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Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire

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Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire

#291

Post by chalst »

giaour wrote: post #287
polygamous_bat wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just regulatory arbitrage. I am not a lawyer, but until there are clear laws about it, why can't you just claim that this is just funny money with no real world value, and it has no more seriousness than an in game gold/xp?

> why can't you just claim that this is just funny money with no real world value, and it has no more seriousness than an in game gold/xp? That might work in a jurisdiction where the trade in cryptocurrency is illegal but its possession is allowed, but I can't imagine a US or European court would take that argument seriously when crypto has a demonstrable market value. The court would almost certainly treat crypto li…

Eich has been heavily criticised by the cryptcoin ultras for taking KYC regulations seriously.

Cf. e.g., from 2018, https://thenextweb.com/news/brave-blockchain-cryptocurrency-...

Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire

#292

Post by chitowneats »

ephbit wrote: post #290
chitowneats wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the type of trust that can be nullified by securing 51% of mining capacity?

You're welcome to provide a better approach. Pointing out the limits of the currently implemented mechanism (in Bitcoin) does not equate to Bitcoin being inferior to the trust system of conventional currencies.

> currencies are subject to extreme pressures from economic actors (governments, banks, societies, businesses, ..). Therefore claiming that banks can simply be "trusted" to withstand these pressures (by strictly enacting some agreed upon policy) is a bit like closing your eyes on the real world situation of currencies.

I was merely pointing out that your statement about currencies also applies to (at least some) cryptocurrencies. Large mining groups refraining from securing 51%, or colluding with each other to similar effect, is the only thing stopping them from having the power to maliciously inject fraudulent blocks.

So yeah, BTC's proof of work scheme seems to have some conceptual flaws. I'm aware of innovation in the space, but none have caught on the way BTC or Monero have.

Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire

#293

Post by cypress66 »

cesarb wrote: post #203
cypress66 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW is inefficient by design, which SOME cryptocurrencies use. But cryptocurrencies don't need to use PoW. Many already use non PoW systems, and others are going to switch away from PoW (such as ethereum).

> Many already use non PoW systems Looking from the outside, all the ones which matter seem to use PoW systems. > and others are going to switch away from PoW (such as ethereum). I've been hearing that for years, and it's always six months away.

> I've been hearing that for years, and it's always six months away.

"hearing" doesn't really mean much since random people can say whatever, but the switch to PoS has never been claimed to be 6 months away until this year. You're probably confused with the beacon chain with successfully launched in 2020.

Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire

#294

Post by DennisP »

Most of this is old hat but there's one claim I thought was interesting and decided to check, and it's laughably wrong:

> We’re talking [a measurable percentage] of the world’s electricity consumption, most of that has not been paid for. So the mining companies for the most part have been taking the cryptocurrency and borrowing against the cryptocurrency that they create, rather than sell it, because the market’s actually very thin.

So supposedly, the markets are too thin to support the miners actually selling their earnings to pay their power bills. Let's check the top two against 24-hour volume on coinmarketcap:

BTC volume: 1M BTC

BTC issuance: 6.25 BTC every 10 minutes, or 900 BTC in 24 hours, or 0.09% of the trading volume.

ETH volume: 8.5M ETH

ETH issuance: 2 ETH every 15 seconds, or 11,520 ETH in 24 hours, or 0.14% of the trading volume.

I don't think the miners have any trouble selling their earnings for fiat.

Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire

#295

Post by jjav »

edent wrote: post #49
lordofgibbons wrote: post #10

I will gladly stop using Monero if someone can tell me how to privately transact over the internet without CC companies (and others) spying on me and selling my data. Until there is a better solution, I'll keep using it.

I understand this privacy argument - but I'm wondering what the practical downside is of this "spying"? I've been using credit cards online for decades and I am yet to encounter anything negative from doing so. I get that my credit card provider knows that I'm buying £X of goods from merchant Y. But unless that merchant is very specific, the card company doesn't know what I've bought. And, if it did... so what? Perha…

> But unless that merchant is very specific, the card company doesn't know what I've bought.

But the merchant knows and (unless it's a very old mom & pop shop), they didn't do it manually, the itemized receipt is in their computer system. Which the government can easily obtain and correlate with the credit card transaction so now they have both.

