This is the most nonsense article Ive read in a long time. The leap after leap of bias is amazing.
He presents bitcoin as a way of knowing if some event happened after some other event, that is a clock, where are all the bias leaps?
Bitcoin Is Time
681–690 of 1001 posts
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#682Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a personal policy, which, if treated as a Kantian imperative, would eliminate this. Any invitation to downvotes, I take. Any comment about downvotes, means at the least that I won't upvote that comment. Meta-comments about downvotes are exempt, I would probably upvote this comment if I saw it from someone else. Every person who adopts this policy improves the discourse by discouraging this behavior, please con…
Kant's second imperative is great! However, people wanting feedback beyond mere downvotes is legitimate and downvoting without comment is the actual wrong here IMO. IMO the best scheme here is that you _must_ provide a reason to downvote. People who vote for your reason [ie they agree with you about downvoting the parent] should be the actual downvotes. This way instead of apparently arbitrary downvotes one gets a li…
I agree that the downvote mechanism on HN could use some refinement!
Funny thing, when I went to quote the specific HN guideline, I'm almost certain it used to say "Please don't comment about downvotes. It never helps" or something very much like that.
But the current guideline says:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Which we're all in violation of! I'll do my best to follow this rule in the future.
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#683Earlier quoted context omitted.
First off, thank you for making fair criticisms. Unfortunately some of your information is old. You don’t need a bitcoin backed token, lightning does it. Transaction rates are not artificially kept low. In fact most the vast majority of the time bitcoin has excess capacity. Privacy- this is a legitimate concern but it is improving, slowly. Taoroot and Lightning are both privacy improvements. So your daily transaction…
> Transaction rates are not artificially kept low. You can look it up, larger blocks where allowed in the past, 1MB is a completely arbitrary size that was overkill at the time but hasn’t increased. Even 1$ transactions are quite expensive though they are often much higher. The lighting network has it’s own separate set of issues. It’s Bitcoin backed but loses some of Bitcoins advantages: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.0…
The block size is not a limiting factor in transactions. And it was quadrupled in 2017.
The biggest problem with bitcoin is that scammers spread FUD to justify their scam coins and too many people believe the FUD.
You are repeating FUD here and basing it in your non-understanding of how bitcoin works.
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#684Bitcoin is time, bitcoin is love, bitcoin is life.
Underrated comment
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#685Let 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'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.
This would be a great analogy if Bitcoin were useful and not just a poor substitute for trust.
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#686This is the article that made things finally click with me. Thinking about the pre-WWI gold standard and the issues that existed there and the improvements that Bitcoin brings around time, consensus, etc. The baseless negative comments with no interaction with the article content confirms for me that Bitcoin is on to something. Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think.
Yes, you're right. It's very common for people to refuse to attempt to understand something new and change their mind on a topic. At the same time, crypto has the potential to change the status quo for everyone and those invested in the existing financial systems don't want their pride hurt, adding to the refusal to impartially analyse crypto and make their own decision.
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#687Earlier 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…
But do you think we ever could have gotten to electric cars if we hadn't used gas-powered cars as a stepping stone? I'd probably agree with you if you were to say that it's taken too long, but I'd argue that the crappy fuel-burning stuff is a necessary milestone on the transition to something better.
I see Bitcoin as the Model T of new currency models. Decentralization is the future of currency and contracts, even if Bitcoin itself is wasteful and inefficient as a v1 product.
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#688Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 res…
> Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers; mass transit is less flexible. So they aren’t strictly superior.
Mass transit in much of the world is perfectly acceptable. You build cities around transit, walking and biking instead of giant chasms between buildings. This is not a problem that exists in Europe.
You don't have to get rid of all cars, just most of them. And the best way to start is by getting rid of free parking, which is a regressive tax on the poor.
> How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?
That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
Again inflation is easy: once you obtain money, purchase assets. So long as wages keep pace with inflation, which they do, this is not an issue. In fact if you purchase your necessities on a credit card the 0% APR until your bill comes due makes inflation work for you.
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#689Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Lightning was anticipated from the very first email group conversation on Bitcoin. It is not ready for primetime usage, but it is rapidly approaching that point as Lightning improves. The "killer app" of Bitcoin is the shared CPU power / consensus, not necessarily the plain layer-1 transactions.
No clue where you got that from but satoshi expressed in his emails that he was under the impression that bitcoin would scale on its own in the early days. Just like he tough that millions of people would us their desktop to mine and therefore decentralization would only ever increase over time.
> No clue where you got that from
"Most transactions cancel out at the account level. The binks demand bitcoins of each other only because they don't want to hold account money for too long. So a relatively small amount of bitcoins infrequently transacted can support a somewhat larger amount of account money frequently transacted."
https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/th...
> satoshi expressed in his emails that he was under the impression that bitcoin would scale on its own in the early days
And it did. I don't think today still classifies as "early". See above for people already thinking far ahead for longterm solutions to scaling.
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#690Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You are arguing that the kings if the past with lots if gold starved, simply because their gold could buy more food over time. People don’t forgo food for decades to put more money into index funds despite the broad market increasing in value consistently over time.
Computers get cheaper every year such that even inflated dollars can be held to get a better computer next year.
And yet the technology industry has not ground to a halt. Food is low tech, cell phones are high tech.
It is obvious- this argument in favor of government being able to debase the currency to fund wars and somehow that’s good for poor people is never going to hold water.
But here is another thought- no matter how much you call it stupid, or fuedalistic, leftists gave been making this argument fir over a decade now and Bitcoin has only gotten stronger.
You may even be able to make it “illegal” if you ignore the constitution and laws, but you cannot stop it.
Bitcoin will be the tool that liberates the people out from under your technocratic thumb.
Thats what I find most exciting.