51–60 of 93 posts
I like that he calls Bitcoin an “anti-currency” since, all too often, it seems people view Bitcoin as just-another-currency, when it’s fundamentally different from the national currencies we’re used to using every day. National currencies are backed by government bonds, while Bitcoin is commodity-like, in that it’s not backed by anything — it’s a monetary unit in its own right. This avoids the recursive relationship…
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Count my 10 as lost! To be fair they were worth a few bucks at most when I lost them. I personally saw someone accidentally wipe 150 or so when they were around $10.
It was fairly big news in the UK when somebody announced he had thrown away a hard-drive containing 10,000 coins. He considered searching through the dump but didn't bother in the end.
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The main use cases for decentralization are: absolute control of your money, and censorship resistance. Think deeply about what this means. Most people have no idea. Just a few examples (typing on the phone): no company or system can accidentally/intentionally deny your transactions, no merchants can charge you against your will, harder for oppressive government to seize wallets of targeted citizens/organizations, et…
I see the appeal in those things for some people. But I think most people are happy to forego those things and not have to worry about losing significant chunks of cash to fat-finger mistakes or hacks. When most people barely know what a browser is, illuminating them to the intricacies of bitcoin seems a tall task. And if they can just use some system like Coinbase and "not even know they're using bitcoin," then they…
btc seems like a great way to spy on everyone using it.
Unless state is replace by message handling https://github.com/EOSIO/Documentation/blob/master/Technical...
>All state communication among accounts must be passed via messages included in the blockchain.
As far as I know, blockchain-based cryptocurrencies so far only seem to be able to achieve privacy through ring signatures or zk-snarks, and that link doesn't feature either. Additionally, it's prominently built around enabling arbitrary computation like Ethereum, and arbitrary communications that have to be executed by every node have to use something like fully-homomorphic encryption to be private from the nodes computing them, which is presently impractically-inefficient for this use-case and not featured in the link.
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I've heard that bitcoin mixers can take care of completely/somewhat obfuscating coin ownership. > According to Wikipedia: User can send his bitcoins on this service, pay small commission, and then receive the same sum of utterly different bitcoins. If they're paid out to one address it still wouldn't provide the desired level of anonymity, if however they are paid out to multiple addresses belonging to the same user,…
Yes possible but impractical when you split the new payments to multiple new addresses, in unequal amounts and at random times....
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What use case is there for a distributed ledger that is superior to a centralized ledger? As soon as a critical mass is formed around a particular use case, consortiums, i.e. governments will form to regulate and enforce trust and the system will move to far more efficient centralized ledgers.
The main use cases for decentralization are: absolute control of your money, and censorship resistance. Think deeply about what this means. Most people have no idea. Just a few examples (typing on the phone): no company or system can accidentally/intentionally deny your transactions, no merchants can charge you against your will, harder for oppressive government to seize wallets of targeted citizens/organizations, et…
1. Governments have laws backed by guns to prevent things they don't like (like transactions or investments escaping taxation). If you want to change the system of governance, that's fine, but a currency is not going to do it alone, because they will mandate control over your currency or ban it outright. You can't opt out of government. Perhaps we need a new form of government people subscribe to rather than are opted into at birth, but I don't see bitcoin as a step on that road, as it tries to ignore the question entirely.
2. A cryptocurrency in no way gives you absolute control over your money - like any other currency you are buying in to a system, which has points of control - for example in bitcoin those points of significant control are currently the small group of devs who decide on the rules, and the miners who run the network. Both have the ability to manipulate the currency or lead it in directions you don't like. Past that the currency is a system of trust influenced by everyone who buys it or transactions in it - if that trust fails your money is worthless. So like fiat you have very little control over your money and its value.
3. Censorship resistance - this is the strongest point but still vulnerable because transactions can be traced, and anything you do in the real world can lead them back to your addresses. Given sufficient importance and interest from state actors, I doubt anyone could remain anonymous for long.
4. You seem to be assuming companies and systems will be forced to accept bitcoin (or some other flavour), they can easily deny your transactions by refusing to accept it without validated identity (for example KYC laws).
Bear in mind that Goldman Sachs is now about making Goldman Sachs money. For well over a century, they were about making rich people richer and taking a cut. That's no longer the case, and their advice to their clients is no longer particularly good. It's now just usual sell-side broker "analysis". Read "Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs."[1] A friend who was a Goldman Sachs client noticed this when, around 2011, they s…
I wonder how much of BTC's $71bn market cap is eternally lost coins.
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> As a long term owner of Bitcoin, I can say this is the absolute worst time to start investing in it. It's development has been taken over by a group of mentally unstable developers with weird personal agendas and beliefs. The official Bitcoin website and subreddit are heavily censored and are no longer a reliable source of information. It's widely reported elsewhere that their moderator stole millions of dollars wo…
>Roger and his cronies were spamming the network for months For fucks sake. Show the "spam," track it to an individual. The blockchain is transparent yet no one has done this. This is what my other comment was about. Named users in the community have been made into horrific caricatures who are the basis for conspiracies no one is able to prove despite the transparency of Bitcoin itself.
May was the peak of controversy, arguments and discussions about future of scaling bitcoin. core vs unlimited node count, miner support, vendor/merchant support - nobody knew how would things turn out.
throughout that time one of main arguments was that blocks were full and mempool (unconfirmed transactions) was gigantic.
the moment camps settled on agreeing to disagree - mempool was gone.
feel free to continue pretending this all was simply a coincidence.
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That's a totally valid use case. Bitcoin can be many things simultaneously.
strictly as an investment vehicle If by strictly, he means solely, then something that is strictly an investment vehicle makes no sense. The piper must be paid at some point. I can invest in shares of a company, but the shares aren't strictly an investment vehicle, they serve as a way for the company to acquire capital to put toward it's mission.