191–200 of 237 posts
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> Then it's going to be weaponized to launder money We should stick with USD. No one does anything illegal with USD
Holy fucking strawman, Batman! Way to skip over the different potentials for abuse and just dive to the cryptonerd's handwaive argument. Looking forward to your insights about rubber and glue.
I don't think the energy criticisms are that warranted. In my mind, it speaks more to a criticism of how poor our current energy infrastructure is. I don't think for example in 30 years it'll be a big problem when energy becomes more abundant and building nuclear reactors are easier. And this is coming from someone who believes Bitcoin is little more than a Ponzi scheme and most of the innovation in fintech is happen…
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Good riddance. I don't think KYC/AML are a force for good. Its just more box ticking laws that serve to give a false sense of security while poor people are being excluded from the banking system and normal people have their all their data stolen from centralized databases. Real dangerous criminals don't give a damn about KYC/AML laws and operate freely within the banking framework. The European Central Bank chairwom…
Good or bad, "no KYC/AML" is not an option. If governments decide Bitcoin can’t provide KYC/AML, Bitcoin will be nuked from orbit.
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There would first be 1 broadcasted on-chain transaction setting up the channel, with X of my bitcoin and Y of your bitcoin being locked up. This prevents double spend. Then, you and I pass n signed transactions between each other updating our balances Xt & Yt for each t, t+1, ...t+n. At any time, either one of us can broadcast the final transaction with the most up to date balance and unlock the coins.
So it requires one on-chain transaction per pair of parties instead of one per transaction? Clever and I suppose useful but seems a little limited in use, given that the funds are locked the whole time. Good for two parties that frequently have transactions going in both directions?
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Maybe it was "designed to be", but in reality it isn't. BTC has a history, so if I had 1 BTC, and you had 1 BTC, they wouldn't be equivalent. When you deposit BTC into a Coinbase account from a gambling site, CB shuts down your account. That is irrefutable proof that BTC is not fungible. Compare it to cash which is fungible. If you win money at a casino and deposit it at a bank, the bank doesn't know where you got th…
> If you win money at a casino and deposit it at a bank, the bank doesn't know where you got the cash from. You're off base here. There's serial numbers on money and many databases maintained both public and private meant to track those and flag inflows of marked bills. The bank absolutely might know where you got the cash from -- the difference is that there are legal guarantees for the fungibility of cash. It is en…
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Here's one of Ethereum's lead researchers talking about the attacks in that paper. The fixes are simple and not expected to delay the merge. https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/11/02/finalized-no-31/
Written for public consumption that post conveys a great deal of certainty while eliding over doubts: "Change fork choice rule to mitigate balancing and reorging attacks" https://ethresear.ch/t/change-fork-choice-rule-to-mitigate-b... And more fundamentally at the heart of the matter https://ethresear.ch/t/comment-on-three-attacks-on-proof-of-... > Moreover, there is a general argument that the attacker will always b…
Is there a convenient way for an uneducated schmuck like me to read up on this? Just a comment without references isn't much to go on.
Can anyone explain why my genuine question below -- "When will BTC move to an energy efficient protocol?" -- was flagged? Seems a bit gratuitous?
I didn't flag, but if that's what you wrote, it's off-topic. It's also tedious. We get it. It uses energy by design. You can count on any HN Bitcoin discussion to bring out the environmentalist in almost anyone.
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No, but in this analogy, bitcoin is american express, not USD. American Express cards are definitely considered less valuable to potential customers here because they're only accepted in ~70% of stores. It's been a bone of contention at my current employer as our corporate cards are American express but they consequently can't be used semi-frequently
This is not the right way to look at it though. Bitcoin is not an alternative payment system. People keep getting confused on this point, partly because of how bitcoin was marketed in the early days (there obviously is no marketing team, just passionate people telling their stories about what they thought it was). Bitcoin is the bedrock of an alternative monetary system. Visas and AmExes will be built on top of it, j…
But that's no more likely to be true than for a USD-rich person. Whatever ill-gotten USD gains have occurred in the past are easily transferrable to BTC, which means that its really just an alternative portal into the same monetary system, or perhaps the next evolution thereof. The only difference is that this time it doesn't have anybody behind the monetary-policy steering wheel.
I don't think the energy criticisms are that warranted. In my mind, it speaks more to a criticism of how poor our current energy infrastructure is. I don't think for example in 30 years it'll be a big problem when energy becomes more abundant and building nuclear reactors are easier. And this is coming from someone who believes Bitcoin is little more than a Ponzi scheme and most of the innovation in fintech is happen…
But isn't the security of proof-of-work derived from it being cost prohibitive to put up more work on a fraudulent (e.g. double spending) chain? So if energy becomes an order of magnitude more abundant or cheaper, doesn't that just mean that the amount of energy spent on mining will increase by the same amount?
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We don't consider dollars less valuable if they're paid via American Express, even though it's less accepted than Visa. As long as there's a critical mass of users somewhere, the "who accepts what" problem reduces to a software problem that most people will ignore.
No, but in this analogy, bitcoin is american express, not USD. American Express cards are definitely considered less valuable to potential customers here because they're only accepted in ~70% of stores. It's been a bone of contention at my current employer as our corporate cards are American express but they consequently can't be used semi-frequently
Consider BTC-backed debit cards, which give the illusion of paying in bitcoin where only fiat is accepted by converting the tokens at transaction-time. For a government to prevent things like that will require that government's citizens to bear costs that other citizens don't:
- pay the regulators to keep crypto disconnected from fiat
- pay the payments companies to hire people to comply with the regulators
- tolerate the necessary censorship and subsequent unrest when it is abused
This kind of nonproductive spending will hash out as a drag on that government's currency. It wouldn't be crazy for its citizens to start stocking up on crypto (perhaps illegally) as a hedge against local fiat-collapse. Surely a downward spiral for the local crypto user experience, but a problem for BTC as a whole? I don't think so.