141–150 of 198 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're wrong about BTC transactions happening on physical paper with no connection to the network. It's not possible.
Yep, dead wrong. If you hand someone a private key, you now both have control of those coins.
I did say -technically- and I do mean that - I’m not suggesting this is practical.
A lot of these Bitcoin threads get old. The detractors, the pumpers, the bag hodlers ... it's all so tiresome. Here's something I want answered (all three parties are invited to respond): Is there a dependency on mature internet infrastructure that exists for a country to adopt BTC as its currency? Seems like there is to me, but maybe I'm not fully appreciating how this works or am overestimating the connectivity req…
They cite environmental and transparency concerns, but somehow I believe it's more about control and ensuring the continuation of the debt based fiat systems. I have a litmus test I use when discussing global financial politics with friends - "What were the main factors you think lead to Ghaddafi's killing?"
The debt based system will not go away if we ever move the entire economy to bitcoin (laughable as that idea is). You'll have fractional bitcoin reserve banking with absolutely no difference compared to today. In fact, the fact that bitcoin has no on-chain notion of credit is a major limitation that relegates it to being digital gold, not a digital dollar.
Also, I don't see a way to make fractional Bitcoin reserve banking work in practice. You can't simply issue Bitcoin you don't have.
I feel like a lot of people posting in this thread would benefit from reading Dang's post [0] from a few days ago about how shallow cryptocurrency discussions tend to be on HN and how we should all aim for a better level of discourse. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27497207
Is there a term for this kind of "shallow" discussions/responses? E.g. if headline is about X but in the vicinity of Y the thread gets filled with generic comments about Y that have nothing to do with X. It's obviously not exclusive to HN. I keep seeing it on reddit all the time and it's really tiring.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's censorship resistant and permissionless properties make it pretty impressive.
I don't think its cencorship resistence is that impressive. The amount of data you can publish is pretty limited, which is a key property of cencorship resistence.
They cite environmental and transparency concerns, but somehow I believe it's more about control and ensuring the continuation of the debt based fiat systems. I have a litmus test I use when discussing global financial politics with friends - "What were the main factors you think lead to Ghaddafi's killing?"
Who are your friends? Not even my most educated friends would be able to provide an answer at all.
edit: but it's sad how little attention people pay. Ghaddafi predicted the mass-immigration problems that Europe now faces. Libya, for all it's faults, was the place to go for anyone born in Africa looking to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Not just free education - salaried education. Free electricity. Free farmland and equipment. He did plenty of wrong in his life, but he also did some things right as a political leader.
They cite environmental and transparency concerns, but somehow I believe it's more about control and ensuring the continuation of the debt based fiat systems. I have a litmus test I use when discussing global financial politics with friends - "What were the main factors you think lead to Ghaddafi's killing?"
There's a longstanding tendency across financial systems historically to use the law to bar access to the "real" products for various reasons that happen to favor the incumbent elite. Instead, if you get any access, it's the version mediated by a middleman of some kind. There is often a rationalization in play, but the effective control over societal outcomes is the same.
Want to found a disruptive company in 16th century Europe? You had better have a royal charter.
Maybe it's the 19th century and you have a great invention: "Patent fees for England alone amounted to £100-£120 ($585) or approximately four times per capita income in 1860." [0]
You're a laborer in 1900, and you've pooled a little nest egg you want to use to trade stocks? You can't afford the real stuff, so you will have to play in a bucket shop.
You're a middle-class Black person in the 1950's US and you want to own a home or start a business? Redlining ensures that you won't get a good deal or your neighborhood of choice, neither will you get a loan from the major banks(at least, not one on reasonable terms).
And so I have to conclude that the whole basis of the debt system is always subject to some form of gatekeeping, at some point, and that's what has drawn people back to precious metal exchange over centuries, despite its limits. We've been through a long period where debt worked really well, because our economies experienced industrial growth patterns and could coexist within a stable framework(some world wars and interventions notwithstanding). That does not mean it's better or forever.
The same kind of framework is in the process of being enforced in cryptocurrency; cypherpunk-friendly privacy coins that have some adherence to Bitcoin's original spirit like Monero or ZCash have been delisted from most exchanges through regulatory pressure, while defanged "blockchain economy" tokens have stones-throw availability and heavy promotion. Meanwhile a substantial number of token exchange services will play games with your ability to withdraw to keys you own.
But I think that's going to be about as hopeless an endeavor as stopping music piracy was; it's abundantly clear that we're headed towards a long term trend of breakdown in "trust me" debt economies and their model of operation, even if some of the leaks get plugged in the near term in the way that Spotify "solved" piracy[1]; what "trust me" now results in at Internet scale is increasingly sophisticated ransomware hacking. So, while debt and lending itself could still exist and be a rewarding venture, tokens lacking credible mechanisms to back their fundamental value and consensus are going to wash out.
(I also think the El Salvador plan is a stunt - a way of marketing the country with a side of personal benefit - albeit one that could become consequential in surprising, unpredictable ways, in the way Bitcoin has been generally.)
[0] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-economic-history-of-patent-in... [1] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/03/22/music-piracy-spo...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're wrong about BTC transactions happening on physical paper with no connection to the network. It's not possible.
Technically yes, a “transaction” is on-network - but one can trade wallets (eg: trading paper keys or “Physical bitcoins”). The definition of the word “transaction” is the important bit here.
Edit: Additionally, as someone else pointed out, you could have kept your own copy of the key and could empty the wallet before me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the regulatory, financial and legal concerns? Why are they a deal-breaker? If there were no concerns El Salvador wouldn’t need to ask any help, would it?
KYC and AML are some of the biggest regulatory and legal hurdles for bitcoin. On the financial side, tying your country to a coin whose value you can't control, and is known to fluctuate wildly, is obvious financial insanity.
Also, gold's value seems to fluctuate quite a bit and it was / is the basis for some currencies
I feel like a lot of people posting in this thread would benefit from reading Dang's post [0] from a few days ago about how shallow cryptocurrency discussions tend to be on HN and how we should all aim for a better level of discourse. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27497207
At this stage all the interesting aspects of Bitcoin are economic, political or philosophical rather than technical, especially since most of the latter has been discussed to death.