You don’t need to completely repay the principal to benefit from that cash flow.
What other ways could you benefit? Imagine that you had no expectation of selling your share for a higher price in the future, then what other way is there to benefit? You have a shareholder vote, okay but the percentage of shareholders who actually vote is roughly 9%. The only people doing the voting are large institutions, not individuals: https://www.broadridge.com/proxypulse/reports/2013/second-ed...
I could collect dividends for a time and then sell the share for what I paid.
A lot of the "Common Objections" relate to the REASONS people choose to own Bitcoin and how those cases make it a Ponzi. There are many different reasons to own Bitcoin, however the author seems to only view it through the lens of someone living in a wealthy and developed country with financial stability. The properties of it being difficult/impossible to confiscate and its privacy make it valuable in oppressive regi…
The fees for Bitcoin are way too high to make sense for citizens in poor authoritarian counties. The average transaction fee during slow periods is about $5 and it jumps to $20 whenever there is load on the network. And the lightning network is a poor solution to this because the LN requires a lot of capital to fund channels, something poor people explicitly don't have. Finally, the fact that Bitcoin proponents have…
$5-$20 for any amount is comparable or much less than almost any international transaction fee. If you're other option is transferring money out of the authoritarian country into your destination then this could be very attractive.
"Bitcoin privacy" is a contradiction in terms, as has been repeatedly proven. You set up a scene of a refugee "storing their wealth in Bitcoin", but it begs the question: where are these refugees with substantial wealth they are looking to exfiltrate? Typical refugees are emigrating from locales where they were earning dollars per day. The use case of shielding hoarded wealth during a journey to a freer locale is a b…
I loathe Bitcoin, but that’s vastly wrong. As one counter-example, the Syrian civil war didn’t only displace poor people who never had anything to begin with; it displaced a lot of middle class families, made of engineers and doctors and such, who did have assets to their name but that were almost certainly incapable of taking it out of the country with them. It remains to be seen whether it would have been practical…
It is unfortunately quite factual that the vast majority of refugees worldwide functionally have no assets and often end up in debt at the end of their journey from home. Anecdotes of relative handfuls of affluent migrants are hardly compelling vis a vis the utility of e.g. BTC, especially given the lofty claims being made.
it's as old as android with like 5 orders of magnitude less societal impact and worse societal impact when there is societal impact than android. it's eaten a material amount of all gains in renewable energy basically using cycles to heat the world for what ends up being an O(n) database insert.
Database insert? Ok... You may benefit from reading about why Bitcoin works the way that it does, and why certain tradeoffs were made. But you don't really care to know, do you?
I did do the reading. It's an O(n) db insert. The blockchain's the DB and the insert needs PoW.
throughput of a blockchain is contingent upon tweaking but for the original bitcoin, still used, it's 6 mb/hour. electricity consumption is 14 gigawatts. if i were given 14 gigawatts of electricity i think i could do better than 6 megabytes/hour.
Please look at this data and then come back and tell me you still think Bitcoin mining is having a meaningful impact on climate change and why. https://cbeci.org/index/comparisons I'd be curious to read your thoughts.
Not op but I quickly looked through your link. It's as bad as I thought. There is so need to waste so much energy into a bad database.
Lots of people disagree with you about that. Sorry you see it as a waste, but we're going to keep using it and dedicating more energy towards it because we understand its value.
Generally people participating in a Ponzi scheme do not view it as such. The tactics deployed by truly oppressive regimes make anything easy to confiscate including bitcoin.
True, sufficiently oppressive regimes can confiscate bitcoin in a lot of situations. However, as soon as they start doing that to the first few people, what's going to stop everyone else from instantly sending their bitcoin to family and friends across the border for safe keeping?
So you or you child is being tortured but you are "happy" that your bitcoins are safe ? This whole thing omits the question of how a person under oppressive regime came into possession of bitcoin in the first place
Why are such articles constantly popping up on HN? It's clear that the HN crowd does not like Bitcoin. So why keep reiterating similar arguments all over? There is zero utility in the article shared. It states some anti crypto views and that's it. Even the author concedes that this is according to his own definition and not based on real life legal tests (which have of course shown that Bitcoin is not a ponzi). Just…
You can go back 5 years and find all the exact same arguments in the comments on any bitcoin article. It's basically a HN circlejerk at this point and incredibly rare to find something new actually added to the conversation.