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Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

isbitcoindownorjustme.com

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Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#141

Post by theturtletalks »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #111
theturtletalks wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 possib…

I mean decentralization in the "proving ownership" way. Right now, a bank can be the central authority on how much money you have in your account. With Bitcoin, people collectively determine how much each person has through the blockchain. A bank doing it will always be cheaper, but then the bank has too much control. How much are people willing to pay to make sure one entity does not have too much control or power?

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#142

Post by SantalBlush »

lowkey wrote: post #129
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.

Tell me you don’t understand the problem Bitcoin solves without telling me.

Bitcoin does solve a problem, but it's a theoretical problem, not a practical one.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#143

Post by notch656a »

Yuioup wrote: post #130
anderber wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory Keep in mind that not all Cryptocurrency use mining. Nano, for example, is zero fee, environmentally friendly coin that is incredibly fast. Bitcoin gets all the talk but there are some great and interesting tech out there. Get yourself a wallet ( https://natrium.io/ ) and I'll send you some so you can try it out. https://nano.org/

I keep hearing bitcoin apologists saying "Bitcoin is environmentally unfriendly but... check this out" as if that would solve the record temperatures we're having at the moment. How about we stop using cryptocurrency completely. Time for the UN to get together and get this banned.

You can't ban it. I mean you can say you've banned it, but you can't ban crypto. It's way harder than banning the drugs found everywhere in the world (I guess not a lot in Singapore, you willing to start chopping heads off for your goal?)

The best you can do is decide you don't like it, tell people not to use it, choose not to accept it, not to buy it, and rally your friend not to. That's all cool with me. But you can't stop crypto. If it dies it will be because something that replaces the advantages it presents comes along and people can't help but switch over to that.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#144

Post by dan-robertson »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #45
dan-robertson wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. That is, why do market caps matter here?

I don't necessarily agree with it, but market cap is essentially the standard metric for how we measure value in our economy. If Apple goes down 10% people care because they're worth trillions and lots of people lose money. If a mid-size company goes down 10% a lot fewer people care.

I understand what market cap is but I don’t understand why it is relevant to your point. Apple is the same order of magnitude as bitcoin but you claim the media would care about a 10% move in the former but not the latter.

Firstly it doesn’t make sense to me because bitcoin isn’t a company, nor is it made of them so this doesn’t feel like a like-for-like comparison. Secondly it doesn’t make sense to me because I don’t understand why market cap should be related to media reactions to volatility.

I don’t see what cohesive theory underlies your claim that a big ‘market cap’ is required for the media to care about volatility.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#145

Post by cbxyp »

Yuioup wrote: post #130
anderber wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory Keep in mind that not all Cryptocurrency use mining. Nano, for example, is zero fee, environmentally friendly coin that is incredibly fast. Bitcoin gets all the talk but there are some great and interesting tech out there. Get yourself a wallet ( https://natrium.io/ ) and I'll send you some so you can try it out. https://nano.org/

I keep hearing bitcoin apologists saying "Bitcoin is environmentally unfriendly but... check this out" as if that would solve the record temperatures we're having at the moment. How about we stop using cryptocurrency completely. Time for the UN to get together and get this banned.

It's afraid.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#146

Post by kentonv »

kebman wrote: post #116
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.

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

According to this: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/cost-per-transaction

Bitcoin costs $150-$300 per transaction. Unless I'm misunderstanding something?

Needless to say, nothing in the regular banking system comes anywhere near those kinds of costs.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#147

Post by camjohnson26 »

vanusa wrote: post #79
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…

All without any meaningful service costs No we can't, because there's no way you can dismiss the climate costs (and the impact on energy prices and chip supply) as not meaningful. It is this blue-sky pollyanna-ism among crypto advocates which generates much of the "hate" against it, btw.

Those are externalities, not service costs. Hal Finney didn’t have to pay a dollar to keep the network running, the users pay all the costs, and the users are miners or accounts.

Nuclear bombs can be cheap and bad at the same time, the 2 things aren’t mutually exclusive. If you can’t admit the nuclear bomb was an engineering achievement because it had externalities, then that’s short sighted.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#148

Post by nmz »

Yuioup wrote: post #130
anderber wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory Keep in mind that not all Cryptocurrency use mining. Nano, for example, is zero fee, environmentally friendly coin that is incredibly fast. Bitcoin gets all the talk but there are some great and interesting tech out there. Get yourself a wallet ( https://natrium.io/ ) and I'll send you some so you can try it out. https://nano.org/

I keep hearing bitcoin apologists saying "Bitcoin is environmentally unfriendly but... check this out" as if that would solve the record temperatures we're having at the moment. How about we stop using cryptocurrency completely. Time for the UN to get together and get this banned.

The problem is mining, its a good idea, but bitcoin is basically an alpha project that is being treated as a fully fledged solution.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#149

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

SantalBlush wrote: post #137
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If bitcoin's benefits do not offset the "massive costs" for you (because you're likely coming from a first-world country), it doesn't mean that these benefits do not exist for people who were not so lucky as you are.

Carbon pollution is not just a one-time cost, it is a debt that carries a massive interest rate with it that will be paid for generations. So whatever benefits someone else might reap from Bitcoin, it certainly isn't worth it to me.

People use way more energy for dumb heating. In my region humans can't survive in winter without it. There is no reason why mining rigs can't be used for 'smart' heating, heat being a byproduct of mining.

It is not done currently only because the energy use of bitcoin is so miniscule compared to other uses, that it's not even worthy to bother yet. Down the road, it'll likely change, but currently complaints about 'massive costs to the environment' are mostly virtue signalling.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#150

Post by matheusmoreira »

krzyk wrote: post #135
matheusmoreira wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you mean? When it was created, it was idealized as the digital equivalent to cash. Totally private and anonymous so you can do whatever you want without some bank or government monitoring you or taking issue. It was supposed to be your money, not your social credit at the bank that the authorities allow you to use for approved purposes. Bitcoin totally failed to become all that. The ledger is public and per…

> Bitcoin totally failed to become all that. The ledger is public and perfectly traceable so it's even worse than money at the bank. Well, but that's not about "not regulated", just not totally anonymous. But it if you think about it is better than money in the bank. Because that can be traced only by governments, and here average Joe can do the tracing. So it is at least more egalitarian.

Anonymity is a prerequisite to being unregulated. Monero for example is apparently resistant to US sanctions. They tried to sanction a wallet and ended up sanctioning a transaction hash.

https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.txt

> Digital Currency Address - XMR 5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207887e2af87322c651ea1a873c5b25b7ffae456c320;

https://localmonero.co/blocks/search/5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207...

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