Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

All You Need to Know About Bitcoin's Rise, from $0.01 to $11,000

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 109 posts

Re: All You Need to Know About Bitcoin's Rise, from $0.01 to $11,000

#91

Post by DenisM »

jimmies wrote: post #67

I haven't been understanding bitcoin for the longest time: It has been more than five years since I first heard about it. I tried to look it up, I can never quite get the overall picture, why it works the way it is. I finally understood the bitcoin mechanism and I can explain the original paper well just two days ago. I feel dumb reading this paper. Intellectually, I think it's a hallmark of many great inventions in…

Why wouldn’t those same people running for their lives store their money in a numbered bank account? If they need to hide from their own government they could use banks of one of the major players: US, EU, China, Russia. Whomever is the least friendly with your oppressor.

Re: All You Need to Know About Bitcoin's Rise, from $0.01 to $11,000

#92

Post by ufo »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #89
eqmvii wrote: post #10

Something I rarely see discussed is the gender breakdown of bitcoin ownership. I'd be surprised if it wasn't something like 90%+ men mining, trading, and owning bitcoin. If bitcoin really takes over the world, it's going to look like a bunch of dudes printed themselves a fortune and then convinced the rest of the world to buy it from them.

Maybe this is a result of theory that males have a slight bias to tend to like things while females like people relatively more. Or maybe cause of the theory that males tend to be greater risk takers. (Not saying one sex is better than another, as in different situations, different traits will succeeded. And not saying that all people of a particular sex must take on these traits, but rather only these are tendencies…

I think the simplest explanation is that Bitcoin got popular in internet communities that didn't have many women to start with.

Re: All You Need to Know About Bitcoin's Rise, from $0.01 to $11,000

#93

Post by fiatjaf »

lawn wrote: post #80
blhack wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bitcoin development team is * rightfully* extremely cautious and correctly moves extremely slowly. That's a GOOD thing. I don't want "move fast and break things" with bitcoin.

No it's not a good thing. When it takes too long you stop being cautious and start being incompetent. The "1MB block issue" has been going on for years yet they haven't even come up with good (or any) research for an optimal block size.

For multiple years people tried to make research for "online money" and couldn't.

Re: All You Need to Know About Bitcoin's Rise, from $0.01 to $11,000

#94

Post by wu-ikkyu »

emodendroket wrote: post #47
backtoyoujim wrote: post #26

> , a Nobel laureate in economics, said recently that bitcoin "ought to be outlawed” because it’s designed to evade regulation and "doesn’t serve any socially useful function." A world where if something is not required it is forbidden is not a world that I want any part of Nobel winner or otherwise.

It seems to me like you're only taking into account half of the argument (the other half being that it's designed to evade regulation).

Regulation itself is not always "socially useful" for most people

Re: All You Need to Know About Bitcoin's Rise, from $0.01 to $11,000

#95

Post by bglusman »

Joeboy wrote: post #87
ringaroundthetx wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah nobody downloads the whole blockchain lmao, 2012 called and wants its argument back

Well I tend to assume people are using bitcoin in a decentralized fashion because that was its entire raison d'etre, but it's true that at this point that seems to have fallen by the wayside.

Depending on what you mean by "in a decentralized fashion" the two aren't mutually exclusive. Many bitcoin clients, like Electrum, are distributed, non-centralized, but rely on the existence of SOME copies of the entire blockchain somewhere, but only verify back a fixed configurable number of blocks themselves when sending and receiving money. I suppose there's a minor degree of "trust" involved there, but I think the number of full nodes talked to is probably also configurable, so it would be pretty hard to fool the client, I think equally hard or harder than other kinds of double spend attacks.

Re: All You Need to Know About Bitcoin's Rise, from $0.01 to $11,000

#96

Post by prance »

Joeboy wrote: post #76
tr4cefl0w wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like many, you’re not aware that the Lightning Network is on its way and will solve most of these issues. Moreover, transactions between Segwit-compatible wallets is pretty fast and cheap. I’m kind of tired to hear people complain about the fees while all they have to do is use a different wallet that supports Segwit. Edit: Ah, the downvotes. I was expecting them.

Maybe I don't fully understand it but from what I've gathered, the Lightning Network is a plan to enable people to do transactions outside of the main blockchain and eventually sync them back. It seems to get touted as a magical plan to solve Bitcoin's scaling problems, but unless I'm missing something (which tbf is very possible) it seems more like a plan for bitcoin to abrogate its primary original purpose of handl…

The thing you're missing is that in order to achieve scaling, Lightning Network sacrifices one of Bitcoin's main advantages, decentralization: https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...

Re: All You Need to Know About Bitcoin's Rise, from $0.01 to $11,000

#97

Post by emodendroket »

wu-ikkyu wrote: post #94
emodendroket wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me like you're only taking into account half of the argument (the other half being that it's designed to evade regulation).

Regulation itself is not always "socially useful" for most people

If there is some sort of regulation that is harmful (do you have something specific in mind or is this just a generality?), it seems like the thing to do would be to reconsider that regulation, and not to simply allow a handful of savvy investors to skirt the regulation while the average person is still subject to it.

Re: All You Need to Know About Bitcoin's Rise, from $0.01 to $11,000

#98

Post by jimmies »

DenisM wrote: post #91
jimmies wrote: post #67

I haven't been understanding bitcoin for the longest time: It has been more than five years since I first heard about it. I tried to look it up, I can never quite get the overall picture, why it works the way it is. I finally understood the bitcoin mechanism and I can explain the original paper well just two days ago. I feel dumb reading this paper. Intellectually, I think it's a hallmark of many great inventions in…

Why wouldn’t those same people running for their lives store their money in a numbered bank account? If they need to hide from their own government they could use banks of one of the major players: US, EU, China, Russia. Whomever is the least friendly with your oppressor.

Store how? I was from a country that the money inflated 25% over a year, and the government made it extremely hard to send the money abroad.

In the US, it's not possible to open a bank account without a SSN. How do you get an SSN if you don't work in the US?

Re: All You Need to Know About Bitcoin's Rise, from $0.01 to $11,000

#99

Post by dang »

to_bpr wrote: post #73
influx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you see as the barriers for women to participate in bitcoin?

>What do you see as the barriers for women to participate in bitcoin? Why do you want to have a discussion involving logic when all I want to do is signal my virtues?

It's against HN's rules to use this site primarily for political or ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, so please stop doing that. Flamebait, like the comment you posted here, is particularly against the rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: All You Need to Know About Bitcoin's Rise, from $0.01 to $11,000

#100

Post by wu-ikkyu »

emodendroket wrote: post #97
wu-ikkyu wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation itself is not always "socially useful" for most people

If there is some sort of regulation that is harmful (do you have something specific in mind or is this just a generality?), it seems like the thing to do would be to reconsider that regulation, and not to simply allow a handful of savvy investors to skirt the regulation while the average person is still subject to it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
Post reply on HN