Bitcoin Is Time • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#741

Post by imbnwa » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

tachyonbeam wrote: post #577

ball_of_lint wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think young people today are willing to take these extreme risks? Casinos and speculative instruments existed decades ago. I think it's because of the massive economic inequality that people experience today. Working an unskilled, or even a skilled job doesn't go as far today as it has in the past. Many people have internalized that they will never be as "successful" or as rich as their elders. Given that…

It's not an extreme risk if you only invest a small amount of money. I wouldn't suggest anyone remortgage their house to put that into bitcoin, but I've invested ~$1200 in there and I'm willing to wait and see what happens. If I lose it, it will be a learning experience and I'll be just fine.

People bet big when the ETA to payoff is perceived as near and possibly large. A number of elements impede this behavior wrt BTC I wager since it was always pitched as a slow roasting investment, whereas in the case of GME, being a stock and not Bitcoin, we saw this behavior more liberally I think

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#742

Post by Geee » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 10:33 PM UTC

cyphertruck wrote: post #711

Geee wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There hasn't been a secure decentralized PoS protocol. Mostly they rely on one or more trusted validators. Cardano's Ouroboros is apparently the first secure decentralized PoS, that is mathematically proven to be as secure as Bitcoin. I don't know if that's true, but that's what they say.[0] [0] Ouroboros - A Provably Secure Proof-of-Stake Blockchain Protocol https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/889.pdf

I looked into the “mathematical proof” a couple years ago, all I could find was hand waving and sleight of hand. This convinced me it was a scam.

I can't really understand their papers, but they've been published in peer-reviewed journals, so they're at least somewhat legit. And if it's a scam then someone should be able to attack it.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#743

Post by cyphertruck » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 10:34 PM UTC

mortehu wrote: post #733

cyphertruck wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The hair dryer, unlike a blockchain, is not a technology for durable, immutable and highly available storage, so I wouldn't judge it based on energy per byte second.

That us not the purpose of bitcoin. (There is no “blockchain technology”)

While bitcoin is a record of transactions, and as such a database, it was not created to be a database.

Did you read the OP article?

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#744

Post by epx » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 10:35 PM UTC

reader_mode wrote: post #360

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…

Interest rates are negative - if you're saving in cash you're losing money. Everyone is happy to gamble in assets and commodities because the money has to go somewhere and it's not like there's infinite opportunities the money can go into, so it's "to the moon" on the markets.

This is one of the few positives about Bitcoin - if people choose to sink money into it, effectively redistributing weatlh to people that bought these useless hashes when they were sold at $100, real estate, gold and other useful things we want will not appreciate as fast as if it didn't exist :)

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#745

Post by blobster » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 10:36 PM UTC

moralsupply wrote: post #680

knodi wrote: post #24

Bitcoin has turned in a joke.

I'm certainly laughing with how much purchase power Bitcoin provided me so far. I'll be laughing at your comment in 5 years time once a single Bitcoin will be valued above $1M USD while your fiat currency savings will have lost at least 50% of its current purchase power. Screenshot this.

You're predicting >12% yearly inflation? That seems like a pretty bold prediction. I'm curious if you have any sources that would back your prediction.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#746

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 10:36 PM UTC

helen___keller wrote: post #612

eloff wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#747

Post by glitchc » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 10:36 PM UTC

fredfoobar wrote: post #636

glitchc wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet! Taking over mining power or electricity resources could certainly propel wars of the future if Bitcoin becomes the reserve currency of the world.

I'm sensing a small nuance missed here, I'll clarify pro-actively: Adding more energy to your mining operation won't result in more bitcoin for you, you will only make the network more secure. Mining bitcoin is mostly about securing the bitcoin network and there is a small reward for doing so.

~600K USD per block is not “small” :). Mining power is directly correlated to cost of electricity. Most mining is located in electricity-rich districts for good reason. It’s the only cost-effective way to sustain the network. Those regions are scarce across the globe, ergo in high demand.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#748

Post by notahacker » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 10:36 PM UTC

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.

> 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.

Then you see that Bitcoin moves more when Elon tweets...

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#749

Post by fredfoobar » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 10:37 PM UTC

fredfoobar wrote: post #718

hisham_hm wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed! you sound like eminent scholar in the area of "usefulness of things", clearly your opinions are free of bias. I tip my hat to you, you have unmasked me! I feel naked. In all seriousness though, we should at least move to electric cars. If that is acceptable we already have electric money (bitcoin), it'll fix most of our pollution problems. We don't have to worry about how much oil is being consumed to secure…

What I desperately would like to understand is that why are there so many attacks on bitcoin based on flimsy opinions and incorrect information?

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#750

Post by svachalek » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 10:37 PM UTC

thewarrior wrote: post #137

olah_1 wrote: post #69

This 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.

I recently decided to think deeply about Bitcoin and I think my initial skepticism about Bitcoin was wrong. Most of the criticisms of Bitcoin are centered around the fact that Bitcoin has a very low throughput. However this is not necessarily a problem. And here is one hypothetical example of how we can overcome this issue: When countries owe each other money they used to transfer gold back and forth or trust someone…

This idea is a big one behind the development of modern crypto currencies. Ideas like "Layer 2", "Zero Knowledge Rollups", and "Parachains" are all built on the idea that not everything that happens needs to be on the main blockchain.

Personally I suspect that eventually a more modern blockchain will become the base level of record, or more likely that we may never settle on a single one, but indeed with proper layering it could all be BTC in the end.