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Bitcoin Is Time

dergigi.com

901–910 of 1001 posts

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#901
post #69

This is the article that made things finally click with me. Thinking about the pre-WWI gold standard and the issues that existed there and the improvements that Bitcoin brings around time, consensus, etc. The baseless negative comments with no interaction with the article content confirms for me that Bitcoin is on to something. Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think.

I recently decided to think deeply about Bitcoin and I think my initial skepticism about Bitcoin was wrong. Most of the criticisms of Bitcoin are centered around the fact that Bitcoin has a very low throughput. However this is not necessarily a problem. And here is one hypothetical example of how we can overcome this issue: When countries owe each other money they used to transfer gold back and forth or trust someone…

Good takeaway.

Sounds like something straight out of The Bitcoin Standard [1].

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36448501-the-bitcoin-sta...

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#902
post #624

The earlier points in the piece about the distinction between information and physical matter got me thinking. I only have a bachelor's in computer science and not much cryptography knowledge, so please excuse if this question has a simple answer: What fundamentally prevents us from creating a digital analog of gold? Gold (partially) has value because it is scarce, and it's scarce because it's difficult to create--nu…

I think you would enjoy reading Claude Shannon's seminal paper on information theory.

What you are proposing is profoundly silly. But to understand why it's profoundly silly is very much worthwhile!

http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon...

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#903
post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If its trimmed and only last xxx blocks are kept (there are no days in bitcoin as the article nicely puts it) then the people who have bitcoins and just hold it before the trimming happened will lose bitcoins or won't be able to spend them. Every time somebody does a transaction involving bitcoins mined from a long time ago the entire ledger is need it to see the origins of those bitcoins.

OK I see, thanks for the reply. Seems like it'll remain huge for a long time yet.

Depends on what "huge" means to you.

Bitcoin is 12 years old now, and it's 320 GB. I could store 2 full copies of it on what's left of my 2TB laptop SSD.

In another 12 years, that is in 2033, it will be 640 GB. I'm pretty sure I'll have more than 2TB in my laptop by then; and I could fit one copy of that future blockchain on my SSD right now.

Or to put it slightly differently, I can fit the whole BTC chain on a $20 USB stick.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#904

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…

Video rendering is enormously wasteful. Nobody needs to see your TikTok video of you getting a grandma to slip on a banana peel. The list goes on. Having a global store of value where central banks cant print away peoples lifelong labor they sacrificed their time and health for sounds legitimate to me.

Bitcoin is far too volatile to be a good store of value. There are much more stable ways to protect savings against inflation.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#905

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…

After reading this article, it now seems like BTC is not equipped to to handle general relativity. If we ever become an interstellar species that seriously uses cryptocurrency, I'm not convinced that BTC will be sufficient. The only reason it works on earth is because the "ticks" of its clock are slower than the speed of light, but faster than we need transactions to be settled. If I use BTC to buy a product from a company on Mars, will ~10min be long enough? What kinds of new attacks would bent space give rise to?

These are all things I hadn't considered before reading this article, and I found them enjoyable to think about. If you didn't get anything out of it, that's fine, but don't rain on others' parade.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#906

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't think that either BitCoin or CryptoCurrency in general _can_ be reformed. The whole mess is a complete write-off.

You're dismissing a whole branch of computer science on decentralised systems with no argumentation as to why. Consensus algorithms, solutions to the CAP trilemma, uncensorable decentralised applications that run as long as people are willing to use them, trustless oracles, decentralised dispute resolution, democratised loans and finance. Those are some applications that grew out the cryptocurrency space.

That might be a shame, but a few grifters can ruin a lot; if only a few people pee in the well, then all the well water will taste of piss.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#907

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…

technically almost everything beyond food and medicine is wasteful. BUT cars improve the quality of my life (i like to drive). bitcoins floating through the cybersphere do not. end of story.

Wasteful things like space programs still result in training and gaining experience. That experience can then be used on more productive activities once they have been discovered.

