111–120 of 272 posts
I know it is not fair to just count code lines to compare the complexity. But the Ethereum python code base has only 30K-40K lines code including test while Linux kernel has 15M lines.
He’s criticizing Eth for being a “ science experiment”? The entire crypto ecosystem is just an experiment, including bitcoin. It’s all immature and unstable.
I've always tried to tell people that ask me about crypto currencies that not only do they not have any intrinsic value, but the only positive value that they have is entropy. I explained it like this over Christmas dinner, lets say I wanted to start a new commodity, for arguments sake lets say that this new commodity is based on matches. Matches have a value, you light them and they produce a certain amount of energ…
There’s nothing particularly special about AirBnB in terms of software. It’s barely more complex than Bitcoin.
But implementing games so that cheating is prohibitively expensive is very hard. That’s why we only have pretty simple games so far, like “ledger” and “compute”.
But we will some day have the entire set of Games Whose Cheats Can, With Some Effort, Be Made Prohibitively Expensive available to us as cryptocurrencies.
Tokens in those systems will all have intrinsic value proportionate to the value those games have in society.
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Labor is the principal value of a currency. I'm guessing you are a libertarian. Maybe you should learn about how commerce, financial instruments, and debt work before saying money has no intrinsic value. Otherwise, if money has no intrinsic value then why work for it? Maybe we should go be communists. As Labor is the principal value of currency, so is debt the obligations of its members. When you get a loan you are n…
Labor is a sacrifice of ones time, and one expects to receive compensation for that sacrifice. The medium of compensation could be anything, and is certainly not limited to regional monopoly currencies. The key distinction between the currency and Bitcoin is the government's use of force to mandate that people accept the currency as a unit of payment for services (and use it to pay taxes). There is no intrinsic value…
Because no one can be compelled to accept Bitcoin to extinguish my debts to them (i.e. by the courts) and I can't pay my taxes in Bitcoin to my local government (no, "just-in-time currency exchange doesn't count).
So given these problems, what is the exchange rate of Bitcoin into anything else supposed to be? Given, again, that eventually, everyone transacting in Bitcoin needs to transact out of Bitcoin in order to meet local obligations like taxes, or just to acquire goods someone actually wants to accept payment in.
Bitcoin is a lot like gold, in that people might find some cosmetic and novelty value in it which gives it more then 0 value. But unlike gold, it consumes a lot of real world resources (electricity, structured silicon) in order to continue existing.
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What you're saying here goes against any reasonable macroeconomic theory. Deflation causes spending to stop because people hoard money, as spending stops, economies dry up, and voila... economic stagnation at best. But no one without a formal education is Economics is likely to even be remotely aware of that. Inflation, and Keynesian economics, have empirically served the world quite well. The government's and social…
Spending does not stop. It may slow. Most arguments against deflation are largely strawmen, and the historical examples of it are usually a result of too much government intervention, or it following a period of high inflation. Here's an example of deflation: Moore's Law. If computing power is going to double in 18 months, then a computer I buy now will be worth much less in 18 months. If that's the case, best not bu…
"No investment" being the core point - the rich may get richer currently, but they have to buy stocks, bonds, start companies in order to do so - take risks and temporarily at least hand their money to people with less.
Under a deflationary model, they don't - the incentive is to avoid spending and investment, since the 100% safe investment is holding your money. The rich get richer - the poor are forced to part with any currency they have and can never join. Of course the system collapses if you don't have to buy in (i.e. no taxes) because why should anyone join such a regressive system?
Which, incidentally, is very much the reason no one should be getting into Bitcoin - all the coins were mined by early adopters, and you getting into Bitcoin is just allowing everyone who has cheap coins to cash out.
EDIT: And Moore's law is an ideal example of this problem really - at every point you shouldn't buy a new computer unless the present value you'll gain from one is outweighed by the depreciation in the future. Turns out computers are pretty amazing so this is a lot less of a problem - but computers actually do things. Bitcoins don't.
