561–570 of 732 posts
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Funny saying that on HN.
I don't think it is. Startups fail at tremendous rates and are well known for playing it really fast and loose, even if some of them are wildly successful. Not exactly something I'm interested in relying on for finances until there is a much longer track record.
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Yes, it's a smaller problem to lose even all your ransom money, than to be physically captured and put in jail for decades. Can't we just agree on that? Also "fairly trivially traced" can be naive. Here's one scenario from a million possible scenarios. You hate politician John Doe and happen to know me. I have a stash of millions in ransom money on my public anonymous wallet. So I start sending money to organizations…
Do you know any books or articles that go into more depth on this, giving more examples, etc?
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the rise and consolidation of settlement channel aggregators is going to lead to another visa / Mastercard style duopoly, "but with blockchain."
That doesn't make any sense, the channels are p2p, you can open and close channels with whoever you wish and your channel counterparties don't actually hold your funds, you hold them.
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I've heard precisely these claims 1000 times. 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…
> BTC is not stored energy because it cannot be converted back to energy Certainly not. I never claimed it was. Neither can cement, cars, porcelain, or most other products of heavy industry. Aluminum is an exception here. > a future where mining is constrained by geography and friendly states absolutely obliterates any decentralization I'm not sure what kind of future you're imagining here. Are you thinking that mayb…
These are resources. The more we have of them, the more we can do. BTC does not operate this way. If 100BTC exists and if 100,000,000 BTC exists the network functions in the same manner.
> I'm not sure what kind of future you're imagining here. Are you thinking that maybe Algeria will monopolize world bitcoin mining because it has 0.1% more sunlight than Chile and Saudi Arabia, so its mining costs will be 0.05% lower? That seems unlikely to me.
I'm hoping to imagine a future where no nation uses a considerable amount of carbon to generate energy. The claim is that BTC adoption moves us in this direction (though this is later dropped).
> Now, there are some places where coal power generating capacity is increasing. PRC built 38.4 GW of new coal power capacity last year. But it also built 48.2 GW of new solar capacity and 71.7 GW of new wind capacity.
Given that China is one of the regions you mention earlier where glorious cheap renewables are dominating, I think this is a pretty darn important fact. Any increase in carbon use is terrible. We need it to go to nearly zero.
There is still the undressed assumption that deploying more solar lowers the cost but that the same effect is impossible with carbon.
> However, I am done explaining things to you.
I'll wait for 1002 I guess.
There's disappointingly much heat and little light in this thread; lots of people in rich countries ripping on El Salvador (and bitcoin) with little more than stereotypes to go on. Let me try to displace some of the content-free flaming with real information. I'm not in El Salvador, but I do have some experience with how Bitcoin gets used in practice in low- and middle-income countries, despite the transaction fees s…
Can you explain how this is better than e.g. Wise (formerly Transferwise), PayPal, or some other international money transmitter?
And in the case of El Salvador, I think Western Union is popular for remittance because people without a bank account can get cash. Bitcoin does not solve the “cash to people without a bank account”. If the idea is, that people should instead transfer money to each other via the Strike app, when they pay for things, I fail to see how this is different from e.g. sending money to each other with PayPal.
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Because unlike cryptocurrencies it has an actual value as a currency.
What do you mean "actual value" where is that value coming from?
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.…
If BTC used proof-of-stake or some other scheme that was less energy-intensive/made graphics cards a scarce resource there would probably be less hostility towards it.
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It wasn’t an argument I said how it works
Except that's not how it works. This adoption has a massive impact on acceptance of Bitcoin. If we assume Bitcoin is a mistake for humanity - this clearly is a great wrongdoing. A smaller wrongdoing would be buying Bitcoin, holding Bitcoin or making positive comments about Bitcoin on HN. Sadly, all these are economically justified (for now).
Your dissertation seems to be unrelated to this conversation. Your topic sentence says “thats not an argument.” Or “thats not how it works” and proceeds to not disprove that at all, derailing every conversation with something completely unrelated
This is against HN guidelines
This is good news in that we will see a real country with decent population use it and fail badly proving that Bitcoin is not viable as a valid currency. Once that is done its value should plummet dramatically. Until now it is not used for any payments and mainly for speculation/gambling to make easy money. Most of the people are just supporting it to hype up the value so they can make most profit.
What does failing look like to you? If that doesn't happen will you revise your opinion on bitcoin?