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Bitcoin Is Time

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Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#611

Post by glitchc »

fredfoobar wrote: post #495
fredfoobar wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now that people are understanding that horses are better, can I turn your attention to concrete? The manufacture of cement produces about 0.9 pounds of CO2 for every pound of cement. Since cement is only a fraction of the constituents in concrete, manufacturing a cubic yard of concrete (about 3900 lbs) is responsible for emitting about 400 lbs of CO2. We should stop making things out of concrete, it's destroying our…

Concrete is indeed a major polluter, your point stands. The world is already experiencing a severe shortage of concrete, it's that valuable. But it's also very hard to switch to alternatives as concrete has the best compressive strength per unit volume and is very well understood as a building material. Plus, it's hard to build high-density housing out of mud huts (buildings require concrete).

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#612

Post by helen___keller »

eloff wrote: post #551
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…

It's a ten year pump and dump scheme? I'm also skeptical of bitcoin, but it can't be dismissed so easily anymore. There's clearly something to it, but what? Is it it just speculation about future value, a hedge against inflation and government control? A way around laws and currency export controls? I'm not sure.

Bitcoin obviously offers some value to some people, but I think bitcoin's greatest innovations were social.

The bitcoin community has innovated all sorts of social tools for advocating causes and pumping assets. Could $TSLA have reached $850 post-split without these techniques? Maybe. Could $GME have reached around $350 without an army of "diamond hands" and "to the moon" (read: crypto memes)? Definitely not.

This may feel like a stupid point, but I mean it. Goldbugs have been a thing for forever, but the sort of digital advocacy that bitcoin sees puts them to shame by comparison. Not only is there a hoard of crypto fanatics ready to tell you why sitting out of bitcoin is the worst decision you've been making your entire life, but you can even get several entirely disjoint explanations for why bitcoin is something you should invest in (some at a glance: it's going to make digital payments easy, it's a scarce asset like gold and will only increase in price, it will replace fiat as a global currency, it's a revolutionary technology and nothing else like it has been seen before, etc). Similarly, if you try to critique any one of these, another supporter will instantly take up the fight by moving the goalposts to their preferred explanation on why bitcoin is great. (Oh sure it can't do many transactions, but it's not actually for payments it's digital gold...)

This isn't meant to be derogatory against bitcoin supporters, but rather an expression of wonder. It's clearly not a fluke: bitcoin drops off the radar for most people and comes back every couple of years, clearly whatever the supporters and investors are doing to advocate for it is working.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#613

Post by Tenal »

BTCOG wrote: post #186
mediaman wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin has a strong base of advocacy not based on any logic or utility but solely sprung from the mule stubbornness of those who profited from their speculation. 1. Bitcoin is environmentally damaging. It produces 37 megatons of CO2 per year and consumes 78 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. Much of that electric consumption is powered by coal. Not all energy consumption or CO2 output is bad, but value should b…

You have many severely fundamentally misunderstood ideas about Bitcoin. Bitcoin is "money" and not a "currency." Bitcoin works very wonderfully as money. Bitcoin is not very wasteful in energy, contrary to the pushed narrative by those that want everyone to believe this is truth. Bitcoin uses a tiny fraction, currently around 7-9% of the electricity that the global banking system currently uses. Bitcoin uses a very l…

It's sad reading comments like this from bandwagoners who haven't read a single academic or technical whitepaper on the technology, let alone the hundreds of them that have emerged which prove / annotate / express / clarify, in exhausting detail, all of the "fundamental problems" that Bitcoin's PoW protocol have, as well as far superior approaches that are in the process of being implemented.

But it's cute. You like Bitcoin. You're a good cheerleader.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#614

Post by tjr225 »

foepys wrote: post #425
fredfoobar wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Horses literally put shit on the streets. Imagine replacing each car with a horse and think about the amount of poop. Horses are also dangerous. A friend of mine lost almost all of their teeth because their horse kicked them in the face when they cleaned its hooves.

I’m not sure if you’re kidding or not but cars are way way more dangerous than horses.

Over a million people die every year in automobile related accidents.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#615

Post by elixirist »

mortehu wrote: post #464
cloakandswagger wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People clearly see the flaw in PoW if they are not emotionally attached to it because they have no money at stake. You should not misinterpret that as hate because they missed the train to richness. The vitriol that Bitcoin evokes from HN commenters can really only be explained by jealousy, the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.

