181–190 of 302 posts
'always be naysaying' is the mantra of about 80% of HNers
Well, yeah, but more like 97,89%, from what I gather. From time to time I fancy this idea of toying with some NLP package to calculate percentage of the HN comments that go like "Yes, but no", "Cool, but meh" or "Sure, but no way". Oh wait, what did I just do?
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I'm sure there are currencies with a similarly sized monetary base but which are far more stable. Bitcoin's track record as a currency is pretty laughable but just big enough to provide a nice bullet point for the Bitcoin investment vehicle/get rich quick scheme sales pitch.
Perhaps similar in size, but not in newness (the market needs to sort out fair value), untested exchanges, difficulty of moving money in and out. These are early adopter challenges, but they are also sources of volatility.
You'd be crazy to use it right now for legal goods and services. The view of many Bitcoin critics (including myself) that it's horrible as a currency but a massive success as an investment vehicle seems stronger than ever.
'always be naysaying' is the mantra of about 80% of HNers
Well, yeah, but more like 97,89%, from what I gather. From time to time I fancy this idea of toying with some NLP package to calculate percentage of the HN comments that go like "Yes, but no", "Cool, but meh" or "Sure, but no way". Oh wait, what did I just do?
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Corollary: how many bitcoins would you have mined if you'd bought $1000 worth of the best mining GPUs on that day?
It wasn't until over a year later (July 2010) that the first block was likely mined using GPUs. Satoshi implored people in December 2009 (several months after this post) to postpone mining using GPUs for as long as possible[1]. [1]: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12.msg54#msg54
I commented on it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40876.msg520645#msg5...
Likely the best investment opportunity ever posted on HN, possibly in the history of the world, for simple buy/mine and hold ROI.
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The costs of producing BTC or USD are not their backings. You can't exchange your BTC back into electricity. The USD (and usually most other currencies) aims to be indirectly backed by the corresponding amount of goods they represent within the currency zone and their legal status. BTC isn't even indirectly backed. It just exists. And that's okay for its purpose.
You can't exchange your BTC back into electricity. Huh? Why not? Surely you could just buy some solar panels with bitcoins, or convert them to another currency and then buy electricity from the grid.
I can buy gold with the US dollar, but it doesn't mean the US dollar is backed by gold.
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By that reasoning, I can convert my USD into donuts, and hence the USD is backed by donuts, hence the term "dollars to donuts".
Well, it is partly backed by donuts, along with any other commodities or instruments of value that it can be easily exchanged with.
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Bitcoin is different in that is the purest form of a fiat currency in the sense that it is backed by nothing and thus has no intrinsic value whatsoever. Traditional currencies, on the other hand, are at least fractionally backed by (usually) gold and government bonds which in itself are backed by a government's ability to tax its citizens. There is also a second problem in that BTC is deflationary by design. Deflatio…
>> Bitcoin is different in that is the purest form of a fiat currency in the sense that it is backed by nothing and thus has no intrinsic value whatsoever. It's backed by the tremendous amount of electricity required to run the transaction processing network (ie. "mining"). Remember this is the world's largest distributed supercomputer. BTC is a proxy for electricity, that's why mining equipment ended up at ASICs so…
This is a red herring. You also couldn't print the money to pay for all the patents now in existence. Or all the copyrights in existence. Or even all the software now in existence. These things still get bought and sold in USD on a regular basis.
>> The USD is currently backed by absolutely nothing.
At the base, USD are backed by the fact that one can only pay taxes to the US in USD and US bonds are denominated in USD.
>Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency. Hah!
People should be required to place a monetary bet whenever they make a bold claim in public. I think we would see less comments like this one.
One of my favorite quotes (forgot by whom): " Great ideas are fragile at birth because they are indistinguishable from crazy stupid ideas."