71–80 of 227 posts
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Because there are no fees or middlemen in crypto. Never mind that it costs $50 worth in fees to send a penny on Ethereum, and I need to convert my money to casino tokens on some scammy exchange first.
I regularly send Bitcoin txes for sub $1. I buy with 0 fees on strike. Strike supports lightning withdrawals, too so I can withdraw and spend with 0 in fees basically immediately.
Cryptocurrencies have never claimed they address the hardest parts of financial inclusion. Cryptocurrencies solve the issue of trust. > We need to keep track of our customers’ account balances. Right. That's what the blockchain is able to do. It can assert that you, who says you have 1 bitcoin in your wallet, actually really have 1 bitcoin in your wallet (assuming no attack vectors such as 51% attack). > We need them…
Yes, but I think a lot of the meta narratives around crypto currency (used to draw in fresh liquidity) are based around financial "inclusion" - as in bank the unbanked, and own your own keys etc. But of course anyone that has interacted with crypto currencies, or more importantly the exchanges knows that's not really true. Mostly it's a very efficient means of taking money from the poor and diverting it to the rich.…
Anything that is designed to be deflationary, like Bitcoin, is inherently going to increase income inequality and harm the poor to the benefit of the rich.
Crypto crowdsourced the Ukrainian war effort faster and easier than the fiat rails did. I don't even need to list a million other counter points that have been posted to every HN crypto post since time immemorial, but that was a de-facto benefit of crypto over legacy finance.
Nonsense. Sending USD or EUR (or any other currency) to Ukraine is very simple. You can go to their funding page, enter your credit card, and you're done. Then they've got money they can actually use. What are they doing with all the crypto? Did they convert it to fiat? Is it just sitting there? The only reason so many cryptos were sent is because there a lot of people who don't know what to do with their cryptos, th…
Cryptocurrencies have never claimed they address the hardest parts of financial inclusion. Cryptocurrencies solve the issue of trust. > We need to keep track of our customers’ account balances. Right. That's what the blockchain is able to do. It can assert that you, who says you have 1 bitcoin in your wallet, actually really have 1 bitcoin in your wallet (assuming no attack vectors such as 51% attack). > We need them…
Trust is the biggest issue with cryptocurrency. I can trust my bank + the government to keep my money safe. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, I can’t trust an exchange and keeping your own wallet is extremely risky.
The very same old scam banks have made in the '300 invented bank notes to be exchanged instead of gold...
And probably that is the real reason behind crypto: some Bug&Powerful in the IT decide that's about time to kick out banks substituting them with something that's the same but in other hands and safer for the real master, BTW It's not just me saying that but also the Geneva Report 2019 "Banking Disrupted?" [1]. Unfortunately I fear most will not understand in time and actual IT "pseudo-free but still some freedom is possible" will be long gone...
[1] https://voxeu.org/content/banking-disrupted-financial-interm...
perhaps to be skim-read together with more recent
https://asiatimes.com/2021/05/beijing-prods-millennials-to-d...
https://voxeu.org/article/digitalisation-and-future-banking
and countless others
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Trust is the biggest issue with cryptocurrency. I can trust my bank + the government to keep my money safe. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, I can’t trust an exchange and keeping your own wallet is extremely risky.
I can't trust stable coins. I can't trust the price of BTC to drop to $0 when speculators panic. I can't trust that my BTC will be accepted if it was once tied to a money laundering (mixer) address. I can't trust that I will not be rug pulled on any new coin unless I read the fine grained software contract, first. I can't trust a software contract from being hacked unless I can hire a software contract expert to peru…
Why not?