Counterexample: when I recently read about its energy consumption (per byte stored), I sold my bitcoins in disgust, at roughly today's prices. I've held almost continuously since 2011, although I trimmed my position a few times. If I come across something that works without PoW, is safe against quantum computers and somehow eliminates the threat of forks (seems impossible), I'll invest in that.

This will likely be dismissed as shilling of a shitcoin, but on the off-chance anyone is actually willing to take a look, this cryptocurrency meets your criteria (which is exactly why I bought it): https://www.algorand.com/.

The pedigree of the team behind it is ridiculous, most notably its creator: Silvio Micali - one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs as well as other cryptographic primitives.

EDIT: it's not quantum-safe yet, but that's a problem they're actively researching, and given the team they seemed credibly positioned to solve it.

See: https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/chris_peikert_joins_... and https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/algorand-contributes...

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#616

Post by jakupovic »

danShumway wrote: post #606
jakupovic wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say first read the article, which goes in detail what it solves. I'm not doing a TL;DR for you here but the post title does have a lot to do with it. You're stuck on speculation side. There are other parts to the problem which also needed a solution. As the time progresses the reward is smaller and then becomes negligible if bitcoin ever fulfilled it's ultimate goal. This is the reward for early adoption.

I did read the article, it's an explanation of how blockchains work. And I know how blockchains work. What the article doesn't explain is why decentralized consensus and ledgers matter for a system that is increasingly obviously designed to be centralized and used in a centralized manner. Yes, Bitcoin allows transaction resolution in a distributed ledger. The problem is that everything else around Bitcoin's design, i…

First to market and the technology that works good enough. Nothing has come around that is better, enough, to warrant a switch. Once that happens we will go with better technology, it has always been the case.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#617

Post by unnouinceput »

u678u wrote: post #585

One thing that always bothers me about BTC is that the whole blockchain is kept, its like half a terabyte by now. Will they ever agree to just trim off everything older than XXX days or similar? It seems hugely inefficient.

If its trimmed and only last xxx blocks are kept (there are no days in bitcoin as the article nicely puts it) then the people who have bitcoins and just hold it before the trimming happened will lose bitcoins or won't be able to spend them.

Every time somebody does a transaction involving bitcoins mined from a long time ago the entire ledger is need it to see the origins of those bitcoins.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#618

Post by 99_00 »

Scott_Sanderson wrote: post #581
99_00 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not new. History is full of these schemes. Eventually everyone who wants bitcoin has bought it, and there are no more bids.

But yet . . . Would you say eventually everyone who wants dollars will have enough and the demand for new dollars will be zero?

Bitcoin and dollars are not comparable. The US government forces you to use dollars under threat of violence. To exist as a legal entity in society you must use dollars, to pay fees, taxes, etc. And if you depend on the government, you must accept dollars.

No one needs to use bitcoin. Its demand is chiefly speculation. It has very little use other than a speculative vehicle.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#619

Post by olah_1 »

ben_w wrote: post #139
olah_1 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What benefits? Bitcoin isn’t fundamentally better than a database running on a fraction of the power (i.e. every modern bank). The claimed benefits of BTC are (1) to remove government control of money, and (2) to eliminate the need for trust, but (1) ignores why we have chosen to give governments control of money in the first place when gold still exists (and can be traded electronically), while (2) requires you to i…

> being ripped off by a vendor [...] things like chargebacks and courts are there to deal with this

Third party escrow services, the better business bureau, the police... all of these can (and should in many cases) exist with bitcoin. It doesn't have to be either/or.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#620

Post by yurielt »

hannasanarion wrote: post #587
fredfoobar wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Accidentally because opposition to bitcoin, like opposition to cars, isn't luddite rustic anti-industrialism, it's common sense advocacy for equally modern but different solutions to the problem. Bitcoin doesn't do anything that electronic banking can't do better, and it causes a lot of harm in wasted energy and space. Cars don't do anything that busses, trains, and bicycles can't do better, and they cause a lot of h…

>Implying electronic banking can do anything about inflation Don’t be so dishonest
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