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Remittances without high fees. I think as entropy becomes very inefficient to produce (difficulty multipliers increasing on crypto as the network expands...) it will become more clear that the expensive part about sending money internationally is trusting all parties involved. You pay VISA/MASTERCARD a 3% fee because you trust them to protect your account in the case of fraud. Moneygram takes 2% of all transcations o…
I don’t pay a fee on my credit cards, the merchant does, and in case of fraud I can issue a chargeback to boot. As long as I pay my balance each month, my credit card is free, plus generating rewards. That’s almost the opposite of cryptocurrency, where far from being able to tackle fraud, it makes theft or loss nearly impossible to remediate. A credit card is also one of the easiest things to use, and all of the hard…
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Remittances without high fees. I think as entropy becomes very inefficient to produce (difficulty multipliers increasing on crypto as the network expands...) it will become more clear that the expensive part about sending money internationally is trusting all parties involved. You pay VISA/MASTERCARD a 3% fee because you trust them to protect your account in the case of fraud. Moneygram takes 2% of all transcations o…
I don’t pay a fee on my credit cards, the merchant does, and in case of fraud I can issue a chargeback to boot. As long as I pay my balance each month, my credit card is free, plus generating rewards. That’s almost the opposite of cryptocurrency, where far from being able to tackle fraud, it makes theft or loss nearly impossible to remediate. A credit card is also one of the easiest things to use, and all of the hard…
You're transacting with the merchant, and a third-party, the credit card company, helps itself to a piece of the action.
Whether that is coming from you or the merchant is the wrong view.
The transaction between the two of you pays it.
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Okay, but what happens to energy prices when enough miners flock to low-cost centers? Prices go up. In a long enough time horizon, opportunity to take advantage of energy prices basically gets competed away. I haven't read much on energy production, but as far as I know there are many places on the planet that cheaply produce renewable energy.
Energy production is heavily regulated and centralized to a few entities. Very much like financial institutions. It's highly unlikely that the free market somehow sorts this out in the future, considering that it's the free market that gave rise to these power law distributions to begin with.
There will always be some limiting factor or theoretical vulnerability. If it's not ISPs/Internet infrastructure, then its the exchanges and fiat on ramps. But yet, its been pretty hard to kill illegal filesharing, VPNs, etc.
It's even harder to stop those things when the population doesn't believe in legislating against it, at least in a democracy.
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> I don’t pay a fee on my credit cards, the merchant does While that may be technically correct, it's ignorant of the fact that costs are always passed down the line in any economic relationship like you're describing. That fraud protection costs the card issuers, which is the basis for that merchant fee, and the merchant passes the cost on in the form of higher prices. (Merchant accounts with higher fraud rates will…
If the price of Good N is Value of N+x where x is a markup to cover the costs you’re talking about, that cost is passed on to people who pay with any means. If I buy a TV with cash, or credit card, it costs the same. Except of course that I can get cash back on my card, but not with cash (or bitcoin). So, credit card or not, the cost is there, even if I pay with bitcoin or ether. Except of course for the benefits of…
Only if the vendor of the TV is abiding by the rules of the credit card provider not to offer discounts for cash transactions.
In effect, the customers buying TV's with cash, paying the same, are paying a "credit card tax" to support the credit card users.
Also, they pay the same, but don't earn any of the incentivizing kickbacks (points, cash back, ...).
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If the price of Good N is Value of N+x where x is a markup to cover the costs you’re talking about, that cost is passed on to people who pay with any means. If I buy a TV with cash, or credit card, it costs the same. Except of course that I can get cash back on my card, but not with cash (or bitcoin). So, credit card or not, the cost is there, even if I pay with bitcoin or ether. Except of course for the benefits of…
>" that cost is passed on to people who pay with any means. If I buy a TV with cash, or credit card, it costs the same." If people start charging less when paid via methods that have less chargeback risk will you reassess?