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Coinbase outages

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211–220 of 310 posts

Re: Coinbase outages

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! The original Bitcoin whitepaper from Satoshi Nakamoto is available here: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf It is titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" So, based just on the title, it's pretty clear that it's original intent was as an electronic payment method. The first sentence of the abstract is: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly…

That's BSV, maybe. Bitcoin core deviated from the original white paper long long ago

Are you arguing that the original Bitcoin whitepaper is invalid as a source of whether Bitcoin is "desired" as a payment method?

Clearly, at least one person (the author of the whitepaper!) "desired" Bitcoin as a payment method. They desired it so much, that they went off an invented it!

If that doesn't count as a source indicating what someone "desires" then nothing does.

Re: Coinbase outages

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the surface of the Earth will eventually become a black body radiator _anyway_, so why should it bother anyone if we want to have a little fun first.

There is a theory that life exists, because it is effective at spreading out energy as heat more efficently[0]. In such case, bitcoin (or having fun) can be seen as a good purpose for life. Most of activities seen by people as "fun" use up energy and spread it as heat. [0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...

Super interesting thanks for sharing.

Re: Coinbase outages

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so many FBI inquiries started from the GME fiasco, right?

You seem to be sarcastic but in fact yes the Robinhood/GameStop BS resulted in both a congressional probe and it skipped the FBI and went straight to the prosecutors at the Department of Justice.

And it's not only Robinhood. Citadel, the market maker seems to be the brain behind all this price manipulation and media attacks on AMC and GME and selling a whole lot of synthetic shares on the market which when retail investors buy do not affect the price. I've been following this saga closely and am beyond horrified of how corrupt our free market is. It is not free at all and heavily manipulated.

Re: Coinbase outages

#214
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those following the GME saga believe it’s Wall Street banks scrambling to find liquidity in response to emergency rule changes by the OCC. It’s fascinating stuff to follow — watch the VIX today, a measure of stock market volatility. It’s absolutely soaring already.

The GME saga is over outside of fervent believers who cannot accept that Wall Street did not tumble because one small hedge fund made a bad bet.

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Re: Coinbase outages

#215
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope - the author is incorrectly using total energy / total transactions to get this number. Which, is understandable. However, if there were 2x the transactions, the total energy would stay very close to the same. So no. There's a lot of energy to secure the network, but the actual energy usage per transaction itself is a small fraction of that misquoted number.

But it's worth clarifying that the number is correct — Bitcoin is currently using 1 Mwh per transaction.

That is not correct.

Two glaring gaps in that concept...

First, energy use is not tied to transactions. An empty block uses the same amount as a full block.

And second, the transaction count we’re discussing is the count of settled base layer transactions. This doesn’t include the majority of transactions of value: those that occur off chain or through second layer transactions. An infinite amount of off chain and L2 transactions only need a single on chain transaction to settle.

Re: Coinbase outages

#216
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope - the author is incorrectly using total energy / total transactions to get this number. Which, is understandable. However, if there were 2x the transactions, the total energy would stay very close to the same. So no. There's a lot of energy to secure the network, but the actual energy usage per transaction itself is a small fraction of that misquoted number.

Isn't the network already saturated with transactions though? To the point where it was needed to implement something like Lightning Network to compensate for that?

It was never needed. What was needed was to increase the max block size.

Instead, new people took it over and kept the throughput to the rate of a 56k modem. Now for the cost of a single transaction you can pay for enough hard drive space to hold the entire chain and enough bandwidth for a billion transactions.

This is like building a sidewalk instead of a freeway then saying you need to build a network of gondolas over it that just plunks groups of people down at different places on the sidewalk to move people.

Re: Coinbase outages

#217
post #183

I was shocked the other day on the Ethereum PoS announcement by the energy consumption per transaction metrics. It threw the whole crypto market into a new light for me. BTC is using over a megawatt hour PER transaction! That's almost 5000 miles in a Tesla model 3. BTC is using about 2/3 of the power of every data center on the planet! Many, many people have been imprisoned or executed for creating less societal harm…

The power per tx metric is a dumb metric. Power usage doesnt increase or decrease per tx

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Re: Coinbase outages

#218

I'm not sure if it is the causation but China took drastic restrictions on cryptocurrencies yesterday, and Chinese players IMHO held a big share of those cryptos. Also, people in China would call it "unplug" when exchanges going down. It's a popular meme because people find every time the market crashes those Chinese exchanges would go down as well, thus many people believe they intentionally did that to let oligarch…

Chinese people will continue to siphon money out of China and cryptocurrencies are the ideal vehicle, they will continue to do it one way or another.

Re: Coinbase outages

#219
post #57

I'm a bit of a cryptocurrency newbie, but I know enough about it to know that centralized exchanges are not what cryptocurrency is really about. It's more about spending with cryptocurrency (in a decentralized way) instead of exchanging some fiat for it, and vice versa, no? It's a bit of chicken and egg problem I suppose (If I want Bitcoin I need some fiat to get it in some cases), unless I acquire Bitcoin via some o…

People realised some time ago that Bitcoin isn't actually fit for purpose for most payments because transactions take so long to close. So it's now pivoted to this value idea of storing "value". Absolute house of cards.

Transaction fees are over $10 right now!

Re: Coinbase outages

#220
40B+ company which sole product is web-site can't keep it running? Where is the value in that? Or are they doing it intentionally to slow down things?
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