Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies • Hacker News Board

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#121

Post by sravaka » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 7:47 PM UTC

Jasper_ wrote: post #33

nscalf wrote: post #12

This is some of the worst junk writing I've seen on the hill. Some pretty wrong things in here, like insinuating that the only value of crypto is to criminals, and all but saying that the reason there are hackings to things like critical infrastructure is because crypto exists, which is just silly. Then it flags bitcoin as an environmental hazard, though estimates seem to be ~50-70% of BTC energy use is from renewabl…

> though estimates seem to be ~50-70% of BTC energy use is from renewables Bullshit. When one coal mine in a remote region of China flooded, the Bitcoin hash rate measurably dropped by 30%. Keep in mind this was just one coal mine. Not all of China's production. https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-env... > it's more apt to call it Web 3.0 than cryptocurrency at this point. I've said this so many…

> I've said this so many times: But what does it doooooo???

It does exactly what it set out to do in the first sentence of the original white paper.

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."[0]

[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#122

Post by basch » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 7:48 PM UTC

Jasper_ wrote: post #73

briefcomment wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've said this so many times: But what does it doooooo??? Are you asking about Bitcoin or Crypto? Bitcoin doesn't do much atm, but Ethereum does stuff, and Bitcoin Cash is pretty practical as a currency at the moment. There's plenty that can be done, but the market will have to decide what to converge on.

OK then, what does it do? Feel free to tell me. I've asked a lot of times and have never gotten a good response.

Quite simply, escrow. Programming complex escrow, that holds and releases funds when appropriate conditions are met. People have bundled many escrow statements together to create entire banks. People can pool different currencies together to create liquidity pools and exchanges between currencies.

It's not all that different from (transfer)wise except a bit less owned by one central firm.

It can be "pay this vendor when this thing ships" or "pay out this pot when this event or game score happens." Any measurable metric online can turn into the IF of an if then statement.

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#123

Post by snejad123 » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 7:49 PM UTC

verdverm wrote: post #114

snejad123 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decentralized marketplace is more akin to what you would see in ancient bazaars of Mesopotamia. It will allow vendors to collect more money for their service while at the same time allowing customers to pay less for the same service. This is because a decentralized service does not need a thousand people and billions of dollars of VC funding to run (take Uber for instance). Instead there will be the smart contract…

> Instead there will be the smart contract (which will require funding so there will be a very small fee per transaction) So you are saying there are still middlemen who take a cut of the transactions?

You are on YC's forum!

I suggest you learn how the price of a product or service changes based on regulation, cost of employees, the amount of money a business owes in loans, basic stuff!

More overhead adds to the cost.

A smart contract infrastructure will not have zero overhead, but it will be close to it. Much less than a centralized service provider.

There is no "middlemen" but more just one "middleman" which is the smart contract which each will have a different protocol and how they handle fees.

Some will use it to pay for API calls, others will use it to do some automated token buy-backs. Depends on the contract. And the beauty is, the contracts are all publicly available so you can read it before requesting to the service.

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#124

Post by snejad123 » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 7:51 PM UTC

verdverm wrote: post #115

snejad123 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the onus is not on me to hand-deliver you information. I'm just here to say OP is wrong, speaking emotionally/egotistically, and spreading trite arguments that have been debunked time and time again. Go ahead and google "L2 ethereum" and "ethereum proof-of-staking migration". If you want to dive deep into the ecosystem it's all in plain sight for you to do so. There is a lot going behind the scenes and I simply don't…

L2 has been delayed years, still years out, and optimistic rollup seems to be following the course of delays

well not sure what this proves, but I guess you can bet against the ethereum developers delivering. I'm personally not making that bet, but if you want to do so, that's your view of the world lol.

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#125

Post by mkolodny » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 7:51 PM UTC

neurotrace wrote: post #75

snejad123 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just because you don't use it or put in the effort to look at different decentralized projects doesn't mean there are "no use-cases". I think with the amount of activity on AAVE and yearn, plus the growth these projects have received have killed that argument. Very 2017 argument that no longer makes any sense and is presented by luddites. Most the bottlenecks right now to why you don't have day-to-day apps deployed o…

I'm not OP but this doesn't seem to answer the question. You presented a lot of speculation and mentioned two things that I've never heard of

Proof-of-stake is a strategy being used to make some cryptocurrencies more environmentally friendly. Instead of using lots of compute to compete create new bitcoins, cryptocurrencies using proof-of-stake, like Ethereum 2.0, dole out new coins to people relative to the amount of the currency they already own. Proof-of-stake uses orders of magnitude less compute than proof-of-work, so it's far more environmentally friendly.

Gas prices are transaction fees. Right now, both Bitcoin and Ethereum have high transaction fees - too high to use those currencies for small purchases. The high transaction fees are also delaying "Web 3.0" - new decentralized applications that use blockchains as databases. Once transaction fees go down (and Bitcoin's transaction fees have gone down a lot in the past couple of months), that will make cryptocurrencies practical for more purchases and applications.

