Coinbase outages • Hacker News Board

Re: Coinbase outages

#261

Post by vorpalhex » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #169

dougmwne wrote: post #103

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…

Satoshi is a supervillain who created the most effective weapon of mass destruction the world has ever seen. Unstoppable and fueled by the inherent greed of mankind.

I suspect Satoshi lacks the intent to be a villian here.

The creator of the Keurig, a device which produces amazing amounts of waste, talked about the unintended consequences of his invention and how ashamed he is for the damage his invention has done.

https://time.com/3731356/keurig-coffee-k-cup/

Re: Coinbase outages

#262

Post by loceng » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

grey-area wrote: post #126

idiotsecant wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been hearing the same thing about tether for about half a decade now. We all know it's insolvent. Apparently it doesn't matter.

Until it does. If everyone tries to get out of tether at once there could be a run on the currency and a collapse. If tether has been manipulating prices (seems likely) that will also come out in the crash.

A global, decentralized MLM-Ponzi scheme in an irrational market could last decades - especially with the manipulation of the market and regulatory capture efforts.

Edit to add: It's part of the cycle of educating society, it'll be painful and costly to those who were left holding the bag - a mob of potentially 100s of millions of people financial aligned hoping they can get more of society convinced of their ideology of Bitcoin's supposed exclusive value.

Re: Coinbase outages

#263

Post by gfodor » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

suprfsat wrote: post #129

gfodor wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe take a longer view.

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.

No my point is that eventually the energy burn per transaction in crypto will likely be near zero.

Re: Coinbase outages

#264

Post by pgwhalen » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

idiotsecant wrote: post #114

Mizza wrote: post #66

Shaaaaady. The NYGA report on Tether is due today. Tether is completely insolvent, and once the rug is pulled, all of the exchanges are going to realize that all of their "stable" reserves are worthless and they can't pay out what they're storing for customers, and the price will tumble all the way down as there's a run on the pseudo-banks that can't payout. Or not, what do I know.

I've been hearing the same thing about tether for about half a decade now. We all know it's insolvent. Apparently it doesn't matter.

One way to reason about why it doesn’t matter: insolvency is not the key part of the financial survival constraint, liquidity is. You could think of tether as just “leveraged” against its underlying USD holdings. It’s only problematic if there is a run on tether, so to speak, where it does not have enough liquidity of USD reserves to satisfy redemptions. (There’s some kind of a limit on redemption though, right?)

The same is true for other types of money - a bank does not hold reserves (assets) against all of its deposits (liabilities), but that does not prevent it from operating, or from bank customers understanding bank deposits as “real money”.

To be clear, I’m not very informed about tether, and as a lay person I do find it to be a shocking situation that probably makes sense to label as fraud. I’m just trying to offer some explanation.

Re: Coinbase outages

#265

Post by papreclip » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #209

Algent wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the most destructive person to have ever lived I'm not sure if we can that easily pin the responsibility on a single person and not on every single one who still continue to go for PoW while knowing how destructive it is.

There's a reasonable argument that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr was a contender for that title previously.

I would say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber blows him out of the water

>Haber is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I, especially his actions during the Second Battle of Ypres.

but more importantly,

>Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process. Thus, the Haber process serves as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018

Anything past 1.6B is overpopulation, and is driving the holocene extinction, global warming, pollution, etc... all of our big problems scale with population, and removing this natural limitation on our food supply has allowed us to blow the suspension out on all of them

Re: Coinbase outages

#266

Post by thecupisblue » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:49 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #53

bradam wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please point me a source where Bitcoin is "desired" as a payment method? It's seen more of a store of value, not used for paying for everyday things.

You’re asking for a source to prove that people want to use a cryptocurrency as currency? Feels a little like asking for a scientific paper proving that fish swim in water.

I would also love to have that source. Any statistics on % of crypto used for actual transactions vs only for trading?

Re: Coinbase outages

#267

Post by dougmwne » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

mathiasrw wrote: post #256

dougmwne wrote: post #103

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 consumption is a result of the greed to get the reward (fee + per block coins) and is not related to how the blockchain is operating. You can see the carbon footprint from different blockchains on https://coincarboncap.com

But the only useful thing BTC does is transfer money/property from one party to another. Take that away and it's nothing at all. The block rewards are just there to operate the network. That the rewards were allowed to get so valuable that they consume the energy equivalent of Norway is a fatal flaw in the design, no?

