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Bitcoin Is Time

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Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#501

Post by user-the-name »

arbawk wrote: post #106
user-the-name wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing baseless in saying that using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous, and an environmental disaster of massive proportions.

Now do the gold mining industry, and then how USD is backed by armies. And then you can research Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin and how it can process an unlimited number of transactions.

Quite an amazing feat fitting all the ridiculous things Bitcoiners say about energy usage into such a short post.

1. The gold mining industry has nothing to do with bitcoin.

2. The gold mining industry has nothing to do with money.

3. The gold mining industry does not use anywhere near 0.1% of the entire energy production of the planet.

4. Just throwing the army in there for some reason, huh.

5. The lightning network does not "process an unlimited number of transactions".

6. The Lightning network does not scale.

7. Nobody knows how to make the Lightning network scale.

8. If the Lightning network worked, which it doesn't, it doesn't need to run on top of Bitcoin, so Bitcoin still does not need to burn 0.1% of the world's energy.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#502

Post by user-the-name »

olah_1 wrote: post #104
user-the-name wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing baseless in saying that using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous, and an environmental disaster of massive proportions.

> using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous In comparison to what? What do we get in return? Many consider the benefits to be worth it.

In comparison to literally anything in the world.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#503

Post by _ea1k »

fredfoobar wrote: post #373
boredpandas777 wrote: post #348

Let me fix that title. Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I only have 11 points. Go ahead. "Bitcoin Is A Waste of Time (and Resources)" What Bitcoin has done is that it taught people they can come together in a sustained flash mob (like an on-the-fly hedge fund operation) and manipulate the price of speculative assets by creating artificial short-term pump-n-dump type demand. Bitcoin has trained our colle…

I've been saying the same damn thing about automobiles man, horses already have self driving even! and they don't pollute like cars. Look at the mess we're in now! who's laughing?? Cars pollute and need roads, we had to build so many roads and gas stations. We even had to go to war to make sure we have enough oil.

One of the motivating factors behind late 19th century horseless carriages was the reduction in pollution.

It isn't at all accurate to say that horses don't pollute. In some respects their pollution is worse.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#504

Post by zepto »

fwiwm2c wrote: post #436
zepto wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of us are in here for the money and don't give two hoots of the technology Given that the technology determines the timeframe over which you can make money, this seems like a weird position to take.

No - not necessarily. IN crypto, it is quite possible to multiply your money when investing in altcoins - purely based on shilling and positioning with no technology to speak of. This is what the OP likely is trying to do here.

Fair point!

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#505

Post by samatman »

krrrh wrote: post #291
thewarrior wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently decided to think deeply about Bitcoin and I think my initial skepticism about Bitcoin was wrong. Most of the criticisms of Bitcoin are centered around the fact that Bitcoin has a very low throughput. However this is not necessarily a problem. And here is one hypothetical example of how we can overcome this issue: When countries owe each other money they used to transfer gold back and forth or trust someone…

One of the properties of gold that roughly held true for centuries was a stable value. When gold threatened to become too scarce for a growing economy the incentive to mine, explore, and develop new mining technology increased. Goldbugs often point out that an ounce of gold has always been close to the price of a nice suit (admittedly a fuzzy measure, and it’s sometimes a really nice suit, and sometimes just a really…

This is where it's good that the article did such a solid job of explaining the difference between a token and a ledger.

Any ledger which represents value in a purely abstract sense has to start at zero value— and any ledger which represents ownership of some concrete asset has to be kept aligned with reality, which makes it a nonstarter for a trustless, distributed system.

As an aside, the value of "one Bitcoin" is a bit of a distraction: market cap is the relevant measure, as long as we're using an existing currency as the unit of account, and the only market cap at which a distributed ledger could be relatively stable is many trillions of dollars.

So, for a trustless and decentralized ledger to become the next monetary framework through voluntary action, it has to start cheap, and persist for long enough to become expensive. There's simply no other way of doing it.

As for why Bitcoin, and not some other cybercoin: well, jury is out, isn't it? But money exhibits very strong network effects, and Bitcoin's first-mover advantage is considerable. A global marketplace doesn't have any reliable way to communicate other than price signals, and either BTC forms a Schelling point as the new baseline store of value, or it doesn't.

It hasn't yet, but it remains the most credible candidate. If you were a small central bank, nervous about the effect of 2020 USD and EUR printing on the buying power of your foreign exchange reserves, and you wanted to buy a little chunk of some distributed ledger "just in case", which one would you pick? Probably the first one you heard of, and the one with the largest market cap: Bitcoin and BTC, respectively.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#506

Post by [deleted] »

paulmd wrote: post #243
gnrlst wrote: post #210

I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity. Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons: - emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3. - energy us…

> The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising. it's actually worse than that - lightning only works in the context of centralized banking. It presumes there is some other entity with whom you can hold a channel open, who you do roughly equivalent amounts of deposits and withdrawals from. If that criterion is not met, then you have to keep closing channels and re-open…

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#507

Post by fredfoobar »

ant6n wrote: post #500
bennysonething wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

O know this a joke, but the other problem with horses is fuel: endless fields for hay. So wilderness destruction.

I think the bigger problem is poop

Sir, get with the times: https://www.workinghorsetack.com/catch-it-manure-bag-horse-d...

You can use horse manure to grow the food for the horses. It's a total ecosystem. What can you do with the pollution cars create?? can you capture it in a bag?? THINK for a second!

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#508

Post by o_p »

So the propaganda machine is now trying to smear Bitcoin because of energy, ridiculous! I guess that the smearing it by associating it with criminlals didnt worked well enough.

T

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#509

Post by pbhjpbhj »

samatman wrote: post #479
anthropodie wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I see another comment on top doing the same. Why do people start with this? If you don't bother you should not even brought that up. Seems like an underhanded way of getting more points. Do people even fall for this?

I have a personal policy, which, if treated as a Kantian imperative, would eliminate this. Any invitation to downvotes, I take. Any comment about downvotes, means at the least that I won't upvote that comment. Meta-comments about downvotes are exempt, I would probably upvote this comment if I saw it from someone else. Every person who adopts this policy improves the discourse by discouraging this behavior, please con…

Kant's second imperative is great!

However, people wanting feedback beyond mere downvotes is legitimate and downvoting without comment is the actual wrong here IMO.

IMO the best scheme here is that you _must_ provide a reason to downvote. People who vote for your reason [ie they agree with you about downvoting the parent] should be the actual downvotes.

This way instead of apparently arbitrary downvotes one gets a list of reasons with scores (HNs score hiding aside, though they'd still be ordered) indicating their relative worth as reasons for downvoting.

That is actionable. Under K2I that would allow everyone to tailor their contents to the audience if they wished, or at least understand the audience's approbation.

tl;dr I downvoted you ;o) ... except I didn't because your comment has value even if I disagree !

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#510

Post by noxer »

olah_1 wrote: post #498
noxer wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do the same kinda research about FBA you will "get it" too and you will know that PoW is useless. You probably wont make money form that but still I hope you dig into it. I myself saw "the beauty" in bitcoin once and later saw it in FBA again. After all it solves the same problem just in a very different way.

> You probably wont make money form that but still I hope you dig into it There is something to say for incentives. The positive incentive loop is what drives adoption, innovation, security etc.

There are FBA coins out there so people who want can trow money at something an maybe make profit if they gain value. But its not new so who knows how early people who join now really are. Can't compare it with buying bitcoin at a few bucks that's for sure.
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