Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, because energy is not free.
Energy expended to mine BTC in the past is a sunk cost and so is irrelevant to the discussion. In the future, if the price of energy required to mine a BTC is below the value of the BTC there will be an incentive to mine BTC. There is no equivalent incentive in the opposite direction. You can convert energy to BTC, you can't convert BTC to energy.
Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance
451–460 of 532 posts
Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "My [product] would be perfect if only I could convince humans to stop acting like humans," is the original sin of bad [technologists] fixed that
There was recently an article posted to HN [0] about a startup founder doing this very thing, blaming his customers for behaving like humans. >I was fighting human nature and losing. >Everyone swears they will eat right and exercise, but most don’t. Everyone agrees they need to spend less to be financially secure later, but most won’t. Our users were telling us they would use ContractBeast to achieve those long-term…
Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recall walking through an airport this year and seeing Crypto ads everywhere. That was my shoeshine boy moment (1) (1) https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-spot-stock-market-bub...
I visited Brazil recently (3-4 months ago), I got into cryptocurrency-talk or some shitcoin peddled by cashiers, Uber drivers, waiters in some restaurants, acquaintances that aren't tech-savvy at all, etc. That's when it downed on me how big this whole thing got outside of internet chatter, it downed how many vulnerable people are exposed to the fallout of a crypto implosion.
... but yeah. It's depressing. Countries with already bad economic conditions (like "we literally don't have functioning currency" level, not the things US residents complain about) seem particularly susceptible to it.
Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance
#454Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide a decision rule that distinguishes financial services from financial engineering? I do not feel as confident as you seem that the group of things called “crypto” will not be useful for financial services.
My definition: Financial engineering is the quantitative isolation and amplification of financial risk/reward, usually through leveraged/synthetic derivative products. There's no perfect source, but you can see similar definitions here [0] [1] [2] To give you a crypto example of this, Aave is financial engineering, because it allows users to make a bet that they can execute high-volume short-duration trades that yiel…
The nuance makes sense on its face. Although I don’t trust my own judgement of what impacts the real economy and what is just shuffling of decomposed elements of risk and reward.
Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
> MtGox being the most infamous example. I was there for it. I mined my first coins in late 2011. Few people want to run their local node (server), few people want to point their wallet at their own node, and fewer people want to run code they've compiled themselves. If you aren't running your own node you are relying on someone else's. As a mass adoption decentralized trust-less technology for transacting, bitcoin h…
I'd say you have a more black-and-white vision than me. While it's not perfectly decentralized, e.g. some users do delegate their trust to centralized services for convenience or security, it is still more decentralized than fiat where (digital) self-custody is simply not possible. Decentralization and trust are a spectrum, not a binary. Even compiling the software yourself wouldn't get you 100% there [0]. I also fee…
Quite the opposite. It's getting disrupted by rich, powerful people, who are rocking it as hard as they can to disabuse common people of the notion that they have any alternative.
Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
False. Fiat monetary systems are built on a state monopoly on violence. Trust is merely a byproduct. You are required to pay taxes in the local fiat currency, and if you fail to pay then the government will eventually seize your assets by force, or perhaps put you in jail. This is a feature, not a bug, and it generally works fairly well in practice as long as the government is at least minimally competent.
This. The original purpose of money is to enable to government to quantify precisely how much of your stuff it will take each tax season.
Taxing in kind is way better, it's inflation proof.
Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I gather, and certainly someone may come in with a much better explanation or refutation is that Bitcoin is in a sense a finite resource (let's just look at the mechanics right now) and if appetite for Bitcoins increases you can't make more of them. If a central bank is inflating a currency, it means each year that more of that currency exists than it did previously, so people can effectively bid for resour…
Prices don't rise 'due to inflation'. Inflation is just another name for price rise. This 'transmutability' you speak of is called currency. Bitcoin has some but very little compared to cash. Also the so-called 'deflacionary' nature of bitcoin, supposedly caused by the supply cap assumes a constant or growing demand for it, which is far from assured. Bitcoin only needs to collapse once to become worthless forever, th…
I agree that Bitcoin is a poor currency compared to fiat currency, but conversely a dollar is a very poor store of wealth while Bitcoin is looking like it may be a good store of wealth. The confusion comes when you (not you specifically) don’t recognize that you can assess the utility and value of these “things” across various traits. Gold is a decent store of wealth, but a very bad currency. Stocks are great at producing and storing value and are highly liquid but awful currencies.
I’m not a Bitcoin advocate. I’m a neutral investor. You are correct in my view that if Bitcoin collapses it may become worthless forever. We have examples of this happening with fiat currency as well, though, so it’s not a unique trait of Bitcoin.
Diversification and asset accumulation are what I focus on. Bitcoin could turn out to be totally worthless. So could Amazon stock. So could GBP.
Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I gather, and certainly someone may come in with a much better explanation or refutation is that Bitcoin is in a sense a finite resource (let's just look at the mechanics right now) and if appetite for Bitcoins increases you can't make more of them. If a central bank is inflating a currency, it means each year that more of that currency exists than it did previously, so people can effectively bid for resour…
Prices don't rise 'due to inflation'. Inflation is just another name for price rise. This 'transmutability' you speak of is called currency. Bitcoin has some but very little compared to cash. Also the so-called 'deflacionary' nature of bitcoin, supposedly caused by the supply cap assumes a constant or growing demand for it, which is far from assured. Bitcoin only needs to collapse once to become worthless forever, th…
Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love how cocksure people are of Tether's decline. Do you believe reading a bitcoin (or IOTA) whitepaper is sufficient to understanding market structure because I get the sense that you do not understand it. If you are so sure, feel free to short Tether.
Is there a place one can short Tether, that can also be trusted to pay out on a short position in the event of a catastrophic Tether collapse? I.e. not a crypto exchange?