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Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

bitcoinity.org

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Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#231

Post by sanswork »

FatalLogic wrote: post #226
sanswork wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"community" /r/bitcoin|/r/bitcoinmarkets|bct "source" the few weeks a month or so back where every second post was about how evil or bad or stupid blockchain.info was and no one should use them anymore. It was around the time the problem was discovered with their keygen and when someone was regularly sweeping coins from wallets on the service.

You're right to put "source" in quotes, because that's embarrassingly weak. You haven't even counted them. You're providing no real data. There's no way that it justifies your stark claim that "most people in the community have lost faith in Blockchain.info". Why do you feel the need to enhance your argument with exaggeration and unsupported assertions?

I didn't realize my statement would confuse someone into thinking it was the result of a scientifically accurate survey and not just an observation of sentiment. I apologize for the confusion.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#232

Post by XorNot »

moe wrote: post #220
XorNot wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical infrastructure costs have been declining for decades, with banks actively trying to push them down by prioritizing digital over physical services. Physical security also scales well. The volume of secure space you have increases to the 3rd power with only an approximately 2nd order increase in the costs of creating it (your basic area/space tradeoff working for you in this case). The argument that payroll do…

Finally and most importantly [...] the difficulty goes up, so more and more power is required to preserve the status quo. Except... The difficulty also goes down . But don't let facts get in the way of your flaming argument...

Irrelevant. A decline in difficulty occurs due to a decline in hashing power. Not a decline in real energy consumption.

A decline in hashing power can only happen from people looking at real energy consumption and saying "to hell with this". At which point the network compensates to keep hashing difficulty the same, but does not reduce energy consumption for any of the remaining participants.

But correspondingly, the mean difficulty does go up continuously - that's the fixed number of coins. So even when the block to block difficulty is adjusted, the net trend is less coins per unit hash, which means the marginal energy cost of the coins approaches infinity.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#233

Post by moe »

sanswork wrote: post #227
moe wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cases where they don't agree they should refund you. Um, and with VISA they will just happily ignore you taking back what they consider their money and wish you a good day? Cases where they just don't want to refund you. Same as above? Cases where they are scammers/criminals. Why would you send money to those? Since you know there is no Chargeback mechanism wouldn't it be wise to demand product/service first or use a…

>Um, and with VISA they will just happily ignore you taking back what they consider their money and wish you a good day? VISA doesn't consider it their money. So ya they will do that. You not knowing that suggests a huge gap in your knowledge of how credit cards work/how charge backs work. >Why would you send money to those? Since you know there is no Chargeback mechanism wouldn't it be wise to demand product/service…

I'm not confusing it at all. I was giving an example that closely maps to the security concern with a credit card.

So if you agree that Bitcoin is not a credit card then what relevance does an example have that maps to the security concerns of a credit card?

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#234

Post by celticninja »

TheDong wrote: post #139
brazzy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any idea how much energy, work and time is being spent on the infrastructure of regular currencies? Minting, ATMs, secure transport, brank branches, all kind of mainframe dinosaurs running 40 year old COBOL code? Even if scaled up to global usage, I very much doubt Bitcoin mining would be worse.

Yes, bitcoin mining would be worse. Provably worse. As computers get better, traditional applications, like databases, perform better and you can either serve more customers, use cheaper (and often more efficient hardware), or do nothing and use your outdated hardware. With bitcoin, your enemy is not the performance of the raw work you are doing (you can hash better), but the fact that everyone else also has these in…

>power usage of cpus, then gpus, and then asics, you'll see that in general power consumption for bitcoin constantly increases.

That does not tell the whole story though, power usage per gigahash is a more accurate measure, because the higher the GH the more secure the network. From CPU, to GPU to ASIC the power use per gighash has fallen significantly.

If you really want to compare it to the banking sector then you need to include the full and real costs of that banking system, power alone is not the only cost. One bail out, as seen in the last few years, dwarfs the power cost of bitcoin. That is without considering the knock on effects of the banking meltdown on the overall economy.

And bitcoin can take advantage of improvements to reduce power consumption of ASICs (as there is no next step tech that will provide an increase in gigahash as ASICs did, so now it goes to refining the power usage. Additionally larger farms are looking at renewable alternatives and uses for the excess heat being produced. It is still a very young sector so there is a lot of working out to do, but it is being done.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#235

Post by [deleted] »

Daviey wrote: post #196
zamalek wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, bitcoin mining would be worse. Provably worse. ... and exponentially worse as time goes on (by design).