As the downstream comments say, if you're any kind of persecuted minority, this is a big problem.

Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire

#296

Post by jjav »

nanidin wrote: post #52
edent wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand this privacy argument - but I'm wondering what the practical downside is of this "spying"? I've been using credit cards online for decades and I am yet to encounter anything negative from doing so. I get that my credit card provider knows that I'm buying £X of goods from merchant Y. But unless that merchant is very specific, the card company doesn't know what I've bought. And, if it did... so what? Perha…

Have you ever needed to buy something illegal?

> Have you ever needed to buy something illegal?

Or more importantly, something that is normal today but becomes illegal with some future government (or court).

Having a paper trail of everything in perpetuity is always dangerous in the future.

Best to use cash for most things.

Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire

#297

Post by MerelyMortal »

pontus wrote: post #282
MerelyMortal wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of years ago on reddit, someone issued a challenge to find the destination of their private Zcash transaction. Someone won the challenege, not by tracing the transaction itself, but by recognizing it was the only transparent to private, and private to transparent transactions with in a timeframe. That's why privacy needs to be mandatory like it is with Monero.

This is quite outdated, I believe. With the launch of NU5/Halo2 in a couple of weeks, all transactions will be private by default. Plus, even without that change, the shielded pool is way larger these days. Finally, a fairer comparison with Monero would have been to trace a shielded to shielded transaction. This should be literally impossible with Zcash.

Private transactions by default sounds good, glad to hear. I guess that's why they extended their 20% dev tax past the initial first half of emittance like they originally advertised.

Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire

#298

Post by jjav »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #147
lordofgibbons wrote: post #10

I will gladly stop using Monero if someone can tell me how to privately transact over the internet without CC companies (and others) spying on me and selling my data. Until there is a better solution, I'll keep using it.

Your "data" is not worth anything. No-one is spying on you. You are not interesting.

> Your "data" is not worth anything. No-one is spying on you. You are not interesting.

The billions (trillions these days?) online advertising market clearly disagrees with you.

Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire

#299

Post by danans »

coldcode wrote: post #81

You can say the same thing about stocks, gold, bonds, commodities depending on what year you are in. Everything goes up and eventually down again. Oil futures even went below zero not that long ago, now the cash price is over $100 a barrel. I saw the crash in 1987 and yet here we are, at all time highs recently. Crypto of course has less economic meaning as it's just bits, but anything that is traded goes up and down…

> down in value, even pointless things like baseball cards

Baseball cards that have any value aren't pointless. They are kind of historical artifact, and are traded like artifacts or antiques. They have value as long as enough people place value on baseball history.

Newly created baseball cards are effectively worthless, and a vanishingly small percentage will ever have any value.

Crypto has no cultural value like that. There is no sentimental value attached to it.

Eventually in the future when nobody cares about it remembers what baseball is, the cards will have no value, but the fact is that value today comes from both their scarcity and the ownership of a piece of history.

Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire

#300

Post by Havoc »

TimPC wrote: post #163
Havoc wrote: post #44

>help me make it die in a fire I'm rather mistrustful of people that are this forthy about being against a new technology. If it really is that devoid of merit it'll die on its own. I also think it is a rather fundamental failure to see the big picture. Not efficient? Well neither was the Ford model T. Newer generations are getting better. Similarly somehow existing systems seem to get a free pass for things that are…

I personally think it’s a bit disingenuous to call people out for legitimate anger. The appropriate reaction to endless Ponzi schemes is anger. The appropriate reaction to pointless environmental destruction is anger. So “be calm bro, why so angry?” no longer seems like a legitimate criticism. If you want people to not be angry don’t build technologies that are highly destructive and cause immense harm. Other argumen…

>I personally think it’s a bit disingenuous to call people out for legitimate anger.

You misunderstand me. They can be angry all day long. My point isn't that they shouldn't be angry, but rather that it makes me doubt that their rationale is balanced.

>Bitcoin is literally destroying the world

That's true for damn near everything we do. Everything from cars, to space travel to computing to doing laundry.

> firestorm of ransom ware

And the internet brings an endless stream of viruses, spam, malware, hacking etc yet somehow people can accept that tradeoff just fine.

Few new technologies are pure positive only, or risk free, or awesome straight from the start.

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