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Bitcoin breaks above $20k

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Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#421

Post by keymone »

three_seagrass wrote: post #413
xtracto wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don´t agree with you. I see it more like SABRE, SAGE in the 1960´s and ARPANET in the 1970s, Compuserve in the 80s and the Internet in the 90s. Hashcash, eGold and other similar pioneered the "dark ages" of digital money/value-transfer. Now we are in the ARPANET/Compuserve stage. Cryptocats and crypto-games is akin to "90s" internet. Next 10 years will bring really interesting thinks.

Technology adoption has changed since those analogies were developed. Bitcoin has been consistently "around the corner" from mass market for a decade now, while other technologies have been released and adopted.

> Bitcoin has been consistently "around the corner" from mass market for a decade now

do you even know how old bitcoin is?

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#422

Post by fidelramos »

spurgu wrote: post #207
phoinix wrote: post #144

Someone has to feel sorry for Btc. Many people are going to lose money. Bitcoin has value. It is only Btc people that took a very nice technology and crippled it. The put a cap in it's block size, and they removed instructions of the Bitcoin Script language. Bitcoin's usage lies in it's use as an immutable ledger, that no one can change the past. We can put other information inside it,alongside with the money transac…

Easier and more effective to just store the hash of the video on a blockchain.

Yes, and this is what blockchain notaries like notary.bitcoin.com do.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#423

Post by dumbfoundded »

93po wrote: post #396
three_seagrass wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold isn't controlled by a handful of miners in China, the way Bitcoin is. The whole decentralization-as-design principle of Bitcoin has shown that, given few constraints, anything of value naturally centralizes on the select few with the means to control it anyways. The block size debate, and the tragedy of the commons that it shines a light on, is a prime example of that.

Gold is controlled by small handful of nations, which are in turns controlled by a small handful of people.

One person used to control a lot of gold too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#424

Post by Taek »

three_seagrass wrote: post #353
Taek wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"By design, any changes to update the Bitcoin protocol need to be accepted by the miners with the majority of computing power - a.k.a. a hard fork." This is incorrect and a common misunderstanding about Bitcoin. Hard forks require users to update, and it doesn't matter what the miners do. It also doesn't require a majority of users to upgrade, anyone who does upgrade will be on the new network, and anyone who does no…

Semantics. Any hard fork that majority of miners do not accept and support becomes it's own branch and a separate crypto. This is why I reference the bitcoin block size debacle. Bitcoin Cash was created as a hard fork that miners ultimately did not accept and is now just a dwindling alt coin.

It's not semantics, it's an incorrect worldview. Miners follow revenue. If miners had chosen to mine Bitcoin Cash, all that would have happened is they would have lost a ton of money competing with eachother while the miners who stayed on the original chain raked in hundreds of millions in additional profit.

Segwit2x had 80% hashrate support at the time it was proposed. It also had the support of most of the exchanges and major centralized players in the space. And yet, Segwit2x did not succeed.

Miners don't control Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#425

Post by JxLS-cpgbe0 »

three_seagrass wrote: post #412
JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is why I never said that > currencies, which are widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce So billions of dollars of institutional trading means BTC is widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce. So, you said it's a currency. That makes no mention of the consumer space, where I bought my widescreen monitor with BTC and pay my friends i…

>So billions of dollars of institutional trading means BTC is widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce. So, you said it's a currency. This is a straw man. USD is a good currency because it is widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce. BTC is not a good currency because it is not widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and org…

BTC is widely accepted globally, engaged with, and in use, as currency, by people and organizations in commerce. I've given examples of major institutions that prove all of the above is true.

Do you have a single reason to believe it's a hobby currency?

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#426

Post by AdamGibbins »

Kiro wrote: post #298
capnorange wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

coldcard if Bitcoin only. Trezor for crypto. Avoid Ledger if possible. I own all three. Currently using Coldcard + Casa.

Why avoid Ledger?

