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Bitcoin Is Time

dergigi.com

311–320 of 1001 posts

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think. Or maybe it comes from people who have read an Econo101 textbook and who have spent a lot of time trying to explain a crowd of Bitcoin enthusiasts why their reasoning is wrong but no one has been listening to them so far so they are bored. Back in the time I used to spend my days on a forum about Economics. Every other week there was a random guy who signed up jus…

Would you care to share your Econo101 knowledge? I'm not an economist, but nothing has convinced me yet that bitcoin is not the best form of money.

The collective energy spent by Bitcoin miners equals the energy consumption of Argentina, yet the Bitcoin network only processes a small fraction of the number of transactions per day that Visa processes. For reference, Visa itself consumes only a small fraction as much energy as Argentina.

In other words, you must cover the cost of vastly more energy per Bitcoin transaction compared to the mainstream financial system. Environmental concerns aside, that amounts to a huge tax on every transaction that reduces the economic efficiency of the system. Note also that this is a per-transaction tax, regardless of transaction size, making Bitcoin less useful for small transactions.

There is also the fact that such a high energy cost per transaction causes the value of Bitcoin to be more strongly correlated with the price of energy. Energy prices are notoriously volatile; hence Bitcoin's value will also be volatile. Volatility makes a currency less useful (it introduces risk into every transaction and disincentives investment) and a very volatile currency will eventually be abandoned entirely. It should surprise nobody that the overwhelming majority of merchants who "accept cryptocurrency" as payment do so via services that immediately convert that cryptocurrency payment into their local fiat currency, because the majority of the world's fiat currencies have very stable values (compared to Bitcoin etc.).

I could go on but to be honest the technical objections to Bitcoin outweigh the economic objections, at least in my opinion. Happy to get into those objections as well if anyone is interested.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising I'm curious to know why this is the case. I don't know much about it - ELI5 or a good link to read more?

It's not, it's fully functional and there are many users. Only people who haven't actually tried using it says things like "it's incredibly buggy".

How many? What is the transaction volume like compared to Ethereum, Bitcoin, BSC, etc?

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#313
post #210

I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity. Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons: - emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3. - energy us…

Stop shilling. And to have the galls to say something like Nano has the ability to take on Bitcoin just indicates that you very new to this market - and thus want to make a quick buck by shilling your random shitcoin. The thing which Bitcoin has, and that few others can match, is acceptability from a large swatch of investors and predictable security/emission schedule.

And, just fyi, Nano is not made of users. Go to its reddit and you will see everyone shilling it and having price targets on it. Stop giving such these weak arguments - most of us are in here for the money and don't give two hoots of the technology.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also no meaningful contribution for the work. Imagine if there was a blockchain crypto attached to folding@home it would work that has value.

Isn't that Gridcoin (GRC)

Not sure. Let me check that puppy out.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#315
post #210

I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity. Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons: - emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3. - energy us…

Stop shilling. And to have the galls to say something like Nano has the ability to take on Bitcoin just indicates that you very new to this market - and thus want to make a quick buck by shilling your random shitcoin. The thing which Bitcoin has, and that few others can match, is acceptability from a large swatch of investors and predictable security/emission schedule. And, just fyi, Nano is not made of users. Go to…

> And, just fyi, Nano is not made of users. Go to its reddit and you will see everyone shilling it and having price targets on it.

Not saying you're wrong, but this feels like every subreddit dedicated to a crypto.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#316
post #210

I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity. Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons: - emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3. - energy us…

Stop shilling. And to have the galls to say something like Nano has the ability to take on Bitcoin just indicates that you very new to this market - and thus want to make a quick buck by shilling your random shitcoin. The thing which Bitcoin has, and that few others can match, is acceptability from a large swatch of investors and predictable security/emission schedule. And, just fyi, Nano is not made of users. Go to…

> most of us are in here for the money

This seems a little ironic after complaining about shilling.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#317

Nothing is less material than money. . . . Money is abstract, I repeated, money is future time. It can be an evening in the suburbs, it can be the music of Brahms, it can be maps, it can be chess, it can be coffee, it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold. Money is a Proteus more versatile than the one on the island of Pharos. —Jorge Luis Borges, “The Zahir” https://longreads.com/2016/06/14/borges…

> Richard Dawkins said in an offhand comment in The Selfish Gene that “Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism.” - https://nakamotoinstitute.org/reciprocal-altruism-in-the-the...

This is an amazingly refined definition.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#318
post #210

I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity. Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons: - emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3. - energy us…

But a 51% attack (with e.g. a double spend) will be easily spotted by the community, right? What would be the incentive for an actor with such a vast amount of specialised hardware just for Bitcoin mining, to undermine its security? Its not that I'm saying it is not possible but its your usage of "likely" that I would argue against

I see the ideological foundation for a theoretical 51% attack more aligned with causing mass disruption & chaos than some kind of financial gain. Yes, it would likely be detected. But it would undermine BTC, lots of people would lose lots of money, lots of businesses would go under, portions of the global banking system would be disrupted and likely pushed back to more centralized alternatives. The most likely threat actor for such an attack would therefore be a nation-state.

China is the only country pushing that kind of hash rate at the moment, so we should analyze whether the move would be beneficial to them in order to determine the risk.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#319
post #210

I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity. Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons: - emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3. - energy us…

The market has spoken: https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NANOBTC/.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#320

That was an excellent read! Every time I read about Bitcoin here, I see the "Energy" arguments. Bitcoin was designed to solve a specific problem and it solves that. Even Satoshi himself would not have foreseen the energy requirements for PoW. If we had argued about energy requirements in late 60s we would have never reached Moon or built the LHC. Technological advancements will always need energy. We should be discus…

What problem did bitcoin solve?
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