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Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

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Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#111

Post by matheusmoreira »

theturtletalks wrote: post #103
matheusmoreira wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no benefits to mining bitcoin specifically. You're right about that, it buys us nothing. Wouldn't mind even more energy being spent to secure the Monero blockchain though. Also, scams are only common in the smart contract networks. People create useless shitcoins and spam telegram groups in order to generate some quick hype and exit with as much money as possible. I'd certainly like to believe nobody would be…

The cost users are paying is the cost of decentralization. One single entity will always be cheaper than blockchain decentralization, but the cost can be spread across millions or billions of users. Now if the cost is worth it remains to be seen.

Bitcoin is not decentralized. You need specialized hardware to mine bitcoin and the entry costs are enormous. One CPU one vote is history. As a result there are relatively few miners. Just look at how much bitcoin suffered when countries started banning mining activities. A truly decentralized coin would simply shrug off attempts at regulation because there are so many independent nodes no single country could possibly ban them all. What happened instead is one country banning BTC put a stop to a huge chunk of the network.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#112

Post by blackshaw »

unobatbayar wrote: post #89
beaconstudios wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a meaningful service cost, it's just paid for by mining. Environmentally there's also a massive cost, one that is not offset by the benefits bitcoin brings - which is primarily financial speculation and scams. Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory.

How is financial speculation and scams an environmental cost?

It's not the speculation and scams that are an environmental cost, it's the fact that the Bitcoin network uses more energy than a medium-sized country.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#113

Post by krzyk »

Darmody wrote: post #59
camjohnson26 wrote: post #43

For all the hate Bitcoin gets because it’s obviously in a bubble market, can we at least agree that it is an astounding engineering achievement that an anonymous individual and a small group of researchers were able to build a network capable of transacting billions of dollars of value with only 2 service incidents in 14 years? All without any meaningful service costs and no hacking of the network, despite huge incen…

Using more energy than many many countries with populations of millions isn't meaningful?

Bitcoin mining can be easily checked for energy usage and that's the problem.

But do you know how much energy is used for printing money?

Or for agriculture (take into account production of equipment and fertilizer), car production, getting oil from ground into cars?

Or by all ACs in the world (which are just a nice-to-have, just like bitcoin)?

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#114

Post by spinny »

brokencode wrote: post #97
notch656a wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantify the environment cost that has been borne by bitcoin and now compare it to the cost by overheating or cooling houses (except perhaps a few elderly or infants, no one needs a house to stay within 60-80 degree band, you can survive with much less heating/cooling energy usage). Then explain to us how anyone living in a comfortable room temperature heated home that complains about bitcoin isn't a hypocrite, using…

Of course we could live at 60 degrees in the winter, but most people would agree that their lives are meaningfully improved by increasing the temperature to closer to 70-72. On the other hand, Bitcoin provides no meaningful benefit to society compared to other currency. The only real benefits of Bitcoin are that it makes ransomware easier to accomplish (which is bad for most people) and that it has made some people a…

> On the other hand, Bitcoin provides no meaningful benefit to society compared to other currency.

Decentralization and censorship resistance does not exist in the fiat world. Ask some greek people if Bitcoin was useful to buy food.

Because it's easy for you to open a bank account and have you money secured, it doesn't mean that other people have this luxury.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#115

Post by brokencode »

notch656a wrote: post #106
brokencode wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course we could live at 60 degrees in the winter, but most people would agree that their lives are meaningfully improved by increasing the temperature to closer to 70-72. On the other hand, Bitcoin provides no meaningful benefit to society compared to other currency. The only real benefits of Bitcoin are that it makes ransomware easier to accomplish (which is bad for most people) and that it has made some people a…

Crypto provides extraordinary meaning to many people in society compared to other currency. Argentinian freelancers use it to get paid, for instance due to systemic issues with financial transaction in their country. One big one to me is buying precious metals online with >lives are meaningfully improved by increasing the temperature to closer to 70-72. Well I could say "nuh uh" and then you could say about bitcoin "…

That’s a fair point. We should be including the cost of pollution and climate change with the price of energy, and if we were, then I’d care a lot less about the energy use for what I consider nonessential.

