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Bitcoin Is Time

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Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#781

Post by splintercell »

varajelle wrote: post #339
paulmd wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising. it's actually worse than that - lightning only works in the context of centralized banking. It presumes there is some other entity with whom you can hold a channel open, who you do roughly equivalent amounts of deposits and withdrawals from. If that criterion is not met, then you have to keep closing channels and re-open…

> It presumes there is some other entity with whom you can hold a channel open, who you do roughly equivalent amounts of deposits and withdrawals from. I don't get how you go from there to "centralised banking". Contrary to a bank, you do not need to trust this entity with your money. Also it is not centralised, there can be many such entity and they connect together.

How do you think banks became centralized?

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#783

Post by splintercell »

keymone wrote: post #465
gnrlst wrote: post #210

I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity. Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons: - emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3. - energy us…

Nano is a scam. Nano fanboys don’t even get the concept of latency on the internet, forget anything more complex like recovery from network partitions. There are reasons behind most of the things that you consider drawbacks in bitcoin, shitcoin proponents don’t understand those reasons and simply copy bitcoin with some parameter changed, completely oblivious to the fact that it makes their shitcoin worthless.

Leave it to the bitcoin maxis to make the term "scam" meaningless. If bitconnect and nano are both scams, then the word has no meaning.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#784

Post by Twirrim »

hannasanarion wrote: post #663
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 My e-cargo bike with a trailer can hold more stuff than my sedan ever could. Did an Ikea trip with it last year, carried home a filing cabinet, a desk frame, and a small table. > mass transit is less flexible frequent mass transit is plenty flexible. If a bus comes by your stop every 5 minutes, you never need to worry about planning. > distributed mu…

> frequent mass transit is plenty flexible. If a bus comes by your stop every 5 minutes, you never need to worry about planning.

I never once missed my car when I lived in London. Pop along to the end of the street for a bus every 5-10 minutes, or just a little bit further away and I was at a tube station where I could be on a train within 10 minutes that took me right across London far faster than any car could. The one or two occasions I needed a car, I could rent one, and still be better off than if I'd been paying the month-to-month expenses of keeping a car on the road (insurance, MOT etc.)

Car rentals are even easier these days than they were back then.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#785

Post by paulryanrogers »

hannasanarion wrote: post #713
jyrkesh wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The fact that cars burn gas is one of the least harmful parts of them. Electric cars are just as bad as any other car. The real harm of cars is in how they forced cities to spread out, putting miles of asphalty moonscape between every destination, forcing people to spend thousands of dollars a year on vehicles that they shouldn't need, driving greenfill development that doesn't raise enough revenue to support itself,…

> The fact that cars burn gas is one of the least harmful parts of them.

Air pollution is still a significant harm, even if the space wasting harms also exist.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#786

Post by mortehu »

elixirist wrote: post #615
mortehu wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This will likely be dismissed as shilling of a shitcoin, but on the off-chance anyone is actually willing to take a look, this cryptocurrency meets your criteria (which is exactly why I bought it): https://www.algorand.com/ . The pedigree of the team behind it is ridiculous, most notably its creator: Silvio Micali - one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs as well as other cryptographic primitives. EDIT: it's…

Can you explain how this prevents forks? An example of a fork would be someone creating a new client that rejects transactions from old clients.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#787

Post by drdeca »

hannasanarion wrote: post #563
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.

The energy wastage argument isn't "environmental concern". If bitcoin were to scale up enough to combat Visa, it would twice as much energy as all the generators in the world put together can produce, just to do what Visa already does, but without fraud detection, ID verification, or reversibility.

I'm not confident that it would. There doesn't seem to be a clear connection between the transaction rate and the power use. That's not to say that the power use is or isn't "worth it" or whatever.

