In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism • Hacker News Board

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#221

Post by BTCOG » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 3:18 PM UTC

thinkmassive wrote: post #154

orblivion wrote: post #152

So the creator of Ethereum makes (imo) a very impressive steelman argument against Ethereum (and most other coins). He clearly took some time with this. Pretty interesting take on the April Fools joke. I sincerely understand Bitcoin maximalism now better than I have before.

Keep in mind, before he started Ethereum, back in 2011 Vitalik started Bitcoin Magazine.

Also keeping in mind, Vitalik has always loved Bitcoin he just doesn't care for the maximalist culture so much. Vitalik created Ethereum after raking in tons of Bitcoin, loving the idea but choosing to take it in another direction with the smart contracting that had been disabled within the Bitcoin code.

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#222

Post by BTCOG » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 3:22 PM UTC

Cobragri wrote: post #19

tromp wrote: post #7

> Blockchains sacrifice privacy, requiring even crazier and more expensive technology to get that privacy back. The Mimblewimble protocol [0] bucks that trend, providing more privacy at the base layer while being less expensive in terms of the historical size of transactions [1]. > a focus on simplicity and deep mathematical purity: a 1 MB block size, a 21 million coin limit A supply of 50/(2^{height/210000}) coins e…

''Eth fails miserably '' Ethereum failed already at beginning. A blockchain; Mutable ,premined and ICO is already there. Eth is the target for regulations and censorship sooner or later. And i agree with that scalability is very important part of decentralization. Privacy and scalability well balanced in MimbleWimble.

Proof of Stake in general also failed in the very early days in concept and allows for easy restructuring of block rewards and monetary policy. Ethereum has been able to change monetary policy about six times now and is tantamount to a fiat currency with even more despotic bent.

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#223

Post by BTCOG » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 3:25 PM UTC

NoblePublius wrote: post #9

Why is uncensorable money worth the risk of permanently losing your money because you forgot a password or lost a thumb drive?

This is similar to losing your wallet full of cash. Simply do not lose your cash. Don't store every dollar of your cash in one place so easily to lose, either.

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#224

Post by ashwagary » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 4:10 PM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #151

prohobo wrote: post #84

People still don't understand cryptocurrencies, and at this point it seems more like intentional obtuseness for political reasons. At the same time, cryptocurrencies still haven't provided a killer app that shuts everyone up. So, IMO that's the only real thing that matters. Either you build something with it that's useful - or it isn't useful. I understand that it's difficult because of all the infrastructure require…

Bitcoin started in 2008, 14 years ago. The Internet was opened to commercial use, in 1993. That is 29 years ago. Bitcoin is half the age of the commercial Internet, so Bitcoin is no longer new. 14 years after the opening of the Internet to commercial use, Google was well established, Facebook and Twitter were rising rapidly, MySpace and Digg had already peaked but still had huge audiences. Amazon had already become a…

>14 years after the opening of the Internet to commercial use, Google was well established, Facebook and Twitter were rising rapidly, MySpace and Digg had already peaked but still had huge audiences. Amazon had already become a behemoth.

Difference is the things you listed are free services that had massive marketing budgets.

Bitcoin has zero marketing budget, grew from 0 organically, and adoption requires converting a percentage of your networth, which is a major ask. For this and many other technical/educational reasons the barrier to entry is much higher which makes this a bad comparison.

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#225

Post by kragen » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

aaaaaaaaata wrote: post #212

kragen wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a lot of "those people" who are using Bitcoin already, but I would never refer to unbanked people as "those people," being for all practical purposes one of them. We mostly aren't using it safely (a lot of us don't know the difference between Binance and Bitcoin) but we are using it. The last transaction fee I paid was 33¢, and the average transaction in the last Bitcoin block was 913 bytes, so your internet a…

How long before there's safe tech for relaying your transactions via other people's connections, as a cooperative distributed mesh, to improve confirmation and delivery speed of your own packets?

That's been part of Bitcoin since it was invented in 02008.

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#226

Post by toyg » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:37 PM UTC

cinntaile wrote: post #121

toyg wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You "just have a cashflow problem", or are "temporarily embarrassed for money". In other words, you broke.

Not really. If my bank has problems with processing transactions resulting in me being unable to use my card that day doesn't mean I'm broke.

A war can last years.

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#227

Post by orblivion » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 3:40 PM UTC

aaaaaaaaata wrote: post #202

bhaak wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if it really is one of a kind. Having a bit of money on PayPal would cover almost all scenarios equally well and even have less friction actually using your money. The combination of PayPal and Gold doesn't seem to justify to me the valuation of a market cap of 800 billion dollars or in other words, a daily budget of 40 million dollars for securing the blockchain.

> Having a bit of money on PayPal would cover almost all scenarios equally well Unless you're...Ed Snowden? Or Paypal takes a dislike to you for their own reasons? etc

To be fair, political persecution is another application. And maybe I should have started with that.

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#228

Post by latchkey » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 6:44 AM UTC

InitialLastName wrote: post #114

prions wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all of the data for https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership/ is fake?

It might or might not be fake. All we can say is that it can't be substantiated by anything on their website (they aren't referring to external sources), and that they are pretending that their data has been independently substantiated (presumably hoping nobody actually follows the citation links).

It is quite a sight to watch someone explain to someone else that something that they read on the internet, might not be believable.

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#229

Post by buildbuildbuild » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 12:59 PM UTC

giraffe_lady wrote: post #133

koonsolo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> poverty in the US Here is where you go in the wrong direction. It's not about poor people in a stable country, it's about rich people in an unstable country. So the use-case is actually the complete opposite.

No that's pretty much the point I was making. The person I was responding to implies they have firsthand knowledge of the needs of the unbanked and "financially oppressed" globally. I don't think knowledge that broad is possible and so it's largely a rhetorical move ("WHAT SO YOU HATE THE POOR & OPPRESSED??"). I have firsthand knowledge of at least one group in this category that isn't helped by this technology so I…

I have been unbanked and am not open to talking about it publicly at this time.

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#230

Post by vageli » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 3:34 PM UTC

ALittleLight wrote: post #168

vageli wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Literally the only way you can profit with crypto is if people keep buying in at higher prices. It's the perfect instantiation of a pyramid scheme. How does that differ from other commodities trading? The only way to profit in the futures market is to buy low and sell high, too, for instance.

Commodities are eventually consumed or used. Traders don't buy wheat futures for the joy of collecting wheat futures, they buy them because eventually some business wants to buy and use the actual wheat. The "and use" phrase is what differentiates commodities from cryptocurrency.

Sure corporations use futures to ensure stable prices but there are also traders that specifically just trade futures without any hope for receiving the underlying commodity.