Bitcoin Is Time • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#831

Post by aaron695 » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 1:45 AM UTC

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…

> 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)"

The fact this clever whoring works on HN, saying you'll be downvoted then saying something mainstream popular to get upvoted says a lot about the HN community.

Absolutely 100% off topic to the article and painting the garden shed.

Good work to OP turning their claimed karma level from 11 to 177, that's hacking.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#832

Post by ryandrake » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 1:47 AM UTC

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…

I need to haul an old kitchen oven to my dad's house so he can cook dinner, since his failed. Dad lives deep in the mountains at the end of a dirt road, far from any train station.

I've got a 20 foot fishing boat sitting in my backyard. I want to take it out on the lake.

I'd like to visit my in-laws who live on a farm in a rural town without bus service, 200 miles away. The temperature is a few degrees above freezing and it's raining.

I can't use a car, either owned or rented. What superior transportation solutions exist that allow me to do them?

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#833

Post by ilikehurdles » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

fireeyed wrote: post #828

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…

> because dense urban development, public transit, walking, and cycling is better Why is dense urban development better ? I could cite 100 studies why it’s not better not to mention all the people who hate living in “dense” living conditions

It's better if you acknowledge climate change as the real, human-caused catastrophe that it is.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#834

Post by wruza » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC

Solvitieg wrote: post #632

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".

It's easier to parrot a tired critique than it is to contribute a useful thought. What's concerning is its the top comment on this HN thread.

A criticism tires if it’s target doesn’t change. Meanings are upvoted if a majority supports them. Are you expecting a new view on the aged rat or a pitying silence?

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#835

Post by ALittleLight » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 2:03 AM UTC

hannasanarion wrote: post #544

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.

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…

Cars are only an incremental step towards an even more sustainable future. Once we get self-driving electric cars powered by nuclear, solar, wind, fusion - then they'll become pretty green. Self-driving cars will cut down on parking space too because we'll be able to have our cars drop us off and go somewhere out of the way while we shop/eat/whatever.

I'm also not certain how much cars are worse for the environment compared to horses. If we had to sustain similar numbers of people without cars we would have tons of horses (I assume horses emit similar amounts of methane to cows, which I know are a major contributor). We'd also have to feed our hundreds of millions or billions of horses. That agricultural effort would probably have a huge environmental cost. We'd have to deal not only with places to park our horses but also somehow manage the immense amount of waste that would come with packing a few million horses into a city and the accompanying health problems with that.

I think cars are a pretty good invention and wouldn't be surprised if, on net, they were better for the environment.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#836

Post by fredfoobar » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 2:03 AM UTC

_ea1k wrote: post #817

fredfoobar wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You think its a small problem? Imagine as many horses as cars in a dense urban environment, each one using those bags. Now how do you get all those bags out without garbage trucks? It isn't as easy a problem as our modern minds might imagine. Of course, cars as the savior is also an oversimplified narrative, but it was a fun one.

Have you seen the amount of waste we humans generate? have you seen the landfills?

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#837

Post by freeone3000 » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #600

freeone3000 wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem it solves is that currently, it's not possible for any single central entity to prove anything about ownership changes directly. Now, you can simply trace every on-chain transaction on the chain -- it's as if there were a universal log of every SWIFT transaction, available to the public. It's incredibly useful for forensics! And we can leverage the huge amount of compute power directed here to do useful w…

But no, it doesn't solve those problems. Because you're talking about setting up a central exchange and layering separate currencies on top of it. You're talking about the majority of settlements and transactions taking place off-chain. So when you think about tracking on-chain transactions, what you're really talking about is tracking government-level, giant transactions that are largely divorced from the kind of de…

Currently the MSFT identity approach uses blockchain as an identity stake and then layer2's the access. The identity stake allows for anyone to verify that the credential is valid and belongs to a real person without everyone involved having to run the entire chain back to that point, with a secondary chain providing a changelog. Since you only need to exist once, this can cost $5 or so without major issue. (We can't use a centralized database for this because people in the US are afraid of the government.) NHS is using it as a cross-region credentialing system, since it's easier for them to accept a blockchain entry than work out all the regulatory nonsense about actually sharing history, or getting their systems to work together securely.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#838

Post by cloakandswagger » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 2:12 AM UTC

CyberDildonics wrote: post #434

cloakandswagger wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bitcoin bros" is inflammatory and slanderous. Please edit your comment.

You have called lock downs "arrogant and threatening authoritarian movements" and told someone that saying racist hate groups lead to violence is "hyperbole that isn't going to work for you much longer". You also said that "hn is filled with indignant nocoiners". I think acting offended by 'bitcoin bros' is hypocritical.

My own comments (many of which I don't remember making, it's possible my account was temporarily compromised) shouldn't have any bearing on the offensive remarks made by others.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#839

Post by fredfoobar » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 2:17 AM UTC

hannasanarion wrote: post #530

cwkoss wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exchange it for goods and services. What can you do with USD besides exchanging it for goods and services? (Pay taxes)

The USD (and more importantly, the banking system), also allows for efficient high-volume transfers, reversibility, ID verification, and fraud investigation. None of this is possible with blockchain, by design.

You should tell that to Citibank then, poor guys can't get back their money they accidentally wired:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-laws...

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#840

Post by porknubbins » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 2:17 AM UTC

If I ever come to HN and the top comment about Bitcoin is NOT a grumpy “I could build that in a weekend with Aws” style comment I will know the top is finally in. I think the issue is Bitcoin is no longer tech news- its a finance, or social or business topic and for some reason it inspires engineers to try to reanalyze everything from first principles to write angry comments that miss the forest for the trees. I can only imagine how something like NFTs which truly appear to be a baseless speculative mania would go over.