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I think this is a problem until it isn't. The first country that starts pricing its oil exports in bitcoin will a) cause the price to initially skyrocket, and b) create a stabilizing force on the price that percolates to all other goods and services. And the interesting thing, is that because bitcoin is energy money, there is a very direct and explicit correlation to the amount of bitcoin you can earn from using your…
Bitcoin mining is not elastic enough to do what you propose (also, what a terrifying thought), for the fact that a) you needs mining equipment, which becomes obsolete in relatively short amount of time and b) electricity transfer is not free, so large scale centralized bitcoin mining will require additional power generation facility Your description of the petrodollar is borderline conspiratorial as well. And even wi…
This is only because mining ASICs have rapidly developed towards state of the art chip fabrication, making each generation a huge jump in hashes per watt efficiency. Now that state of the art mining chips are 5nm, the regular obsoleting of old chips is likely to drastically slow down and you'll be able to make profit from old machines for a much longer time if you treat them well.
> electricity transfer is not free, so large scale centralized bitcoin mining will require additional power generation facility
This is a very odd statement. One of the magical things about bitcoin mining as an electricity consumer is that it is one of the most modular and delocalized customers of electricity ever created in human civilization. You can drop small pods of miners right next to every electricity producer on the planet with a satellite connection. Some miners are deploying these small units to oil extractors to use their flared natural gas, which then allows oil producers to a) generate income on wasted gas when it's not economical to transport via pipes or liquefied natural gas and b) burn the nat gas more efficiently than flaring, which reduces global methane emissions (a GHG 100x more potent than CO2 that eventually degrades in to long lasting CO2).
Moreover, bitcoin miners will soon be deployed to new electricity producers to help them start generating money before transmission lines and grid capacity are funded and built out. I and many others think this is why bitcoin will soon become the tip of the spear in accelerating energy buildout.
> the US Navy will beat ASIC mining machines 100% of the time. How could it happen "peacefully"
The US military is not obviously an enemy of bitcoin, and may actually turn into a strong supporter. https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-btc-national-securit...
archive link, https://archive.ph/wfesI
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a) China's new digital yuan isn't a novel competitor to bitcoin. It's just the same old fiat in a new, more authoritarian enabling form. b) China, while increasingly powerful, is not the whole world. If the rest of the world decides that bitcoin is the only viable fair global reserve currency that doesn't disproportionately benefit some global empire, then they'll eventually be forced to come along for the ride, and…
Bitcoin is too volatile, when will it become stable enough to be used for pricing IRL goods?
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I can't trust stable coins. I can't trust the price of BTC to drop to $0 when speculators panic. I can't trust that my BTC will be accepted if it was once tied to a money laundering (mixer) address. I can't trust that I will not be rug pulled on any new coin unless I read the fine grained software contract, first. I can't trust a software contract from being hacked unless I can hire a software contract expert to peru…
> I can't trust stable coins. Why not?
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Things is, companies like this solve a real world problem for real people in developing countries now . At least where I am, Colombia, crypto has utterly failed to do this. The target audience of such products doesn't care much about some hypothetical ifs and whens of the future.
I live in Argentina and crypto is the best solution available today. I've tried multiple services like Paypal, Payoneer, Wise, Bankera, Paysera, Wester Union, etc. They all have the same issues.
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Trust is the biggest issue with cryptocurrency. I can trust my bank + the government to keep my money safe. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, I can’t trust an exchange and keeping your own wallet is extremely risky.
And that's the most important thing crypto enthusiast always deny or fail to comprehend, it's like famous https://xkcd.com/538/ most enthusiasts do not accept that the blockchain will became unmanageable by most just due to it's ever-growing size. At that point exchange will be mandatory by nature and at that point users will have no more viable means to verify anything. The very same old scam banks have made in the…
Some blockchain protocols like Bitcoin make the silly argument that in order for a chain to be worthwhile, a full history of all transactions needs to be maximally available on the network.
Other chains either drop, or plan to drop data that's been on the network for over a year or so (EIP-4444, for Ethereum). This relies on the weak assumption that the consensus algorithm will not finalize invalid data and then continue to build on it for over a year.
When you take history expiry alongside state expiry, the technology is absolutely out there to bound blockchain size.