811–820 of 1001 posts
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ever wond2red why?
Everyone here knew about it when you could mine a few bitcoins per hour on a midrange laptop CPU, but we all thought it was a stupid idea. Here we are, a decade later, still sure it's a stupid idea and increasingly frustrated that the public doesn't understand that.
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…
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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.
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.
As the other comment pointed out, for FOMO to be this "powerful force" everyone would be constantly enraged they didn't buy Tesla shares 10 years ago, or save that collection toys from their childhood that suddenly became valuable, or any number of other things.
FOMO is only a problem if you struggle with envy.
== Traditional currency ==
- needs central authority
+ energy efficient
== Bitcoin ==
+ doesn't need central authority
- energy intensive
If there already is a central authority you can trust, it doesn't make sense to go through the song and dance of having a trustless currency system designed to work under adversarial conditions. Bitcoin isn't on the cusp of taking over the world, it fulfills a specific niche.
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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…
A single car lane can move 600-1600 people per hour while a two way bike lane of the same size can transport 7500 people per hour (https://nyc25x25.org/#report)
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One of the motivating factors behind late 19th century horseless carriages was the reduction in pollution. It isn't at all accurate to say that horses don't pollute. In some respects their pollution is worse.
Sir, are you telling us that instead of dealing with that small problem of pollution ( https://www.workinghorsetack.com/catch-it-manure-bag-horse-d... ), we created a whole new system for transport that requires you to build infrastructure from the ground up just to use them? I wonder why.
Of course, cars as the savior is also an oversimplified narrative, but it was a fun one.
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…
https://wolfstreet.com/2021/02/28/the-big-buy-hype-bitcoin-c...
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> Why are we still talking about bitcoin and first gen blockchain tech. Because it doesn't seem to be going away faster than the newer generations. There is a real chance that if cryptocurrency ends up being a thing forever that BTC is the winner. And that is an environmental disaster until we get to 100% clean energy worldwide.
Even then. This stuff produces heat. The way the scaling operates, as it goes along, even if you had FREE energy piped from a hyperspatial link in the heart of the Sun… eventually the ASIC farms themselves will begin to cook the planet. It doesn't stay alive and profitable unless it keeps burning energy MORE. The fact that the energy's going to come from the dirtiest and most dangerous (cheapest) possible fuels, is c…
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For most other topics, I'd probably agree. In the case of crypto currencies it's important to point out that you'd rather hear compelling counterarguments rather than the all too frequent "You're right but I wish you weren't" downvotes.
wow, can you teach me how to read minds?