481–490 of 732 posts
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Bitcoin beach is run by a few college students. Not exactly something to depend on.
Funny saying that on HN.
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According to the article, the town didn't even want to use Bitcoin. An anonymous donor gifted them a large amount of Bitcoin on the condition that they must learn how to use Bitcoin and advocate for the use of Bitcoin: > After meeting with several philanthropies in the region, all of which wanted to take the funds and convert them into fiat to cover the community's immediate needs, the donor partnered with Michael Pe…
Seems legit to me. It worked. There was no reason for them to want to cash out apart from resistance to change.
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It is not hard to scale Bitcoin for millions of people for everyday transactions. You give people a custodial wallet and track the balances off-chain using a trusted third party. As long as a government is willing to allow such a service to legally operate: 1. You can easily support billions of bitcoin transactions a second since the transactions only change centralized database entries. 2. Users can send and receive…
Thats all great until fractional reserve banking enters the game. In the end we will efficiently trade IoUs and the best outcome would be that they are redeemable and we have a gold-standard-like thing again. That in itself would be a godsend already though probably not what Bitcoin maxis vision looks like
Bitcoin maxis have a very ambitious and grand vision and I don't think they should compromise it. It sets a high bar that drives innovation. I do think that over the short term any nation scale usage of bitcoin for everyday payments will look very different from that vision and that is ok.
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Sort of. It's not entirely off chain. It's hedged in that a transaction is created sending X BTC between us, we repeatedly update that transaction off chain every time we move small amounts of money between eachother, then after Y days we submit the final transaction to the blockchain to resolve the total amounts. The idea being if one of us starts to be uncooperative, the other can just submit the transaction at its…
Most of the examples of Lightning that I've seen involve frequent transactions between small numbers of parties. How would this work in a retail transaction? For example, if I want to buy a cup of coffee from a shop that I visit infrequently?
But as you said, coffee shop needs some path to you to make that feasible. So then you get BTCVisa (c) or whatever, which is a channel provider that has built a network of channels open with lots of vendors. If you open a channel with them then you get to benefit from getting to use the wallet you already have. There is cross-channel routing of course so maybe that doesn't happen but it seems like a natural result.
LN is neat in concept, but I'm not sure I really see the point compared to Bitcoin cash or the like that just say scale on chain. I guess we'll see.
I am just surprised how much negativity is in HN towards Bitcoin. This is the first case of decentralised open source tech winning against big established powers - governments/faceamagoos. We should be celebrating this. I sure hope that Bitcoin is going to be Linux of money/finance. Lightning might not be at the scale it needs to be now but it will improve greatly. maybe it is good enough already? Like Ruby on Rails.…
I think a lot of the negativity comes from the fact that this is largely a forum of technologists, and Bitcoin is objectively inferior technology. That's not necessarily a knock against Bitcoin, it was revolutionary when it was introduced, but it was the 1.0 cryptocurrency and it's already essentially fossilized and become legacy technology. Miners hold sway over the community and they're not really interested in cha…
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So "off chain" means LN holds the BTC in some other data structure then batches it up as one big transaction? Kinda like how a broker covers small retail trades until they hit enough volume to register an NYSE trade on the floor? Is that how it works? If so , this means lots of BTC is tied up in LN ... that seems dubious as heck.
You have onchain BTC, and you can decide to put them in a LN channel with another party (this causes an onchain transaction) You and that party can now transact freely between each other with no fees, but if that other party is a gateway, it can route payments through it and through other gateways too, and each of them charge fees for routing. Once any of the parties decide to close the channel, is when a new onchain…
EDIT: ah, I think "nicpottier" explains a little more, below. about having an account on LN requires a certain amount of a deposit (like a debit account).
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The digital dollar has been here for years. I couldn't even tell you the last time I carried paper currency.
If I hand a cashier a physical dollar, no fee to me. Not so with your so-called digital dollars. An actual digital dollar would have no transaction fee whatsoever.
If two Bitcoin forks both claim they are the "real bitcoin", who decides which one is the real legal tender? El Salvador courts?
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But that's true for renewable energy too. Nothing about the two energy sources are different. Either energy prices are decoupled from mining rewards, in which case reduced prices of either fossil fuels or renewables (or increased price of BTC) means more profit for miners or energy prices are coupled to mining rewards, in which case changing prices of fossil fuels or renewables means nothing to miners. Please tell me…
Well, read through this 1001st version of the argument, and finally you'll understand why it's not bogus! It's really terrible that you've been arguing with such stupid people, because it's not really that complicated to explain why bitcoin mining is a renewable energy subsidy. It's really very simple, although it involves a lot of facts you aren't acquainted with. > But that's true for renewable energy too. Nothing…
I am just surprised how much negativity is in HN towards Bitcoin. This is the first case of decentralised open source tech winning against big established powers - governments/faceamagoos. We should be celebrating this. I sure hope that Bitcoin is going to be Linux of money/finance. Lightning might not be at the scale it needs to be now but it will improve greatly. maybe it is good enough already? Like Ruby on Rails.…
I think a lot of the negativity comes from the fact that this is largely a forum of technologists, and Bitcoin is objectively inferior technology. That's not necessarily a knock against Bitcoin, it was revolutionary when it was introduced, but it was the 1.0 cryptocurrency and it's already essentially fossilized and become legacy technology. Miners hold sway over the community and they're not really interested in cha…
Personally it seems all the negativity comes from people who don’t get it or those who are salty because they missed the boat.