Cryptocurrency in the 2020s • Hacker News Board

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#231

Post by hnews_account_1 » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

dane-pgp wrote: post #166

hnews_account_1 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should've phrased that better. What I meant was to assume consumer affordable storage space will increase in size exponentially i.e. if we pay $0.01 / GB today, we should be paying fractions of that fraction in a year (because obviously "exponential" is loose term here). > (ignoring things like High Frequency Trading) HFT is not a blockchain transaction. They are off blockchain transactions entirely because they tr…

> The point of bitcoin is that everyone should have a copy of every transaction (excluding lightning network transactions). Is that the point of bitcoin? Satoshi said: > Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section 8) to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day. Onl…

> (He also didn't say anything about "lightning network transactions".)

Correct. I'm not going by what Satoshi said, but by what development the bitcoin core team is aiming to create now.

> If blocks had been 10 times bigger, the blockchain would still be less than 3 TB

Correct. The aim of the project is to keep it as small as possible. 3 TB may not seem prohibitive today, but that's because there's hardly been any usage of the network compared to what the real world looks like. If bitcoin truly competed with Visa / Mastercard, both of those numbers will start looking a lot bigger. If the compressed version was 3TB, the bigger blocks version now becomes 30TB - suddenly far out of consumer grade storage for a normal person.

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#232

Post by wpietri » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

induetimesir wrote: post #68

wpietri wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It has been 10+ years since the Bitcoin paper. No cryptocurrency has significant consumer adoption. [1], [2] Except for light financial crime (ransomware, money laundering, gambling, theft, etc), it has no demonstrated advantage over alternative technologies. I don't think it will go away, any more than Ponzi and Make Money Fast schemes have gone away. But like you, I expect it will fade into the background…

"no demonstrated advantage" - said by someone who doesn't remember what it's like to wait for a large check to clear. or hasn't tried to fund their IRA via an ACH transfer but their bank won't allow it bcs rules.. or hasn't wanted to wire money (or receive a wire) for a fraction of the price (and hassle) of a wire transfer. I have sent hundreds of bitcoin transactions. And I admit that it's not perfect. There's lots…

You haven't yet listed a specific occasion when Bitcoin is better than the alternatives. Let alone doing it for a significant group of people facing a specific problem. So I'm sticking with "no demonstrated advantage".

Do existing approaches have problems, especially the legacy ones? Sure. Nobody denies that. But Bitcoin needs to be better in practice, not just in theory.

I'm sure you do believe that Bitcoin is on the cusp of change. But Bitcoin has been on the cusp of change for 10 years. It's the same routine some Christians have been running for 2000 years: Jesus is coming back any day now. When they predict a specific date, they always turn out to be wrong, but that does not change things: https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1071833726294749184

I was very interested when Bitcoin appeared a decade ago. It's an interesting idea backed by interesting technology. Of course, so was 3D TV. In both cases, however much the respective fan groups are sure it's superior, in practice the great majority of humanity turns out not to care because the other options turn out to be as good or better for their actual needs.

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#233

Post by wpietri » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 4:47 PM UTC

vinniejames wrote: post #120

induetimesir wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"no demonstrated advantage" - said by someone who doesn't remember what it's like to wait for a large check to clear. or hasn't tried to fund their IRA via an ACH transfer but their bank won't allow it bcs rules.. or hasn't wanted to wire money (or receive a wire) for a fraction of the price (and hassle) of a wire transfer. I have sent hundreds of bitcoin transactions. And I admit that it's not perfect. There's lots…

A good number of these negative arguments appear to have a similar line of thinking. "I don't know much about Bitcoin, or finance in general, but I can adamantly tell you Bitcoin has no benefit, something something money laundering"

Oh? If you're so confident Bitcoin has demonstrated utility for other categories, It should be pretty easy for you to demonstrate it. The original goal was peer-to-peer electronic cash: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Real cash usage is gradually declining, but approximately zero of that difference has been taken up by Bitcoin: https://www.frbsf.org/cash/publications/fed-notes/2018/novem...

Merchant adoption is not just stagnating, it's in reverse: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-12/bitcoin-a...

If you contrast this with the speedy rise of M-Pesa, it's obviously a failure as digital cash. It's also a failure as compared with things like Venmo, which are all popular with people doing cash-like things: https://money.com/venmo-cash-app-zelle-better/

So if it's not good for the stated purpose, what's it now good for? No speculation about the future please. Just name a specific, significant group of users, state their problem, explain how Bitcoin solves it better than alternatives (better on their terms, not yours), and link to statistics showing sustained, rising adoption.

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#234

Post by wpietri » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 4:49 PM UTC

sincerely wrote: post #35

wpietri wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It has been 10+ years since the Bitcoin paper. No cryptocurrency has significant consumer adoption. [1], [2] Except for light financial crime (ransomware, money laundering, gambling, theft, etc), it has no demonstrated advantage over alternative technologies. I don't think it will go away, any more than Ponzi and Make Money Fast schemes have gone away. But like you, I expect it will fade into the background…

>Except for light financial crime (ransomware, money laundering, gambling, theft, etc), it has no demonstrated advantage over alternative technologies. I know this is a crime, but it's not a financial crime: cryptocurrency has HUGE advantages over alternative tech for buying drugs online.

Fair point. It becomes financial crime for the drug seller, but you're right that Bitcoin is also good for other kinds of crime. In a world where marijuana legalization wasn't happening, I think Bitcoin would have more of a chance.