Human existence is meaningless and thus anything we do is meaningless. However, that also frees us up to do whatever we want since there is no universal authority telling us how to live our lives. Even in the face of an abusive police state we can still decide to resist.

The problem with Bitcoin is that if one were to maximize human potential then Bitcoin would be a really, really low bar. It's basically a premium currency for an MMO, except the MMO doesn't exist and there is no item shop and even the idea of creating such an item shop (think of NFTs) suffers from problems mentioned in the article. You can simply copy digital assets. Ownership over a digital asset doesn't protect it from being copied.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#908

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accidentally because opposition to bitcoin, like opposition to cars, isn't luddite rustic anti-industrialism, it's common sense advocacy for equally modern but different solutions to the problem. Bitcoin doesn't do anything that electronic banking can't do better, and it causes a lot of harm in wasted energy and space. Cars don't do anything that busses, trains, and bicycles can't do better, and they cause a lot of h…

>Implying electronic banking can do anything about inflation Don’t be so dishonest

Well, there are two things you need to know.

Small amounts of inflation like 2% are necessary because of productivity improvements and full employment. Every year the economy becomes slightly more productive and that means that supply is rising naturally over time. If you print a tiny bit of money then that money can be spent on the excess production and thus companies are encouraged to produce more and employ more people since future prices are always higher than in the past. Think of the opposite. Deflation reduces prices of goods and thus makes it harder to employ people. The coming years can only get worse.

The reason why we have fiat money in the first place is that money has to adapt to us and our economyy, we don't want to adapt to the money.

Ok, now onto the second point. Hyperinflation isn't the same as inflation. Hyperinflation is primarily caused by the inability to exchange currency to purchase basic necessities. If there is a war and all the farmers have died there is not enough bread for everyone. No matter how much paper you have you can't conjure bread out of nothing. The currency becomes worthless, precisely because you can no longer use it for anything useful like buying food. The government/super market will have to import food from a different country. That country uses a different currency. So you either have to borrow the foreign currency or exchange your money into the foreign currency. Money is leaving your economy and being put into foreign people's hands. Every single coin or bank note that is being printed to e.g. pay back debts or buy food in a foreign currency will instantly turn into inflation and since there isn't enough food for everyone you can never stop the printing press. The bigger and more resilient your economy, the lower the potential for hyperinflation.

The central bank might be doing crazy things but it is not forced to do them. Nobody is putting a gun to their heads and forcing them to do this. If they stopped creating more money the worst thing that could happen is a crash and we had so many of them and lived through all of them that it's really no big deal, compared to hyperinflation.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#909

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…

I'm so sick off those blog posts that take 1 million words to explain monads with so many empty words. Monads are simply endofunctors coupled with coherence conditionned morphisms. Nothing newsworthy, just be a little smarter

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#910
post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect and highly misleading. You don't have to open and close channels like that. Instead you keep them open and do circular rebalances when your channels are imbalanced. As an experiment I've been running an lnd node for the last 6 months. During this time I've routed 1445 transactions totalling 4.68249963 BTC (~223K USD currently) and only closed a handful of channels, using single digit sat/vB as it's…

This sounds cool, do you have any recommended resources to get started with running a lnd node and getting it connected to a larger network? And, just curious, do you make any money from lighting fees?

> resources to get started with running a lnd node?

I use https://github.com/rootzoll/raspiblitz, easy to assemble and install and runs silently in a corner.

> getting it connected to a larger network?

Connecting to others is simple. What's more difficult is getting inbound connections, ie. others connecting to you. Historically you asked people to connect to you but recently you have https://pool.lightning.engineering/ (integrated into Raspiblitz) with which you can buy incoming connections easily.

> do you make any money from lighting fees?

In short no. I made ~$30 from routing fees in 6 months and spent around the same on on-chain fees (opening/closing channels). It's just an experiment for me (same with bitcoin itself) to see how it all works not something i expect to generate money.

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