Bitcoin Is Time • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#591

Post by dcist » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 8:42 PM UTC

arbawk wrote: post #117

SkipperCat wrote: post #68

Bitcoin is only popular because tech workers get paid a lot and have the ability to speculate, we live in a world of massive asset bubbles created by government fiscal policies and Bitcoin is excellent for buying drugs on-line. Most people want security in their assets, which is why a majority of folks read articles about bitcoin but never touch one. All of these articles are great examples of creative writing. I do…

Actually it's pretty important for many: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYYh4aPXAM It's being widely adopted in countries with inflating currencies: Nigeria, Vietnma, and Argentina made it to #3 today (this link is slightly old). https://www.statista.com/chart/18345/crypto-currency-adoptio...

I fail to see how something with wildly fluctuating value like bitcoin can ever serve as a stable currency or medium of exchange.

Maybe it's a "less terrible" solution in poor countries with inflation challenges, but I don't see that as a strong proposition for the utility of bitcoin. Cigarettes are used as a medium of exchange in prison. That doesn't serve as a strong argument for using cigarettes as currency.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#592

Post by kenniskrag » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 8:42 PM UTC

fredfoobar wrote: post #523

perfect_kiss wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with electrobikes. Also electrobike can use multiple horse powers, instead of just one.

Will an electrobike take you home when you are blind drunk? What do we do when you run out of charge on your electrobike? what happens when there is a blackout? I don't think you've thought through all the problems properly.

lol. still a bike :D

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#593

Post by tachyonbeam » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 8:42 PM UTC

snarf21 wrote: post #372

keiferski wrote: post #55

Nothing is less material than money. . . . Money is abstract, I repeated, money is future time. It can be an evening in the suburbs, it can be the music of Brahms, it can be maps, it can be chess, it can be coffee, it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold. Money is a Proteus more versatile than the one on the island of Pharos. —Jorge Luis Borges, “The Zahir” https://longreads.com/2016/06/14/borges…

I've always thought about it this way: We trade our time (work) for money and later trade that money for time (other's work). We see this manifestation in lots of places: bus is cheap but also costs time vs limousine is expensive but uses minimum time. Growing food is dirt cheap but also costs time vs buying produce is expensive but uses minimum time. This exchange has also allowed the producers to invest in efficien…

That sounds almost poetic. I wish people who mindlessly rail against capitalism on twitter actually took the time to understand how these systems work. I think many of them would like to believe that we can all live in a system without currency. They don't realize that much of the freedom we enjoy today comes from capitalism. The ability to start your own business, and more fundamentally, to decide how your money (and time) is spent. Communism and centralized control over resource utilization necessarily results in less freedom.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#594

Post by keymone » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 8:42 PM UTC

yholio wrote: post #572

keymone wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valid observation. The difference is that bitcoin isn’t a premine.

That's hardly relevant for someone looking at them in 2021, of for choosing a "global reserve currency" which involves a staggering appreciation of both. Bitcoin 2021 has been 85% "premined", the only difference is that it is (much) more widely distributed.

The difference is that it was not a premine. I don’t know how can you say it’s a small difference..

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#595

Post by baxtr » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 8:43 PM UTC

fredfoobar wrote: post #548

hannasanarion wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is accidentally a good analogy. Because yes, cars have made the world materially worse, not because horses are better, but because dense urban development, public transit, walking, and cycling is better. Cars are enormously wasteful, much like bitcoin is, not only because it uses way more energy than is necessary for the task it is performing (~90% of the energy used by cars is spent to move the car, not the car…

"accidentally" Do you always feel superior to other people? or is it just today?

I liked your first comment. This one: not so much. It’s not HN like.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#596

Post by cyberlurker » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 8:43 PM UTC

fredfoobar wrote: post #523

perfect_kiss wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with electrobikes. Also electrobike can use multiple horse powers, instead of just one.

Will an electrobike take you home when you are blind drunk? What do we do when you run out of charge on your electrobike? what happens when there is a blackout? I don't think you've thought through all the problems properly.

An electro bike doesn’t require someone to pick up all the crap and won’t throw you when it hears a loud bang. I don’t think you’ve thought through the problems with horse transportation properly.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#597

Post by briatx » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 8:43 PM UTC

Taek wrote: post #455

lxgr wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is indeed a game, but not all games are zero-sum. I feel like when people criticize games, they are often implicitly referring to the latter kind, and in that sense, it‘s often constructive criticism.