But, I think that one way the "energy per transaction" framing is misleading, is for exactly the "if you scaled up the transactions, the power use would scale proportionally" idea. First, it isn't clear to me that it is even possible to scale up the transaction rate without either making the security worse or substantially modifying the design (or possibly both), but if you did manage increase the transaction rate, it isn't clear to me that this would impact the total energy use rate at all.

Well, ok, it might influence the power used by influencing the price or the issuance rate. But, aside from that, I expect that the power use would be determined by whether someone profits by increasing the amount that they spend on power in order to mine bitcoin. This doesn't depend on the transaction rate. Err, ok, I suppose technically if the transaction rate were higher, miners might get more transaction fees, and really the relevant thing is issuance rate + transaction fee rate, but I suspect that the average transaction fee would decrease if the number of transactions were increased, so that impact should be small I think, because those two should largely cancel out.

Hm, ok, so if the transaction fees are determined essentially as an auction, what is the effect on the average fee per transaction, of multiplying the number of items (slots in the block) available per amount of time? I think this depends on the demand curve for transactions. I don't know what that curve looks like. If we pretend that it is linear (just pulling that out of a hat. Though I guess if we zoom in far enough it should look locally linear, unless we zoom in too far and then it will look piecewise constant due to discrete numbers of people... whatever.), then, --- I should get back to work, shouldn't be doing this calculation right now.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#788

Post by cbozeman »

matwood wrote: post #491
oliv__ wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I was a little disappointed since the poster didn't weave in tulips...

They've been saying the same shit about Bitcoin for over a decade. I started fucking around with it in 2010 on a spare Asus laptop I had with a Core2Duo. Glad I did. I thought it was intriguing then and I believe in it now.

We've seen the exact same cycles over and over and yet no one seems to "get it". When the block reward halved from 50 to 25, the price skyrocketed, then crashed. When the block reward halved from 25 to 12.5, the price skyrocketed, then crashed. And after every crash, there was a recovery.

Guess what's gonna happen the block reward halves from 12.5 to 6.25?

Go on... take a wild guess.

Worldwide central banks are printing money nonstop, literally by the trillions, which is great if you're in a shitload of debt, but not so hot if you're holding a lot of cash assets. Well you can't "print" another 21,000,000 Bitcoins. And BTC is just the first of the cryptocurrencies. It won't be the last, and it probably won't even be the one the world eventually settles on, but make no mistake, this'll be where humanity goes.

I wonder why no one bothers to ask how much power all the payment processors in the world like VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Stripe, QuickPay, etc. and so forth use... oh yeah, that's because in their mind they're "legitimate", whatever the fuck that means. This illusion that seems to grasp everyone's mind and never let go utterly boggles me. Its a bunch of made-up bullshit, including Bitcoin, yet for some reason people hang onto it like its a loaf of bread they could eat to stay alive.

All these currencies have as much value as a bunch of people think they have. Period. I've never seen someone eat Renminbi and stay alive. Never seen someone build a house out of British Pounds.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#789

Post by TimJRobinson »

smolder wrote: post #757
lowkey wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see countries going to war over BTC (or the mining pool) as they already have cornered all the fiat currencies in a tight system. I think that's the point here. Unlike BTC which is powered by Proof of Work (POW), the US Dollar is powered by Proof of Violence (POV). As a result the full accounting for the externalities caused by US dollars would have to include the cost of supporting and using the largest mi…

Fiat is not powered by "proof of violence" because violence is not needed for it to function. It is maintained by social contract and the threat of violence, because otherwise it could only depend on trust, and trust is very expensive, as Bitcoin proves.

You need to have an army and weapons to enforce that threat, which costs a lot of energy to maintain.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#790

Post by helloworld11 »

notahacker wrote: post #748
SamPatt wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I support the idea of Bitcoin and blockchain despite flaws in both but you beat me to pointing this obviously bad argument against stock markets in defense of Bitcoin. BTC constantly has insane movements over absurd things like Musk tweets and etc.. It's much worse than the stock market at being volatile.
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