151–160 of 162 posts
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That's a bad example but one thing that wouldn't happen is a government manipulating its currency to finance wars.
How much war happens because of fiat currency manipulation that wouldn't happen otherwise? Seems like humanity has engaged in war on a pretty regular basis since long before people decided to put their trust in paper money.
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Right -- miners are selling you block space in which to store your transactions. That's the thing everyone's buying with Bitcoin, and that's the thing miners are spending all their energy on -- putting your transactions into blocks. The transactions themselves are very cheap to produce and validate.
This is a distinction without a difference. What use is a bitcoin transaction that is not included in a block?
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For certain cases of attacks, yes with minority forks, and by destroying the attackers stake in other cases, see the section titled "Attacks are much easier to recover from in proof of stake" here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
So why not just have a trusted centralized authority(ies), arguably democratically elected who control the system(s), and where there isn't a transfer of wealth weighted from late adopters towards earlier adopters?
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You can't "solve" the energy consumption of Bitcoin - deliberate waste is built into the Proof-of-work protocol by design.
Makes me wonder if someone can create a cryptocurrency where the mining is for distributed computing research for achieving nuclear fusion power. Crypto-mining that does SETI@home/BOINC work.
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Yes, they would find jobs elsewhere, and their energy consumption and pollution would no longer go to support the finance industry. If you want to make a fair equilibrium comparison, compare the current state of affairs with a future state of affairs where the population is smaller by the amount of people who currently work for payment processors.
I'm really not understanding your argument here. We should decrease the worlds population by the number of people who currently work for financial institutions?
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All large enterprises keep cash reserves. Whether you agree or not, the prevailing thesis behind keeping cash reserves in BTC is not that it will turn a profit, but that it will avoid devaluation like USD.
That's a ridiculous assumption to make. Bitcoin's value comes from speculation, not from anything of value in the real world. The price could tank to $500 tomorrow, because there is no government, no trust, and nothing in the real world backing it up other than hype. In light of this USD devaluation seems like a way less risky alternative.
Historical data hints that we are not close to the peak of the current bubble and when BTC drops it probably won't be lower than today, or at least, not for a long time.
Of course there is also probability that the 12-year trend will crash into zero, but that probability dwindles with every year Bitcoin isn't broken and every popped bubble that lands on an even higher low.
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How many skycrcapers are there in the world constructed for financial institutions. Want to go down the rabbit hole of calculating that CO2? Also, cite your sources
Are all those ASIC miners just sitting out in fields then?
Point of clarity: Bitcoin transactions take negligible energy to produce and validate. It's block production that's energy-intensive, and it's the same regardless of how big or full blocks are. Like any energy-intensive industry that could operate profitably via fossil fuel consumption, mining should be regulated to only use green energy. No different than power production and consumption today.
You can't regulate Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin is not controllable in the same way as say, rare earth metal mining, where you can exert pressure on whoever is mining them (or whichever nation is exporting them). There's very little any government can do to pressure a mining farm in Far East Russia or Northern China to use green power for their operations. You can do Bitcoin mining almost completely offline. Once that mag…
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This is a distinction without a difference. What use is a bitcoin transaction that is not included in a block?
Here's a real-world example: I sign and give you a transaction that, if you relay within the next 1000 blocks, will give you some BTC. You can choose relay it, to let it expire, or to resell it to someone else by signing another transaction that consumes my transaction's UTXO to you and grants up to the same amount to your buyer.
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Are all those ASIC miners just sitting out in fields then?
Show me a skyscraper that is even 10% filled with asics and I'll send you a bitcoin.
This is such a disingenuous point: as though a world running on Bitcoin wouldn't be filled with the exact same financial institutions, doing the exact same things they do now, even though those exact things are what all the new business involving Bitcoin are generally trying to do.