221–230 of 238 posts
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Why double sha256?
The disappointing truth is that we simply don't know. Satoshi never explained it. For SHA-2 it can be used as a mitigation against length-extension attacks¹, and this seems like the most likely explanation, but it's just speculation. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_extension_attack
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While I don't disagree in general, there are a couple gaps in your reasoning that weaken the argument: Adoption doesn't necessarily correlate completely with price. Price can increase without much adoption, due to speculation. In theory, adoption could also increase without much price increase. Electricity isn't the only requirement for mining. Hardware is also required. Miners can't simply use lots of additional ele…
> In theory, adoption could also increase without much price increase. Not really. A fundamental purpose for any currency is to act as a "store of value". There is no way for bitcoin to represent a store of value (i.e. value commensurate to real-world goods) for a larger and larger portion of society without the price skyrocketing, especially since Bitcoin is inherently deflationary with a max number of coins. Regard…
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What did folks in Argentina and Venezuela do before Bitcoin? Perhaps that's even better?
Decades ago, in my country it was illegal to hold dollar bills. Naturally, you couldn't have dollar bank accounts. What was done back then was to illegally keep bills inside bags, hidden, and pray god they weren't found because you would go to prison. The alternative is not holding money yourself. Buy everything as soon as you can, and hoard physical goods, which is cumbersome, dangerous and inefficient. Bitcoin is a…
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Isn't this kind of the opposite? Mining Bitcoin requires both hardware and electricity, and the cheapest electricity is solar. There isn't any severe scarcity of the raw materials to make solar panels, or of sunlight, so Bitcoin miners can buy as many solar panels as they want and it would only increase the economies of scale for producing them for other purposes too. Solar has inconsistent output. There is none at n…
You're making a lot of highly idealized assumptions that don't hold true in reality. Most significantly that the increased demand due to mining will result in grid operators investing in proportional new capacity to offset it over a reasonable time scale. Instead of just driving up prices due to basic supply/demand. Also that miners are only consuming electricity when renewables dominate the mix. Otherwise they're re…
If anyone can buy a piece of land, plop down some solar panels and start selling power to the grid, that's what happens whenever the market price gets higher than the cost of doing it. If they can't, that seems more like a regulatory problem than a Bitcoin problem.
> Also that miners are only consuming electricity when renewables dominate the mix. Otherwise they're responsible for more CO2 emissions to do something useless.
~100% of new net generation capacity in the US is renewables and that seems poised to continue for economic reasons. Adding some new nuclear could also make sense in an amenable political environment (some new data centers are trying to build it) but that also doesn't emit CO2.
> Plus in markets like Texas, miners also manage to get subsidies intended for actually useful customers like factories to go offline at peak times. So ratepayers are essentially paying protection money so they won't over stress the grid by performing their useless work.
Those "subsidies" (really discounts) exist because the cost of supplying power 100% of the time is dramatically higher than the cost of supplying it 99% of the time, so you pay less if you only need it 99% of the time and the power company gets to choose when.
Having more customers that can do that allows the grid to supply power to everyone for less money. You install some solar panels whose average generation can support a Bitcoin mining operation + X number of homes. When the output is half of normal for an extended period of time, the Bitcoin mining operation cuts out and "half of normal output from twice as many panels" can power all of the homes. Without the mining operation buying half the typical output there would only be half as many panels to begin with and then you would need something like natural gas peaker plants to power the other half of the homes when solar generation is low, which both costs more and emits more CO2.
> In a world where bitcoin miners had to install new solar capacity to entirely offset their peak usage and sell back to the grid any excess then sure, seems like that wouldn't be a big societal net negative like it is right now.
If you care about CO2 then you do a carbon tax or similar (and then refund all the money to the public as checks so it doesn't damage the economy), at which point that's exactly what happens, only it happens for everybody and not just Bitcoin miners, which is what you want anyway.
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Decades ago, in my country it was illegal to hold dollar bills. Naturally, you couldn't have dollar bank accounts. What was done back then was to illegally keep bills inside bags, hidden, and pray god they weren't found because you would go to prison. The alternative is not holding money yourself. Buy everything as soon as you can, and hoard physical goods, which is cumbersome, dangerous and inefficient. Bitcoin is a…
If Bitcoin were similarly illegal, would it still be an upgrade?
I am talking about normal people who want to take money out of the country. if you own a shop you will know how to surf the hostile environment; they probably already have contacts.
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Your guess would be wrong. If you’re trading physically settled commodity futures, and don’t close before the settlement date, you are now the owner of a large quantity of your commodity of choice. It just happened today: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1siq4m2/any...
Not sure if this is true - there is this Bloomberg evergreen from 2015: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/that-time... How did she not get to buy oil while the reddit guy got it delivered? And down in your reddit thread someone says: > This is fake but this has happened before years(decades?) ago, hence why brokers added to t&c that they will close out unrolled contracts on your behalf so retards pla…
You're right that your broker will do all they can to avoid you shooting both you and them in the foot. But your agreement with your broker does not control your relationship with the counterparty to your futures contract. If the broker doesn't (or can't) close your position in time you('re both) on the hook.
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Very easy. If the merchant supports it, it is extremely easy; equivalent to pointing your phone at a reader to pay with GooglePay. Between people -- a QR or similar.
This doesn't answer my main concern. How do most people use Lightning? Do they operate on their own or use a big hub?
Most people who use Lightning do not operate their own nodes; same as with other payment methods -- credit card users do not operate their own payment networks, people writing checks do not operate their own banks, etc.
It feels like we are talking across each other and I just do not get it.
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Lightning has mostly done this by being a lot more centralized in practice and one could argue... What's the point of it all in this case? Why not just use regular currency?
Sorry, I do not understand your comment. Can you clarify. What does "a lot more centralized in practice" mean? > What's the point of it all in this case? Lightning is an L2 protocol, highly scalable and used for low cost payment in Bitcoin. Level 1 networks are almost never used for user transactions: your credit card payments do not go over fedwire, etc. Bitcoin protocol is not scalable to serve worldwide money tran…
Fedwire isn't a "level 1 network", it's an entirely different service with different end users and goals in mind. ACH isn't an "L2 protocol", but does orders of magnitude more transactions per second than Bitcoin.
It's like cryptobros don't understand the basics of the systems they're attempting to replace.