171–180 of 369 posts
When can we call Bitcoin a failed experiment? And don't tell me it was "always about storing value", that's not in the original paper.
Failed in what sense, and for whom? Some people made and are making a lot of (real) money from it (especially the thieves that have executed the numerous heists from exchanges, wallets, etc.) There is a definite ecosystem here that has players profiting from it that would want it to continue.
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One of your points is of dubious validity: fees may not be higher. Fees went very high when the network became congested; but when it’s not congested, they’re much lower than credit card systems are for normal businesses. https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ suggests that right now, what equates to about nine US cents is sufficient for a basic transaction. And if you’re happy to wait an hour, then two cents ought to do you…
One benefit of crypto might be that it lights a fire under the ass of banks to improve their services. There is no technical reason why banks can’t match or exceed the convenience of crypto for making money transfers. They just haven’t had enough competition to make it happen yet.
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Isn’t this issue inherent in its design? If you can only have 21 million Bitcoins, the value will skyrocket until the currency is worthless.
It's more than 21 millions since bitcoins can be divided. And no, it could serve as a digital gold / long term investment, and others crypto currencies could be used for day to day transaction
Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. Gold does. There's no long-term investment there when even pizza places and Steam think the "currency" is bunk.
It's one thing if Goldman Sachs thinks the currency is worthless, but another issue entirely if the digital equivalent of Circle-K won't accept your virtual dollary-doos.
Let's see, would I rather invest in a company like Intel whose processors are in every American home, or McDonalds whose an international brand, or in Bitcoin whose sole usage is relegated to druggies and sole investment limited to grandmas and millennials who think they're going to strike it rich?
It's pogs for adults.
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Maybe its a generational thing, but i have no clue how i would go about buying/trading gold and i dont think anyone in my friend group does either. Bitcoin is far more accessible.
It’s pretty easy to just buy $GLD with any brokerage account if you just want gold exposure. If you don’t trust the ETFs to honor your claims when the apocalypse arrives things are harder of course.
I think what people need to realize about cryptocurrencies is that they aren't going to derive their value from being convertible to fiat currency. Rather cryptocurrencies are going to be revolutionary in the sense of how they can be combined with other technologies. For example, what if World of Warcraft used a cryptocurrency based system for ingame currency? Where the ingame money was actually finite and that in th…
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Any SEM with an EDS system will tell you non-destructively if you have tungsten wrapped in gold. X-Ray diffractometry would also do the same. Rutherford Backscattering spectrometry too. All three of these techniques are non-destructive and the first two are quite common to find at universities.
That's quite a leap from "you can verify at some other gold dealer" though.
It has been clear for a while now that Bitcoin is an inferior payment system for the consumer: * The fees are higher. * The risk to the consumer is higher. * The difficulty of use is higher. * It is accepted at an extremely low amount of vendors and even that is falling. So you really how to wonder why people ever thought consumers would use it en masse.
It's pretty remarkable that the transaction layer (Lightning network) on top of Bitcoin hasn't garnered any discussion in this comment section - I would expect this to be the primary topic when talking Bitcoin commerce! It's not possible to have an intelligent discussion on Bitcoin commerce without discussing its most relevant tech. From my experience, I see that most apolitical or politically averse techies (a lot o…
I think what people need to realize about cryptocurrencies is that they aren't going to derive their value from being convertible to fiat currency. Rather cryptocurrencies are going to be revolutionary in the sense of how they can be combined with other technologies. For example, what if World of Warcraft used a cryptocurrency based system for ingame currency? Where the ingame money was actually finite and that in th…
Why would they need a distributed system? They already have an in-game currency with a central authority (their trusted servers) and can already limit the rate of currency creation (reduce monster's gold drop rate to zero or whatever).
EVE Online shows just how well a central authority can manage a virtual game currency. No crypto or blockchain needed.
> Let's say we wanted to build a social network, where we didn't actually want everybody to just be able to say whatever they want without a threat of consequence
Cool, so like a reputation system on old forums where you have to have a certain number of positive comments to participate in other private forums, and there's heavy moderation?
Oh woah, no crypto, no blockchain. I don't see how cryptocurrencies make the fundamental problems of building such a system any easier btw. Attaching a value to someone in a database is easy, and even distributed social networks like mastodon trust the participating servers (and if you don't, you block the whole server).
Cryptocurrencies are a problem looking for another problem, and it turns out rubbing two problems together doesn't make fire.
A central database is usually better (the WoW example), and they're often orthogonal to other ideas they're shoved into (reputation system, file storage, whatever).
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If the government wants your gold or private key, they’re going to get it. How long are you going to hold out against their proverbial $5 rubber hose? Solitary confinement? Mundane legal threats?
How does it know you have one? You can use brain wallet[1], you can use trezor with multiple passphrases. You can give up some of your bitcoins and if you manage your wallets properly then no one can prove you have some more. 1. Don't use brain wallets, unless you really understand security