Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

cointelegraph.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 1001 posts

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#481

Post by TillE »

tekchip wrote: post #460
optymizer wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The global financial system can handle considerably more than three (3) transactions per second.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#482

Post by Klonoar »

jojobas wrote: post #291
wlesieutre wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole premise of burning energy just for “proof of work” is what I hate. I work in architecture and year after year the industry is pushing to squeeze every last bit of energy efficiency out of everything. Meanwhile bitcoin is like “BURN SOME COAL TO ACCOMPLISH LITERALLY NOTHING USEFUL! AND KEEP DOING IT FOREVER!” And the crypto people will always bring up “Mining gold just to make gold bars is a waste of energy…

That "nothing useful" bit is where you don't get it. Is Taylor Swift useful? Sex and the City? Options trading for Tesla stock? You could eliminate 80% of the US service sector for not being useful. "Somebody wants to pay for it" is the best criterion and bitcoin fits.

The first two are pure entertainment and hardly a comparison to an attempt at a new banking system.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#483

Post by kerouac999 »

david_shi wrote: post #442
kibwen wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Not only was the decline of the Roman empire too slow and variegated to attribute to a single cause, "inflation and overspending" isn't even on the shortlist. If we're oversimplifying, it was more akin to the opposite of the sentiment that you're shoo…

The Romans were only able to fund the expansion of the empire by overextending their resources. This meant that the empire became too expensive to maintain without relying on tactics like currency debasement, subsequently triggering many of the other symptoms of decline that you listed. Of course, we aren't living in the Roman Empire today. But what is consistent is that delegating monetary policy to a third party me…

[dead]

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#484

Post by markburns »

tekchip wrote: post #460
optymizer wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

YouTube is one of those things that consumes more energy than bitcoin.

That is bad, but it doesn't seem part of the public narrative that YouTube is bad because of global warming. Also the general narrative posits that electric cars are good. They also use a lot of energy. There's nothing inherent about EVs versus bitcoin that suggests one uses clean energy versus another. They both use a lot of electricity.

But so does the banking sector. And entertainment, farming, travel and a lot of the other things 8 billion people choose to do or depend on.

Any usage of fossil fuels should rightfully be a target and held to the same standards.

There is another narrative that we need continual growth and that inflation aids this. And deflationary currencies are bad because they don't help growth. This seems so ingrained in modern politics and economics that I slightly hesitate to question it in public.

Well maybe unbounded growth and exponential usage of resources is the actual problem.

I hope we reach the social limit on unbounded growth before it destroys everything we have. It's literally in physical terms unsustainable. My only hope here is that nuclear fusion gives us a respite for a hundred years or so. But we'd still have the same problem at a different scale if we used that to grow to a trillion people.

I can see that a deflationary global currency could be part of the solution to the problem. And I can see why suggesting deflation is good can be seen as a threatening thing to those that have resources.

So I feel in that light, the bitcoin = global warming narrative is really convenient, even if a little ironic.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#485

Post by toenail »

cortesoft wrote: post #465
toenail wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And more generally, determining the optimal level of the money supply to match the needs of a dynamic economy is not trivial No, we don't need some grand wizards in an ivory tower to finely tune the amount of money in the economy, that idea is absurd. The economy has worked fine for thousands of years before they started doing that. In fact, since they started doing it we've seen ever growing boom and bust cycles.

This is the OPPOSITE of the truth. Boom and bust cycles were much worst in the pre-central bank world.

Are you saying the global financial crisis was MUCH smaller than previous busts?

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#486

Post by upbeatduhconsi »

kragen wrote: post #471
democracy wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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.

i trade bitcoin with other people here in argentina several times a year; it's by far the easiest and safest way to send money either into or out of the country, and it's widely used by money changers remember that this is a country where the police take dollar-bill-sniffing dogs onto river ferryboats to prevent people from taking usd or eur across the river to their bank in uruguay someone in a [dead] comment said,…

[dead]

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#487

Post by the_gastropod »

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…

I have a sonicare toothbrush older than bitcoin…

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#488

Post by Mariehane »

tekchip wrote: post #460
optymizer wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While Bitcoin is designed to reward high energy consumption the opposite is true for the fiancial system, since lower energy costs would make the different processing entities earn higher margins.

Thus, the financial system provides much more utility for the energy it consumes than bitcoin does.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#489

Post by 0raymond0 »

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…

When I learned about the limited supply of Bitcoin, I thought, "Great, no more rampant currency printing!" But then they developed the fork technology, which can split one Bitcoin into countless pieces. I guess I underestimated the extent of human greed. Thankfully, it's all digital and our math can handle it.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#490

Post by lottin »

david_shi wrote: post #462
democracy wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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.

USD and Euro are great assets to hold if you have the ability to access banking services that support them, which isn't universal. Are you questioning the data? https://www.statista.com/statistics/1202468/global-cryptocur...

"The data" that you link to doesn't support your assertion that people in third world countries use bitcoin to protect themselves from hyperinflation.

Also USD and Euro are NOT great assets to hold. People only hold cash because they need it for transactions purposes.

Post reply on HN