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Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

cointelegraph.com

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Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#511

Post by [deleted] »

kibwen wrote: post #386
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…

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#512

Post by guappa »

benlivengood wrote: post #287

Finally a workaround for high transaction fees! This should also solve the scalability issues quite a bit by reducing the need to record as many transactions in the first place once the exchanges hold most of the coins. Finally this should reduce the long-term potential in mining as the block reward keeps reducing exponentially with lower expectations of transaction fees. Sometimes regulatory solutions do fix hard te…

Is this the kind of solution where you aren't actually using the blockchain, and are just ending up trusting a 3rd party that acts like a bank but is not regulated?

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#513

Post by Ekaros »

latchkey wrote: post #295
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…

> I work in architecture and year after year the industry is pushing to squeeze every last bit of energy efficiency out of everything. So is the entire bitcoin mining industry, it is built into their ROI. Have you not noticed the J/Ghash ratio over the years?

So the whole bitcoin network now uses less energy than when it started? As that is what efficiency means.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#514

Post by hackernudes »

reaperman wrote: post #304
killerstorm wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It provides an alternative to banks. Once you realize that banks are very fragile and abusive, just having this alternative is important. Banks can deny you access to your money on a whim. Compliance, glitch, failure, whatever. You can't use your money. You can't buy food. You can't pay rent. You can't buy tickets. You can't hire a lawyer. It's nice to have something which is based on completely different principles.

I think you'll be amazed at the extent to which BTC will be able to be controlled by strong central governments. I'd be shocked if in ten years there's not granular control over which wallets contain "tainted" bitcoin and cannot be converted to fiat except through actual money laundering. There's been a lot of consolidation of the exchanges in USA, tons of KYC controls in place now, and old-school options like localb…

What about the lightning network? Or Liquid sidechain? There are lots of people working on scaling bitcoin so that it can be used like cash (low fees and anonymous).

When a user receives a payment in Cash App or Strike over the lightning network there is no way to track where that bitcoin came from. I haven't really tested that out yet, but I find the idea that bitcoin can be the rails of transferring value pretty compelling. Most people can still transact in fiat but with trustless interoperability between banks and service providers. And of course if people are happy transacting in units of bitcoin it can all be done in a trust-minimized way (with tradeoffs available for convenience, etc...).

But to your point, the government could crack down on the app stores and service providers to not support this kinda stuff.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#515

Post by earnesti »

guappa wrote: post #512
benlivengood wrote: post #287

Finally a workaround for high transaction fees! This should also solve the scalability issues quite a bit by reducing the need to record as many transactions in the first place once the exchanges hold most of the coins. Finally this should reduce the long-term potential in mining as the block reward keeps reducing exponentially with lower expectations of transaction fees. Sometimes regulatory solutions do fix hard te…

Is this the kind of solution where you aren't actually using the blockchain, and are just ending up trusting a 3rd party that acts like a bank but is not regulated?

The majority of people don't want to touch the blockchain.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#516

Post by demondemidi »

Octokiddie wrote: post #205

The strong anti-Bitcoin sentiment on HN is still amusing. It goes way back - 13 years or more. Having read many of these negative comments, I think part of this sentiment boils down to the commenter seeing no point to Bitcoin. Just this thread has examples. It must be more than a little annoying to feel very strongly that Bitcoin is pointless, but to also notice that it's still here. Year after year. If that shoe wer…

Nah. You’re over speculating. The real reason for the negative sentiment is that HN is mostly smart people.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#517

Post by Yodel0914 »

marenkay wrote: post #467
Yodel0914 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism has its problems, for sure, but it is the only system in history that has raised the majority of people out of abject poverty. Even Marx recognized this, which is why capitalism is a necessary step on the path to Marx's communism. And of course Marx was seeing capitalism before it had done the majority of the good it has done over the past ~200 years.

I lived in capitalism for 50 years. I’ve seen hyper capitalism reduce or remove education, devalue income and Labor, force people to work two or three jobs to survive barely. That’s in a western society where capitalism is supposed to work. If anyone thinks the good it did is anything but an accident I expect some people will be really surprised when it turns out how bad things are. At this point it’s ignorant to not…

I apologize if I'm wrong, but "3 jobs to survive" sounds like you're living in the US. I don't think equating the US political and economic system with "capitalism" is particularly useful - it is a capitalistic society, for sure, but it is far from the only one.

The US is, for whatever reason, accepts extremes of both wealth and poverty. Many other capitalistic societies choose a different mix, sacrificing the upper extremes to protect against the lower extremes.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#518

Post by wesapien »

marenkay wrote: post #467
Yodel0914 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism has its problems, for sure, but it is the only system in history that has raised the majority of people out of abject poverty. Even Marx recognized this, which is why capitalism is a necessary step on the path to Marx's communism. And of course Marx was seeing capitalism before it had done the majority of the good it has done over the past ~200 years.

I lived in capitalism for 50 years. I’ve seen hyper capitalism reduce or remove education, devalue income and Labor, force people to work two or three jobs to survive barely. That’s in a western society where capitalism is supposed to work. If anyone thinks the good it did is anything but an accident I expect some people will be really surprised when it turns out how bad things are. At this point it’s ignorant to not…

First it giveth, then it taketh away.....Well it's all relative to where and when. From the perspective of someone in PRC, participating in markets and having some form of capitalism helped. Deng literally lifted China out from Up the Mountains down to the Countryside into the cities and into everyones homes. We've just lived long enough to see things deteriorate. Nothing goes straight up forever, life is stochastic.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#519

Post by solumunus »

chemicalnovae wrote: post #459
david_shi wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely true in the West. I said millions because of every day crypto usage in countries like Argentina and Turkey, where inflation makes it challenging to save money, and in countries where there are high remittance rates. More builders are definitely needed to improve the crypto user experience across a range of categories.

Isn't crypto used in these places simply a more convenient form on pinning to the USD than due to any inherent properties of the crypto itself?

Convenience is a property.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#520

Post by lottin »

fearface wrote: post #493
0raymond0 wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, weird that you’re comment is so high up, but shows how little crypto knowledge is around in HN. A Bitcoin is a Bitcoin, but it consists of smaller units called Satoshis. Like Dollar and Cents. Since the beginning of Bitcoin. A fork is a copy of the underlying source code of Bitcoin, which in itself has no value at all. You would also need to find people who run nodes for your fork and start convincing exchanges t…

If you fork the bitcoin blockchain you have now two ledgers, each one telling you that a certain number of bitcoins really exist. Who is to say that one is right and the other is wrong? In this scenario, it's debatable how many bitcoins are in existence.
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