They leaked everyones data that they were storing for no reason way past the period in which it was needed. So people are now being spammed via email and SMS phishing attacks on an almost daily basis.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#427

Post by dumbfoundded »

Auracle wrote: post #197
arithma wrote: post #87

Just a question, isn't all criticism against bitcoin applicable to gold? Money/Currency/Value in general can't be reduced or derived from first principles. You always have to take into account human nature, economic activity, and most unfortunately: psychology. So all criticism about how bitcoin inherently being pointless, sounds like off-tune. I want good reasons to/NOT-to buy in. First-world country citizens kind o…

In the age where we might see asteroid mining in our lifetimes, or possibly even economically transmuting elements, gold seems like a bad investment to me.

The power requirements for transmuting elements would probably significantly out do the power needed for mining bitcoin.

In the case of asteroid mining, it'd likely go the way of the diamond. Diamonds are not rare and easy to create in labs yet still retain high values due to monopolization of the supply. No company that mines asteroids will want to flood the markets. Instead, they will monopolize the supply and find a balance of introducing supply and maintaining prices.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#428

Post by dumbfoundded »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #152
arithma wrote: post #87

Just a question, isn't all criticism against bitcoin applicable to gold? Money/Currency/Value in general can't be reduced or derived from first principles. You always have to take into account human nature, economic activity, and most unfortunately: psychology. So all criticism about how bitcoin inherently being pointless, sounds like off-tune. I want good reasons to/NOT-to buy in. First-world country citizens kind o…

Gold is not just a store of value, it's a material with many practical uses (like all the electronics that make having this conversation possible). Even gold's decorative value gives it a serious advantage over BTC in my book (though I like silver and platinum better, to be honest).

Most of gold's value is attributed to speculation just as bitcoin is. Bitcoin uniquely offers a way to spend money without the government knowing about it. Ransomware, moving money out of China, buying drugs online were all extremely difficult without bitcoin. Of course Bitcoin isn't completely anonymous, but it can be. Buy bitcoin with cash to a new wallet and then send anywhere.

Gold is just the physical version of that. Just like all money is made up, the value of bitcoin and gold are pretty much imaginary.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#429

Post by pdpi »

NoOneNew wrote: post #281
pdpi wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just saying "this will help the poor because they have nothing" over and over with no real plan, let alone action, doesn't make it true. I used to work at a bitcoin company, and we had large user communities in countries where the local currency was subject to very high inflation, and access to stabler currencies (like dollars or euros) was severely limited. We were actually helping proper deal with real problems,…

Okay... how does bitcoin differ from an unstable traditional currency? Both are subject to high and low swings to inflation and deflation. The one thing bitcoin has not been in its history is stable. This still ends up to being the equivalent to "there are 14 standards, let's make a standard to unify them... there are now 15 standards". Plus, all you described was a currency exchange with an extra step. You could rep…

Ranging 2015—mid 2017, BTC was slowly going up in price, in a nice steady fashion. It wasn’t until late 2017 that things went completely apeshit.

At any rate, the price instability is exactly that — unstable. It’s not systematic hyperflation. For when you don’t have access to conventional forex, it’s better than nothing.

> You're not wrong for wanting to help poor people. But people need to come to the realization that bitcoin has been Theranos-like the whole time. It's a waste of time if you're goal is to help the poor.

Yeah. That’s a large part of why I used to work at a Bitcoin company.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#430

Post by gruez »

DennisP wrote: post #349
anonymousDan wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this criticism a lot. And I don't disagree with it fundamentally, but I would be interested to hear how its advocates justify the decision. How do the Ethereum founders attempt to rebut it? Are there any good counterarguments?

Ethereum was only about a year old at the time. When Bitcoin a year-and-a-half old, it had a bug that required a five-hour chain rollback. Bitcoin people will object and say that was a bug with the blockchain itself. However, sample code on ethereum.org had vulnerabilities similar to TheDAO's bug, so arguably it was a platform issue on Ethereum as well. There have been large thefts from contracts since then, includin…

>Ethereum was only about a year old at the time. When Bitcoin a year-and-a-half old, it had a bug that required a five-hour chain rollback.

>Bitcoin people will object and say that was a bug with the blockchain itself. However, sample code on ethereum.org had vulnerabilities similar to TheDAO's bug, so arguably it was a platform issue on Ethereum as well.

I think the main difference here was that bitcoin never had a "code is law" belief, whereas ethereum did.

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