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Bitcoin Is Time

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Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#651

Post by BLKNSLVR »

99_00 wrote: post #618
Scott_Sanderson wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you describe quite well the fundamental reasons bitcoin was created.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#652

Post by hannasanarion »

yurielt wrote: post #620
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…

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

Want a deflationary monetary policy? Vote for it. Technology isn't going to solve the problem for you.

Also, deflationary monetary policy is insane and nobody should want it. Economies grow from continuous re-investment and commerce, not from people stashing away their money and watching its value increase for no reason.

edit: also, the fact that bitcoin is deflationary is entirely incidental, that was just Nakamoto's choice. It would have been just as easy to make bitcoin highly inflationary. The only thing that blockchain guarantees is that monetary policy can't ever change, which is also a thing that no sane person would ever want, there are lots of good reasons to modify the rate of inflation/deflation.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#653

Post by u678u »

unnouinceput wrote: post #617
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.

OK I see, thanks for the reply. Seems like it'll remain huge for a long time yet.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#654

Post by Gatsky »

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…

Well what you say has some merit, but...

Goldrush FOMO is a very powerful force. Not saying this applies to you, but I think some people can’t stand the cognitive dissonance of being a hacker and not getting into bitcoin, missing out on life-changing money. To deal with it, they need to vilify bitcoin often on quasi-moral grounds.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#655

Post by aerosmile »

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…

Gutsy, but it paid off. 86 karma points at the time of this writing.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#656

Post by Aunche »

olah_1 wrote: post #566
Aunche wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is nothing like gold. Gold has inherent value. If I buy 100% of the world's gold, gold would still be valuable. If I buy 100% of the world's bitcoin, it's the same as owning no Bitcoin. Gold would be immensely valued during an extreme global crisis (WWIII, massive solar flare, etc) whereas bitcoin would be entirely useless.

> If I buy 100% of the world's gold, gold would still be valuable Sure, yes. It would be valuable in the way that a barrel of oil is valuable. It has a number of practical uses in electronics, medicine, etc. Valuable as a currency or means of transferring wealth? Not as much. It's cumbersome for that role. Bitcoin's value is not "coins". It is valuable for what it does (transfer wealth). It's a ledger, not really "co…

The point of this comment was to debunk how Bitcoin is a good store of value. Gold is great in that aspect because the unique color, density, and stability make it trivial to identify, which gives it has immense strategic importance. This is why nations hold much more of it in reserve than they would need from industrial applications.

This comment of mine explains why I think Bitcoin is not a good form of money. Transferring wealth may be the most important function, but it's far from the only one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319657

The article is certainly interesting. Unfortunately, the main source of inconsistencies with ledgers comes from human factors rather systemic ones. Fat finger errors, identity theft, credit card chargebacks, and fraud are all inconsistencies created by humans and can only be resolved through trusted centralized authorities.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#657

Post by BLKNSLVR »

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.

The stock market is also a place for those of significant means to gamble on bets of variable terms.

Your description is correct, but it's far from the full picture.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#658

Post by md2020 »

crazypython wrote: post #631
md2020 wrote: post #624

The earlier points in the piece about the distinction between information and physical matter got me thinking. I only have a bachelor's in computer science and not much cryptography knowledge, so please excuse if this question has a simple answer: What fundamentally prevents us from creating a digital analog of gold? Gold (partially) has value because it is scarce, and it's scarce because it's difficult to create--nu…

> What fundamentally prevents us from creating a digital analog of gold? You can infinitely copy information. It's in the article.

Yeah, I read the article. My question was what really prevents the existence of some cryptographic operation that would allow us to "port" the laws of physics to the digital space, so that when information moves we could enforce that the sender no longer has it and the receiver does.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#659

Post by jdmoreira »

cyphertruck wrote: post #235
vishnugupta wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This[1] is an insightful article from an economist who has experienced the real world economics from very close quarters. I don't have any opinion about Bitcoin one way or another, though through these fascinating arguments I gain new insight about the money and its relationship with geopolitics, human civilisation and other aspects. [1] https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/04/22/bitcoin-and-the-da...

That article is from 2013 and so we must grade it on a curve. He makes several wrong assumptions about how bitcoin works because he’s thinking it is based on trust, and he is an inflationist. I have yet to have an economist explain to me why deflation us bad- computers getting cheaper is good, fixed income people being able to afford things us good. Inflation mainly allows government to hand out money yo wall street…

> "I have yet to have an economist explain to me why deflation us bad"

1 bitcoin will always buy more and more and more and more. So you have zero incentive to spend your money today and you have all the incentive to wait as far as you possibly can before spending anything. The economy would grind to halt. Isn't this obvious?

Besides, rich people can sit on their money instead of re-investing. They will never have to work and neither will their descendants. You basically established some kind of stupid cyberpunk feudalism.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#660

Post by centimeter »

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…

You're describing the concept known as "money".
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