201–210 of 1001 posts
Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme.
It is also completely wrong. A Ponzi requires a central actor (like Charles Ponzi) to actively pay profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.
If you understood that you would understand it is not a Ponzi. I think you think you're trying to say "Pyramid scheme," which it also is not. It's hardly even a "scheme."
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Actually it's pretty important for many: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYYh4aPXAM It's being widely adopted in countries with inflating currencies: Nigeria, Vietnma, and Argentina made it to #3 today (this link is slightly old). https://www.statista.com/chart/18345/crypto-currency-adoptio...
I see this being thrown about as a talking point a lot, but I think it ignores what's fundamentally happening here. Bitcoin is essentially a proxy for another currency. Mostly the USD. These people need a way to protect their assets from what their own governments are doing to the value of their native currencies. They cannot buy securities or foreign currencies for various reasons. Bitcoin gives them a way. A way to…
Yes, but this is only temporarily. It's like refactoring systems. You create a new system and a proxy and then have the old system communicate with the new one via the proxy (or vice versa). Eventually, the old system becomes obsolete, so you kill it and get rid of the proxy.
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Can you elaborate on how that's true? Gold has use in making other physical products, such as electronics, which can do things and thus create value. Bitcoin comparatively seems to be a net drain on resources and value.
The vast majority of gold is held for speculation. If that use case went away it'd be effectively worthless.
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Here me out. What if it was the only way to defund the US military? Would you be interested then? Why do we waste so much energy building killing machines? Why is there not a daily hackernews thread complaining about the energy consumption of the US military? Because it’s a necessary to ensure you can buy and sell things when you want to.
If you think the US military or any military will go away because Bitcoin you’re delusional. > Why is there not a daily hackernews thread complaining about the energy consumption of the US military? People are willing to pay a high energy cost for safety. Bitcoin doesn’t provide me any safety and it doesn’t have the strongest military in the world claiming it’s worth anything. If you think Bitcoin will topple governm…
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Here me out. What if it was the only way to defund the US military? Would you be interested then? Why do we waste so much energy building killing machines? Why is there not a daily hackernews thread complaining about the energy consumption of the US military? Because it’s a necessary to ensure you can buy and sell things when you want to.
If you think the US military or any military will go away because Bitcoin you’re delusional. > Why is there not a daily hackernews thread complaining about the energy consumption of the US military? People are willing to pay a high energy cost for safety. Bitcoin doesn’t provide me any safety and it doesn’t have the strongest military in the world claiming it’s worth anything. If you think Bitcoin will topple governm…
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I'm not saying this is you, but many people on HN will cry out "Use Boring Tech!" while also not understanding why Bitcoin is king. Bitcoin is old, secure, proven, and most importantly _simple_. Of course what you sacrifice with Proof of Stake is sovereignty. A random person cannot participate in the network unless they have X amount of existing resources. So that's the trade-off as I understand it. Depends on where…
Doesn't the same hold for PoW systems, except the X amount is in the form of mining resources? This is why people argue PoS blockchains are (besides being more eco-friendly) actually more decentralized.
That's not as true as I would have thought. Surprisingly, a single person can have a profitable mining setup on Bitcoin today. It might only be $10 USD per day profit, but it's something. To me, that is an achievement.
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If you think the US military or any military will go away because Bitcoin you’re delusional. > Why is there not a daily hackernews thread complaining about the energy consumption of the US military? People are willing to pay a high energy cost for safety. Bitcoin doesn’t provide me any safety and it doesn’t have the strongest military in the world claiming it’s worth anything. If you think Bitcoin will topple governm…
Erm, there's a good portion of the world's population (I'd say over half) that doesn't think the US military's activities support it's safety.
What makes you think the US wouldn’t put it’s population in front of the rest of the world in a life or death war scenario?
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This is just whataboutism. Gold isn't used as a currency. Seems a stretch to claim the armies exist solely for the USD. And until the Lightning Network is actually implemented it will remain theoretical.
Not sure where you get your news but LN is implemented and functional. There are wallets, services, software, etc, downloadable, functional, used every day. If what you mean to say "get all the marchants that support BTC to accept LN", then yes, there is still some progress needs to be done.
That's an understatement. There are two restaurants within 100 miles of my home that accept BTC, let alone use LN.
This is the article that made things finally click with me. Thinking about the pre-WWI gold standard and the issues that existed there and the improvements that Bitcoin brings around time, consensus, etc. The baseless negative comments with no interaction with the article content confirms for me that Bitcoin is on to something. Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think.
>Bitcoin is onto something What if it "was"? The "hate" people express against bitcoin especially here on HN is often towards the implementation. People clearly see the flaw in PoW if they are not emotionally attached to it because they have no money at stake. You should not misinterpret that as hate because they missed the train to richness. Objectively PoW does not scale. Objectively we have DLTs (blockchains) with…
The vitriol that Bitcoin evokes from HN commenters can really only be explained by jealousy, the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.
Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons:
- emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3.
- energy usage due to Proof of Work is growing astronomically, and the higher the price of bitcoin, the less incentive there is to use renewable energy. Bitcoin uses more energy than the country of Argentina.
- transaction times are SLOW, and expensive. The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising.
There is a better alternative. RaiBlocks, named nano since 2018. It got a bad rap due to the BitGrail hack, but it's picking up steam again. The developer community is great, the main dev team on the Nano protocol has been consistently chugging along regardless of the 3 years of crypto winter on a shoestring budget and the nano community is made up of users, not speculators.
This article sums it up quite nicely: https://senatusspqr.medium.com/why-nano-is-the-ultimate-stor...
I'm happy to receive downvotes, but all I ask in return is that you give it a read with an open mind.