Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

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Sure, but I can't lease servers anonymously with tulip bulbs. If for no other reason, because they're physical objects. Maybe with tulip futures, or whatever, but I digress.

I've followed discussions of anonymous electronic currency since the 90s. Nothing introduced before Bitcoin has survived. The main defect was centralization, which allowed government take-down. If I've missed one, please share.

And about the bubble thing, I don't much care. The Bitcoin price has seen times of huge volatility. The increase during 2017 from ~$1000 to almost $20000 was impressive. As was the collapse during first quarter 2018. But now the price seems relatively stable at $7000-$9000. And payments go through quickly enough.

And about anonymity. Yes, Bitcoin itself is not at all anonymous. Everything's in the public blockchain. But one can use mixing services, through Tor, and get different Bitcoin. Which aren't linked to the starting Bitcoin, or to any identity or IPv4 address that's linked to the user in meatspace. Maybe it's not perfect, but it's good enough for me.

> But now the price seems relatively stable at $7000-$9000. And payments go through quickly enough.

Great. Is this system that provides, so far, minimal to no advantage over other transaction systems worth expending the same electric power that a small developed country (Portugal) uses?

If you know another way to make anonymous payments, please share. I had a Liberty Reserve account, but they got busted. I have a Pecunix account, but it's not accepted anywhere. If I were wealthy, I could setup shell corporations and so on. But I'm not.

I do agree that a system that used less energy would be better. When it's available, and widely enough accepted, I'll switch.

If you think that Bitcoin transactions are anonymous then you are grossly mistaken. All transactions are part of PUBLIC ledger and are there to stay forever. The illusion of anonimity comes from thr fact that you don’t need an ID to create a Bitcoin wallet, but still it’s possible to trace your transactions back to you.

Well, it may or may not be possible. The ledger may record a series of transactions like A → B → C → D → E, and you may know that A belongs to Joe and E to Mary, but it's not certain that you can know whether B, C and D are decoys created by one of them (and so they actually transacted directly) or if they're other people and the money simply circulated.

There are techniques to try to find that out, but they're not infallible.

From my parent comment:

> And about anonymity. Yes, Bitcoin itself is not at all anonymous. Everything's in the public blockchain. But one can use mixing services, through Tor, and get different Bitcoin. Which aren't linked to the starting Bitcoin, or to any identity or IPv4 address that's linked to the user in meatspace. Maybe it's not perfect, but it's good enough for me.

So yes, usably anonymous.

You can also launder money after swapping it, doesn't make it anonymous either.

Engage the services of your local money launderer, they're doing the same thing.

Wait, you're saying they're criminals? I wonder why the bitcoin guys aren't.

The term "criminal" can mean so many things. It's like "terrorist". One person's criminal/terrorist is another's freedom fighter.

People hurting others (what's criminal to me) will use any system that's secure, hidden, anonymous, etc. Tor is a good example. But in a sense, they serve as canaries for other users.

This is a genuine question with no snark intended (sometimes we need to clarify stuff like this on the internet hah).

What's the overall energy expenditure for all fiat production,maintenance, asset storage (gold), mining of assets etc?

There are some interesting developments in the crypto sphere moving away from high energy proof or work to a holding system (Proof of stake).

I have no clue. But I don't doubt that systems as energy-intensive as Bitcoin would consume far more energy. Likely, orders of magnitude more.

I like to think of myself as caring about ecosystems. But after decades of work on decentralized electronic payment systems, Bitcoin is what we got.

I'm no expert, but I suspect that the Bitcoin protocol could be tweaked to make humongous mining operations unprofitable. But the chances of that are likely not so great.

I do hope that proof-of-stake systems will develop. Stake still means wealth, but at least it's not wealth that's funding energy-intensive proof-of-work.

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