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Bitcoin Is Time

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Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#891

Post by 1996 »

2-tpg wrote: post #487
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…

In my country, bitcoin guards against inflation. Local currency in relation to the dollar, in 2020, I lost 50%. Bitcoin in relation to the dollar, in 2020, did 300%. Bitcoin here is a wealth transfer from the older generation to the newer generation. The older generation owns and invests the real estate, and this keeps the prices high and exclusive. The newer generation (techn-savvy) can now use crypto profits to fun…

> I topped bickering about and promoting bitcoin on HN when the price was around 4500$. The very sentiment then: This is a waste, and a hype, and a bubble, and only criminals use it, tulip mania, gambling addicts. All the nay-sayers back then should realize they actually lost people money!

Same. I did cost me dearly to listen to the loud voices on HN, people so certain about themselves that they just couldn't envision the possibility they could be wrong.

Fortunately, I did not suffer from this hubris, so when confronted to evidence that I was wrong, I changed my mind.

It served me well, but like you I feel so sad these stupid people caused so many hackers to remain poor, and are still hurting the community.

> Do you allow yourself to keep commenting negatively, knowing how wrong you were for years now? Are you really doing the HN community a service with your expert hot takes?

These negative people are the reason may bright minds will remain chained to a day job at a FANG selling ads and dopamine, instead of really innovating.

Sad, really sad.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#892

Post by samatman »

phyro wrote: post #9

Thank you for sharing this! I wrote a much shorter article on why I believe Grin is the closest to "time is money" here https://phyro.github.io/what-is-grin/grin_emission.html Bitcoin can be thought of as a clock, but the unit that is being transfered can't be thought as time because for it to be mappable to time, you need a linear function and Bitcoin's emission is exponential because of the halvings.

For what it's worth, I agree with you that Grin's emission scheme is the 'correct' one.

The effect of adding one coin to a pool of coins, on a steady schedule, results in inflation along a logarithmic curve. Inflation is about how much money is created relative to how much exists, so the second minute of Grin is 100% inflation, the third minute is 66%, and so on.

Also, people lose their cybercoins. It might average out that Grin hits a steady state, or even deflates a bit, depending on how frequently people or corporations lose their keys, die without heirs, send to a nonexistent address, and so on.

But even without this, the mining reward remains consistent even as overall inflation becomes negligible. Inflation never stops, but it does hit a point where it may as well have.

Bitcoin, by contrast, is guaranteed to be deflationary, and in fact the property that everyone holding BTC gets a permanent bump in asset value every time a bit of the ledger is lost strikes me as... moderately hazardous to the health of those who hold large allocations of the ledger.

I don't think this has much bearing on the article though, just wanted to tip the hat to another Grin respecter.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#893

Post by yurielt »

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…

>just buy assets What? You think like that everyone can JUST buy assets that is preposterous Moreover and in regards to your arguments no the wages of lots of people do not go up with inflation like have you ever talked to anyone that isn’t in the software industry? Lots of jobs don’t do that and that set of people want to be saved against inflation if inflation is not a problem for you that is one thing but it sure is for a lot of people

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#894

Post by lmm »

ryandrake wrote: post #832
hannasanarion wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No-one's arguing for an outright ban on cars everywhere in all circumstances. I'm pretty extremist but all I want to see is an end to using public space for private car storage, zero-parking buildings as a norm where land costs warrant it, single-vehicle-width shared streets (Americans would probably perceive them as alleyways) as a norm in cities where land costs warrant it...

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#895

Post by yurielt »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #833
fireeyed wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>you should psychologically punish yourself and live like tuna in a can because companies want to pollute

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#896

Post by ebcode »

cyphertruck wrote: post #715
rpowers wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really glad someone can articulate what I've bee thinking for a long time. It started when I realized that bitcoin was being used to fuel dark markets then again when I saw that anyone was able to make a coin and pre-mine thousands before sharing with others struck with FOMO.

You can easily make rpowerscoin. But it won’t be bitcoin. And its existence will have negligible impact on bitcoin. There have been 100,000 clones of bitcoin (according to someone who claimed to have counted)but none are genuinely successful. Even forks if bitcoin fail despite spending millions on propaganda. Think there might be a reason?

I think that can be adequately explained by this entry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#898

Post by pedroma »

Uptrenda wrote: post #821

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…

To be fair to most people, they don't know what any of these terms mean: double-spending, peer-to-peer, distributed server, timestamp, computational proof.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#899

Post by entropi »

VRay wrote: post #806
usernamefk wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am one the people you describe, and I am still sure it is a stupid idea. Worse ideas got more support from the public in the past, and I think this one needs more time to be seen.

On the other hand, a government-issued cryptocurrency that is entirely under government's control with no anonymity, is not stupid at all. And I think this will be the future of crypto. Not saying it is good, just saying it is inevitable.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#900

Post by renewiltord »

1123581321 wrote: post #890
floydnoel wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but you didn't even add the requisite "go ahead and downvote me!"

They’ve just fallen in with a different meme that makes comments attractive to a different set of users.

Yes, indeed! I can certainly tell you that post The Selfish Gene I have been entirely enamoured of the concept of the meme. I find it very elegant. If that isn't a brainjack, I don't know what is.
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