181–190 of 202 posts
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>a solution that does not involve moving away from autonomous ledgers that use cryptoeconomics to maintain consensus. What are your proposed solutions to identified problems then?
Can you give me an example of a problem with blockchain, that you think is intractable, because it's inherent to the data structure?
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In that article he conflates theoretical trustworthiness (software verifiability) with practical trustworthiness (system comprehensibility to a supermajority of voters). Blockchains might be made to work in a verifiable way, but they won't work for enough of the voting base to trust that they do in fact operate correctly. The entire point of voting is to provide a way to pick something that virtually everyone can agr…
"Blockchains are too complex for virtually everyone to understand, and so most people can't agree that they're a fair way to decide on things" Almost nobody understands any of the complex systems in their life (e.g. banking, software) but it doesn't stop people trusting them. People have trust in these systems because they reliably produce the desired output not because they understand how they work.
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It’s not? To me that sounds like the only one on which basis I’d agree with limiting our freedom to do what ever we want.. because it actually may hurt others. That is, if we assume that to be true.
Is it? This is an article stating that the blockchain (and by extension crypto) is a crappy technology by some random dude. It's not Biden who wrote it, it's some random dude. So who exactly is limiting your freedom? If a random dude can limit your freedom with a mediocre Medium article, then I'm afraid you don't really have much freedom to start with.
Satoshi is not limiting my freedom because I can opt not to use his work. Net Freedom would be lost if I would force Satoshi to make BTC according to my vision.
I transfered some BTC around back in the day, order sushi, pay a fried, order Raspberry Pi stuff at the Pi Hut. It feels like magic so I'm a believer.
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> Having the promises of blockchain sold to us for years now without a single, useful purpose for it in sight other than, well, cryptobros. the issue is that we show the things being made and hn calls them all scams and ponzis and fraud. we show the rates adoption, and the growth in use and hn says its all speculation and fraud and needs to be made illegal. we point out that crypto is in many ways doing better than o…
Adoption... Bitcoin has roughly 500K transactions per day with an estimated 80% of them being trades (with an estimated 77% of those trades going through the "big three" exchanges). Visa has 1B transactions per day and virtually every single one of them is someone purchasing a good or service. Credit cards were "invented" in 1951. By 1970 51% of US households had at least one. All happening well before the internet.…
Source for this?
Also, all of these transaction numbers are for on-chain transactions. They don't include layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network. Given that the Lightning Network is built for micro-transactions, where sats can literally be streamed to a creator, while someone listens to a podcast for example, it's possible (though impossible to definitively confirm?) that on-chain AND off-chain transactions already exceed credit card services.
You have to understand that Bitcoin (the blockchain network) isn't trying to be a credit card network. It's a settlement layer/clearing house. Traditionally for a transaction to occur with finality would take days, perhaps weeks to occur. When you make a purchase with a credit card that payment isn't occurring with finality in the banking system. It takes days to "lock in". On Bitcoin it takes 10 minutes and is completely automated and trustless.
The Lightning Network (enabled by the SegWit upgrade) allows for payments to occur instantly, with low fees, and can be used for micro-transactions. The tradeoff to that convenience is it's less secure. This is why you would have a Lightning wallet for your day to day usage, and your "savings account" in cold storage on-chain. You would only use on-chain transactions for big purchases, or to open a Lightning channel.
> Globally we're more connected than ever. It's been 13 years - if bitcoin was actually superior for anything other than speculative trading people would be using it for something other than speculative trading.
It literally is, you're just not paying attention. As already mentioned it is being used to stream payments in podcasts as your listen, it is being used in competitive video games, there are gift card services like Bitrefill,
The Lightning Labs blog does a good job of summarizing the state of the Lightning Network.
https://lightninglabs.substack.com/p/the-flywheel-is-startin...
https://lightninglabs.substack.com/p/the-summer-of-lightning...
More bad takes from people who don't understand the point of Bitcoin and its blockchain. It's all so... tiresome. The fact that the author is comparing to services like Venmo or PayPal really goes to show how much they don't understand about what Bitcoin was built to achieve. Also goes to show that people like the author should also check their financial privilege: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-finan…
Tbf, blockchain is the dark matter of technology. People are never allowed to criticize it without the same, repeated feedback “If that’s what you think blockchain is, then you don’t understand it.” Why doesn’t someone, then, who actually understands their almighty blockchain god, illuminate us, mere mortals, on the wonders of blockchain and how it can be good for society in the foreseeable future. You know what’s re…
> People are never allowed to criticize it without the same, repeated feedback “If that’s what you think blockchain is, then you don’t understand it.”
That's because the criticisms are always the same talking points, all of which have been addressed multiple times ad nauseam. If Bitcoin advocates appear dismissive or opaque it may be that they're exhausted of debunking the same criticisms over and over again, particularly when there's a wealth of information out there to find. Though you have to be willing to leave the anti-Bitcoin media bubble. Perhaps all us Bitcoiners are sufferring from delusions reinforced by confirmation bias, but perhaps you are too?
> Why doesn’t someone, then, who actually understands their almighty blockchain god, illuminate us, mere mortals, on the wonders of blockchain and how it can be good for society in the foreseeable future.
