501–510 of 699 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or transacting for goods and services. You know, like in an economy. I just bought coffee with it.
You made money with bitcoin by buying coffee with it?
There are tons of these out there https://bitcoinerjobs.co/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are missing the point. When the us was on a gold standard, the army was not required to create the dollar's value. Now that the us is on a sovereign credit-based system, the might of the military is an integral part of the dollars value, both in the obvious sense that the military protects sea lanes and in the more subtle sense that government debt and the sustained credit cycle goes in no small chunk to the mili…
The army has nothing to do with the value of a dollar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can you possibly imagine adoption of Bitcoin would end the US army? The US army existed for hundreds of years on the gold standard. World wars were fought on the gold standard. Exactly, step my step, please explain how adoption of bitcoin would reduce military energy consumption.
That’s not what I said. It’s simple. Bitcoin has value because of proof-of-work which uses a ton of energy. US dollar has value because it’s propped up by the military which uses MORE energy (more so because there is no more gold standard)
Excellent news for the climate.
It's a thunderous dunk while your team is down 40 in the 4th. A loud, but small, short term win. "Excellent news" would be the halting of state subsidies for coal mining, and introduction of a carbon tax.
They will probably never stop subsidizing coal mining though. Otherwise they will get even more reliant on foreign coal which gives a hypothetical US blockade much more clout.
I hope the rest of world follows. There is nothing more volatile than a decentralised crypto currency. The amount of people making a profit from it is less than 5% and energy consumption is beyond acceptable. Crypto as a tech to serve something different is totally fine of course.
Just because one crypto currency is like that doesn't mean there cannot be another decentralized crypto currency that is better.
Just because your or mine imagination does not reach there doesn't mean there can't be somebody that can figure it out.
Blockchain, not specifically crypto currencies, are also a means to operate anonymously outside of an authoritarian government. Sure there are gotchas with remaining anonymous, but I am sure China wouldn't want a blockchain-based, mesh, peer-to-peer, or distrubuted network, that could operate outside of the Great Firewall's ability to regulate or censor it. High-power, long-range WiFi and mesh networks would be hard…
A lot of the hardline pro-law FUD here is, I am pretty sure, astroturf. Same with all the comments that were pro-Apple in the phone scanning threads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine living in a civilized country that can't bring itself to ban a massive distributed Ponzi scheme with huge environmental consequences. Bitcoin alone uses about 1/10th as much energy as the entire world's concrete production. Even if it were to transition entirely to renewable energy it also generates as much e-waste as an entire first-world country. These things actually have huge meaningful state security ris…
It's going to look a lot less like a Ponzi scheme if/when the dollar collapses.
If there were a serious problem with the USD, first, because of it's seigneurage position in the world, it would imply a 'giant crisis'. It would be bad.
People would switch to other currencies like Euros, Pounds, Canadian / Australian Dollars and Swiss Franks, RMB and Yen because they are fungible and transactable.
Gold and other commodities would increase in value, but only as stores of value, they're not good for transactions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, because if you dont pay taxes you go to prison. Not going to prison is in high demand!
so, when the US had no income tax, this was not even the case for the median american. Yet the dollar still had value!
Earlier discussion (was on this same front page just over an hour or so, but disappeared, somehow) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28640964