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Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

cointelegraph.com

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Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#431

Post by david_shi »

shock-value wrote: post #403
david_shi wrote: post #354

Bitcoin exists to solve the principal-agent problem that comes with delegating control of the money supply to singular institutions. If you look at the history of empires, from the Romans to the Han, it is littered with instances of societal decline as a direct result of inflation and overspending. This unilateral currency debasement is much harder if the collective (and global) definition of money is determined by d…

Speaking of Bitcoin specifically, if this is your view then you should take some time to understand the severe societal and economic problems that come with persistent deflation. And more generally, determining the optimal level of the money supply to match the needs of a dynamic economy is not trivial — there is no simple formula involving straightforwardly measurable variables that I am aware of.

Bitcoin and BFT consensus primarily solve the principal-agent problem, and give us a better means to experiment.

Personally, I don't think a deflationary global reserve currency is the precise answer, but I do believe that these experiments in monetary governance (like Ethereum's burn and mint model) will allow us to move closer to it.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#432

Post by TapWaterBandit »

kibwen wrote: post #400
TapWaterBandit wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol power usage is such a strawman argument. 1% of all electricity in USA is used watching Netflix but you don't hear people complaining. But running a global permissionless decentralised store of value currency network should supposedly be "super cheap" or it's an environmental disaster and must be stopped.

The reason that bitcoin's energy usage is a philosophical nightmare is because it's a system where energy consumption is the product. As opposed to industries which are "merely" energy-intensive, let's take aluminum refining for example, spending more energy to refine aluminum does not create more demand for aluminum, but spending more energy on bitcoin increases the price of bitcoin, which induces more demand, which…

Proof of Work is an energy-intensive solution to a very deep and old social problem: how do you verify transactions between parties over a great distance/online without a trusted intermediary?

Proof of work is enormously socially valuable and will change the world. Bitcoin may not be the PoW application to do it (although it also might be) but proof of work is here to stay because of the huge advantages it has over the existing system where individuals/institutions insert themselves between transactions to their own profit.

RE energy, not here to argue philosophy. Just going to point out that if that is your concern luckily the world is going over to renewables so that particular objection will be gone soon anyway.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#434

Post by david_shi »

AlexandrB wrote: post #382
david_shi wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OG hacker spirit is still alive in the crypto community

The cryptography community, yes. The cryptocurrency community is a bunch of Wall St. bros looking for a new pay day.

The two are more interconnected than you might think.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#436

Post by optymizer »

cs702 wrote: post #273

The Bitcoin network has survived everything that has been thrown at it. Nothing has stopped the damn thing. It's always there. It's one of those things that just keeps on existing, like gold. It doesn't care what you think. It doesn't care whether you like it or not. It doesn't care if you understand it. It's just always been there. Might as well make it easier for people and companies to own it and trade Bitcoin, an…

It has survived by changing the narrative and getting people to buy the stories.

It was going to replace money, but then it didn't because the network slowed down to the point where it was unusable. Nobody was going to wait 30 min for a transaction to complete.

So then the message was flipped and Bitcoin was now 'an asset', not a currency, further supported by IRS's decision to tax it like an asset, so it was advertised as a store of value, "like gold".

It didn't deliver on the currency promise, even with all the lightening and proof-of-stake talks.

It is actively hurting the entire planet at this scale by generating useless heat.

And last, but not least, KYC lets governments track all your bitcoin purchases forever to an extent impossible to do with cash, including deanonymizing transactions retroactively decades later.

A digital currency will not give us more freedom, it will only take more of it away, which is why I personally no longer support Bitcoin, and I don't think others should either.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#437

Post by Eliezer »

shock-value wrote: post #403
david_shi wrote: post #354

Bitcoin exists to solve the principal-agent problem that comes with delegating control of the money supply to singular institutions. If you look at the history of empires, from the Romans to the Han, it is littered with instances of societal decline as a direct result of inflation and overspending. This unilateral currency debasement is much harder if the collective (and global) definition of money is determined by d…

Speaking of Bitcoin specifically, if this is your view then you should take some time to understand the severe societal and economic problems that come with persistent deflation. And more generally, determining the optimal level of the money supply to match the needs of a dynamic economy is not trivial — there is no simple formula involving straightforwardly measurable variables that I am aware of.

Grow per capita nominal GDP by a 6%/year level target. (NGDPLT.)

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#438

Post by ivancho »

dcolkitt wrote: post #410
lmm wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are memecoins a scam? I would say they're more like a massively multiplayer form of gambling. They're practically indistinguishable from penny-stock scams, and they almost always involve a bunch of outright lies in their promotional materials; the only reason you can argue that many buyers aren't deceived is because lying is so rampant and expected in that space that people take it as given that the claims are goin…

> All of which still fails to add up to anything actually working and useful, 15 years in. The first packet switched network came online in 1969. Fifteen years by 1984 almost all the use cases were hobby, and it'd be another ten years before the Internet really started changing life. Decentralized consensus is a fundamentally new computing primitive, similar to packet switched networks. Developing applications on top…

Except with packet switching networks I can immediately point to the problem they are solving and can also make a guess how things will change when we create 000s of bigger and better ones. And the timeline is definitely not what you are making up here - the 70s had immense development of networks and protocols, every telco was building new networks across the country, it was most certainly not hobby stuff, there just weren't that many computers until the 80s.

What problem are we solving with decentralized consensus? How will things improve if we have a giant one? Say every mobile phone was a part of the consensus mechanism, churning Turing-complete smart contracts. Billions of nodes. What do we get out of that?

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#439

Post by CyberDildonics »

neodypsis wrote: post #280
CyberDildonics wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrency still works the same as it ever did. I would be more concerned that the average bitcoin transactions costs over $11 dollars (down from over $37 USD a month ago) https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

You pay a lot in credit card fees, only that the true cost is obfuscated into the prices of the goods and services. Also, bank transfers aren't cheap. For example, in Costa Rica, to transfer any amount from an account in bank A to another account in bank B, you pay a fee in the range of 1$-3$, irrespective of the transferred amount. If you consider transfer across countries, then you enter into 50+$ transfer fees.

I didn't think anyone would actually try to defend bitcoin's astronomical and completely unnecessary transaction fees. Cryptocurrencies can be a solution to everything you mentioned, just not bitcoin. Litecoin, Dogecoin and Bitcoin Cash are all bitcoin clones with more throughput and their transaction fees are a few cents to fractions of a cent while their transaction counts are on average in the same ballpark as bitcoin with a lot more headroom.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-do...

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-doge-lt...

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#440

Post by transcriptase »

fragmede wrote: post #221
transcriptase wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then buy a large fire safe, bolt it to your floor inside a closet, and fill it with 10 lb barbell plates until it requires a forklift to move. If your threat model includes someone inside your home with power tools and you can’t trust a bank… you might want to consider moving.

That's cool. What do I do when I move every few years because I'm a renter and can't afford to own a home in this economy?

You tell me.
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