Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#101

Post by tomp » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

str33t_punk wrote: post #38

crumbshot wrote: post #29

Bitcoin and other compute-intensive cryptocurrencies should be banned or taxed so heavily that it's financially infeasible to use them. The amount of energy being wasted (reportedly more than seven nuclear power plants worth) on what is essentially an unproductive project is quite absurd. In a world where we should all be increasingly concerned about the looming climate catastrophe, it's wholly irresponsible for Bitc…

You would love Eth 2.0 then! The idea of proof of stake is to remove waste from the equation

Isn't the basic idea of ETH still "distributed computer" a.k.a. "pointless redoing every computation over and over" albeit with 2.0 it's sharded (i.e. only a subset of verification nodes redoing each computation)?

Still sounds wasteful, except slightly less massively so.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#102

Post by lambdadmitry » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #78

jayd16 wrote: post #22

Can someone explain why BTC going from 13k to 20k in a month isn't the yearly pump and dump?

More on ramps and institutional investors buying in seems to be a big part of it.

This "institutional investors" meme is a bit like God: no one can prove it, but it gives its believers all the hope. There is no evidence of that happening on massive scale and no reason for them to do so.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#103

Post by cloudinshape » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

crumbshot wrote: post #29

Bitcoin and other compute-intensive cryptocurrencies should be banned or taxed so heavily that it's financially infeasible to use them. The amount of energy being wasted (reportedly more than seven nuclear power plants worth) on what is essentially an unproductive project is quite absurd. In a world where we should all be increasingly concerned about the looming climate catastrophe, it's wholly irresponsible for Bitc…

Bitcoin is perhaps the most important project we'll see in our lifetimes.

The liberation of the most important asset in a capitalist society, money, from the tragedy that has been the current fiat system can not be over emphasized.

Money touches everything and is about time the market takes control of it, takes it away from the crony-states destroying the value of our savings, hence destroying our productivity, undermining the law at every turn in defense of a faux-egalitarianism when in reality that power has only been used to inflict (unwillingly or not) more pain to the marginalized sectors propping up a financialized economy that only exacerbates the wealth gap and radicalizes society to a dangerous level that sadly we all know where it ends up.

Bitcoin may not end up succeeding, but its fight is worthwhile, and necessary, and in the end inevitable, and because of that if the price now is 7 nuclear power plants we should pay it, as god knows we waste enough resources in lobbying, war and corruption already, because the cost to society of not doing it will be even greater in the future, and most probably, bloodier too.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#104

Post by arcticbull » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

brian_cloutier wrote: post #98

arcticbull wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Energy consumption in the classical model is substantially lower because if you scaled up Bitcoin to the size of Visa alone it would exceed the amount of energy generated on earth a few times over and the amount of ewaste generated on earth too. This is a classic pro Bitcoin argument that’s trivially falsifiable. The fact folks here think their transactions in the online economy should heat their homes is so bananas…

You're making two mistakes. The first is that scaling Bitcoin up to the size of visa is not particularly possible. You might be able to match visa's throughput by greatly increasing the block interval (e.x. one block every week) but the protocol cannot reasonably scale past a couple hundred transactions per second without taking a massive hit to transaction latency. So, in this sense the question of how much energy B…

> The first is that scaling Bitcoin up to the size of visa is not particularly possible.

That’s no mistake, folks are suggesting that on a per transaction basis - today - Bitcoin is cheaper or more efficient if you take into account hand wavey externalities not captured in the classical transaction cost model of a payment processor like visa.

What I’ve done is invalidate that argument not by scaling visa down to a single transaction (as that doesn’t capture externalities, per the argument posited) but scale BTC up as the argument is BTC captures all externalities. By then showing that it’s physically impossible I’ve disproved the thesis.

You’re making a different argument about avenues for scaling and that deserves its own conversation.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#105

Post by colejohnson66 » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

WealthVsSurvive wrote: post #36

crumbshot wrote: post #29

Bitcoin and other compute-intensive cryptocurrencies should be banned or taxed so heavily that it's financially infeasible to use them. The amount of energy being wasted (reportedly more than seven nuclear power plants worth) on what is essentially an unproductive project is quite absurd. In a world where we should all be increasingly concerned about the looming climate catastrophe, it's wholly irresponsible for Bitc…

It's a plutocrat wealth store during uncertainty, like gold, but it has no intrinsic value. That's it, that's its only purpose.

Preface: Bitcoin is a neat idea (decentralized currency), but it’s not practical at scale.

