41–50 of 94 posts
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With settlement time of 60 minutes Bitcoin was never designed as true currency, but more as a holdable asset. While some of the critiques are valid, as system matures, there will be less and less of it. Crypto is here to stay.
The first line of the Bitcoin white paper: > A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Now, if you want to say that it was badly designed for its purpose, that is a different matter.
And it successfully achieved this specific goal, however it never claimed it is a good solution for micro/small payments, which is a requirement for "normal currency". Payments of small amounts require small fees and quick settlement time, neither of which Bitcoin has by design.
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PoW already brought us to huge wealth concentration so it is not the solution either. This is one of the hard-not-so-talked problems of cryptos at the moment, and I can't see how to solve it.
PoW tries to minimizes wealth concentration by imposing a competitive cost on obtaining coins. Of course it cannot reduce the wealth concentration already present in fiat. It can at best not make it much worse (as PoS does). PoW still suffers from wealth concentration due to varying block subsidies over time, which is why I'm a strong supporter of uncapped emissions like 1 coin per second forever, which gives no adva…
From here: https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/crypto-absurd.html > There are no fundamentals to any crypto token and it’s discounted future cashflows are all strictly zero and thus its present value must be strictly zero. This is demonstrably false. Cash has no future cash flow, yet its value is clearly not zero. The way I see it, the value of an asset depends on how desirable it is to market participants (demand), as…
I see an argument like this in every crypto thread. Come on. You should know that this is a political argument and that, in the US at least, we're pretty damn divided. Talk about stuff that you can plausibly predict at least. You can't predict worldwide economic failure _inevitably_ leading to increased use of crypto. Full stop.
From my perspective, that probably does a lot of damage and doing anything other than leading, governing, non-violent protesting (in person) will not help. The wild west of complete lack of regulation over the economy is a scary and probably dangerous thing. As someone who actually _enjoys_ government regulation (gasp!), I hope you realize that this turn isn't at all likely in the western world from my point of view. Further, if your arguments only apply to countries with authoritarian regimes, please say so.
You may say "well hey, but it's perfect for people living under authoritarian regimes tho!" to which I say, cool - let them get after it. Does it do _anything_ (other than lose/make me money) that I couldn't do with my current currency in the US? No? Okay, then that's a terrible idea.
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There is no safe way to wind down mining. As mining becomes unprofitable, mining equipment will be shut down. But it will still exist, and it will be in the hands of people desperate for cash. This means that the price of 51% attack will drop massively, and that completely undermines the safety that PoW provides. A large drop in price followed by a large drop in mining completely destroys the security of bitcoin.
The price of a 51% relative to the total marketcap won't change drastically (only moderately due to wider availability of hardware), and that's what security is based on, not the absolute cost of a 51% attack.
From here: https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/crypto-absurd.html > There are no fundamentals to any crypto token and it’s discounted future cashflows are all strictly zero and thus its present value must be strictly zero. This is demonstrably false. Cash has no future cash flow, yet its value is clearly not zero. The way I see it, the value of an asset depends on how desirable it is to market participants (demand), as…
Well of course it will when enough people (globally) decide to have a literal revolution (including the crime and punishment that entails) after realizing that neo-libertarian ideals are _obviously_ the only plausible way to maintain a society. /s I see an argument like this in every crypto thread. Come on. You should know that this is a political argument and that, in the US at least, we're pretty damn divided. Talk…
My only issue is that investment in the traditional markets is subject to government-caused inflation.
This was only the case since Nixon. I would love to go back to stricter regulation such as the gold standard. It is a simple way to enforce financial sustainability.
The US never reverted the "temporarily" suspended convertibilty of the USD to gold. Bitcoin is a reaction to that - gold for a digital age. It IS a form of nonviolent protest. It is scarcity through complete accounting and messaging.
Web3 has many reasons it could fail. I choose to be optimistic. > The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works. https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
> What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.
This could have been written last week about the metaverse, or the experiences we faced with the pandemic. That article is quite on point in retrospect. What Clifford forgot is that replacing salespeople and customer support with nothing is valuable because it cuts costs. A CD-ROM (or or iPad app, to update the analogy) sucks as a replacement for a real teacher, but it is a hell of a lot cheaper...
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Every single one of those dollars came out of the pockets of somebody who lost money because they invested. You got lucky. The majority of people did not.
Yeah, no thank you, I don't come to Hacker News for crypto talk, the bias is comical and the talking points are recycled as a new article every week (scams!, speculation!, hype!, wasted electricity!, tether!) All of those have rebuttals, but I don't want to get into the politics of it, there's plenty of that already. Can we please talk about the fucking tech here? I'm talking about what's made with it, not some sort…
> https://github.com/OffcierCia/DeFi-Developer-Road-Map
Background and development information, no applications. This link, by itself, has a massive number of links.
> https://github.com/bkrem/awesome-solidity
This links is later duplicated, but is also mostly background and developer information. There is one section titled "deployed on Ethereum mainnet" which seems to be mostly dev tools again
- rarity, an MMO (example UI: https://raritymmo.com/). That's kind of cool, if unlikely to be monetizable.
- ronin, a sidechain implementation to support another game called "Axie Infinity".
> https://github.com/bekatom/awesome-ethereum
Another giant linkfarm. Has a "DAPPS" section. Again mostly dev tools or tools for interacting with Ethereum itself, but a few things that look like applications:
- a decentralized crowdfunding platform: err, doesn't the money eventually go to a particular endpoint? What's the point of decentralizing this.
- zeronet decentralized websites: bitcoin doesn't provide compute infrastructure or a high-bandwidth distribution mechanism (bittorrent is used for this), so...what does this actually _do_? auth can be handled by TLS.
- augur: platform for prediction markets. interesting idea, but ... ultimately the actual result has to be certified?
I'm out of time but in general I haven't seen a simple example of what problems a decentralized ledger solves, ignoring all the technical issues like energy use and 51% attacks.