Well, cost of doing business. So it’s not perfect, nothing is. But is it still a better store of value than your bank and pension which you may not realize, but are getting robbed by the Robinhoods you voted to power to replace the manchild?
Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet
511–520 of 862 posts
Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet
#512Bitcoin is an almost perfect exploitation of humanities fatal flaws (greed, unwillingness to acknowledge externalities - i.e. selfishness). It's that old SF-trope that the cause of many of humanity's biggest problems is humans.
sounds like traits in common with criminals.
Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have been polluting and overheating the planet to make virtual characters eat pills and rescue princesses for over 30 years. What's the utility of that?
The amount of energy required to rescue a single princess does not increase exponentially over time. In fact it pretty much stays constant. Furthermore, gaming energy expenditures are probably minor compared to the amount spent on Bitcoin these days (last I heard it had an energy footprint equivalent to the Netherlands.) There are also other cryptocurrencies that don't have the same problem as Bitcoin with being incr…
I think the carbon footprint of one btc transaction is probably enough to power all the gameboys in the world for a few weeks at least!
Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet
#514At a larger scale of things given what Bitcoin just made possible and what it's trying to disrupt (decentralized, uncensored), Bitcoin is literally just 12 years old and I feel these judgements are too harsh and too soon for something which is still yet to be adopted or even understood by 95% of the population. The benefits of Bitcoin can truly be appreciated or judged once the tech has been adopted in a relatively l…
> 12 years old > too soon In today's terms, a decade of existing but somewhat mediocre results means it's time to move on. It's already proven useful; at the same time, already proven non-disruptive/revolutionary.
That's actually why I said we should zoom out a little. Disrupting global financial monetary policies or Gold itself which has a timescale of thousands of years => 12 years is a very short time (in fact the first 5 years can be counted off as extremely experimental, not-serious for-nerds only thing).
Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet
#515Bitcoin is an almost perfect exploitation of humanities fatal flaws (greed, unwillingness to acknowledge externalities - i.e. selfishness). It's that old SF-trope that the cause of many of humanity's biggest problems is humans.
How is it possible that a HN user espouses views like this
Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet
#516Bitcoin is an almost perfect exploitation of humanities fatal flaws (greed, unwillingness to acknowledge externalities - i.e. selfishness). It's that old SF-trope that the cause of many of humanity's biggest problems is humans.
How is it possible that a HN user espouses views like this
[deleted]
Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin innovated through a blockchain years ago and the world has already adopted that. But the current state of bitcoin makes it bad at its other 'innovation', digital currency. Bitcoin is far too volatile to be a widespread, standard currency which seems to be the "reason" people say it's worth as much as it is. But it will never be a widespread currency until it has stability. So it's a chicken/egg situation, one…
How do you explain banks and hedge funds putting their money into it? Your explanation is that they want a digital currency, which you're saying is impossible. But it seems like the BTC advocates aren't arguing that, but instead that it's a store of value as a hedge against inflation?
> How do you explain banks and hedge funds putting their money into it?
Banks and hedge funds put money into cigarette companies and arms manufacturers and all manner of scam companies.
Their decisions are based on estimated risks and rewards over different time periods.
Taking a position in Bitcoin doesn’t imply anything about it’s nature or long term prospects.
Only that there is a perceived path to potential gains over a time period known to the investor, and not to us.
Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that's like giving someone your ATM card and PIN code instead of handing them $5 for said sandwich.
no its not, sign a TX and let the new owner broadcast it whenever he wants to (if ever) Alice has never given Bob her bank account, more like created another account just for Bob
Signing the transaction does zip to block a double-spend without committing it to the ledger. The buyer could walk around town signing dozens of transactions for the same money and only the first seller to submit the transaction gets the money.
There's a similar problem with handing someone the private key to a wallet with a pre-set amount of money as an offline transaction. Besides not being able to verify the amount in the wallet without checking with the central ledger, you also don't know that the other party isn't handing out the same private key to multiple people.
Paper money or even metal money can be counterfeited, sure, but in low-counterfeiting environments individuals transacting can verify the authenticity of the script locally with reasonable confidence, without consulting a (distributed, decentralized) third-party to verify.
Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
What defines a currency being "better" than another? Is it number of transactions? Is it acceptance among merchants? Is it low fees? Is it stability in purchasing power? Is it likelihood that there will be a fatal flaw in the system that causes financial loss? Every project has its own strengths and weaknesses, but it's hard to argue that Bitcoin isn't the best on many of those measures. It's all about which of them…
All the features mentioned above. For example: - transaction times - energy consumption - scalability (BTC currently does 7tx/s) - security (BTC is getting more centralized over time, increasing the risk of a majority takeover.) - fewer fees as possible (ideally 0) BTC only has first mover advantage, and security...for now.
Metcalfe's law is also an interesting way for measuring value of the network
Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet
#520Bitcoin is a beautiful concept that has been bastardized by economies of scale. The mining concentration is decreasing its security over time. The centralized block structure and exorbitant fees will afflict it more and more as it grows. Even arguments about renewable energy being used to mine BTC are moot, because they don't consider the opportunity cost of what could be done with all that energy instead. I truly be…
> Even arguments about renewable energy being used to mine BTC are moot, because they don't consider the opportunity cost of what could be done with all that energy instead. That argument itself is not great either because it assumes the fixed pie fallacy.
A growing pie doesn't refute the opportunity cost argument. Even if you grow the energy supply, you have to consider what else that energy could be invested it, be it food, or housing construction, or transportation, or even space travel. Energy is the real currency in this world, convertible between different forms, and mining bitcoin is sort of like an unavoidable thermodynamic loss for doing any work -- a high cost one.