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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

#451

Post by kibwen »

TapWaterBandit wrote: post #432
kibwen wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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.

This is dangerously missing the peril of the current situation.

The problem with our current energy makeup is not "there's not enough renewables".

The problem with our current energy makeup is "there are too many carbon emissions".

As a first-order effect, it does not matter how many renewables we bring online. What matters is taking fossil fuels offline. It does not matter if renewables make up an ever-increasing percentage of an increasing energy market, because the problem is not the relative market share of fossil fuels, it is the absolute amount of emissions, which is already more than our planet can handle. And the increasing demand for energy makes taking fossil fuel plants offline less viable than it otherwise would be, and bitcoin is a nontrivial component of that and it threatens to grow at an exponential pace, which makes it an existential threat to mankind.

Please trust me when I say that I do not give a damn about the price of bitcoin. What I care about is stopping runaway energy consumption, and from that perspective proof-of-work is the biggest existential threat to humanity since the atom bomb.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#452

Post by CyberDildonics »

npoc wrote: post #139
dovakin wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Lightning Network isn’t working as intended and the devs have basically admitted it’s never going to though. I don’t think blockchain as it is built for the btc network is as scalable as you think it can be.

I offered the Lightning Network as a single example. I don't agree with you, but it's largely irrelevant at this stage. The fact is that Bitcoin is very likely to absorb a vast percentage of the worlds value simply as it is. Once this has happened its value will stabilise and it will become useful as a unit of account/day-to-day currency. By this point, there will be far more motivation to focus on developing solutio…

The fact is that Bitcoin is very likely to absorb a vast percentage of the worlds value simply as it is.

Your prediction for the future that a ledger with the throughput of a 28.8 modem will absorb the world's value is "fact"?

By this point, there will be far more motivation to focus on developing solutions (such as Lightning) to allow smaller and faster transactions.

It has been in the works for a decade and no one wants it. Why would someone use that when any other cryptocurrency (except for ethereum) already do small and fast transactions?

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

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#453

Post by democracy »

boeingUH60 wrote: post #28

As my Dad told me, anyone investing in crypto is a fool looking to take advantage of another fool. It’s all Greater Fool Theory.

Your dad didn't understand the philosophy of Bitcoin. It is more about to fool the unbanked and to unbank the fooled. Not the other way around, remember!

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#454

Post by Yodel0914 »

marenkay wrote: post #392
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…

Bitcoin just like capitalism is a horrible failure making life worse for humanity and no proof exists it made anything better. Both accelerate the destruction of the planet and humanity. It’s ridiculous to claim any of this is good just because you think you have a chance to get some imaginary part of the big cake.

Capitalism has its problems, for sure, but it is the only system in history that has raised the majority of people out of abject poverty. Even Marx recognized this, which is why capitalism is a necessary step on the path to Marx's communism.

And of course Marx was seeing capitalism before it had done the majority of the good it has done over the past ~200 years.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#455

Post by mlcrypto »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #351
Aunche wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I view Bitcoin the same way I view Herbalife. I don't have any issue with the product. I'm bothered by the misleading claims made by proponents to benefit themselves.

This is really what it comes down to. I really didn't mind bitcoin before the price exploded, it was a curiosity and interesting experiment. Since then, it has been used to transfer a lot of wealth using outright fraud, cons, and other criminal means. I get paid a lot of money (fiat) to program digital payment systems, and have spent time understanding the underlying technology, as well as a holding a degree in econo…

For every boomer retiree there's a young person pumping new money into the S&P and social security

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#456

Post by lmm »

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…

> 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.

By 1980 CompuServe had thousands of paying subscribers, both home and business - and I suspect they'd invested far less getting there than the amount of VC money that's gone into cryptocurrency. You can say the home users were "hobbyists", but they were getting real value out of the network; online chat or games might not have had a clear business purpose, but they were fun, and that's real value.

I've seen literally one niche for cryptocurrency that people seemed to actually enjoy for its own sake rather than as a crime tool or get rich quick scheme, cryptokitties, and that seems to have proven itself fundamentally unviable (either your collectibles are too cheap to be interesting, or they're too expensive to be fun). Cryptocurrency is not merely wildly unprofitable to date, it's not generating value and there is no indication that it ever will generate value.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#457

Post by democracy »

david_shi wrote: post #381
qualifiedai wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Millions are involved precisely because of the appeal of get rich fast and ponzi schemes. Tens of thousands are invoved because of its technological promise and appeal which you've described. This imbalance is the main problem crypto industry needs to solve before it truly reaches its potential.

This is definitely true in the West. I said millions because of every day crypto usage in countries like Argentina and Turkey, where inflation makes it challenging to save money, and in countries where there are high remittance rates. More builders are definitely needed to improve the crypto user experience across a range of categories.

...another fairytale about people in poor countries using crypto ))))

Nothing beats good old USD or EURO as an asset if you live in a country with hyperinflation.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#458

Post by jMyles »

ksjskskskkk wrote: post #254
postcynical wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and what would happen during/after a fork?

fidelity et all have all the dollars. if there's a fork, they will probably own 51pct alone. you will be asking about THEIR fork.

> fidelity et all have all the dollars. if there's a fork, they will probably own 51pct alone. you will be asking about THEIR fork.

I have read this comment five times, and I simply cannot make heads or tails of it.

What is "THEIR fork"? If there's a fork, everyone has keys which underpin addresses on both forks. How do you know which fork belongs to "fidelity et all"?

And more importantly, why is that relevant? Isn't the longest chain the only determiner of canon? Or has that changed recently?

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#459

Post by chemicalnovae »

david_shi wrote: post #381
qualifiedai wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Millions are involved precisely because of the appeal of get rich fast and ponzi schemes. Tens of thousands are invoved because of its technological promise and appeal which you've described. This imbalance is the main problem crypto industry needs to solve before it truly reaches its potential.

This is definitely true in the West. I said millions because of every day crypto usage in countries like Argentina and Turkey, where inflation makes it challenging to save money, and in countries where there are high remittance rates. More builders are definitely needed to improve the crypto user experience across a range of categories.

Isn't crypto used in these places simply a more convenient form on pinning to the USD than due to any inherent properties of the crypto itself?

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#460

Post by tekchip »

optymizer wrote: post #436
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 adverti…

This global warming rhetoric against bitcoin is nonsense right? The current financial system doesn't run off as many or more computers in datacenters around the globe? I don't have objective numbers but I'd lay money credit card processing alone dwarfs bitcoin by a pretty good margin.
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