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Bitcoin Is Time

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Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#221

Post by shawnz »

cyphertruck wrote: post #185
nickysielicki wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin is digital gold for settlements among digital currencies. What are the implications of this on the network stability wrt mining? Doesn't bitcoin need transaction volume to remain a stable network? My read is that the incentive structure changes. Right now, miners are motivated by block rewards. In the future, they'll be motivated by transaction fees. If transactions are rare, mining profitably is going to b…

To answer that question you have to make assumptions about the cost of mining, the cost of attacks and the cost of hash power at a point 117 years from now. But we know in the future hash power (technology) will be cheaper and thus bitcoin security will be cheaper, while bitcoin will be more valuable (or non-existing — it has to be either or). Also remember if you have wealth in bitcoin you would likely mine at a los…

> Also remember if you have wealth in bitcoin you would mine at a loss merely to secure your own bitcoin.

You could also send null transactions which do nothing but pay a transaction fee

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#222

Post by cyphertruck »

noxer wrote: post #182
olah_1 wrote: post #69

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…

As an engineer with twenty years experience in this space and nearly as long studying the economics of it, I have yet to see a replacement for PoW that solves the problem that PoW solves.

Proof of Work is trustless decentralization.

Proof of stake is trusting the dudes who premined the coin and sold you a “fix for bitcoins inherent problem” to hype their ICO.

If you were right, after 10 years one of those PoS currencies would be winning. Can you even remember the proof of stake currencies from 2011?

Why did they fail? After all they had a huge economic advantage over bitcoin mining as they cost effectively zero electricity.

Can you answer that question?

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#223

Post by toto444 »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #136
toto444 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think. Or maybe it comes from people who have read an Econo101 textbook and who have spent a lot of time trying to explain a crowd of Bitcoin enthusiasts why their reasoning is wrong but no one has been listening to them so far so they are bored. Back in the time I used to spend my days on a forum about Economics. Every other week there was a random guy who signed up jus…

> That does not make it less true that money does not have magical properties and bitcoin will not create a new world order. Is anyone really claiming that? The OP's post doesn't seem to be in this spirit anyway. It's more like "Bitcoin has true usefulness, it will keep some meaningful value for a long time, enable other use cases that didn't even exist before.". Nobody is saying that it is going to replace all other…

> Nobody is saying that it is going to replace all other forms of money.

To be a money it somehow has to. What is the value of a dollar ? The set of goods you can buy with a dollar. As long as the value of a bitcoin is expressed in another currency that is weird to call it a money.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#224

Post by phyro »

olah_1 wrote: post #107
phyro wrote: post #9

Thank you for sharing this! I wrote a much shorter article on why I believe Grin is the closest to "time is money" here https://phyro.github.io/what-is-grin/grin_emission.html Bitcoin can be thought of as a clock, but the unit that is being transfered can't be thought as time because for it to be mappable to time, you need a linear function and Bitcoin's emission is exponential because of the halvings.

Thanks for linking the Grin article! Now you've sent me on a rabbit hole reading about different emission strategies and ideas. (I follow Beam development, so I love to read about both projects). Doesn't the consistent emission of Grin depend upon the number of users and transactions also rising at the same consistent rate? Can we really count on that like we can count on the ticking of time?

Glad to hear that. In Grin, each block creates 60 coins. The time to mine a block is set to be 1 minute on average, so it will average out as 60 coins each minute and hence 1 coin per second. This won't be _exact_ of course due to the variance in block times so you definitely can't count on that - just like you can't count on Bitcoin getting exactly 24*6 blocks each day. But these systems are defined such that if the blocks start coming in too fast, they make them come slower and if they are coming in too slow, they make sure to make the puzzle easier to solve so the blocks can come faster. I think this follows the models they have good enough.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#225

Post by nerdkid93 »

thewarrior wrote: post #137
olah_1 wrote: post #69

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.

I recently decided to think deeply about Bitcoin and I think my initial skepticism about Bitcoin was wrong. Most of the criticisms of Bitcoin are centered around the fact that Bitcoin has a very low throughput. However this is not necessarily a problem. And here is one hypothetical example of how we can overcome this issue: When countries owe each other money they used to transfer gold back and forth or trust someone…

> then basically defaulted and forced everyone to accept dollars by force

I found 3 instances of "defaults" over the history of the U.S. Federal Government[0], and I cannot figure out to which of those occurrences you might be referring. Bretton Woods was the agreement that made the USD the world's reserve currency, and that lasted for 30ish years while the U.S. was still on the gold standard.

[0] Has the U.S. Government Ever "Defaulted"? https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44704.pdf

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#226

Post by Vecr »

casi wrote: post #128
arbawk wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now do the gold mining industry, and then how USD is backed by armies. And then you can research Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin and how it can process an unlimited number of transactions.

"unlimited" surely you mean limited? theres rarely tech with no limits. also the military/police/law/government defend you from being killed for your bitcoin.

Pretty close to unlimited, if you imagine a channel as slider or a bead on an abacus, as long as both nodes using the channel agree where it is, the position can be updated an infinite number of times without touching the blockchain. Timelocks let a transaction pivot through many of these.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#227

Post by solosoyokaze »

almost_usual wrote: post #213
solosoyokaze wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the US military won't go away as long as USD is used as the world's currency. Getting off USD is a prerequisite to ending American imperialism, it's not the only thing that needs to be done by a long shot though.

Ending American imperialism is a massive war. It’s possible but it’s not going to happen without millions of casualties.

We can lessen those casualties by working hard to defund the military (which is a multi pronged endeavour).

For instance, I have no problem paying taxes for social services. I have a major ethical problem with my tax dollars being used to fund military action. Bitcoin is not the only piece of the crypto puzzle but if I could keep my assets out of the hands of the US government, I would do it for purely ethical reasons.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#228

Post by jakeva »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #196
jakeva wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume comments like that are from people who are conflicted by the fact that if their head weren't so far up their ass they would have entertained the notion enough to at least acquire a few bitcoin, but because it's now too late it's better to celebrate just how far up their ass their head is.

You are basically restating this crappy argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26316375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26316392 See the replies. There is nothing more to add to this deeply dull line of thinking.

And yet what I responded to was a restatement of the same "deeply dull line of thinking" as you put it that triggered the responses you say I'm restating. I'm not sure what your point is, other than to say people on the internet tend to restate things.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#229

Post by Vecr »

dandanua wrote: post #102

Bitcoin network is constantly readjusting mining complexity, so that every new block will be mined in approximately 10 minutes. Then, they substitute the notion of time with the sequence of Bitcoin blocks. Yeah, well done! Bitcoin proponents are becoming more and more insane.

It's always been like this, I'm not sure what you mean by "becoming". According to this article, the concept comes from a series of papers from the 1990s.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#230

Post by solosoyokaze »

jcranmer wrote: post #219
solosoyokaze wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the US military won't go away as long as USD is used as the world's currency. Getting off USD is a prerequisite to ending American imperialism, it's not the only thing that needs to be done by a long shot though.

Why do you think it is a prerequisite? Imperialism can certainly exist without having the reserve currency--consider the world situation on the outbreak of WWI, which was the height of imperialism and yet no country had a reserve currency (everyone being on the gold standard).

Taxes on USD are used to fund the military. I see long term value storage in Bitcoin with operational and privacy focused "cash" like crypto being pegged to BTC as a way to choke the input funds to the US military.
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