Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 209 posts

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#121

Post by nullc »

etrabroline wrote: post #114
nullc wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's just pure nonsense, untrue, and totally unsubstantiated (and thoroughly off-topic for the thread). Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it. Rather than any substantive argument, it merely lists a set of wild allegations. But since you asked nicely I'll break it down sentence by sentence. > Blockstream bought out most of the the btc devs who had commit ability Blockstream hired myself and Pi…

Great response. Thank you for taking the time to write it. I'm curious why did you get interested in Bitcoin to begin with? If credit cards and fiat currencies are just fine, gold is still a pretty good store of value, why work on crypto at all?

Being just fine for a vast majority of transactions isn't "just fine": Being able to transact privately and without unaccountable private companies randomly censoring your transactions is critical to human rights. The capriciousness of institutional choke points deprives people of due process and makes it impossible or unreasonably complex to make automated systems that transact autonomously without constant human supervision and intervention.

But these are all issues of exceptional cases, where additional complexity, costs, or risks (e.g. from fraud due to irreversibility, key management liability, or loss due to exchange rate volatility) are acceptable costs of doing business. The vast majority of payments -- even by some hypothetical outlaw-freedom-fighter-bandit -- are extremely boring, low risk, and not likely to be subject to censorship. The value of being able to pay in Bitcoin primarily is that it exists if and when you need it. But on a daily basis for most boring non-international payments it isn't a big win.

I don't agree that gold is a good store of value at all. It's most commonly used form is a totally unauditable fractional-reserve (rehypothicated) censorship prone IOU. In physical form it is extremely expensive to secure, transport and transact with. It is easily seized both by state authorities and bandits. It's essentially unusable for international payments due to transport risks, which Bitcoin is extremely useful for international payments. It is easily forged in ways that are difficult and costly to detect (gold coated tungsten requires special instruments and potentially destructive tests to detect). There have been single incidents involving well over 2 billion dollars of fake gold at a time ( https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Mystery-of-2bn-of-l... ). And if we ever figure out how to mine asteroids Gold will be no more valuable than the cost of dropping rocks from the sky. And as icing on top: Gold has even more disadvantageous tax treatment in the US than Bitcoin does!

Even if you use Bitcoin in a custodial way-- which essentially gives it all the positive properties of a centralized system, along with many of the negative one-- it still retains extremely powerful audit abilities, custodial Bitcoin can cheaply prove it isn't fractional reserve in an unforgable way, and it's still immune to central bank monetary policy whims. [Not that I advocate that-- I think custodial Bitcoin misses the point, but for applications that don't need Bitcoin's other properties it can be a reasonable alternative.]

If you're interested in my history with Bitcoin I did an interview on Bitcointalk a month ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5262967.msg55722022#...

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#122

Post by nepthar »

shawnz wrote: post #66
ineedasername wrote: post #35

This is the paradox of wanting crypto to be both widespread and free of government influence. It cannot gain "market share" without interacting in some form or fashion with the regulatory structures already in place, putting it under de facto regulation of any jurisdiction of the people who want to use it.

I don't think it is a paradox at all but simply a separation of concerns. I believe government regulation is essential to a healthy economy, but it can still be useful to have methods to store and transact value outside of centralized control in case there is a failure of government. It's kind of like how the fourth amendment makes it easier to commit crimes, but we accept it as a society anyway because it is more im…

I agree. There is nothing to suggest that something can't both behave in a regulatory environment and exist if that environment fails. Cars, for instance - They require registration so long as the body enforcing registration exists. If that changes, cars can still run.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#123

Post by TylerE »

aazaa wrote: post #62

The most surprising thing is how little this announcement has moved the USD exchange rate (~$0.25). That rate is about where it was last month. https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/XRPUSD/?exchange=BITFINE... Yes, there was a big run-up, but that was largely drafting off the increase in the bitcoin exchange rate. The real test will be how much further XRP drops (or doesn't) from here.

About? On Nov 28th is was $0.61.

That's down over 50%.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#125

Post by FreeTrade »

gruez wrote: post #93
chemmail wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockstream bought out most of the the btc devs who had commit ability. Their end goal is to cripple btc to where it is today. The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. Think skimming money like charge cards do, but offering no real advantage or service beyond that. So far they have found building a new network neigh impossible. Hence the memes: Lightning only 18 month…

>The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. [...] Hence the memes: Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development." Can you elaborate on this? Isn't lightning free and open source? I'm not sure how that's going to be monetized.

Bitcoin adoption was growing and working well for monetary transfer but its capacity was throttled to encourage use of an unproven technology, the lightning network.

The claim, as far as understand it, is that Blockstream supported this plan, anticipating its failure, while working on its own replacement technology, Liquid.

Ironically, both liquid and lightning appear to be failing. Nb, both grubles and nullc have some close relationship with Blockstream.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#126

Post by nullc »

flarex wrote: post #91
nullc wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just an outright lie and malicious defamation from top to f*king bottom. Hateful nonsense by scam promoters like you turns HN into a toxic enviroment.

