981–990 of 1001 posts
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I thought that "darkness" was slyly implied in the dawkins quote
Maybe not in the quote above but the full Dawkins piece it was taken from is dark enough https://dizzynomics.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/money-as-a-form...
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LN fundamentally changes nothing. Its still uses bitcoin Tx it just combines many Tx and does the on-chain settlement at a later point thus reducing the number of on-chain Tx increases speed and reduces fees. But if we reduce Tx on the chain we dont solve scalability we just bump into the limits a little later. LN on a global scale would still need orders or magnitude more on-chain Tx then possible. And if LN would a…
The difficulty can adjust down over time if interest goes down, and that's pretty much fine as long as no one gets over 50% of the hashrate.
If 80% of miners go out of business someone can buy the hardware from them wait for the 80% difficulty adjustment and then start the attack. He could mine blocks faster than anyone else so even if someone mines a block his chain will eventually be longer. There is no know way to recover from something like that.
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"This space" didn't exist 20 years ago.
Yes it did. It has been going on for ~50 years, and bitcoin is the culmination of work spanning that period. Bitcoin was not the first cryptocurrency. It was the first good one, though.
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Presently sell bitcoin for cash, swap cash for milk. Same as for stocks, bonds, gold bars, foreign currency and many other time honoured investments.
Yes, but that would also apply if what I had was a used car, rather than bitcoin or gold, etc. The requirement for intermediate conversion to another currency in order to realize value implies that bitcoin isn’t (at least yet) a currency (even in the case where foreign currency isn’t local currency, there is a context where it is currency: that foreign country). I can also buy milk by exchanging my car for local curr…
Buying bitcoin early would have put me 10 years ahead. Missed, maybe bitcoin cash isn't bad as everyone taints it to be.
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Bitcoin is a settlement layer, like ACH, not a payment provider like Venmo
The payment provider layer is the part that ordinary people worry about when they're looking at transaction fees, security, censorship, and privacy. If Bitcoin isn't a payment provider, then why should I care about it? It's more expensive and slower than ACH is. It's being converted into normal currencies and tracked by the same companies that are making payment providers today. What is it solving? All of these payme…
It creates a separation of concerns: If the layer 2 service providers you are using today become abusive/untrustworthy, it would be easy to switch to different ones.
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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?
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Bitcoin has a strong base of advocacy not based on any logic or utility but solely sprung from the mule stubbornness of those who profited from their speculation. 1. Bitcoin is environmentally damaging. It produces 37 megatons of CO2 per year and consumes 78 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. Much of that electric consumption is powered by coal. Not all energy consumption or CO2 output is bad, but value should b…
You have many severely fundamentally misunderstood ideas about Bitcoin. Bitcoin is "money" and not a "currency." Bitcoin works very wonderfully as money. Bitcoin is not very wasteful in energy, contrary to the pushed narrative by those that want everyone to believe this is truth. Bitcoin uses a tiny fraction, currently around 7-9% of the electricity that the global banking system currently uses. Bitcoin uses a very l…
It's like that with Bitcoin fanatics.
"Money" and "currency" do have definitions built up over time by economists and financiers over the past centuries. They are not the same as is used, apparently, in the Bitcoin-Disney fantasy park.
Conventionally - and by conventionally, I mean as it is used by all economists and financiers for centuries - currency is a subset of money. A currency is the dollar, the Euro, the yuan. It doesn't have to be fiat, but today usually is. Money is any type of highly liquid asset typically used for the payment of debts, which includes currencies but can include short term bank notes as well. Although there have been times in history where gold was used as money, it is generally not used as money now, although like most assets it can be converted into money. Bitcoin can be money too, but it's a crappy money, for the reasons I described above. Generally, economists don't spend a lot of time splitting hairs about money and currency, because they're very similar concepts.
"Money" is not a synonym for "store of value." You will not find that in any economic textbook, or even Wikipedia for that matter.
Even if you wanted to use the fantasy park definition of money as anything with a store of value, you chose not to even defend Bitcoin as a store of value. Possibly because it's a terrible store of value.
Again: this is just Bitcoin. Crypto can be designed better. The fact that Bitcoin fanatics obsess over Bitcoin in particular is just proof that they're talking their book.
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This will likely be dismissed as shilling of a shitcoin, but on the off-chance anyone is actually willing to take a look, this cryptocurrency meets your criteria (which is exactly why I bought it): https://www.algorand.com/ . The pedigree of the team behind it is ridiculous, most notably its creator: Silvio Micali - one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs as well as other cryptographic primitives. EDIT: it's…
Can you explain how this prevents forks? An example of a fork would be someone creating a new client that rejects transactions from old clients.