Bitcoin is also not zero sum, it's a monetary system with unique properties (particularly censorship resistance and resistance to seizure) that can't be found in any other monetary system. Those qualities add value in a way that makes it attractive to buyers even if they expect the price to go down over time.

You're right! It's actually negative sum.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#598

Post by fredfoobar » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 8:45 PM UTC

BoorishBears wrote: post #589

fredfoobar wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will an electrobike take you home when you are blind drunk? What do we do when you run out of charge on your electrobike? what happens when there is a blackout? I don't think you've thought through all the problems properly.

I live in NYC, in 50 story apartment building next to several other similarly sized high rises. Our cars need about 75 sq. ft each (they're on stacked up 3 levels high in the garage) How many sq. ft. would we need for all of our horses? How many people would be needed to take care of them full time? Actually yeah... outside of cities who'd be taking care of these horses? Because cars need mechanics when something goe…

So, you're telling me you want less responsibility and want to live in a crowded place. I feel bad for you.

Taking care of a horse is easy, it's therapeutic even. Besides, if you don't want to own a horse, you can always hitch a ride from a friendly neighborhood horse-carriage operator.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#599

Post by glitchc » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 8:46 PM UTC

fredfoobar wrote: post #542

glitchc wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as it's funny, this is a false analogy. Horses don't travel as fast as cars, or as far. They also can't pull/carry as much as a car, let alone a truck. How many horses are needed to carry the same load as one 18 wheeler? Would Amazon be possible without trucks? How about Walmart?

Nice, I just want you to keep going in that line of thought and be consistent everywhere. Fingers crossed.

I think I know where you want to go with this, but I'm not falling for it. Bitcoin is not progress towards the future, but a regression to the past. Pegging our economy to a finite (potentially volatile) asset has led to boom-bust cycles in the past, whether it is physical like gold or digital like Bitcoin.

People crave financial stability. Bitcoin will not give it to them. I'm not averse to the idea of a distributed ledger acting as an underlying settlement mechanism for global finance, but Bitcoin does not achieve that goal either as it's zero sum (whereas economies are actually growing).

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#600

Post by danShumway » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 8:46 PM UTC

freeone3000 wrote: post #514

danShumway wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or, preferably, ONE big exchange, where all settlements can take place off-chain and the blockchain sits in a big vault and everyone just trusts you can redeem your account balance for Bitcoin if you ever want it, but you won't want it, because the balance is more valuable than the actual Bitcoin. That's an important point, because it prompts the question: what is the problem that Bitcoin is solving if the preferab…

The problem it solves is that currently, it's not possible for any single central entity to prove anything about ownership changes directly. Now, you can simply trace every on-chain transaction on the chain -- it's as if there were a universal log of every SWIFT transaction, available to the public. It's incredibly useful for forensics! And we can leverage the huge amount of compute power directed here to do useful w…

But no, it doesn't solve those problems. Because you're talking about setting up a central exchange and layering separate currencies on top of it. You're talking about the majority of settlements and transactions taking place off-chain.

So when you think about tracking on-chain transactions, what you're really talking about is tracking government-level, giant transactions that are largely divorced from the kind of detailed forensics that people would want to do. Which... there are better ways to audit giant government-level agencies than a blockchain.

Similarly, leveraging the blockchain to handle things like proof-of-identity doesn't work if the transaction speed for ordinary people can't keep up. If you want to use Bitcoin for proof of identity transactions, you need ordinary people interacting with the network, not a central exchange. Because again, if you have a few central exchanges that everyone is interacting with, then it's almost strictly better to just let them handle proof of identity and proof of ownership in shared centralized databases.

The only reason Bitcoin could matter is if it actually did scale enough that it was feasible for ordinary people to use it for micro-transactions and as a performant, robust API. But the problem is that Bitcoin as a technology is poorly suited for that use case, and none of the people hyping are interesting in solving those problems, evolving the technology, or moving to other coins that would be better suited.

In a world with centralized exchanges and secondary layers on top of bitcoin that consolidate and batch transactions, all of the problems you're describing end up being easier and better to solve by just having the centralized exchanges coordinate with each other, the same way that banks already do. And to the extent that banks don't coordinate with each other right now, it's unrealistic to assume that the blockchain is going to suddenly change their incentives or force them to do so.