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

791–800 of 1001 posts

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#791

Post by jyrkesh »

tzs wrote: post #758
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…

> But do you think we ever could have gotten to electric cars if we hadn't used gas-powered cars as a stepping stone? That's probably not a good example, considering that electric cars predate gas powered cars. By the start of the 20th century, 40% of the cars in the US were steam powered, 38% electric, and 22% gasoline.

Yes, but do you think we would have reached the innovations and supply chain capabilities required to make modern electric cars if not for the supply chain build-out of trucks, the commutes of folks researching these technologies, etc.

And even if my specifics are wrong, my point is that some technology may be impossible to leapfrog because we build on the innovations and rollout of past technology in order to innovate further.

And again, you can debate that modern electric cars could have been more capable earlier if we had distributed more towards innovation than to rollout of old tech (e.g. would a carbon tax on gas cars 20 years ago that went towards battery research have accelerated us towards our current position more quickly?). But my uber-point is that gas cars were probably required for some period of the last century. Maybe even to make, like, internet, smartphones, and all kinds of stuff

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#792

Post by wott »

arcticbull wrote: post #688
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; 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…

> You build cities around transit, walking and biking instead of giant chasms between buildings. This is not a problem that exists in Europe.

Ahem, European reality begs to differ.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#793

Post by cbozeman »

Gatsky wrote: post #654
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.

That's a fallacy into which they're falling. Not a logical one, just a mental fault in their thinking.

You and everyone else around you are always missing out on life-changing money.

I missed out on GameStop when it was $4. Roaring Kitty was posting on YouTube then... but I didn't know about him. I didn't hear anything about GameStop until it was already in the hundreds of dollars. I missed out on Tesla. I missed out on Microsoft, Apple, Apple's resurgence in the 90s, etc.

There's always going to be some thing that everyone misses out on.

I'm biased, because I've been mining Bitcoin since 2010, starting with an old Asus Core2Duo laptop, then I got a Butterfly Labs Jalapeno miner, and then the Chinese miners took over the scene and I got out because I didn't see the point trying to compete with them.

But I'm still missing out of all kinds of life-changing money scenarios even today. And so is everyone else.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#794

Post by arbawk »

sova wrote: post #726

>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…

You should read the Bitcoin Standard or Layered Money to get a sense of what money is and how your notions are quite far from the truth, although delivered with feverish confidence.

BTC is infinitely divisible, and so can be used as currency. Can you give an example where its capped supply would cause an issue?

Bitcoin is backed by proof of work. Money backed by entities are liabilities, which is a bug and not a feature of fiat money. I really suggest thinking about this for a lot longer.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#795

Post by solveit »

marshmallow_12 wrote: post #761
hannasanarion wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is accidentally a good analogy. Because yes, cars have made the world materially worse, not because horses are better, but because dense urban development, public transit, walking, and cycling is better. Cars are enormously wasteful, much like bitcoin is, not only because it uses way more energy than is necessary for the task it is performing (~90% of the energy used by cars is spent to move the car, not the car…

technically almost everything beyond food and medicine is wasteful. BUT cars improve the quality of my life (i like to drive). bitcoins floating through the cybersphere do not. end of story.

That says more about you than it does about cars and Bitcoin. I like having code that nobody can take down but don't drive.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#796

Post by nwah1 »

megameter wrote: post #552
nwah1 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only answer that makes any sense is that you can do things that are otherwise illegal or banned by major companies. But the drawbacks are plentiful, even for this sort of use case. And this use case doesn't get easier with a whole bunch of speculation. In fact, it gets harder. And there's no particular reason for such users to leave it in a volatile form. Rather, they would be rational to cash out once the illega…

It should be noted that should you have the right kinds of connections, bitcoin mining itself lets you launder. The miner is given the dirty money as capital, energy subsidies, etc, then creates clean bitcoin, which appears in some anonymous wallet and is then sold. So it's not just that the black market has incentive to use it, there's incentive to make it and even to prefer it over alternatives, because the operati…

The date of the provenance of the coin would be possible to note on the ledger, and cross-reference with the hashrate at the time to determine how much capital would be needed to mine the coin. Which in turn poses the question of where that capital came from.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#797

Post by mr_toad »

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 can’t blame Bitcoin for starting the fire, people have been speculating on financial assets as long as they’ve existed. And not just the huddled masses; smart people like Isaac Newton have been burned by bubbles.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#798

Post by jyrkesh »

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,…

I didn't mean to get caught up on the specifics of electric cars vs. other technological innovations. I clarified a little more over here[1].

As for the decentralization aspect: I think a lot of people in countries outside of the US would disagree with you that trust is not a problem with the banking system. Not everyone out there can just get a credit card with 2% cashback that's backed by the rule of law I enjoy in the US.

I think you've also sidestepped the issue of inflation. Just because the American public hasn't yet learned that their money's value is being printed away doesn't mean that they're not going to be the ones feeling the hurt in 5-20 years, particularly if UBI et al don't keep pace with their decrease in purchasing power.

I saw another one of your comments allude to the idea that democracy is a solution to this, but I don't ascribe to the idea that we should shirk technology solutions because political ones might exist. In many cases, technological innovation drives demand for political action. I don't want to debate the merits of Uber as a company, but I think it's hard to ignore the idea that the introduction of car-hailing apps created demand for governments to completely rethink taxi monopolies.

Ultimately, I'm not trying to make a case for Bitcoin. I'm trying to make a case for the idea that the adoption of and furor around Bitcoin is going to significantly influence the vNext of our banking system, even if that just means e.g. that the near-instant clearing of large Bitcoin transactions is showing folks that ACH is garbage, or that T+1 stock settlement is achievable.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26322823

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#799

Post by patcon »

anthropodie wrote: post #370
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…

> Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I see another comment on top doing the same. Why do people start with this? If you don't bother you should not even brought that up. Seems like an underhanded way of getting more points. Do people even fall for this?

Yes, adversarialist sentence fragments are examples of thought-porn that does very well on HN :)

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#800

Post by mr_cyborg »

hannasanarion wrote: post #609
kenniskrag wrote: post #586

Earlier 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…

> And if you think cars aren't utopian, tell me the last time you've seen an automobile ad that showed somebody being stuck in gridlocked traffic in the lincoln tunnel inhaling gas fumes for over half an hour.

I don’t think this is as ubiquitous as is suggested here - there aren’t really any tunnels in a lot of places, and New York has one of the best park and ride systems around if you have to make that trip regularly and want to avoid this scenario on the daily.

> I will contend that there does not exist a single automobile advertisement that shows the average car owner's typical experience of driving, certainly never in an urban setting.

I think it all depends on where one lives and their lifestyle. There are plenty of places, urban or otherwise, in America at least, where the picture painted preceding this quote is not a regular experience for people. I would venture to suggest the urban traffic grind is probably not the experience for a large majority of people. A ton of people drive in rural or suburban areas and run local errands and things as is depicted in many car ads.

Overall, I understand the importance of alternative means of transportation, but cars are one of the most personally efficient modes to get from Point A to Point B directly.

Post reply on HN