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Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

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Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#161

Post by donkarma »

Yuioup wrote: post #130
anderber wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory Keep in mind that not all Cryptocurrency use mining. Nano, for example, is zero fee, environmentally friendly coin that is incredibly fast. Bitcoin gets all the talk but there are some great and interesting tech out there. Get yourself a wallet ( https://natrium.io/ ) and I'll send you some so you can try it out. https://nano.org/

I keep hearing bitcoin apologists saying "Bitcoin is environmentally unfriendly but... check this out" as if that would solve the record temperatures we're having at the moment. How about we stop using cryptocurrency completely. Time for the UN to get together and get this banned.

What is your issue? If my dog bites a dog, do we need to ban all dogs? Cryptocurrency is not even that much responsible for emissions in comparison to countries or corporations. Who told you that crypto is bad?

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#162

Post by iszomer »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #17
boxmonster wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a little joke, but probably not funny to those hodling BTC

To those people bitcoin going down is cause for celebration. It's a sale and they get to buy more for cheap. The real joke is the fact there are far better coins out there that nobody cares about just because they're not BTC.

"..from centralized exchanges" should be appended to "..they get to buy more for cheap."

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#163

Post by outside1234 »

dan-robertson wrote: post #38
OnlineGladiator wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The S&P 500 market cap is over $40 trillion. The bitcoin market cap is under $2 trillion. I just looked up this data super quick with Google so corrections are welcome. And yep, I'm editing my comment because apparently that data is for all of crypto - bitcoin is $815 billion according to ycharts. https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_market_cap That's still an absurd amount of money, but there is more than an order…

I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. That is, why do market caps matter here?

He is trying to say that Bitcoin is wildly overvalued.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#164

Post by matheusmoreira »

theturtletalks wrote: post #141
matheusmoreira wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is not decentralized. You need specialized hardware to mine bitcoin and the entry costs are enormous. One CPU one vote is history. As a result there are relatively few miners. Just look at how much bitcoin suffered when countries started banning mining activities. A truly decentralized coin would simply shrug off attempts at regulation because there are so many independent nodes no single country could possib…

I mean decentralization in the "proving ownership" way. Right now, a bank can be the central authority on how much money you have in your account. With Bitcoin, people collectively determine how much each person has through the blockchain. A bank doing it will always be cheaper, but then the bank has too much control. How much are people willing to pay to make sure one entity does not have too much control or power?

> With Bitcoin, people collectively determine how much each person has through the blockchain.

That's how it was supposed work. The current reality is small highly centralized group of miners maintain the blockchain.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#165

Post by rackjack »

anderber wrote: post #110
beaconstudios wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a meaningful service cost, it's just paid for by mining. Environmentally there's also a massive cost, one that is not offset by the benefits bitcoin brings - which is primarily financial speculation and scams. Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory.

> Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory Keep in mind that not all Cryptocurrency use mining. Nano, for example, is zero fee, environmentally friendly coin that is incredibly fast. Bitcoin gets all the talk but there are some great and interesting tech out there. Get yourself a wallet ( https://natrium.io/ ) and I'll send you some so you can try it out. https://nano.org/

Silly question: what's the problem with fees? If you need other people to do work (process your transaction) for you, you should pay them, right?

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#166

Post by notch656a »

beaconstudios wrote: post #154
notch656a wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bitcoin consumes massive amounts of energy for basically no benefit except pure money wonkery, which is no benefit at all. It's a net negative in every possible way. Well I disagree here. It provides benefit for many people. The example I continually use for me personally is buying precious metals with I think we're in agreement we would do well to be as efficient as we can with our resources. It would be great to f…

Are you buying precious metals in the abstract, commodities market sense or are you manufacturing? Because if its the former, I still don't think that's a net positive. I do think it has some small benefits like transferring money where there are no other options. But the vast majority of the network's use is in purely financial use and justified by HODLers and libertarian types. Its existence is largely a downside o…

>Are you buying precious metals in the abstract, commodities market sense or are you manufacturing? Because if its the former, I still don't think that's a net positive.

