121–130 of 164 posts
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I’m sad to see HN become a place where people pat each other on the back for “burns”. (And I think GP makes a good point.) edit for context: parent originally started with “BURN!” before edit
General Practitioner?
Is it? Let's check back in ten years. I don't know that Bitcoin-as-in-BTC will be 'the future of money' by then, but I would bet that money will continue to look more like Bitcoin than it does like today's dollar. Like it or not, and I know a lot of you don't, cryptocurrencies aren't censorable (governments can't stop you from sending or receiving them), are hard to seize, and can't just be inflated away from storing…
> but I would bet that money will continue to look more like Bitcoin than it does like today's dollar. so not Bitcoin. Thats the authors point. > Like it or not, and I know a lot of you don't, cryptocurrencies aren't censorable (governments can't stop you from sending or receiving them), are hard to seize, and can't just be inflated away from storing value. These are attractive properties to a lot of people. I agree.…
So not necessarily Bitcoin, is my point.
If PoS works out at scale then PoW chains are probably toast. I don't know if that will happen, though, there's a self-licking lollipop aspect to the whole concept which has never set right with me.
I'm glad we're going to get to find out though. I think the entire discourse around energy use is misguided, but there's no question that using 2000 times less energy and equipment is both better for the environment and economically superior ceteris paribus.
The complete auditability of BTC is not to its credit, but Bitcoin is conservative, not completely static. Big blocks didn't get implemented (I agree with this decision) but Segwit 2x did. If BTC added ZK-SNARK shielded transactions, that would be a big win for privacy and anonymity.
That could easily happen in the next ten years. The winning network is more of a game theory problem than a technological one; we'll just have to wait, take such bets as we're comfortable taking, and see what happens.
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It's not just the speed, it's also the fees. You ideally want something that has really minimal fees, so that you can send $.0001 without paying 10x that in fees. The ability to process micro-transactions cheaply and at scale could actually have the transforming affect that bitcoin was originally after.
Right. That’s what Satoshi wrote in their paper. But throughput and fees are related, of course. As I noted, low transaction throughput combined with high popularity means very high fees. Fees get bid up. So to maintain low fees while having high popularity, you need high transaction throughput.
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> The entire power of a modern market democracy rests in the ability to control its currency. State monopoly over money is a good thing or a bad thing? > If you remove that power, the state itself has no legitimacy. We've had "legitimate" states since the dawn of time, before fiat currencies. Many kings and republics ruled and minted coins, but they were always limited by what they had, and could not arbitrarily crea…
Kings transacted gold, which can be debased, hidden, and cut up, but there is no practical, economic way to destroy it. Bitcoin can be destroyed, cheaply. It isn't the government-proof asset you think it is.
How do you "destroy" Bitcoin?
It was getting there. I remember Bitcoin was getting a wider adoption for payment back in 2013ish. I paid for my domain from namecheap in Bitcoin back then. But it then blew up and everyone treated it more as a store of value and it made all the shops stop accepting it as payment due to its volatility.
Unfortunately most "investors" aka gamblers aren't pushing coins with the best tech, but rather the coins that are most deflationary (and using the tech as sexy marketing to hook people in). Unfortunately deflationary coins just encourages everyone to never spend on actual stuff, simply hold onto it till they can sell it off to some other investor.
Have 3 houses and only live in 1? The fact that your houses are losing value in Bitcoin terms will push you to sell if wealth preservation is the goal.
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> but I would bet that money will continue to look more like Bitcoin than it does like today's dollar. so not Bitcoin. Thats the authors point. > Like it or not, and I know a lot of you don't, cryptocurrencies aren't censorable (governments can't stop you from sending or receiving them), are hard to seize, and can't just be inflated away from storing value. These are attractive properties to a lot of people. I agree.…
> so not Bitcoin. Thats the authors point. So not necessarily Bitcoin, is my point. If PoS works out at scale then PoW chains are probably toast. I don't know if that will happen, though, there's a self-licking lollipop aspect to the whole concept which has never set right with me. I'm glad we're going to get to find out though. I think the entire discourse around energy use is misguided, but there's no question that…
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There are stablecoins on top of Ethereum. Some are backed by off-chain bank accounts, others are based on price feeds and on-chain derivatives over ETH.
Too bad gas fees make the whole thing very expensive.
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Fair, this isn't reddit. To explain the derision, I don't think the GP makes a good point at all, as crypto-adherents pre-suppose that there's a common acceptance that blockchain currencies are an internet-level breakthrough. Linked lists are useful. Merkle trees are useful. Blockchain currencies haven't so far proven a single use case they perform more usefully than existing systems. All that the ICO craze, the NFT…
To set the record straight: I'm not even an "adherent" per-se, just a tech nerd who follows things closely. My point is that it's arrogant to claim to know the outcome of this grand experiment already. So many folks on both sides have already been so wrong so many times, yet hold firm to their ability to predict the future. Opinions are fine, but none of you are oracles.
All I’m saying is that it’s fine if people within that community believe this is as massive as they claim, but to have a common dialogue about it we would need to have common facts.
To adherents it’s bigger than the Internet, to others it’s a ponzi scheme built around linked lists and arbitrary hashes.
Go to the git repo on GitHub, check out the code, go to the first commit, and see how many times the word “Poker” is in the code base. Bitcoin was simply designed to be an in game currency for a poker game, but the narrative has been co-opted by so many people that it’s become something else.
In the original-bitcoin repo I've found CPokerLobbyDialogBase class [2]. So I can partially confirm your theory.
According to bitcoin.com in the early stages of the project there was an idea for implementing on-chain poker game [3].
> Bitcoin was simply designed to be an in game currency for a poker game
Could you back this theory with some evidence?
[1]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/4405b78d6059e536c3...
[2]: https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/92ee8d9a99...
[3]: https://news.bitcoin.com/satoshis-pre-release-bitcoin-code-c...