Reply: To be fair, the US’ currency has no intrinsic value either. Prior to the removal of the gold standard, your $20 bill was backed by exactly $20 worth of gold in some vault. Mid-1970s, the gold standard was stopped and the US’ currency became “fiat”; it only has value because the US says it does. Should the US’ economy collapse, the bills become literally worthless.

It’s not exactly the same, but Bitcoin is essentially fiat money as its only value is what people say it is (somewhat similar to the stock market). So I think it’s an apt comparison.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#106

Post by brian_cloutier » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

CJefferson wrote: post #84

ISL wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The resources consumed by Bitcoin should be compared with those consumed by other transaction-clearing and store-of-value methods. Credit-card companies consume a few percent of revenue for a large chunk of consumer transactions. Gold mining is an environmental catastrophe [1]. Bitcoin is far from perfect, but it is important to place it in context with other systems that achieve the same ends. As bitcoin-mining tech…

Bitcoin costs about 6$ per transaction (based on block reward). That is more than many transactions I make. Also, if you are using electricity to heat a house, heat pumps are about 4x more effective than bitcoin mining. This "mine for heat" meme has no real basis in fact.

I admit $6 is very expensive when compared to credit card fees, but Bitcoin is the only way I know of sending someone in a different country $10k for just a $6 fee. It would still be $6 if you sent $1M.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#107

Post by aeternum » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

dahdum wrote: post #86

centimeter wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of stake does not have the same security properties as proof of work. The arguments are too complicated for me to usefully communicate them in a short HN post, but as a heuristic just keep in mind that most cryptocurrencies haven't adopted PoS despite it facially seeming better/"less wasteful".

You're right, but that's only the case right now. Incredible effort has been and continues to be made on making PoS secure, scalable, and distributed. I'm not aware of any insurmountable problems having been found. With Eth2.0 steadily approaching launch and other networks in various stages of progression, it seems increasingly unlikely we'll find one.

The insurmountable problem is that a user cannot tell which is the 'real' fork of a PoS chain without some kind of sidechannel information.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#108

Post by wavepruner » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

crumbshot wrote: post #29

Bitcoin and other compute-intensive cryptocurrencies should be banned or taxed so heavily that it's financially infeasible to use them. The amount of energy being wasted (reportedly more than seven nuclear power plants worth) on what is essentially an unproductive project is quite absurd. In a world where we should all be increasingly concerned about the looming climate catastrophe, it's wholly irresponsible for Bitc…

The most important use-case for Bitcoin is the separation of money and state. As in, taking the place of USD as the worlds reserve currency. It does not need to be used to settle every little transaction for this, but rather used as a base layer for institutions. I know you are unlikely to see this use-case as plausible, but that is why so many people are buying Bitcoin right now.

For this use case, the amount of energy used to secure Bitcoin should be compared to the amount of energy used to secure the USD. Not just the energy to print cash, maintain digital system, etc, but the energy and human lives spent on war to maintain dominance.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#109

Post by mrlala » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #22

Can someone explain why BTC going from 13k to 20k in a month isn't the yearly pump and dump?

It's all bullshit speculation. And rich people / institutions doing whatever they can to "make money" no matter what.

Am I saying crypto has no value at all and never will? No- but it's stupid that the "drive" for people to create new cryptos and hold current crypto is to uh.. make money off of it vs a currency like USD? That's stupid as hell.

Crypto that is not pegged to something like USD is made for gambling and to make the rich richer. If I were to "gamble" $1000 in crypto the last few years sure, maybe I make 50-100k. Whoopdydoo. Yeah that's great but it's not like mega life altering. Rich people can be like "Oh I'm going to throw $1 million into this.. oh look, I just made $50-100 million, now I can take this and buy a bunch of new businesses or buy my new mega mansion somewhere!". It's just sickening, honestly.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#110

Post by jasonlaramburu » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:24 PM UTC

lawn wrote: post #82

jasonlaramburu wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The remote African Village use case is already solved by mobile money solutions like M-Pesa, which are cheap and easy to use via SMS or low-end feature phones. The cost of buying a smartphone with data plan to use a BTC wallet is prohibitively expensive for most people in developing countries.

Naturally you don't verify the blockchain yourself, but use a light wallet that uses very little data. And you don't use BTC as the fees are way too expensive. This is what people are doing in Venezuela for example.

OK but are there any secure BTC or alt coin wallets (even light wallets) that will work on feature phones or SMS? Very few people in in remote villages can afford even the most basic Android smartphone. What incentive would they have to switch from M-PESA (or Alipay/wechatpay in Asia) that is already secure, cheap and widely accepted.

Cryptocurrency is a fascinating technology and social experiment but so far has no unique use case other than speculation.