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Bitcoin Is Time

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Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#321

Post by kiliantics »

dnautics wrote: post #191
7373737373 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 isn't too far off from the point that David graeber makes in debt: the first 5000 years

I think this is a rosy-eyed view. Money is a formalised manifestation of debt, which previously was an informal system of reciprocity and altruism. But formalising this debt with financial and monetary systems destroyed the altruistic part of the arrangement.

Graeber explains how money was created by states to enforce its authority and basically coerce people into participation. The anonymity of monetary debt and the fact that the system is controlled by the "powers that be" make it kind of the opposite of altruism.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#322

Post by kache_ »

gnrlst wrote: 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…

Is it really getting this easy to create a shill account and bot it on hnews?

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#323

Post by aeternum »

gnrlst wrote: 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…

Suppose I create a new coin that I also call Nano. I create a bunch of bots and websites and post on message boards so it looks like my version is more popular and has more participants.

How will people tell the difference?

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#324

Post by casi »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #188
casi wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty weird seeing this recent trend of hn going from crypto-resistant, to cardano pumping. out of all the blockchains cardano? thats where you see the future? really? bizarre.

Pretend that someone is really reading and trying to understand for a moment ;). What do you see in Cardano that makes it a poor candidate for a future blockchain? Governance? Functionality? Algorithms? Investment?

well #1 would be Charles Hoskinson and his history...

but more meaningful opposition would be in why use a DPoS network now that we can have PoS networks without the delegation? if you value decentralisation and think it has a future why would you go for a DPoS network that can so far just send tokens, there are better dpos networks like cosmos or polkadot, and ethereum is moving to pos. What is cardano actually (still attempting) to solve that hasnt already been solved by polkadot/cosmos?

Why use haskell as the contract language? do you think in the limited pool of blockchain developers there are many people are wanting to write haskell? and that they are going to port all the existing tokens/defi/contracts made over the past few years to a haskell+utxo model? who is expected to build on this. in 15 years of dev work ive met a handful of haskell devs, they are all in academia and dont make production software.

And alongside that, and why i refer to it being pumped, is that it is getting so much publicity but barely being used. i just looked at the block explorer and in the past ten blocks three are empty and the rest have a top of 10 transactions being processed. Where are the supposed network effects driving it? shouldnt the blockspace be in demand? especially with the recent price surge, if the price is going up but it has empty blocks surely that is a bad sign?

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#325

Post by loceng »

olah_1 wrote: post #69

This is the article that made things finally click with me. Thinking about the pre-WWI gold standard and the issues that existed there and the improvements that Bitcoin brings around time, consensus, etc. The baseless negative comments with no interaction with the article content confirms for me that Bitcoin is on to something. Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think.

Lazy people who don't read an article and comment becomes a proof point that Bitcoin is onto something? That's an extremely weak argument point.

And arguably there's a much larger mob of people who haven't critically thought through any of Bitcoin - who own Bitcoin - but that are financially incentivized to promote Bitcoin or are biased to want Bitcoin to become something.

Convincing yourself that someone commenting negatively about Bitcoin is simply jealous is also a common thing I've seen many Bitcoin owners use to justify ignoring legitimate counter-narratives of a lot of propaganda.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#326

Post by la_fayette »

paulmd wrote: post #243
gnrlst wrote: 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 lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising. it's actually worse than that - lightning only works in the context of centralized banking. It presumes there is some other entity with whom you can hold a channel open, who you do roughly equivalent amounts of deposits and withdrawals from. If that criterion is not met, then you have to keep closing channels and re-open…

This is not true! RTFM

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#327

Post by betterunix2 »

cyphertruck wrote: post #264
Retric wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Bitcoin specifically. You can use a different token backed up by Bitcoin, but the actual implementation has these issues. Transaction rates - Artificially kept low to profit miners. Privacy - Every Bitcoin transactions is on a public blockchain. Transaction fees - Using Bitcoin for even one transaction a day gets expensive. Online only - Unlike cash only works with network access. Conformation Time - Failing to w…

First off, thank you for making fair criticisms. Unfortunately some of your information is old. You don’t need a bitcoin backed token, lightning does it. Transaction rates are not artificially kept low. In fact most the vast majority of the time bitcoin has excess capacity. Privacy- this is a legitimate concern but it is improving, slowly. Taoroot and Lightning are both privacy improvements. So your daily transaction…

"Online Only- I don’t think there is a solution to this criticism, but not sure what the issue is."

The fact that I need to connect to some peer-to-peer network or third party service for every transaction is a limiting factor. It reduces the efficiency of the system and increases latency, and it adds additional points of failure.

In fact it can be solved for electronic transactions and there is a mountain of published research on the topic that dates back to the late 80s. Here is a recent research paper:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1220.pdf

The idea is to ensure that users who attempt to double spend can be identified and penalized later (e.g. by being added to a blacklist; some systems actually ensure that all transactions in which the cheating user participated can be identified, so merchants who try to evade the blacklist can also be penalized). The money has to be issued by a bank under the security definition. If anonymity is not a requirement -- and presumably a Bitcoin enthusiast does not care about anonymity since Bitcoin is not anonymous -- this can be easily achieved by using ordinary digital signatures.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#328

Post by pyrale »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #257
boringg wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems inflammatory (covetousness?). My take is HN commenters try to typically reason through articles with thought and an open mind. I would wager there are so many bitcoin bros who hype ad nausea that beckons the skepticism you see here.

"Bitcoin bros" is inflammatory and slanderous. Please edit your comment.

On the other hand,

> the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.

...is an insulting way to dismiss a concern without adressing it.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#329

Post by hfsp »

krrrh wrote: post #291
thewarrior wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently decided to think deeply about Bitcoin and I think my initial skepticism about Bitcoin was wrong. Most of the criticisms of Bitcoin are centered around the fact that Bitcoin has a very low throughput. However this is not necessarily a problem. And here is one hypothetical example of how we can overcome this issue: When countries owe each other money they used to transfer gold back and forth or trust someone…

One of the properties of gold that roughly held true for centuries was a stable value. When gold threatened to become too scarce for a growing economy the incentive to mine, explore, and develop new mining technology increased. Goldbugs often point out that an ounce of gold has always been close to the price of a nice suit (admittedly a fuzzy measure, and it’s sometimes a really nice suit, and sometimes just a really…

>There’s a bizarre religiousity and post hoc rationalizations for some of the weirdest decisions in its design, and mistaking speculative mania and nominal price for success

This is a feature, not a bug. It is very difficult to change the protocol. We have a 100% certain monetary policy.

I agree with you that perception of what btc is and isn't changes with time.

If you have a proposal, you are free to create and propose a BIP, or fork off.

Good luck.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#330

Post by anthropodie »

raziel2701 wrote: post #320
anthropodie wrote: post #298

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?

Did you read the article?
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