (and if anything, underpromised based on where we are today). Within 4years of Navigators release, I was making my fulltime living building websites. The iPhone was another immediate “this is obviously the future” technology. 13 years into Bitcoin, it’s still not obvio…