311–320 of 486 posts
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The current BTC blockchain size is 422GB [1] so that easily fits on a single 1TB SSD. How is that "too large" ? [1] https://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/dashboard/
Who has ~250 euros (excluding the machine this SSD has to be in) to drop on a random hobby?
Thousands of people are doing it and these sorts of things make it easy to do:
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Self fulfilling prophecy there.
Where is the self-fulfilling prophecy? Nowhere do I talk about my actions, I only talk about reality.
If all non-rich people took that view, then only rich people would be arguing about what the rules should be, and thus they will represent what rich people want.
Self-fulfilling.
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I often wonder about this. How liquid are these coins? Ie if it’s a currency then converting every single coin to cash should result in no change to the conversion rate. If exchanging x coin to cash will net about the going rate, but ax results in dramatically less than a*conversion rate then it’s not a currency. If the difference is even further diminished it challenges the notion of it as a store of value. Edit-Thi…
> if it’s a currency then converting every single coin to cash should result in no change to the conversion rate Is that how it works for currency? I would think that if people tried to sell every single Euro for USD, the conversion rate would absolutely change.
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There is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy that predicts exactly this happening. It was written in 1867. When reading articles like this I sometimes feel like the only thing we can learn from history is that we do not learn from history.
I think it's a bit more complicated. We just arrived a little while ago in late-stage capitalism (around 2007 I reckon?), so now looking forward it's either revolution or back to feudalism.
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There seem to be a lot of similarities between crypto and growth stocks that are held by founders with > 15% ownership. Similar to early stage investors who have essentially zero cost basis, early BTC holders have zero cost basis when BTC was pennies each versus late stage current investors paying in at $60,000 for each BTC. For early BTC holders its easy to diamond hand. There are a lot of similarities for sure betw…
> For early BTC holders its easy to diamond hand That's not true, say your investment of a few dollars is now $1k. And the price is popping and just dropped 30% in one day? Would you sell for the profit? What if that investment got to 10k? 100k? People sell at some point. I'd argue it's incredibly hard to diamond hand for early holders, that is why there are more stories of people selling their coin for cheap rather…
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Can't it still be fucked with via regulation? eg China banning it outright etc.
Yep. That’s the thing that crypto supporters just seem to ignore: it requires an infrastructure that is owned and controlled by a higher power. Namely, the internet. In the end, the government has the power to easily shut this entire thing down. It only exists because they let it.
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> Soooo. . . you're saying a tiny fraction of the population controls the vast majority of the resource? You mean just like every other major resource on the planet? :) I understand the need to try to dismiss this problem, specially from those who have a dog in the race, but the dream of having a magical pseudo-currency that solves all problems and unexplainably makes everyone richer and richer just falls out flat if…
> magical pseudo-currency that solves all problems and unexplainably makes everyone richer and richer That's not what's exciting about bitcoin. What's exciting is that it is the first digital, global money that isn't protected by the proof of violence of the state. The US dollar is the world reserve currency because the United States is the best in the world at deploying destructive power, and the British and French…
I completely agree that the US govt and all super powers before it have made many mistakes, and shed much blood.
But the world isn't a utopian bubble free of conflict. The US military doesn't bestow value to the dollar because it goes around nuking every country in sight...it bestows value because it this huge potential of force keeps more peace than we would otherwise have. It's the same rationale for why a 51% attack on bitcoin is so unlikely: those with the ability to attack, also have the most to lose. Mutually assured destruction was not a new concept that started and ended with the cold war. It's fundamentally game theoretic and is why cooperative strategies are so powerful.
If you take into consideration all of the atrocities of the past 50 years, even the truly horrific scars on the US military industrial complex, this has been the most peaceful and prosperous period in all of humanity by a large margin. Could it be better? Of course, and we should strive for that.
But the same underlying reasons that the dollar is considered safe are the same forces that allow bitcoin to be successful. The fact that the world has come together and cooperated on a massive information sharing network called the internet is an example of something that, ignoring the tech advancements, would have been unfathomable mere centuries ago.
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> 50+ miners is also well enough to prevent any 51% attack That number sounds trivial for even a very wealthy private individual to get them each in a vulnerable position. For example, how many are in China or the U.S.’s reach? Because that means literally two people, Xi and POTUS, could round them up and effect a change. (Not saying they would. But a damning vulnerability for a libertarian ideal.)
>POTUS We still don't live in a dictatorship, the President alone can't do this.
One can imagine scenarios where the President would have the power, motivation and even duty to do this, e.g. in times of war or other exigent circumstances. Point is, this sort of concentration opens up Bitcoin to concrete routes of attack which were previously purely hypothetical.
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> The government can print USD for themselves, effectively stealing money from everyone through inflation. Not quite. The only people bitten by inflation in the long run are those who stockpile cash and intend to perpetually live off capital gains without contributing anything to society. Meanwhile, the vast majority, which are either salaried employees or own businesses, see both their income and expenditures adjust…
AKA stealing from the elderly to fund today’s excesses.
The Techspot article is a summary of this Bloomberg piece: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-25/bitcoin-s... which is itself reporting on this paper from the NBER: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29396/w293...
Interesting quotes from the first section of the paper: "We first document that 90% of transaction volume on the Bitcoin blockchain is not tied to economically meaningful activities but is the byproduct of the Bitcoin protocol design as well as the preference of many participants for anonymity." "We show that the Bitcoin mining capacity is highly concentrated and has been for the last five years. The top 10% of miner…
Their work is nonsense. They assume address=single investor, which is not the case. That large address that has hundreds of thousands of bitcoin on it? It could be a whale, sure. It could also be Bitfinex's cold storage wallet representing tens of thousands of individual investors.