Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin Is Time

dergigi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 1001 posts

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#721

Post by cyphertruck »

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.

Good. I hope you git rid of your hair dryer as well.

It’s not too late, you can get back in, though you will have a tax bill. Maybe it can be a wash trade.

But if FUD that’s dishonest about bitcoin mining scared you off then you haven’t learned enough about bitcoin yet.

This us how bitcoin seeks the strongest hands. HFSP

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#722

Post by smolder »

newsbinator wrote: post #431
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.

I agree that cars are a horrible solution to the problem of transporting people and goods. It's only by virtue of history and our willingness to accept massive loss of life and limb every year that cars, driven at 100 kph by sleepy, angry, elderly or distracted people, are still a thing. Not to mention the massive loss of life and limb from climate change spurred by cars. You're making a solid point.

I think building life around cars is the dark turn that could have been avoided. At the time, I doubt anyone saw burning too much oil from the ground or giving the poor jobs to toil at as an evil thing, it just made them richer. In retrospect, manipulating people into wasteful lifestyles for personal gain might be the invention that ends us.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#723

Post by malwarebytess »

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 taken a gambling-friendly society with feverish lust for winning (think for-profit fantasy sports, online poker, day trading, Vegas et al) and turned us into a giant decentralized casino.

I agree with your post overall, but I think you'd be foolish to think that it wasn't always this way. The only difference is another strata of folk now can play as well.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#724

Post by cyphertruck »

noxer wrote: post #458
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.

Funny how there was no "environment" argument in the whole message but someone came alone an made sure to devaluate it anyway. The argument was that PoW can not not scale. Its an obvious objectively verifiable fact and its completely irrelevant what kind of environmental side effects bitoin has or will have in the future. For all we know it could run on fusion reactors and biodegradable ASICS only and it still would…

I don’t understand the recent preference for taking assertions and declaring them “obviously objectively verifiable fact”.... but that is a good indicator they are false.

Bitcoin can and has scaled. And that is a fact, from Segwit and Taproot to Lightning the capacity and cost have improved dramatically.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#725

Post by cyphertruck »

saalweachter wrote: post #423
pyrale wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, > the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness. ...is an insulting way to dismiss a concern without adressing it.

I believe the distinction is that if you or I are accused of sour-graping Bitcoin, we cry crocodile tears on the internet, but if Bitcoin bros aren't taken as serious thought leaders of the future world economy, they stand to lose a lot of money, potentially leveraged.

“Bitcoin bros” is a pejorative.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#726

Post by sova »

>Time is the only thing we will never be able to make more of. It is The Ultimate Resource, as Julian Simon points out. This makes Bitcoin the ultimate form of money because its issuance is directly linked to the ultimate resource of our universe: time.

All things equal, BTC has a limited supply, making it unusable as a currency (but great as a deflationary store of value). I suppose the definition of "money" is less specific than "currency," but this notion of "money" goes contrary to the nomenclature of the human realm. Yes, technically anything that is tradable is "money," but then the term becomes rather meaningless.

Money must be backed by a creative asset, such as an orchard or labor or technology. Time alone a currency does not make.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#727

Post by cyphertruck »

noxer wrote: post #664
olah_1 wrote: post #241

Earlier 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.

Lightning network is just a brand name for the cryptography that was needed to make Satoshi’s payment channels work.

So, while Satoshi’s opinion isnt really relevant to bitcoin’s future, since you brought it up, Satoshi clearly didn't think layer one was the inly way yo go.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#728

Post by ben_w »

olah_1 wrote: post #619
ben_w wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you have a society where those work, “trustless” is no longer a benefit.

It’s a catch-22: to be useful, it can’t be useful.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#729

Post by Vecr »

noxer wrote: post #633
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But did you really include Lightning Network in your mental calculations? If so, care to elaborate on what exactly would stop it from working? (I mean it already works now, there is nothing technical that is going to stop it from scaling)?

LN fundamentally changes nothing. Its still uses bitcoin Tx it just combines many Tx and does the on-chain settlement at a later point thus reducing the number of on-chain Tx increases speed and reduces fees. But if we reduce Tx on the chain we dont solve scalability we just bump into the limits a little later. LN on a global scale would still need orders or magnitude more on-chain Tx then possible. And if LN would a…

The difficulty can adjust down over time if interest goes down, and that's pretty much fine as long as no one gets over 50% of the hashrate.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#730

Post by cyphertruck »

noxer wrote: post #633
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But did you really include Lightning Network in your mental calculations? If so, care to elaborate on what exactly would stop it from working? (I mean it already works now, there is nothing technical that is going to stop it from scaling)?

LN fundamentally changes nothing. Its still uses bitcoin Tx it just combines many Tx and does the on-chain settlement at a later point thus reducing the number of on-chain Tx increases speed and reduces fees. But if we reduce Tx on the chain we dont solve scalability we just bump into the limits a little later. LN on a global scale would still need orders or magnitude more on-chain Tx then possible. And if LN would a…

“ LN fundamentally changes nothing. Its still uses bitcoin Tx it just combines many Tx and does the on-chain settlement at a later point thus reducing the number of on-chain Tx increases speed and reduces fees.”

That’s changing everything.

Post reply on HN