881–890 of 1001 posts
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…
Time is money. Bitcoin is wasted time. And wasted money. And wasted energy.
To be less glib, I think the article makes it clear just how inordinately difficult blockchains make their lives when they have to build, from scratch, a reliable definition of time. If you could have a trusted time source, you could at a stroke get rid of one of the most egregious flaws in bitcoin, its vast wastage of energy, because of its 'proof of work' mining. Bitcoin miners are running at full pelt 24/7, pickin…
I'm so sick of these profound-sounding blog posts that take 1 million words to say precisely jack shit. Yes, the key innovation around Bitcoin was to order events. You can call this 'time' if you want. This is literally the most obvious thing you can say about the system. It's so obvious in fact that it's in the introduction section to the Bitcoin whitepaper. Here is the entire blog post written much shorter and more…
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To be less glib, I think the article makes it clear just how inordinately difficult blockchains make their lives when they have to build, from scratch, a reliable definition of time. If you could have a trusted time source, you could at a stroke get rid of one of the most egregious flaws in bitcoin, its vast wastage of energy, because of its 'proof of work' mining. Bitcoin miners are running at full pelt 24/7, pickin…
> why then are the same people happy to use smart contracts where the use of centralised oracles is apparently both acceptable and commonplace? This just isn’t true. Only a vanishingly small fraction of these people has ever touched smart contracts.
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It wasn’t a small problem. In 1880 there were 2.5 million pounds of poop per day in New York. https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/clay10/2019/11/11/horse-manure-in-ma... In 1880 NYC’s population was 2 million. Today there are 23 million in the metropolitan area. We probably still wouldn’t have a good way of dealing with 25M+ pounds of poop a day. And at least garbage disposal is relatively orderly; horses just pooped everywhere.
Are you telling me that we've built a whole sewer system for human poop, but we'll be screwed by a few million pounds of decomposable horse manure?
Decomposing poop takes time, and it's pretty awful to be around while it's happening. Also, for something to decompose into the ground, it needs to reach the ground, which it's not going to do if the street is paved.
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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 ou…
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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.
It seems to be the other way round to me. Certain Bitcoin fans can't stand that other "hackers" don't buy into the Bitcoin story as religiously as they do. 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. F…
I did say powerful, not ubiquitous.
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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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 c…
Cars, on the other hand, are not incremental - they have locked us into an urban design pattern that will remain problematic no matter what the form of energy generation that drives them is.
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Haha, that was unnecessarily controversial on my part. I can totally accept that other people disagree on that.
but you didn't even add the requisite "go ahead and downvote me!"