For those that don’t know nullc is Greg Maxwell, a former Blockstream employee. He is infamous in crypto circles.

Since you apparently think it's no big deal to go around doxing people (as you've attempted multiple times in this thread), perhaps you'd care to disclose your name and which parties you work for?

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#127

Post by aeternum »

etrabroline wrote: post #101
gruez wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and correspondingly has not seen any real-world adoption. It is effectively dead. but https://blog.kraken.com/post/7225/a-need-for-speed-kraken-to... and https://coingate.com/lightning-network

> In 2021 So they are still putting money into the project and promising things in the future. Years ago, before venture capital took over BTC, I could buy games on Steam with Bitcoin. Can I buy video games with Lightning? https://blog.kraken.com/post/7225/a-need-for-speed-kraken-to... > https://coingate.com/lightning-network Ok. What can I actually buy with it? There's tons of venture capital going into this project…

You could buy Steam games years ago because Bitcoin volume was low.

Just try some math: How large would blocks need to be to handle just 50% of Visa's current US transaction rate?

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#128

Post by gruez »

FreeTrade wrote: post #125
gruez wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. [...] Hence the memes: Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development." Can you elaborate on this? Isn't lightning free and open source? I'm not sure how that's going to be monetized.

Bitcoin adoption was growing and working well for monetary transfer but its capacity was throttled to encourage use of an unproven technology, the lightning network. The claim, as far as understand it, is that Blockstream supported this plan, anticipating its failure, while working on its own replacement technology, Liquid. Ironically, both liquid and lightning appear to be failing. Nb, both grubles and nullc have so…

That doesn't answer my initial question, how is blockstream supposed to monetize lightning, or anything for that matter?

>The claim, as far as understand it, is that Blockstream supported this plan, anticipating its failure, while working on its own replacement technology, Liquid.

I took a quick skim of blockstream's materials on liquid, and it sounds like it's something totally different to lightning? They describe it as some sort of ripple-like network for transacting in tokens? eg.

>Liquid uses an approach to consensus called Strong Federations. A Strong Federation removes the need for costly Proof of Work mechanisms and replaces it with the collective actions of a group of mutually distrusting participants called functionaries.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#129

Post by stouset »

jeofken wrote: post #79
root_axis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, how do you propose to power your mining rig and connect to the internet without a government?

Assuming free people could not create internet and electricity infrastructure is like an East German assuming free markets could not provide a Trabant alternative

People like that have existed and yet in 100% of cases they’ve been outcompeted by and swallowed up by people who form governments. Funny that.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#130

Post by nullc »

etrabroline wrote: post #24
briefcomment wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “BTC has been a joke ever since the GitHub repo was hijacked by Blockstream and Adam Back” Could you spell out the implications of this?

Wall Street doesn't want Bitcoin to serve its intended purpose of removing their control over the money supply. They did this by co-opting the software project with venture capital money and making technical decisions that make Bitcoin ecommerce economically infeasible due to high fees. Initially they intended to replace Bitcoin with an alt-coin whose issuance was controlled by the Blockstream corporate entity. That…

Man, your post is just full of malicious disinformation, most of it addressed elsewhere in this off-topic subthread.

> EDIT: The Lightning network markets itself as an improvement to Bitcoin, but it is a completely alternative settlement network that just happens to denominate in BTC. I don't think debating the use of the term "alt-coin" is material.

That is just entirely untrue. :( Whoever fed you that idea was confused or outright lying to you.

Lightning is a technique for using Bitcoin's smart contracting ability to pay bitcoin without bringing each and every transaction to the network.

The basic idea is that you take some Bitcoin and set a script on it that says that if there is a disagreement over who owns it, the involved parties will post to the ledger the last record in an external ownership transcript which is signed by the involved parties, and if anyone cheats and posts an outdated record, anyone else can post proof that a later entry existed and all the coins go to the non-cheating party.

With this in place, the parties can then transact back and forth securely as fast as they can sign and send Bitcoin transactions to each other without any global broadcast taking place. Taking it a step further, collections of these transactions can be made mutually atomic so that they're all successful or all fail (essentially by making them conditional on a common secret). This is how lightning makes it possible to pay people you've never transacted with before, by routing on a graph of these pairwise payments (that's what the 'network' in lightning network refers to).

All the transactions exchanged between participants are Bitcoin transactions-- which could be posted at any time to the network at the participant's whim, they refrain from doing so to save fees--, the system is built from the novel programmatic ability of Bitcoin, and it is completely ununsable without Bitcoin (or some clone that copies the required functionality, of course).

This kind of channelized usage of Bitcoin was foreseen by Bitcoin's creator and enabled by the consensus rules of the protocol from day one (particularly: nlocktime and sequence numbers which were explicitly added to support channels).

Post reply on HN