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Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

blog.coinbase.com

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Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#131

Post by dane-pgp »

pixelperfect wrote: post #105
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hilarious you think Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong doesn't "know what Bitcoin is for." Maybe you don't know what it is for. People that are sane like Mr. Armstrong and Satoshi Nakamoto intended it to be used as a currency. If Satoshi is still alive I'm sure he was quite disappointed when Bitcoin decided to not scale past its blistering 7 transactions per second. "Bitcoin can already scale much larger than tha…

Bitcoin is continuing to scale, but it's doing so with the Lightning Network instead of by increasing block size. I'm not super familiar with Bitcoin's tech, but that seems sensible to me. The blockchain is already 250 GB at 7 transactions per second. If you multiplied that by 100, you still have orders of magnitude less transactions per second than credit card processors, but the hardware requirements are now high e…

For context, I don't think anyone is suggesting that BTC's blocks would still be full if they were 100 times bigger, so it is premature to talk about competing with credit card processors.

However, 250 GB is approximately 25 GB per year (since Bitcoin started in 2009), which, if you multiply it by 100, is 2.5 TB per year. That means it will take about 6.4 years to fill a 16 TB hard drive, which should cost less than $600:

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/worlds-largest-hard-disk-d...

It's not hard to imagine someone paying under $100 per year to run a full node, whereas on the day that TechRadar article was published, the average price of a bitcoin transaction was $4.58 as seen here:

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#132

Post by hnews_account_1 »

geekpowa wrote: post #43
nordsieck wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As has been remarked over and over again, they don't solve any above board problem more efficiently or with lower expense than existing technologies. If you mean by that, it's possible to have a fiat currency with no dilution, that is true. Crypto currencies are fundamentally a political innovation; it is much more politically expensive to force dilution onto a crypto-currency than a fiat one. Whether that's valuab…

Dilution / inflation is a feature not a bug. Money should be put to work doing productive stuff in the economy, not hoarded. Also crypto currencies, are not currencies. They are commodities. It is far more accurate, conceptually to think about them the same as precious metals and grains, not dollars.

> Dilution / inflation is a feature not a bug.

This is not true. We have simply adopted a system where it is a feature. We did not have steady enforced inflation until the 1950s. There are entire schools of economics that believe the concept of controlled inflation should be relegated to the past, and replaced with market ruled inflation / deflation.

I'm not saying I understand how such a fictional world will work (and I am a finance professional so I understand this very well already), but people always saying "inflation is necessary" are people with no imagination who don't look at history.

Greenspan thought we'd solved the problem when he realised he could just keep lowering interest rates and growth will keep on happening. Turns out Bretton Woods withdrawal and the stagflation of late 70s gave enough cushion for him to test his hare brained schemes on the world and lead to the explosion of growth that came afterward. And then 2008 happened. Turns out Mr.Yes-Market was wrong all along.

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#133

Post by [deleted] »

pixelperfect wrote: post #105
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hilarious you think Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong doesn't "know what Bitcoin is for." Maybe you don't know what it is for. People that are sane like Mr. Armstrong and Satoshi Nakamoto intended it to be used as a currency. If Satoshi is still alive I'm sure he was quite disappointed when Bitcoin decided to not scale past its blistering 7 transactions per second. "Bitcoin can already scale much larger than tha…

Bitcoin is continuing to scale, but it's doing so with the Lightning Network instead of by increasing block size. I'm not super familiar with Bitcoin's tech, but that seems sensible to me. The blockchain is already 250 GB at 7 transactions per second. If you multiplied that by 100, you still have orders of magnitude less transactions per second than credit card processors, but the hardware requirements are now high e…

[deleted]

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#134

Post by vinniejames »

hnews_account_1 wrote: post #130
vinniejames wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good number of these negative arguments appear to have a similar line of thinking. "I don't know much about Bitcoin, or finance in general, but I can adamantly tell you Bitcoin has no benefit, something something money laundering"

As a finance professional, I can tell you without shame that much of my industry doesn't understand finance either. The mask of online anonymity simply emboldens people with no knowledge to come forth and spout. I keep moving platforms trying to get away from that shit. Reddit is horrible in this regard, so I only use it for memes. HN has full credibility professionals in programming, but its finance base is really n…

Does a hacker newsish platform exist for the finance world?

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#135

Post by hnews_account_1 »

chii wrote: post #62
nordsieck wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dilution / inflation is a feature not a bug. Money should be put to work doing productive stuff in the economy, not hoarded. There are few people who are interested in crypto-currency and have not heard this argument in many forms. Crypto-currency fans generally either don't care or don't think it's true.

whether crypto fans think or believe it to be false (or not care) is irrelevant. Crypto has only shown the characteristics of a speculative commodity (like gold), and the laws of economics are as universal as any other law - bitcoins cannot become a currency unless it is done by fiat (like how china is exploring doing so right now, but with their own version of a crypto-currency where they control the chain).