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#235

Post by kerkeslager » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 4:50 PM UTC

nootropicat wrote: post #214

kerkeslager wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, first, "censorship-resistant" doesn't imply "censorship-proof". Second, I don't think we can conclude what would happen if China tried to censor. China certainly has 51% attack capability against Bitcoin, but the only implication that of that which is clear to me is that they could potentially execute double-spends. Using 51% attack capability to orphan transactions is different. With a double spend, there's tw…

>There would be the Chinese censored branch and the uncensored branch everyone else is using Every fork is vulnerable to the same attack, which is why such a switch doesn't make sense. There's no way to prevent Chinese miners from mining on the "Western" bitcoin if it's the more profitable option. The censorship can be easily made reactive: first, all Chinese miners have to register and report their hash power. If th…

> Every fork is vulnerable to the same attack, which is why such a switch doesn't make sense.

No, it wouldn't. I don't think you're understanding the solution I'm proposing. There isn't an amount of computing power that allows you to submit invalid blocks.

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#236

Post by heptathorp » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

kerkeslager wrote: post #209

nootropicat wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>censorship-resistant money It's not, the majority of hash power is in China. That means the Chinese government could start censoring bitcoin transactions in a week if they wanted to - by orphaning non-compliant blocks. Regardless of anything else, this centralization alone makes bitcoin a failed experiment. https://cointelegraph.com/news/study-chinas-btc-miners-contr...

Well, first, "censorship-resistant" doesn't imply "censorship-proof". Second, I don't think we can conclude what would happen if China tried to censor. China certainly has 51% attack capability against Bitcoin, but the only implication that of that which is clear to me is that they could potentially execute double-spends. Using 51% attack capability to orphan transactions is different. With a double spend, there's tw…

>You know the transaction exists, and at some point (i.e. after a certain number of blocks), if the transaction isn't included in the chain, you can conclude with reasonable certainty that the transaction is being intentionally orphaned. This allows you to reject the chain that doesn't include the transaction as invalid, and choose the longest chain that does include it.

So you are going to reorg after many blocks (enough to be sure a transaction is being censored). This sounds extremely undesirable as it kills finality. Today you can very reasonably be sure that after say, 6 blocks, a transaction is irreversible. That's not the case with this new rule.

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#237

Post by thebean11 » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

nootropicat wrote: post #214

kerkeslager wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, first, "censorship-resistant" doesn't imply "censorship-proof". Second, I don't think we can conclude what would happen if China tried to censor. China certainly has 51% attack capability against Bitcoin, but the only implication that of that which is clear to me is that they could potentially execute double-spends. Using 51% attack capability to orphan transactions is different. With a double spend, there's tw…

>There would be the Chinese censored branch and the uncensored branch everyone else is using Every fork is vulnerable to the same attack, which is why such a switch doesn't make sense. There's no way to prevent Chinese miners from mining on the "Western" bitcoin if it's the more profitable option. The censorship can be easily made reactive: first, all Chinese miners have to register and report their hash power. If th…

Reusing the same attack would just result in a never-ending series of offshoots from the "western" chain. If anything that would guarantee that the uncensored chain stays dominant, as all of the forks would be quicky abandoned for the next

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#238

Post by Can_Not » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

v64 wrote: post #16

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #7

Consider the source, right? How many people without a large vested interest in the propagation and uptake of cryptocurrency consider further growth likely? My guess is that governments will more and more realize that the main utility of blockchains is money laundering and speculation. As has been remarked over and over again, they don't solve any above board problem more efficiently or with lower expense than existin…

I honestly don't understand where the perception comes from that this technology is only useful for laundering and speculation. Certainly it is currently being used for those purposes. But to say there is no imaginable use outside of that seems unwarranted. I've commented in the past here that the use of public blockchains to automate the functions of clearinghouses and escrow services will be a huge cost reduction f…

I think your average developer will interpret everything you said as mostly technobabble and not understand why something like MySQL wouldn't just work.

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#239

Post by thebean11 » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

danans wrote: post #112

aazaa wrote: post #72

The trouble with this article is that the author doesn't seem to know what Bitcoin is for. Notice the vague treatment of actual cryptocurrency applications. There are lots of predictions about startup activity, "flippenings" and venture capital, but little about the goods and services customers will actually be buying, or what specifically startups will be building. It's this kind of thinking that leads people into t…

> It places Bitcoin on the side of personal freedom and on a collision course with some of the world's biggest governments, including the US. And until and unless you can use it to purchase the goods and services needed for daily life, and the military and police forces needed to secure the supplies lines of those, it will be at best a theoretical form of personal freedom. Even if Bitcoin doesn't rely on trust, the r…

Not sure I understand how the military is going to stop individuals from exchanging goods within a country, are you suggesting the US/Chinese/Some other military would stop the flow of everyday goods into its own country to prevent Bitcoin transactions?

Re: Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

#240

Post by thebean11 » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

jacobsenscott wrote: post #101

v64 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that any sane financial instrument could increase its return by two points by the holders of it voting to do so is... I haven't the words. Raising the savings rate will also raise the interest rate that those holding loans must pay. If a loan holder doesn't agree with the new interest rate, they are free to close out their loan.

I'm not familiar with this product. How do you "close out" one of these loans? If you mean pay it off, nobody would take a loan they can just pay off at anytime, or where the interest rate can be just arbitrarily voted up.

> nobody would take a loan they can just pay off at anytime

Isn't this just a revolving credit line?