421–430 of 486 posts
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...the next generation trusted DOGE to the tune of 900%+ growth this year. It feels foolish to be long USD at the moment.
Why on earth would anyone be "long USD". The fed has had a policy of 1%+ inflation for decades. It is designed to go down in value over time.
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The people you consider to be central authorities in Bitcoin can not and are not generally trusted to do the right thing. The biggest Bitcoin miner is Bitmain and they have repeatedly tried to subvert Bitcoin such as through the creation of Bitcoin Cash and attempting numerous times to pull off hard forks or oppose updates to Bitcoin. The fact that those efforts have failed, despite them being the largest miner, is p…
Great answer and totally right. There also is no "central authority" since anyone can become a validator. Bitmain, while absolutely huge producer of hardware and a miner, is not the only manufacturer of the hardware. Even better, there is a giant financial incentive to build the best miner [1]. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/15/square-ceo-jack-dorsey-says-...
By this reasoning, there is no central authority in the dollar system since anyone could become chair of the federal reserve. The odds for an individual without specific hardware to actually mine (and then becoming a validator) a single block are extremely thin. (Granted it's more likely than becoming the chair of the Fed, but less likely than becoming the head of the central bank of Malta for a citizen of that country …)
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If Bitcoin is comparable to USD, then there's nothing justifying its use over USD, with its associated ludicrous waste of energy and environmental impact.
The government can print USD for themselves, effectively stealing money from everyone through inflation. With bitcoin, even "small group controlling 90%" can't do that.
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Great answer and totally right. There also is no "central authority" since anyone can become a validator. Bitmain, while absolutely huge producer of hardware and a miner, is not the only manufacturer of the hardware. Even better, there is a giant financial incentive to build the best miner [1]. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/15/square-ceo-jack-dorsey-says-...
> since anyone can become a validator By this reasoning, there is no central authority in the dollar system since anyone could become chair of the federal reserve. The odds for an individual without specific hardware to actually mine (and then becoming a validator) a single block are extremely thin. (Granted it's more likely than becoming the chair of the Fed, but less likely than becoming the head of the central ban…
Being a Bitcoin validator requires nothing particularly powerful in terms of hardware. A cell phone won't cut it, but a 10 year old laptop is enough to be a validator.
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> since anyone can become a validator By this reasoning, there is no central authority in the dollar system since anyone could become chair of the federal reserve. The odds for an individual without specific hardware to actually mine (and then becoming a validator) a single block are extremely thin. (Granted it's more likely than becoming the chair of the Fed, but less likely than becoming the head of the central ban…
You are confusing a validator with a miner. While most miners are validators, not all validators are miners, in fact the overwhelmingly vast majority of validators are not miners. Being a Bitcoin validator requires nothing particularly powerful in terms of hardware. A cell phone won't cut it, but a 10 year old laptop is enough to be a validator.
For more information, this is a good explainer:
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> since anyone can become a validator By this reasoning, there is no central authority in the dollar system since anyone could become chair of the federal reserve. The odds for an individual without specific hardware to actually mine (and then becoming a validator) a single block are extremely thin. (Granted it's more likely than becoming the chair of the Fed, but less likely than becoming the head of the central ban…
You are confusing a validator with a miner. While most miners are validators, not all validators are miners, in fact the overwhelmingly vast majority of validators are not miners. Being a Bitcoin validator requires nothing particularly powerful in terms of hardware. A cell phone won't cut it, but a 10 year old laptop is enough to be a validator.
The only “validation” in the bitcoin protocol occurs at mining time (and ironically enough, it's not even mandatory so invalid blocks have been mined by Antpool before), everything else is just social convention (and assume that laypeople can have access to an untampered bitcoin executable: what if Google Chrome, or Windows, or whatever software running on the same machine replaced it with an alternative binary on behalf of the NSA?).
As a side note, Bitcoin, like all p2p protocols, is extremely brittle if run only by benevolent individuals. It's only secure because it's more of a federated ecosystem of players with pockets deep enough and a relational network between one another to cooperate.
For bitcoin, this federated network is fairly adversarial, and nobody ever managed to get a dangerous leadership on it. But if you look at Ethereum, you'll see a very hierarchical social structure, where Vitalik & Al. have almost complete power over the so called “distributed” network. (rolling back transactions, or completely changing the protocol at the expense of the miners with their move to proof of stake).
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The original capital is not taxed, capital gains is.
Where do you think the original capital came from? When you buy shares of AAPL, you paid ordinary rates on income which you used to buy the shares.
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Where is the self-fulfilling prophecy? Nowhere do I talk about my actions, I only talk about reality.
I may have misunderstood, but it sounded like you were saying because you're not rich, your opinion won't matter and so you won't opine. 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 am not who you are asking but I want to chime in: the problem is not missing regulation, the problem is the rich decide on regulation and this regulation helps keep them rich. Specific examples: UK capital gains tax is lower than income taxes. This means if you are born in to a wealthy family and given a £1MM index fund, you will pay less yearly tax on your capital gains while chilling at home all day than someone…
> the problem is not missing regulation, the problem is the rich decide on regulation and this regulation helps keep them rich. Ok - so the rich have decided on regulations which are not the ones that are best for everyone. So…missing regulations? By definition, if we have the wrong regulations, then we’re missing the correct ones. Capital gains taxes are lower for a specific reason: the capital that was initially in…
That's an excuse, not a meaningful explanation. When I pay sales tax at the store, the money I pay it with has already been taxed when I was paid my wages.
These laws benefit the ultra-rich more so than everybody else for the simple reason that most of the former' income is capital gains, while most of the income for average people is wages.
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Depending on your definitions this might or might no be true but it also might be totally irrelevant. There is a protocol and system specification. There are implementations of that specifications. There is a distributed system running those implementations. And the distributed system has a state. Each of those can change and each of those or a combination of them could arguably be called Bitcoin. If everyone would r…
This is like saying because some people own the majority of printing presses, money is worthless. Money has worth because people accept it in exchange for goods and services. Bitcoin has worth because people accept it in exchange for goods and services. It’s not the miners that create value, it’s the merchants. If miners start some fork they’ll leave the main blockchain, which will run fine without them. And they hav…
It's been quite educational watching the whole cryptocurrency community re-invent economics 101 and find out the problem has never been technical, always been political.