Y'all told me crypto was bad and now I'm bad for dumping crypto to buy precious metals? The litecoin transaction I do uses $0.02 of electricity. $0.02. Ever left a lightbulb on longer than you should have? Spent $0.02 in gas to go to the bank to get fiat? Just can't win. I don't really like holding dollars as the government constantly inflates them, and I see them as part of a system that bombs innocent children abroad and locks up foreign nationals without even a trial. I see it as irresponsible not to store emergency wealth _somewhere_. I'm committed to not become a public charge and I wouldn't resort to begging from family unless there were no other choice and even then I'd probably rather just starve

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#167

Post by samarama »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #65
camjohnson26 wrote: post #43

For all the hate Bitcoin gets because it’s obviously in a bubble market, can we at least agree that it is an astounding engineering achievement that an anonymous individual and a small group of researchers were able to build a network capable of transacting billions of dollars of value with only 2 service incidents in 14 years? All without any meaningful service costs and no hacking of the network, despite huge incen…

> can we at least agree that it is an astounding engineering achievement As the first cryptocurrency, it's certainly an incredible innovation and idea. However, it's already outdated technology. Bitcoin failed to become everything it was idealized to be. It's not anonymous. It's not private. It's not fungible. It's not decentralized. It's not unregulated. It's not even a currency since transactions are not cheap and…

It was never meant to be private or anonymous. You’re creating huge strawmen here.

Bitcoin is definitely fungible and decentralised. You’re using a lot of words that you don’t know what they mean.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#168

Post by throwawaygh »

88913527 wrote: post #28

I am curious how the 99.98% SLA compares to other payment networks (eg: Visa, etc). A bit apples to oranges, since the transaction volume is different.

It's apples and oranges for a two reasons:

1. VASTLY different definitions of "uptime". A credit card POS terminal that required minutes or hours per transaction would be considered defective. If we measure Bitcoin's uptime by typical performance requirements for a CC processing system, Bitcoin has had 0.0 seconds of uptime since inception.

2. Bitcoin has no SLA. If it goes down you have no recourse. If your transaction does not post within N seconds, you have no recourse. If you transaction posts but is later not recognized by the network, you have no recourse.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#169

Post by veltas »

anderber wrote: post #110
beaconstudios wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a meaningful service cost, it's just paid for by mining. Environmentally there's also a massive cost, one that is not offset by the benefits bitcoin brings - which is primarily financial speculation and scams. Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory.

> Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory Keep in mind that not all Cryptocurrency use mining. Nano, for example, is zero fee, environmentally friendly coin that is incredibly fast. Bitcoin gets all the talk but there are some great and interesting tech out there. Get yourself a wallet ( https://natrium.io/ ) and I'll send you some so you can try it out. https://nano.org/

https://docs.nano.org/what-is-nano/overview/

> Every block must also contain a small, user-generated Proof-of-Work value which is a Quality-of-Service prioritization mechanism allowing occasional, average user transactions to process quickly and consistently. The PoW computation for a transaction typically takes a few seconds on a modern desktop CPU.

Seems to me like this hasn't changed anything.

Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?

#170

Post by tsimionescu »

kebman wrote: post #116
beaconstudios wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a meaningful service cost, it's just paid for by mining. Environmentally there's also a massive cost, one that is not offset by the benefits bitcoin brings - which is primarily financial speculation and scams. Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory.

Do you have a measure against the banking system? If you do, then I'd love to see how Bitcoin is worse.

Let's take an article [0] produced by a big Bitcoin miner at face value. They claim the banking system consumes 263.72 TWh globally, twice the power consumption of the Bitcoin network at that time, 113.89 TWh.

Now, Bitcoin is processing 4.6 transactions/second [1]. VISA alone is processing 1700 transactions/second on average, with peak transaction rates claimed in the 24000/second [2]. Mastercard is similar, as are other payment processors.

Even worse, the claimed energy usage is for the entire banking system. This easily amounts to billions of daily transactions, but also many other services that Bitcoin doesn't even come close to offering: insurance, mortgages, credits, risk evaluations, escrow and many others. All this for a mere 2x the total energy expenditure.

[0] https://cointelegraph.com/news/banking-system-consumes-two-t...

[1] https://towardsdatascience.com/the-blockchain-scalability-pr...

[2] https://news.bitcoin.com/no-visa-doesnt-handle-24000-tps-and...

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