Computation complexity and power consumption do not necessary correlate with emerging technology. If anything, power consumption could decrease.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#236

Post by celticninja »

XorNot wrote: post #210
brazzy wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computational costs of traditional banking goes down in theory (in practice, they seem to easily overcompensate for that with increased complexity), but other costs (payroll, physical infrastructure, security thereof, etc.) do not. Unless you're proposing that the future of money is 100% digital, with minimal physical infrastructure. Admittedly, that is not entirely unrealistic, though I doubt things will go quite th…

Physical infrastructure costs have been declining for decades, with banks actively trying to push them down by prioritizing digital over physical services. Physical security also scales well. The volume of secure space you have increases to the 3rd power with only an approximately 2nd order increase in the costs of creating it (your basic area/space tradeoff working for you in this case). The argument that payroll do…

> the difficulty goes up, so more and more power is required to preserve the status quo.

No. the difficulty goes up so more hashing power is required, whether this means more actual power usage will depend on the machines being used and their efficiency.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#237

Post by mikkom »

moe wrote: post #230
tribaal wrote: post #10

Yeah, as much as I like the concept of bitcoin (and the blockchain), I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal. No interest rate, and you have to secure it yourself? No thanks. My "big bad bank" guarantees me at least a small interest in saving money, and if my card is stolen, I get a new one in 24 hours and all transactions are cancelled. I'm happy to pay some transaction fees ("extortion!") to get…

Bitcoin is the electronic version of "let's buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere". It's also the electronic version of: Be able to move that gold around the globe near instantly, without a middleman, at almost zero cost. And some other quite neat things. While these features may seem "anecdotical" for many people in the western world, there's also a large number of people in poorer countries for whom e.g. the fee…

> Be able to move that gold around the globe near instantly

The biggest advantage of gold is that it's value is relatively stable and has been used as a valuable metal since ancient times.

That's quite the opposite of Bitcoin actually.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#238

Post by pliny »

moe wrote: post #230
tribaal wrote: post #10

Yeah, as much as I like the concept of bitcoin (and the blockchain), I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal. No interest rate, and you have to secure it yourself? No thanks. My "big bad bank" guarantees me at least a small interest in saving money, and if my card is stolen, I get a new one in 24 hours and all transactions are cancelled. I'm happy to pay some transaction fees ("extortion!") to get…

Bitcoin is the electronic version of "let's buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere". It's also the electronic version of: Be able to move that gold around the globe near instantly, without a middleman, at almost zero cost. And some other quite neat things. While these features may seem "anecdotical" for many people in the western world, there's also a large number of people in poorer countries for whom e.g. the fee…

Near instant is a bit (a lot?) misleading, it takes on average about 10 minutes to have a transaction confirmed, sometimes much more.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#239

Post by FatalLogic »

adnam wrote: post #40
tribaal wrote: post #10

Yeah, as much as I like the concept of bitcoin (and the blockchain), I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal. No interest rate, and you have to secure it yourself? No thanks. My "big bad bank" guarantees me at least a small interest in saving money, and if my card is stolen, I get a new one in 24 hours and all transactions are cancelled. I'm happy to pay some transaction fees ("extortion!") to get…

"I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal." Well the value of the whole blockchain is over $2.5Bn, so it's more than anecdotal. http://coinmarketcap.com/

The 'Market Cap' of bitcoin is more a reflection of how much people believe in its future value. It's not a very good indicator of current adoption.

For adoption, you'd want to look more at data like transaction numbers, transaction value, merchants accepting it and order statistics from retailers. There's not much data, though.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#240

Post by matt4077 »

Normati wrote: post #199
ballpoint wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, most UK wire transfers are essentially immediate (at most a couple of minutes), even between different banks.

That won't be wire transfers, that'll be some kind of local interbank transfer. A wire transfer is still complicated (paper forms), slow and expensive to send to other countries. You also have to give your name and address to the recipient bank to somehow prove you're not laundering money or funding terrorism.

It's called a "wire" transfer for a reason. In the EU, they take a day and are free.
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