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#126

Post by neurotrace » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 7:52 PM UTC

snejad123 wrote: post #96

neurotrace wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not OP but this doesn't seem to answer the question. You presented a lot of speculation and mentioned two things that I've never heard of

the onus is not on me to hand-deliver you information. I'm just here to say OP is wrong, speaking emotionally/egotistically, and spreading trite arguments that have been debunked time and time again. Go ahead and google "L2 ethereum" and "ethereum proof-of-staking migration". If you want to dive deep into the ecosystem it's all in plain sight for you to do so. There is a lot going behind the scenes and I simply don't…

Let me just preface this by saying that I'm not anti-crypto. From what little I know about it, it's an interesting tech. I just literally don't understand _why_ people use it. So I dug in to what you mentioned.

Layer 2 Rollups

> Layer 2 is a collective term for solutions designed to help scale your application by handling transactions off the Ethereum mainnet (layer 1), while taking advantage of the robust decentralized security model of mainnet. Transaction speed suffers when the network is busy which can make the user experience poor for certain types of dapps. And as the network gets busier, gas prices increase as transaction senders aim to outbid each other. This can make using Ethereum very expensive.

So it makes Ethereum cheaper. As someone who doesn't really get the hype, this doesn't help at all. Making Ethereum cheaper doesn't help me if I don't have a reason to use Ethereum.

After Googling "ethereum proof-of-staking migration" my take away is that moving to proof-of-stake will make it more robust and more energy efficient. Again, it doesn't tell me anything about why I should use Ethereum (or any other cryptocurrency) in the first place.

Everything I read about crypto talks about how it's currency that can be produced by anyone* and blockchain inherently makes it possible to know who did what and when. As a layperson, none of this is interesting or useful. The average person isn't going to start mining, the average person isn't going to speculate on a very volatile market, and the average person has no way to spend any crypto that they own. I'm not saying it's your job to fix the optics here but I've read a ton of comments in this thread and not a single person has pointed to something that made me think "I could use that" and I'm the kind of person who likes to browse Github looking for weird things to try out.

* Provided you have enough money to build a powerful PC and afford the electricity cost

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#127

Post by verdverm » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 7:57 PM UTC

cwkoss wrote: post #98

okareaman wrote: post #37

I'm curious if crypto enthusiasts believe crypto currencies won't be as regulated as other currencies and if not, in what way will it be more free and open in a beneficial manner?

Right now, the government taxes USD cash savings at 5.4% (current inflation rate). There are good reasons for fiat currencies to continue existing, but it is also easy to understand why savers find a currency that cannot be devalued by federal reserve policy appealing. Personally, I also think the transparency of Bitcoin is a positive quality. Even the federal reserve does not have the capability to trace exactly whe…

Govt transparency does not require Blockchain to happen, this could be done with any database. The hard part is recording everything.

Imagine what happens when some agency loses their wallet key...

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#128

Post by verdverm » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 8:01 PM UTC

snejad123 wrote: post #124

verdverm wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

L2 has been delayed years, still years out, and optimistic rollup seems to be following the course of delays

well not sure what this proves, but I guess you can bet against the ethereum developers delivering. I'm personally not making that bet, but if you want to do so, that's your view of the world lol.

I know core devs and hodl, just saying they continuously fail to deliver and that there is doubt that a solution is actually possible. Things get far more complex and the exploits quite interesting

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#129

Post by snejad123 » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 8:01 PM UTC

bamboo2 wrote: post #118

snejad123 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decentralized marketplace is more akin to what you would see in ancient bazaars of Mesopotamia. It will allow vendors to collect more money for their service while at the same time allowing customers to pay less for the same service. This is because a decentralized service does not need a thousand people and billions of dollars of VC funding to run (take Uber for instance). Instead there will be the smart contract…

This is a great answer. I think my problem is explaining it to poor people, who see Elon musk and jack dorsey, pushing Bitcoin as “for the people” and they just think, oh it’s for those rich guys to hype their startup options into the stratosphere, not for us folks living in debt on the verge of homelessness. I want to help those people get in on it, so they aren’t left even further behind if that makes sense.

Yah I totally agree and I don't like the fact that tech giants like Elon & Jack are using their influence to fluctuate the price of crypto so they can make a few bucks. I find it greedy and disgusting.

I think these guys have become pretty delusional with the amount of power they experienced the past few decades.

The true crypto movement inside the developer circles of ethereum is trying to displace these assholes by flipping the value infrastructure to the actual service provider rather than the one who sits at the top of the centralized pyramid.

It will help poor people in the long-run when it allows more accessible services like driving and food delivery to pay more to them.

It may not work, but it's worth a shot and theoretically possible.

This current system of mega-billion dollar centralized tech businesses is actually very unnatural and strange in my opinion.

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#130

Post by verdverm » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 8:04 PM UTC

snejad123 wrote: post #123

verdverm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead there will be the smart contract (which will require funding so there will be a very small fee per transaction) So you are saying there are still middlemen who take a cut of the transactions?

You are on YC's forum! I suggest you learn how the price of a product or service changes based on regulation, cost of employees, the amount of money a business owes in loans, basic stuff! More overhead adds to the cost. A smart contract infrastructure will not have zero overhead, but it will be close to it. Much less than a centralized service provider. There is no "middlemen" but more just one "middleman" which is t…

The miners who charge fees to process transactions, are they not middlemen?

Centralized processors have infra costs, perhaps they have found a good price point already

You could also be more respectful if you are on HN