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What I Think of Bitcoin

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Re: What I Think of Bitcoin

#181

Post by ballofrubber »

rspeele wrote: post #173
ballofrubber wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The energy costs of a block are not in relation with the amount of transactions in it. Just because you have two numbers, doesn‘t mean you should divide them. Short rant: The current settlement system is layers up on layers of legacy systems. How do international settlements exactly work? How long do they take? Where does money come from? Why should flawed metrics and corruptable humans decide when to issue currency?…

> The energy costs of a block are not in relation with the amount of transactions in it. Just because you have two numbers, doesn‘t mean you should divide them. Right, they are unrelated. The energy costs are driven by how much Bitcoin is valued, so the more Bitcoin succeeds, the higher the energy costs go. The transaction rate does not increase, it stays around 400K/day, enough for everybody in Russia to make one tr…

Also I might add that the probability that the layers that people will use will be open source is very high. This inherently makes it more accessible to everyone.

If we look at the Lightning Network (a 2nd layer solution), there are 3 mainstream solutions, all open source.

On top of that you can have something like chaumian ecash, which is even more privacy preserving and cheaper.

Yes, we will need layers on top of Bitcoin, but thats a good thing. The base layer needs to be expensive (small blocks) in order to keep the cost of running a node as low as it is now (<$100)

Re: What I Think of Bitcoin

#182

Post by rspeele »

ballofrubber wrote: post #180
rspeele wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's awesome, but it should get even more awesome as BTC gains mainstream acceptance. The energy usage should hopefully one day match that of the USA or at least India to be even more secure. After all, if Bitcoin is going to become the global reserve currency a 51% attack should be absolutely impossible. Right now all the mining being done is rewarded with a measly ~$55 million per day. That's within the reach of so…

Even at the current state you wouldn't be able to source all the asics needed for a 51% attack.

Why buy them yourself? Just pay the people who already have them to find hashes for you. Pay noticeably better than the existing pools and they would line up at your door.

Miners are motivated by profit. They won't necessarily even know that you're trying to do a 51%, just that you're buying hashrate and are willing to pay them more than they're getting elsewhere.

edit: In fact, you could run a legitimate mining pool at a small loss for a while to build trust. Participating in your loss leader mining pool would be attractive to miners since the other pools, that skim some profit for themselves to support their operations, can't compete on price with one willing to lose a little bit of money. If you want, break it out into 3 "different" pools that you control so that it even looks to the naive like there's no 51% control. Then spring your trap.

51%ing Bitcoin is well within the resources of a motivated hedge fund, major corporation, or country. The motivation just isn't there right now.

Re: What I Think of Bitcoin

#183

Post by andy81 »

kgkyltpgllg wrote: post #123
CyberDildonics wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is much more likely that tether is backed by bitcoin and is a ponzi scheme. Price rises seems to be driven heavily by more tether being created out of nothing, leading to another speculation and news frenzy, leading their btc being more valuable and safety from default despite creating more tether. If bitcoin goes down rapidly or people start exchanging lots of tether for bitcoin (because you can't actuall…

> more tether being created out of nothing How do you know that? Can you see Tether USD bank account, and can confirm that no USD is deposited there when Tether is created?

From the article that caused the panic-

https://crypto-anonymous-2021.medium.com/the-bit-short-insid...

The last nail in the coffin was when I found out about the lack of visible reserves. If Tether Ltd. really was taking in 1 USD for each Tether it issued, then it should have as many dollars in its bank account as there are issued Tethers. And it turns out we can check if that’s true! Tether Ltd.’s bank is Deltec bank in the Bahamas, and the Bahamas discloses how much foreign currency its domestic banks hold each month.

The answer was — at least up to the end of September 2020 — not nearly enough:

From January 2020 to September 2020, the amount of all foreign currencies held by all the domestic banks in the Bahamas increases by only $600 million — going from $4.7B to $5.3B. (The table is in Bahamian dollars, but the Bahamian dollar is pegged to the US dollar, so 1 BSD = 1 USD.)

But during the same period, total issued Tethers increased by almost $5.4 billion — going from $4.6B to $10B!

Re: What I Think of Bitcoin

#185

Post by carleverett »

ballofrubber wrote: post #178
carleverett wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Store of Value" and "medium of exchange" are 2 separate functions of currency that shouldn't be served by the same asset.

Care to elaborate? I don't see why it shouldn't. I will always want the best SoV in exchange for my services, why would I want something else? If I need to exchange the currency for a SoV everytime, I might get the SoV from the get-go.

A good medium of exchange should have: - Little to no transaction fee - Near instantaneous transaction time - stable value

The characteristics of Bitcoin that make it such a good store of value make it really bad at these. Computation-heavy proof of work creates a secure and immutable network, but also makes it more expensive and slows down transaction times. It's scarcity makes it a speculative asset prone to booms and busts, but gives it the best chance of long term value growth.

But I guess what you're saying is that as a buyer, why would I not want my money to live as a strong store of value up until the point of transaction, which I think I agree with. It'd be nice if you could own Amazon stock and then pay at McDonalds with USD taken out of the value of those stocks (though tracking capital gains would be annoying). In that situation though, Amazon stock is the good store of value and United States Dollar is the good medium of exchange.