This kind of snark also doesn't help with the above. But if you're actually curious I thought this did a decent job of explaining Bitcoin's blockchain, decentralisation, and trustlessness: https://dergigi.com/2021/01/14/bitcoin-is-time/
> You know what’s really tiresome? Having the promises of blockchain sold to us for years now without a single, useful purpose for it in sight other than, well, cryptobros.
Perhaps you should stop listening to the promises of "blockchain" and "crypto" and instead focus your learning efforts on Bitcoin only... cryptobros be damned. Bitcoiners probably dislike them more than regular folk.
More bad takes from people who don't understand the point of Bitcoin and its blockchain. It's all so... tiresome. The fact that the author is comparing to services like Venmo or PayPal really goes to show how much they don't understand about what Bitcoin was built to achieve. Also goes to show that people like the author should also check their financial privilege: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-finan…
That's awesome! I'm a refugee from Wallachia. My government has collapsed, my currency is destroyed by hyperinflation. How do I use Bitcoin for payments?
As I mentioned, Alex Gladstein has lots of good articles outlining how people in countries that are affected by war, authoritarianism, hyperinflation, or all of the above, use Bitcoin. These are the best articles for that:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-financial-freedo...
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/cubas-bitcoin-revolution
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/can-bitcoin-bring-palest...
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-a-currency-of-de...
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You transfer btc to someone else and they give you your purchase.
How do I transfer that money? I need specifics. I'm a poor peasant from Wallachia, I barely know how to use a smartphone. ELI10. 1. How do I buy the Bitcoin in the first place? My government or bank aren't selling them to me. 2. How do I actually transfer that money?
That doesn't mean Bitcoin isn't already helping millions of people in these types of countries that have unstable currencies, governments, or both, but also have wide spread internet and smartphone adoption.
Read the Alex Gladstein articles I mentioned above.
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> Meanwhile 1.7 billion people around the world do not have a bank account ...therefore we need bitcoin? Is this the new spin? People don't see it's a tech that was invented without a use case? Many people don't have electricity too, what are you talking about?
Have you read a single quote from Satoshi Nakamoto? He's very clear about the use case... many times.
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> Meanwhile 1.7 billion people around the world do not have a bank account. Do you know why the majority of those people don't have bank accounts? Because they have no fucking use for it! They either have no money (how does crypto help those people?) or they use banking services through their family/friends. Do you know what 3.7 billion people don't have? Access to internet.
Everyone has use for a way to store their wealth, no matter how small. Economies that use money, in whatever form, are much more efficient than those based on barter.
> Do you know what 3.7 billion people don't have? Access to internet.
Yes, Bitcoin won't help people without access to the internet. There are still hundreds of millions (maybe billions?) of people that DO have access to the internet, but don't have a reliable way to store their wealth, either because of irresponsible governments or central banks.
You know what governments and central banks can do to the security and issuance of Bitcoin? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
And that's very valuable to some people.
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Adoption... Bitcoin has roughly 500K transactions per day with an estimated 80% of them being trades (with an estimated 77% of those trades going through the "big three" exchanges). Visa has 1B transactions per day and virtually every single one of them is someone purchasing a good or service. Credit cards were "invented" in 1951. By 1970 51% of US households had at least one. All happening well before the internet.…
> Adoption... Bitcoin has roughly 500K transactions per day with an estimated 80% of them being trades (with an estimated 77% of those trades going through the "big three" exchanges). Source for this? Also, all of these transaction numbers are for on-chain transactions. They don't include layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network. Given that the Lightning Network is built for micro-transactions, where sats can lit…
Generally speaking, L2s are interesting because they all make compromises from the principals of blockchain (as you mention - but that's for another day). It's been interesting, to say the least, to watch some of the fundamental definitions and principals such as "decentralized" and "secure" get redefined over the years.
I use statistics for Bitcoin transaction volume in these comments for several reasons:
1) Bitcoin is more widely known than any other blockchain based technology.
2) It's (essentially) only used for payments so transaction volume is more easily directly compared to other uses. For example, Ethereum has roughly double the daily transaction rate of Bitcoin but it's not clear to me how to easily breakout payments for direct comparison to Bitcoin, Visa, etc.
3) I'd use Lightning transaction volumes if I could find them. Anywhere. I've researched this quite a bit and all I can find are posts like the ones you provided (from Lightning Labs themselves) or from places like the Dailyhodl, etc talking about how big all of the markets Lightning is going to take over are, how much potential there is, etc. The typical "by 2030 we'll be doing (insert astronomical number)".
If you have a reputable/reliable source for the number of transactions on the Lightning Network I'd love to see it. The amount of bitcoin on it, the number of channels, the number of nodes, etc make for some impressive looking graphs but I suspect the transaction volume (to me the only real number that matters in terms of adoption) is still extremely low. If it wasn't everyone in the blockchain sphere would be hyping that too.
Let's circle back - I use blockchain at my current startup. I had 200 GPUs mining Ethereum in 2017. I'm not anti-blockchain by any means. I bring up what I consider to be valid criticisms because the bubble inside a bubble wrapped in an echo chamber present in blockchain today isn't doing anyone any favors. The reality is that (zooming out) after 10 years blockchain is still a toy. If it has any chance of ever living up to the promise and hype at least some people need to step out of the bubble and ask themselves why it's actually been one of the most slowly adopted technologies in the last 100 years.