471–480 of 732 posts
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Then it's easier to give everyone the right to a bank account than introduce a new payment infrastructure.
Banks are free to accept, reject, or kick people. Not just there. Also here. Banks, PayPal, all the same shit in terms of exclusion and power imbalance
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There was a quote recently from a high ranking former FBI agent that worked on money laundering where she said she wasn't really concerned about crypto making money laundering worse (trying to find the article again). Her reasoning was: "what people need to understand is, 95% of money laundering with fiat currency already succeeds today without getting caught." In other words, this won't really change much, it was al…
interesting(ly sad) percentage .. I wonder how come nothing impedes their laundering that said I wonder if having another path won't make them even more hungry.. i'm sure criminals are very creative when it comes to making more money
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But that's true for renewable energy too. Nothing about the two energy sources are different. Either energy prices are decoupled from mining rewards, in which case reduced prices of either fossil fuels or renewables (or increased price of BTC) means more profit for miners or energy prices are coupled to mining rewards, in which case changing prices of fossil fuels or renewables means nothing to miners. Please tell me…
Well, read through this 1001st version of the argument, and finally you'll understand why it's not bogus! It's really terrible that you've been arguing with such stupid people, because it's not really that complicated to explain why bitcoin mining is a renewable energy subsidy. It's really very simple, although it involves a lot of facts you aren't acquainted with. > But that's true for renewable energy too. Nothing…
BTC is not stored energy because it cannot be converted back to energy and its creation does not increase the amount of usable raw materials available to humanity. And a future where mining is constrained by geography and friendly states absolutely obliterates any decentralization - ruining the only benefit obtained by the outrageous energy cost.
Renewables are obviously not cheaper than fossil fuels in any general sense because we are still building coal and gas plants all over the world for purposes well beyond having flexible energy sources. It is abundantly clear that the problem of transitioning to a largely CO2 free energy system is not a problem of deployment. And even if it was, sucking up the fixed deployment to support ever more BTC mining is harming the transition to CO2 free energy. You've swapped now to "The UK will just not mine locally because they are never going to switch off coal" when the original argument was "BTC adoption will speed world transition away from coal".
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There was a quote recently from a high ranking former FBI agent that worked on money laundering where she said she wasn't really concerned about crypto making money laundering worse (trying to find the article again). Her reasoning was: "what people need to understand is, 95% of money laundering with fiat currency already succeeds today without getting caught." In other words, this won't really change much, it was al…
of course crypto would not help criminal money laundering. Bitcoin and Etherium are very traceable by design. In fact, it is often much, much easier to trace to origin of Bitcoin funds than the origin of USD funds, especially when cash was involved. There are "private" coins like Monero but they aren't getting much traction.
I think it's time that we need some expert opinion and debunking of bitcoin. Elon Musk sold his bitcoins, Bill Gates was against it, Warren Buffet mocked it. One could easily make a fun documentary about all the disappointments of bitcoin. The MtGox theft was a wakeup call.
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LN requires opening and closing channels, each of which have to be done as a regular Bitcoin transaction. The value proposition of LN is that repeated transactions with the same entity (or some subset of) can be done without high fees, but considering almost nobody is currently using LN that doesn't change things right now.
So "off chain" means LN holds the BTC in some other data structure then batches it up as one big transaction? Kinda like how a broker covers small retail trades until they hit enough volume to register an NYSE trade on the floor? Is that how it works? If so , this means lots of BTC is tied up in LN ... that seems dubious as heck.
You and that party can now transact freely between each other with no fees, but if that other party is a gateway, it can route payments through it and through other gateways too, and each of them charge fees for routing.
Once any of the parties decide to close the channel, is when a new onchain transaction is created with the last balances state.
While the LN channel is open, only the parties involved know the current state of the balance.
I am just surprised how much negativity is in HN towards Bitcoin. This is the first case of decentralised open source tech winning against big established powers - governments/faceamagoos. We should be celebrating this. I sure hope that Bitcoin is going to be Linux of money/finance. Lightning might not be at the scale it needs to be now but it will improve greatly. maybe it is good enough already? Like Ruby on Rails.…
The only reason the vast majority of people advocating for Bitcoin are advocating for Bitcoin specifically is because they have invested in Bitcoin specifically, and they want the price of Bitcoin specifically to go up. Seeing people advocate for us all to be stuck with inferior technology forever because they have a financial stake in the inferior technology is exactly the sort of thing you should expect negativity about on HN.
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Well, you make it sound like there's a limited number of dollar notes and the bank will refuse your deposit/loan if they don't have enough notes lying around to make the fractional requirements. In reality, they will accept your deposit/loan (as long as it makes business sense) with no regard for how many notes they have lying around. If that puts them over the edge of the fractional requirements, they'll just go to…
This simply isn't how the financial system works. The bank will only loan out amounts based on what they hold in reserve. Asking the Fed/Treasury to "swing their wand around" isn't really close to what happens. Also, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury are different entities. They don't just "print money" for banks arbitrarily.
Demand for money comes from the market and is not very flexible, and certainly not under anyone's control. Lenders will meet the demand for money at ever increasing prices (i.e. higher overnight rates) unless money gets printed arbitrarily.
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It is not hard to scale Bitcoin for millions of people for everyday transactions. You give people a custodial wallet and track the balances off-chain using a trusted third party. As long as a government is willing to allow such a service to legally operate: 1. You can easily support billions of bitcoin transactions a second since the transactions only change centralized database entries. 2. Users can send and receive…
Why bother with Bitcoin at all if you need a trusted third party? Crypto maximalists have let greed blind them from the initial mission of crypto.
This is a good question and we should always be asking "Why Bitcoin?" and think about the trade-offs.
For small amounts of bitcoin a trusted third party, especially an institutional trusted third party, makes a lot of sense. Convenience, availability and low transaction fees dominate the user's needs.
For large amounts of bitcoin, you probably don't want to use a trusted third party and you can afford to run your own infrastructure. For instance a national bank should not keep all its bitcoin on coinbase.
Bitcoin allows you to choose between these two trust models. It is very hard to remove a trusted party from a system which fundamentally relies on a trusted party. However it is often easy to inject a trusted party into a system to make it more useable or scalable. Thus, for maximum flexibility you want your base layer to be as trustless as possible and then add trust as needed to solve different use cases.
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And whenever this comes up, I just like to remind people that we went to a reserve requirement of 0% nearly a year ago with the start of COVID. https://medium.com/navigating-life/we-just-went-from-fractio... Edit: Downvoted, and I'm guessing it's the source? This is legitimate fact though. Here's the fed's own announcement. > In light of the shift to an ample reserves regime, the Board has reduced reserve requirement…
Which is completely fine, because the Fed is willing to step in as the lender of last resort.