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Bitcoin Is Time

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Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#641

Post by chordalkeyboard »

hannasanarion wrote: post #609
kenniskrag wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if you have the same amount of horses like cars? Aren't they wasteful and need a lot of space and at night a heated parking spot? :)

Yes, which is why I didn't say anything about horses. Opposition to cars, like opposition to bitcoin, isn't rustic ludditism. There are modern solutions to transportation that are superior to cars, like rail, frequent busses, and bike infrastructure, but lose out in funding and hype because they're not prestigious and utopian like cars are. Likewise, Bitcoin does not solve any problem that any other transaction netwo…

> There are modern solutions to transportation that are superior to cars, like rail, frequent busses, and bike infrastructure,

Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers; mass transit is less flexible. So they aren’t strictly superior.

> Bitcoin does not solve any problem that any other transaction network technology can't solve,

How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#642

Post by ryanSrich »

oliv__ wrote: post #401
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'm genuinely amazed at how you're able to take such an in-depth, thoughtfully written article, and reduce it into a mere "bitcoin is a waste of time, people are gamblers".

Hacker News' Law - The most negative comments receive the most amount of votes on any thread related to Bitcoin or Cryptocurrency.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#643

Post by ryanSrich »

anthropodie wrote: post #370
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…

> 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?

It's a reddit technique to gain more fake internet points.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#644

Post by danShumway »

cwkoss wrote: post #584
danShumway wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Accept donations or other online transactions without relying on Visa/Mastercard. And then you can either try and meet someone in an alley somewhere, or go to a gatekeeper exchange just like Visa/Mastercard to try and convert those transactions back to money that can actually be exchanged for food and shelter! I mean, let's be serious here. In theory, blockchain could allow us to build a good online payment system…

Bitcoin is a settlement layer, like ACH, not a payment provider like Venmo

The payment provider layer is the part that ordinary people worry about when they're looking at transaction fees, security, censorship, and privacy.

If Bitcoin isn't a payment provider, then why should I care about it? It's more expensive and slower than ACH is. It's being converted into normal currencies and tracked by the same companies that are making payment providers today. What is it solving?

All of these payment providers that are being built on top of Bitcoin are going to have the same regulations, restrictions, and problems as the payment providers that exist today. If Bitcoin isn't capable of replacing them (and there's every indication that it is not), then it's not going to have a tangible impact on how and where I can spend money online.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#645

Post by hannasanarion »

SamPatt wrote: post #610
hannasanarion wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bitcoin exists because electronic banking requires trust in centralized financial institutions. When you see the entire stock market move because the Fed chairperson makes an offhand comment about when they'll start or stop doing xyz policy, you realize having such a highly centralized system is dangerous.

Dude... the stock market is not the same thing as the banking system.

How your investment porfolio reacts to a change in monetary policy has nothing whatsoever to do with the utility of your checking account.

Trust in centralized financial institutions is not a problem. In fact it's is the opposite of a problem, it's an enormous benefit. Centralized financial institutions with government backing ensure the availability and safety of deposited funds.

Nobody has ever had their bank account drained in the US since the introduction of FDIC in 1933. In the last 10 years alone, over a billion dollars in bitcoin has been stolen out of people's wallets by hacked exchanges and smart contract exploits, money that can never be returned because blockchain is irreversible by design. Does that really sound trustworthy to you?

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#646

Post by MrMan »

UncleMeat wrote: post #517
ta1234567890 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just described the stock market. The only difference is that before, there were only a handful of people with the power and tools to manipulate it (ie. Wall Street), whereas now, due to the power of the Internet and social networks, masses of people are able to coordinate to achieve similar effects. In a way, what has been happening lately, is the democratization of the power to game the system. Which doesn’t mea…

The stock market is a place to purchase productive assets. That share I own represents actual work done by human beings to produce goods and services. That BTC I own represents an immutable thing that itself does nothing.

A BTC is a receipt for compute wasted

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#647

Post by zby »

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…

And yet this is the way to create money - money is what we believe other people will want and will give us something valuable in exchange. It only works because other people also believe in it. It started with shells and gold and other collectibles - and we still collectively manipulate the price of gold in a kind of sustained flash mob. It is all circular - but it works and when you want to create a new kind of money you have to do the same trick again.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#648

Post by rawtxapp »

OGWhales wrote: post #625
ketamine__ wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many? What is the transaction volume like compared to Ethereum, Bitcoin, BSC, etc?

I found this site after reading your comment and being curious myself. no promises on it being trustworthy data: https://1ml.com/statistics

Keep in mind that a lot of lightning end-users would have private channels that are truly peer-to-peer, so number of users is likely much higher than any public stats you could gather.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#649

Post by BLKNSLVR »

99_00 wrote: post #393
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 not new. History is full of these schemes. Eventually everyone who wants bitcoin has bought it, and there are no more bids.

The entire world of finance is built upon there being an infinitely increasing supply of people who want to buy in.

You're effectively saying that the global economy is also a scheme. I wouldn't disagree with that, it's just that what you're describing isn't unique to bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#650

Post by hisham_hm »

omginternets wrote: post #526
fredfoobar wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally, I'm being recognized for my wisdom. Thank you for your kind words.

I second this. I was poised to dismiss your comment as facetiousness, and then suddenly realized that you are exactly correct. Why indeed should we prefer cars over horses for most (but of course not all) applications? Aren't we as technologists always preaching the benefits of technological conservatism, minimalism and simplicity? Our environment has obviously changed in such a way that it's now difficult to re-intr…

fredfoobar _was_ being facetious. By his comments such as [1] and [2] it's clear that he's trying to attack other things in the world that happen to be both useful and pollutant, and induce a parallel between them and bitcoin — his implicit argument being that bitcoin supposedly a net-positive beneficial thing in spite of the pollution it causes. Whenever someone counters that assumption, the mask falls off and he's back on the attack [3].

That does not invalidate the point that cars _are_ highly pollutant and shouldn't be the primary means of transportation in any sustainable society.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319996 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319974 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319558

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