211–220 of 330 posts
Bitcoin is the mongodb of finance: You like its features but in reality most people don't need them. Mongo's scalability sounds great until you find yourself reimplementing a relational database for your 1000 users app. Bitcoin decentralisation sounds great but must people don't need it. You just need a less evil and less corrupt government and better fintech. You're curing the symptoms, not the cause.
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> the technology is broken beyond fixability [citation needed] Crypto ideologues are a strawman. Anyone working on the actual tech agrees that blockchains are useful if, and only if, you can't rely on a single party and need a decentralized, trustless append-only database. Otherwise, why bother with the extra complexity? That's the whole point of blockchains, after all. Technology choices are complex set of trade-off…
Correct. The problem is there's virtually nothing that actually benefits from those things. A strong case case could be made for a truly decentralized global currency and maybe smart-contracts, but not "a store of value" or "revolutionizing supply chain bookkeeping".
There is a reason JP morgan is developing quorum
I think price volatility is the only reason it's not working as a normal currency. Right now, these blockchain currencies are traded just like expensive wine, art or gold bar. It's a speculative money game. We can't use wine or art to buy some food for today. Most people don't even run the full node themselves. They relies on somebody else's node. In good term, they are investing, in other words, they are gambling. I…
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This "debunk" is bunk in at of itself - have you actually looked at the presented arguments? They are ridiculous and make no sense whatsoever (e.g. comparing PoW with literal gold mining - as if gold were a currency...).
Of course, I've read everything, including the article by Nic Carter [1] (which I highly recommend) and all his related articles on the subject. The comparison with gold mining is quite apt actually - one of the use cases for Bitcoin is to act as a store of value and hedge against inflation, precisely like gold. [1] https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co...
Ahem, the primary use of gold is jewellery, not a hedge value against inflation. That's where the vast majority of all mined gold ends up (plus some in electronics and medical applications).
As the recent GameStop events have shown, it's uncertain who owns how many shares, settlement is slow and error/bezzle-prone, etc. etc. Plus I venture to guess that HFT algorithms do consume country-level amounts of energy as well. Unlike blockchain, it's not surplus electricity from renewables in faraway places. And all that energy does not even improve the whole ledger security. But hey, unlike the filthy blockchai…
Here's how things are looking in 2021: (1) Scalability Issues Solved - there's a plethora of high-throughput chains in development, either based on sharding or pipelining/MVCC/optimistic concurrency. Some projects like Solana use GPUs and JIT compilation to achieve well beyond 50k tps in a distributed network. (2) Lack Of Intuitive Private Key Management Little progress. Ledger and other hardware wallets make things…
Wait what ?! Imagine saying this on a daily meeting !
I think the #1 reason blockchain doesn't work is very simple - the technology is broken beyond fixability. This article is two years old, but the same variations of these excuses always come up when the crypto ideologues are grilled on why their utopiaic vision hasn't come about, for all of blockchain's existence. Blockchain is awful for most things compared to a centralized or distributed database: it is inefficient…
This is the typical argument on a very technical board such as HN where blockchain is synonymous with a specific implementation. But that's an outdated way to think about blockchains. Yes, Bitcoin's implementation is a huge resource hog and slow. But for most newer projects "blockchain" just means an auditable trail of state changes. Whether you implement this with the shiniest newest db paradigm or some simple SQL d…
A blockchain is a linked list where each element of the list contains the hash of the previous element. It's basically a degenerate Merkle tree. That is all that it is. It isn't a metaphor. It isn't throwing off the shackles of an overreaching government, nor is it a takeover of our society by militant right-wing conspiracy theorists.
It's a data structure.
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> The market cap is a counter argument because it shows the trust people See also Enron, WorldCom, Nortel, Bre-X (for the Canadians out there). > […] and lately corporations put into Bitcoin as a store of wealth and a hedge against inflation. Given its volatility, I'm not sure how useful it is as a store of wealth. Less than a year ago it lost half its value in two days (before the recent run-up): * https://www.cnbc.…
Funny I actually viewed the 2020 BTC drawdown (and subsequent rapid recovery) as my number one buy signal for the current crypto bull market. In a time period when the Dow loses almost 13% in a single day and the fed has to use every move in the playbook to maintain liquidity, crypto holds its own with no fed assistance at all. As for inflation, I’m guessing the exact opposite argument to yours was being made in the…
By definition, inflation is what happens when demand exceeds supply. If the fed keeps flooding the market with cheap credit the expectation is that the money is invested into more production, either by machines or by foreign labor (i.e. in China). Prices stop growing because supply outstrips demand. That's why the fed is failing to create sufficient inflation. Supply side stimulus is causing the opposite effect and at the same time it is leading to an asset bubble.
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> However the fact that we now have a global consensus over the ownership of digital assets that's something new and valuable. It's also completely contrived. Being digital means infinitely replicable, or thereabouts. Do we really need this game of artificial scarcity? People used to talk about things like property records, but if this realm of artificial scarcity is going to interface with the realm of actual scarci…
> Code is law. What does this mean?
When I say code is law, I mean “law” in the physics sense. We can code, print “hello world”, and know exactly what the code will do. We can write code up to some threshold of complexity and know exactly what it will do in all cases. Like how given certain information about a physical system we can calculate trajectories or whatnot up to some threshold of complexity.
I was making the point that civil law is a different kind of law from this physics sense of the word.
With more clarity, code is physics law, but civil law is not physics law, i.e. civil law cannot be fully ported to computer code.
Maybe I'm wrong and all civil law could be translated to computer code. Might that make for a better world? Even if possible, there's so much inertia in the system with lawyers and judges wanting to keep their job which is another human complexity that would have to be worked through.
Here's how things are looking in 2021: (1) Scalability Issues Solved - there's a plethora of high-throughput chains in development, either based on sharding or pipelining/MVCC/optimistic concurrency. Some projects like Solana use GPUs and JIT compilation to achieve well beyond 50k tps in a distributed network. (2) Lack Of Intuitive Private Key Management Little progress. Ledger and other hardware wallets make things…
is there a good resource that you recommend that goes more in depth over advances like these? I think my opinion on cryptocurrencies and blockchain in general is severely out of date
Ethereum.org and the the Ethereum blog would be my suggestions as a primer.