That is unfortunately not the world we live in though, and probably never will be due to political reasons.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#116

Post by kebman »

beaconstudios wrote: post #54
camjohnson26 wrote: post #43

For all the hate Bitcoin gets because it’s obviously in a bubble market, can we at least agree that it is an astounding engineering achievement that an anonymous individual and a small group of researchers were able to build a network capable of transacting billions of dollars of value with only 2 service incidents in 14 years? All without any meaningful service costs and no hacking of the network, despite huge incen…

There is a meaningful service cost, it's just paid for by mining. Environmentally there's also a massive cost, one that is not offset by the benefits bitcoin brings - which is primarily financial speculation and scams. Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory.

Do you have a measure against the banking system? If you do, then I'd love to see how Bitcoin is worse.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#117

Post by notch656a »

Guvante wrote: post #99
cft wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory. Do you have a source for this fact? It might survive the 50 year old fiat dollar experiment. Until 50 years ago, there has not been a currency that wasn't backed up by something that was beyond the government

Don't believe the lies they say about fiat currencies in crypto circles. Currency is way more complicated than they lead you to believe. After all fractional reserve banking has existed since before currency did. And if you have fractional reserve banking you aren't "back up by something" unless you count the credit of the bank as something. Given that is the literal definition of fiat currency (backed by the full fa…

>After all fractional reserve banking has existed since before currency did.

We don't even have fractional reserve banking. There is no reserve ratio, it's 0. Bernanke's own published book states it is only fractional reserve banking when it is required to keep a fractional reserve.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#118

Post by beardedman »

camjohnson26 wrote: post #43

For all the hate Bitcoin gets because it’s obviously in a bubble market, can we at least agree that it is an astounding engineering achievement that an anonymous individual and a small group of researchers were able to build a network capable of transacting billions of dollars of value with only 2 service incidents in 14 years? All without any meaningful service costs and no hacking of the network, despite huge incen…

> without any meaningful service costs

Wow, that's bold. Do you mean service cost to the anonymous individual? Or overall service cost? Because if it's the latter, I think you might be very sorely mistaken.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#119

Post by beaconstudios »

notch656a wrote: post #95
beaconstudios wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You criticise bitcoin for using more electricity than Ireland while using disproportionately high levels of coal power usage, and yet you live in a house. Hypocrite!" This isn't a cogent argument. Yes, overheating or overcooling houses is also bad. If AI training used as much electricity as Ireland I'd be critical of that too.

Heating and cooling uses way more electricity than Ireland. This message is for the hypocrites who complain about bitcoin while keeping their house above 60 when it's cold, or those running A/C below 80 when its hot. Y'all are wasting way more energy than bitcoin, while many of you simultaneously complain about bitcoin. >This isn't a cogent argument. Yes, overheating or overcooling houses is also bad. If AI training…

I mainly just want to ensure the earth doesn't burn. Yes people should ideally not be overheating their home (could easily be done using smart meters if electric companies weren't incentivised to ignore it) and many other things like reducing fossil fuel usage. Bitcoin consumes massive amounts of energy for basically no benefit except pure money wonkery, which is no benefit at all. It's a net negative in every possible way.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#120

Post by cft »

Guvante wrote: post #99
cft wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory. Do you have a source for this fact? It might survive the 50 year old fiat dollar experiment. Until 50 years ago, there has not been a currency that wasn't backed up by something that was beyond the government

Don't believe the lies they say about fiat currencies in crypto circles. Currency is way more complicated than they lead you to believe. After all fractional reserve banking has existed since before currency did. And if you have fractional reserve banking you aren't "back up by something" unless you count the credit of the bank as something. Given that is the literal definition of fiat currency (backed by the full fa…

My statement was that the currency (in this example, USD) until 1971 has always been at least partially backed up by something beyond control of any single government (gold). That was the whole reason of Nixon's speech and abolishing gold convertibility on August 15, 1971 [1]. This regime existed since at least Ancient Greece, but probably longer. I have no empirical reason to believe that the currency system of last 50 years is more stable than the one that existed for 2000+ years ( I think substantially longer).

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRzr1QU6K1o

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