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Bitcoin is a Cult

adamcaudill.com

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Re: Bitcoin is a Cult

#41

Post by Taek »

eksemplar wrote: post #14
maym86 wrote: post #6

I don't disagree but isn't this true for the popularization of any technology. First it's just the nerds then come the less informed masses who don't fully understand the details along with the people trying to make money out of that fact.

I think crypto is different in the way it actually doesn’t do anything. Bitcoin has been around for 9 years and you have never been able to use bitcoin as a currency fewer places than you can now.

9 years is not very long for an emerging technology. AI has been around since the 60's. Arpanet was established in 1969. Electricity was relatively well understood in 1750 (we had batteries that could store electrical charge) but the electric lightbulb wasn't invented until more than 100 years later.

Bitcoin is very early, it's core infrastructure, it's going to take time to get established, and once it does get established it's going to change society as much as electricity did.

Re: Bitcoin is a Cult

#42

Post by awt »

herrokan wrote: post #34
awt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government bonds have been around for hundreds of years but I can't buy coffee with them. Thus they don't do anything.

Government bonds aren't meant to be a currency, cryptocurrencies are.

I don't see the relationship between "meant to be" and "is" here. Doesn't it only matter what it actually is rather than what some people thought it might be?

Re: Bitcoin is a Cult

#43

Post by Taek »

jaequery wrote: post #27

can someone name one successful startup that actually utilizes the blockchain to do something they couldnt have done without?

well, you may not call Sia successful (a cloud storage network with 200 TB of data being actively stored on it), but it uses blockchain to achieve something that it could not achieve without.

Re: Bitcoin is a Cult

#45

Post by awt »

Abidarn wrote: post #37
awt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government bonds have been around for hundreds of years but I can't buy coffee with them. Thus they don't do anything.

Not a great analogy. Government bonds were never meant to be a currency. Bitcoin was advertised as a currency. Yet its adoption for that purpose, despite the massive network available for its propagation, has yet to materialize.

What it was "meant to be" hardly matters. What it actually is is more important than the misrepresentations presented by various misinformed parties.

Re: Bitcoin is a Cult

#48

Post by jonhendry18 »

askmike wrote: post #8
prostoalex wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BTC would exist without the cultists as long as Russian or Saudi assets need to be transfered without too much oversight Liquidity, though.

Exactly: No crypto in it's current state is liquid enough for any serious moving of money. Slipping, fees (and potential hedging costs) will eat you if you need to to move serious money. As such it only works for entities who don't have vast amounts of capital, eg. people who can't afford an army of tax lawyers to create complex legal tax evasion schemes to pay less tax than the rest of us.

"No crypto in it's current state is liquid enough for any serious moving of money"

It's more liquid than real estate, which is widely used for money laundering.

Re: Bitcoin is a Cult

#49

Post by Permit »

I think people have largely missed the point of the article. This is specifically in relation to a "magic hash" on a block that was mined on June 19, 2018 with the hash: 00000000000000000021e800c1e8df51b22c1588e5a624bea17e9faa34b2dc4a

The leading zeros are the "proof-of-work". The bitcoin mining algorithm tries various nonces and generates many hashes until it finds one with (currently) 18 leading zeros. Surprisingly, much of the Bitcoin community doesn't know this and think that the leading zeros are special.

The 21e800 is supposedly 'special' because it relates to the E8 'Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything'. A physics theory proposing a basis for unified field theory.

Anyways, people have mistakenly calculated the odds of such an occurrence and believe it to be exceedingly rare. They are claiming that someone must have left it there and that it is either the result of:

1. A quantum computer

2. Time travelling

3. Something related to the Bible

This doesn't really make sense and we can calculate the odds ourselves. It works out to roughly 3%. (1 - ((16^6 - 1) / (16^6)) ^ 500,000 blocks) = 0.03.

There are 18 hashes with the leading non-zero digits 21e8

There are 3 hashes with the leading non-zero digits 21e80

There are many other "vanity hashes":

(57ea1 or steal) https://blockchain.info/block/000000000057ea16558140e0b3995a...

(1055e5 or losses) https://blockchain.info/block/00000000001055e54d1d11bae837d5...

These things are not rare, but as mentioned in the article, people have ascribed a sort of religious aspect to them. It's really weird.

I also wrote about this today. If you're interested in some of the other weird responses see: https://medium.com/@thisisjoshvarty/lets-talk-about-hashes-o...

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