161–170 of 198 posts
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Can you make me a list of real vs pretend work so I can base my ethical decisions on it?
It's not a comprehensive list, but a good rule of thumb is that any computer spinning around computing a number that no one cares about the value of is pretend work.
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
Maybe it's because Bitcoin is pretty shallow topic on the technical side? 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.
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Conspiracy theory about moving off the petrodollar, presumably.
It's not a conspiracy theory that he wanted to create a gold backed Pan-African currency. He openly promoted it. It's not a conspiracy theory that this would have very possibly undermined the petrodollar and all Western currencies. It's not a conspiracy theory that the United States and its allies have supported coups, rebellions, and the like to maintain their power in the past.
I don't think a mere thing like what currency you use stops the FBI from assuming everything in the world is their jurisdiction.
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> ones that cost nothing Second largest economy in the world Second-fourth largest industrial country in the world ... costs nothing
More military spending than the rest of the world's superpowers and their vassal states combined... Costs nothing!
But yeah, sure. The dollar is a worthless piece of paper that has nothing behind it except the military.
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More military spending than the rest of the world's superpowers and their vassal states combined... Costs nothing!
1.5 trillion in trade with EU, China and Japan alone. But yeah, sure. The dollar is a worthless piece of paper that has nothing behind it except the military.
But yeah, sure. Get all defensive about someone agreeing with you. :)
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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.
The dollar was once backed by gold, so not the best comparison. 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.
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1.5 trillion in trade with EU, China and Japan alone. But yeah, sure. The dollar is a worthless piece of paper that has nothing behind it except the military.
I used the same ironic "Costs nothing" phrase as you did. But yeah, sure. Get all defensive about someone agreeing with you. :)
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> solves a lot of problems in peer to peer computing. Can you list ten of these problems if there are a lot of them?
Sure: - consensus - distributed computation - statefulness - peer to peer identity - peer to peer reputation of nodes - resistance against many classic failure modes (e.g. Sybil attacks) - peer to peer source of truth (e.g. Namecoin/DNScoin) - verifiable code execution (smart contracts) - immutability/ tamper proof - and (obviously) peer to peer payments Granted, some of these overlap with each other, but the point s…
The amount of energy they expend on ads is dwarfed by the amount of energy spent on doing the amount of "distributed computation" that can be run on a Raspberry Pi ten times over.
Most of the problems that this "breakthrough" supposedly solves are solved either extremely poorly, inefficiently, or not at all.
And the reason is simple. Blockchain is a distributed append-only log with an extremely inefficient and expensive way to append logs to it. And that's it. Anything else you ascribe to this breakthrough is wishful thinking.
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> Bitcoin's enegery:market-cap ratio - a proxy for energy vs. value to humans - is >300x better than an airline & 60x better than JP Morgan & 20x better than google's. Market cap is not, to me, any kind proxy for "value to humans". The utility of Bitcoin as an alternative to fiat is obviously unrelated to the number coins or their price.
So say this while offering zero other alternative. How else would you place a value on a company or product's explicit worth to humans?
What is the value of money, viewed as a technology that facilitates the everyday exchanged of goods and services? My only answer to that is "incalculable", since I can't really imagine society without some variation of it. The value of that concept does not reduce to a number.
If we then move on to the discussion of different forms of money, say cash versus digital, or bank deposits versus cryptocurrencies, then I honestly don't see how "number of units times trading price" is any measure of the relative usefulness or value of each of those as technologies. It might be an answer to something, but not that question.
Actually, now that you've made me think about it, I might concede that market cap is useful measure of something's value as an investment object. But the value (rather, usefulness) of a currency is more than that. My salary is not an investment, it's a way of storing the value of my labour and convert it into the stuff I need to survive. So to me, that discussion needs to cover things like efficiency, resilience, and politics (e.g., who controls it). And to me, Bitcoin is very far from a winner in any of those.
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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.
You could say the same thing about cash. Also, gold's value seems to fluctuate quite a bit and it was / is the basis for some currencies