Re: Coinbase outages

#268

Post by trompetenaccoun » Wed, May 19, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

throwaway_kufu wrote: post #229

thefounder wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right! Let me know when they get their money back. I thought that when bad stuff happens on regulated markets at this level(i.e congresional probe etc) the DA, SEC, FCA or whatever agency is in charge is supposed to intervene and make it right. And btw it wasn't just RobinHood. At some point all the retail brokers(i.e Interactive Brokers) decided to hold various positions(buy/sell). People can sue coinbase and any ot…

Look I’m as jaded as the rest, like everyone. I’ve seen mass manipulation to promote bullshit wars. I graduated in 2008 and I am still told to shut up and say thank you to the banks for paying back taxpayer loans with interest that bailed them out of their own fraud and let them consolidate the market. I saw the CDC initially lie about masks to allegedly preserve supplies for healthcare providers. I saw the governmen…

It's not about lawyers being good or not. What we currently have in financial markets is far from a lawful or just system. Just look how Musk manipulated TSLA and got away with a slap on the wrist $20 Million fine. He openly mocked it on twitter afterwards. And that's just a blatant example from someone who doesn't even care to hide it. That recent GME manipulation wasn't an exception, it's the norm. There are a ton of hedge funds engaged in "technically" illegal trades worth billions of dollars. But who's going to stop them when they're in uncovered short positions, which happens all the time. There is no higher power. The SEC is a paper tiger. If you want to sue Citadel, be their guest. The lawyer's fees and occasional fines they pay are already taken into account. Not that someone like you and me could even afford to bring a case against them.

Re: Coinbase outages

#269

Post by jk7tarYZAQNpTQa » Wed, May 19, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #261

Kiro wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi is a supervillain who created the most effective weapon of mass destruction the world has ever seen. Unstoppable and fueled by the inherent greed of mankind.

I suspect Satoshi lacks the intent to be a villian here. The creator of the Keurig, a device which produces amazing amounts of waste, talked about the unintended consequences of his invention and how ashamed he is for the damage his invention has done. https://time.com/3731356/keurig-coffee-k-cup/

> unintended consequences

I'm sorry but you have to be very short sighted to call single dose coffee in non-recyclable capsules "unintended" waste.

Re: Coinbase outages

#270

Post by hwillis » Wed, May 19, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

grey-area wrote: post #253

hwillis wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin picked centralized, slow, and expensive. Most mining is done in giant warehouses, and the whole point is that more computing power results in zero faster processing. It remains to be seen if there are good ways to do distributed currency, but there are certainly less bad ways.

Sure, they could have made better choices, but the decentralisation is really a fundamental problem that can't be designed away. If you want it decentralised it's going to be significantly slower and more expensive than centralised networks.

More computationally intensive, yes- but computationally intensive may mean "running on smartphones in the background for .1% reduction in battery time" or "a medium-sized country".

Increased cost is certainly not so straightforward. If you're sufficiently distributed, using already-existing hardware, with spare compute on extremely efficient devices, it could conceivably cost less. Even if a centralized server farm would be doing an order of magnitude less math, smaller processors use an order of magnitude less power to do that math.

Bitcoin proper has a central ledger- every miner needs to hear about your transaction to verify it. Lightning is a clumsy way of reducing how many actors need to be notified of your transaction. Better currencies include stuff like that as first class. It's all in the name of getting closer to a constant-number verification scheme that is closer to competitive with the O(1) of registering a transaction with a bank.

Centralized credit/debit cards exist so that a big wealthy firm can say yes, this person has enough money for this transaction and I will guarantee the transaction by paying for it even if they can't. What I would really like to see is distributed, automatic guarantees: when you buy something at a coffee shop, people running validators on wifi will pick it up and use their staked currency as insurance (hedged by the system) that they know accounts who trust this particular account, and the transaction is valid. More people staking and trusting this account means more trust by the larger system, which then only has to validate aggregated transactions. Anyone announcing themselves at a validator plugs in at a given level of aggregation, all of which have different staking/network/latency/storage requirements. Unlike off-chain transactions (eg lightning), the system is guaranteed at every level.

Any given transaction will still be validated dozens or hundreds of times. En bloc it will probably use tens or hundreds of times more energy than the server farms powering VISA. I'll be honest, I'm okay with that. I really like the idea of having a bank account that isn't tied to a company.