Re: What I Think of Bitcoin

#186

Post by eyeball »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #24

This post should be mostly discounted because Ray doesn't really seem to be aware of the true risk of the Tether scam, the biggest component of and risk to Bitcoin's value. For those not aware, Tether is a "stable coin" that issues tokens that supposedly represent dollars and can be used as a medium of exchange. However, it's widely suspected that Tether is unbacked and printing fake dollars and even Tether itself ha…

30/870=3.4%

Re: What I Think of Bitcoin

#187

Post by ballofrubber »

carleverett wrote: post #185
ballofrubber wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate? I don't see why it shouldn't. I will always want the best SoV in exchange for my services, why would I want something else? If I need to exchange the currency for a SoV everytime, I might get the SoV from the get-go.

A good medium of exchange should have: - Little to no transaction fee - Near instantaneous transaction time - stable value The characteristics of Bitcoin that make it such a good store of value make it really bad at these. Computation-heavy proof of work creates a secure and immutable network, but also makes it more expensive and slows down transaction times. It's scarcity makes it a speculative asset prone to booms…

> - Little to no transaction fee - Near instantaneous transaction time

That can be done with Bitcoin today. Download a lightning capable wallet in the appstore of your choice and post an invoice, I can instantaneously pay that to your wallet with near zero fees.

> stable value

That is basically what I was saying earlier, we don't know the correct price yet. However bitcoin is only volatile upwards (if your time horizon is > 2 years)

Bitcoin is the perfect settlement base for layers built on top. The Lightning Network uses Bitcoin for its trustlessness and payments are also denominated in bitcoin.

I know that I sound like the typical Bitcoin-shill, but I really think that this is the one of the most important projects of our lifetime. It is the first shot at seperating money from power. Some of us just need to accept that we missed the early train and didn't get rich (we all would have sold at $200 if we bought at $0.30), but accept it for what it is. The first and only trustless, permissionless and decentralized monetary network.

Re: What I Think of Bitcoin

#188

Post by redis_mlc »

thesausageking wrote: post #34
lalaland1125 wrote: post #24

This post should be mostly discounted because Ray doesn't really seem to be aware of the true risk of the Tether scam, the biggest component of and risk to Bitcoin's value. For those not aware, Tether is a "stable coin" that issues tokens that supposedly represent dollars and can be used as a medium of exchange. However, it's widely suspected that Tether is unbacked and printing fake dollars and even Tether itself ha…

Tether FUD always returns when there's an influx of a lot newcomers to Bitcoin. It's been debunked over and over. Here's one by Nic Carter that explains why these "takedowns" are completely wrong: https://medium.com/@nic__carter/assessing-bitcoins-liquidity...

> Tether FUD always returns when there's an influx of a lot newcomers to Bitcoin.

FUD implies unreasonableness. Yet the FUD is warranted when somebody claims to have an asset, but won't prove it.

> It's been debunked over and over.

The word "debunked" is most commonly used by people who are hiding something and can't actually prove their case.

And no, tether hasn't debunked anything, since there's a vanishing small chance they have billions of dollars in assets.

Re: What I Think of Bitcoin

#189

Post by [deleted] »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #24

This post should be mostly discounted because Ray doesn't really seem to be aware of the true risk of the Tether scam, the biggest component of and risk to Bitcoin's value. For those not aware, Tether is a "stable coin" that issues tokens that supposedly represent dollars and can be used as a medium of exchange. However, it's widely suspected that Tether is unbacked and printing fake dollars and even Tether itself ha…

[deleted]

Re: What I Think of Bitcoin

#190

Post by Terretta »

hjek wrote: post #11

Nathan Robinson did a great piece[0] on Ray Dalio's principles and Bridgewater's culture, which looks extremely toxic: > Make sure, of course, that you always make specific people feel bad about mistakes: “Instead of the passive generalization or the royal ‘we,’ attribute specific actions to specific people: ‘Harry didn’t handle this well.’” And make sure everyone knows it: “Use ‘public hangings’ to deter bad behavio…

It's becoming politically incorrect to suggest someone could perform better in a workplace. Curious this doesn't apply on the basketball court, but does apply in the conference room. Is it so unacceptable to drive for the collective win at the "cost" of acknowledging individual gaps?

If your team and your coach aren't a safe space to accurately explore your gaps in pursuit of shoring them up, both with exercises for you and with adjustments to the team play, why train pro at all? Anything less is literal amateur hour.

No professional athlete can afford to think "accurately explore the failings of" equates to "belittle", and no serious player would expect the coach to only give post- or even mid-game feedback behind closed doors.

Without that team discussion you're going to have a really difficult time knowing what to work on in yourself to be better, and your team is going to have a hard time knowing the watch-out-fors to collaborate on guard-railing your play.

(Not incidentally, basketball and baseball are near real-time stats driven. So is BW performance culture. We understand this for improving software by running it under a debugger or tools like New Relic, why not instrument your own processes?)

If you don't feel like opting-in to acknowledging and working on gaps as a team owning the outcomes, don't sign up somewhere that does.

If you do feel like opting-in, seek out teams and managers that believe in reality-based root cause feedback loops -- great retros drive greater forward looking results, for the product, the team, and you.

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