> the laws of economics are as universal as any other law

No they are not.

Can people please stop and think for a second before they vomit everything on their minds onto the keyboard and hit enter as fast as they possibly can in an attempt to make themselves heard in the noise?

See what that looks like? Think about these things before you write them. Physical laws are immutable. If they not, they aren't a law. Economics is entire a human endeavour. The laws are what we want them to be.

Now I'm not justifying anything crypto related with that statement. I'm just saying you need to think before you type.

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#136

Post by hanniabu »

v64 wrote: post #56
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But we don't want financial transactions to be fully automated and immutable. And cryptocurrency does not provide immutability anyway. Remember the DAO Ethereum fiasco where they lost a bunch of money and decided to roll it back.

This is a legitimate point to bring up, but seeing as how the community rejected a second fork in order to fix a bug in a smart contract that destroyed millions of dollars worth of Ether [1], I feel confident at this point saying that another similar hard fork will not occur. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/08/accidental-bug-may-have-froz...

Also it wasn't a rollback of the chain. It was the movement of the funds out of the thieves address, which was voted on by the network.

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#137

Post by _7fvc »

I have a different view of the 2020s. We don't need more tokens or programmable technology. Money is the dominant use case for crypto. We still haven't figured out how to make crypto money that people can use beyond speculation. Notable projects will be around money use cases. Currently, we see Bitcoin, Tether, and stablecoins. In the 2020s, there will be more coins that people can use as money. We'll spend the next decade searching for them.

Tech-focused projects, like Ethereum 2, Algorand, won't be successful. Decentralized coins, Libra, corporate coins, government coins will be.

For decentralized coins, I think the market needs to find a way to incorporate inflationary economics into the system. Bitcoin needs an inflating parallel blockchain. It's all about money. I put my focus there.

I wrote a post on the topic: Emerging Markets of Cryptocurrencies

https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/10/emerging-markets-of-cry...

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#138

Post by [deleted] »

dane-pgp wrote: post #131
pixelperfect wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is continuing to scale, but it's doing so with the Lightning Network instead of by increasing block size. I'm not super familiar with Bitcoin's tech, but that seems sensible to me. The blockchain is already 250 GB at 7 transactions per second. If you multiplied that by 100, you still have orders of magnitude less transactions per second than credit card processors, but the hardware requirements are now high e…

For context, I don't think anyone is suggesting that BTC's blocks would still be full if they were 100 times bigger, so it is premature to talk about competing with credit card processors. However, 250 GB is approximately 25 GB per year (since Bitcoin started in 2009), which, if you multiply it by 100, is 2.5 TB per year. That means it will take about 6.4 years to fill a 16 TB hard drive, which should cost less than…

[deleted]

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#139

Post by hnews_account_1 »

vinniejames wrote: post #134
hnews_account_1 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a finance professional, I can tell you without shame that much of my industry doesn't understand finance either. The mask of online anonymity simply emboldens people with no knowledge to come forth and spout. I keep moving platforms trying to get away from that shit. Reddit is horrible in this regard, so I only use it for memes. HN has full credibility professionals in programming, but its finance base is really n…

Does a hacker newsish platform exist for the finance world?

I'm yet to find it. For a meme-ish sub /r/wallstreetbets is pretty good. Go there and have a laugh. But places like /r/economics and /r/finance are utter shit.

The best resource is financial twitter (fintwit). The news breaks there, the discussion happens there, and loads of meme-ing also takes place (which is always a nice to-have in a serious place). The only drawback is that most of them lean exactly the way I do. So I can bear the place, but I miss out on a bunch of opposing opinions and it's always a challenge finding someone on the opposite side of the fence.

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#140

Post by hanniabu »

paulpauper wrote: post #89
induetimesir wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"no demonstrated advantage" - said by someone who doesn't remember what it's like to wait for a large check to clear. or hasn't tried to fund their IRA via an ACH transfer but their bank won't allow it bcs rules.. or hasn't wanted to wire money (or receive a wire) for a fraction of the price (and hassle) of a wire transfer. I have sent hundreds of bitcoin transactions. And I admit that it's not perfect. There's lots…

how long do you think it takes to turn fiat into bitcoin and bitcoin back into fiat for the recipient? Hint: its longer than clearing a check

That's not bitcoin's fault, it's the traditional financial system's fault. The transaction can only happen at the rate of the slowest party.
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