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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

it was always funny that people with a prepper mentality touted bitcoin as some sort of rock stable currency in times of crisis when government money was going to be worthless despite the fact that it basically takes an electricity source the size of the country to keep the whole thing running.

What are you going to do in the post apocalypse, get a team of people with an abacus to calculate hash functions?

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I'm not really a big bitcoin guy (own a few hundred dollars worth), but this seems like a straw man.

I really doubt that anyone is buying bitcoin for the collapse of industrial civilization. The more prepper-case for bitcoin comes from either very high inflation, financial instability, and/or severe capital controls. It's not implausible that these conditions coexist with the continued existence of industrial civilization.

It's not implausible because it's happened many times before in history. For example, if you were a Jew in Germany circa 1936, Bitcoin would have been very very valuable to you. In much the same that diamonds were valuable to those in that time and place, because of the ease by which they could be hidden and smuggled against the authorities' wishes.

But a service like Paypal would likely work just as well but with the added benefit of being much more stable. That, combined with gold is really enough for most middle class people in Asia.

Once you start getting into the tens of thousands of USD, you can afford to obtain bank accounts outside of the country tied to a business. These are widely available and there's an entire cottage industry of lawyers who can provide everything you need.

You don't see the value proposition of peer-to-peer digital cash, cool.

Bitcoin needs a highly reliable network to work properly. Without block propagation, you cannot do anything with it.

Thinking that there would be a network when even the slightest disruption to civilization happens is simply naïve. The internet would probably be the first thing to go. Even before electric cars.

Bingo. Gold is pretty straightforward -- shiny metal. You don't need any understanding of cryptography, networking, distributed services, or modulus calculus to "get" gold.

You also don't need electricity (or most other modern luxury) to modify, trade, or use gold -- plenty of gold changing hands throughout the ages.

Cryptographic currencies have their use, but if the economy is looking shaky I'd rather have cash, gold, silver, cans of beans, or ammunition; BTC wouldn't even rank top 25.

a service like paypal would not have helped in a (dramatic) example like the hypothetical jew in nazi germany. the nazis would have given paypal a list of known jews and told them to freeze their accounts if they wanted to continue doing business in germany.

Oh come on man, you think that Germany directing a foreign country to freeze assets during the lead in to a war is a more likely way for a Jew in Nazi Germany to lose their hidden savings as compared to them trying to smuggle a USB wallet as they get stripped of all their belongings, clothes, and dignity and loaded on a train? Are they gonna hide it in their butthole and hope they don't have to take a dump until they get out of the concentration camp 7 years later and can finally get around to a computer so they can plug it in and access their bitcoins?

Get the fuck out of here.

I mean, it's no secret that foreign banks absolutely did help Nazi Germany in many ways, including transacting assets seized from Jews in Germany. We also have no shortage of stories about large transaction companies like PayPal closing or freezing people's accounts due to unspecified (but apparently political) reasons.

I wouldn't say "GTFO" quite yet. Not without some more explanation for why you think it's so improbable.

You don’t need a physical token. All you need is the seed, which you can store in your head. Educate yourself.

Because a public personal ledger of every cent you ever transacted is perfect for protecting you from an authoritarian regime willing to use force against you...

See Monero. Transaction senders, recipients, and amounts are hidden by default.

It's obviously not as simple as you conjecture. For the simple reason that the blockchain is simply a record of transactions on anonymous public keys. Generating a new private-public key pair can be done trivially and secretly.

Everyday thousands of illicit transactions are carried out on the blockchain. The US government has never shown a shortage of force when it comes to stopping drug dealers. Yet the number of people who've been arrested based on blockchain analysis can be counted on one hand.

How much, oil, electricity, and blood does it take to prop up the US dollar???

How much more does the dollar and all it's infrastructure do than bitcoin?

Many, many, many times more. Bitcoin could barely cope with the transaction rate of a mid sized town.

A lot, that is why it is backed by the Country with the largest economy in the World...mean while Bitcoin isn't backed by anything except false marketing, it certainly isn't a P2P electronic system of cash.

Have you actively avoided learning about peer-to-peer digital cash or do you somehow feel threatened by it?

If you think someone is mistaken, correct them. Personal attacks are neither polite nor likely to convince anyone.

Hum... I don't know if I'm reading your comment correctly, but Bitcoin is absolutely not a P2P protocol.

The entire community needs to confirm an operation before it's complete. This can be only named P2P if you remove all the meaning from the expression.

I would expect bitcoin to work properly with as few as 3 people... And any computer can calculate hashes.

3 people with electricity, networks, and computers.

You don't think 3 people could figure out electricity and computers and networks whether local or even satellite links? That would be one hell of an apocalypse.

I don't think my entire IT department could figure it out in a disaster scenario

After the power is out, and without internet access or delivery services?

As happened in parts of California last year?

How are you imagining they would do it?

I dunno. Go to a library?

I presume you are trolling.

This is a point I see a lot of people miss about Bitcoin's power consumption. It doesn't have to use as much electricity as it does, as the difficulty is adjusted to mining capacity.

The reason why so much electricity is being used on BTC is a result of an arms race between miners, not a necessity of the technical specification. Bitcoin would still operate correctly with less mining capacity. What is sacrificed is that the threshold for mounting a 51% attack becomes lower with less miners. But again, the network itself does not need a nation-state's worth of electricity to operate.

Practice significantly complicates theory here.

A price crash that forces a bunch of miners off the network means that, not only is a 51% attack cheaper, but the spare capacity to launch one exists, and is just sitting there unused, losing money.

A volatile combination.

For security, the cost of the hashing needs to be greater than the value of being able to subvert the bitcoin network with 51% attacks.

If the cost of the hashing power is less than the value, then the incentive is to just buy the hashing power and do the 51% attacks.

So to the extent that bitcoin has any value at all, it's going to either burn an amount of electricity greater than the value of a network compromise, or it's not going to be secure.

How quickly would the difficulty adjust? My understanding is that there is an algorithm that slowly adjusts difficulty. If a big chunk of the ASIC miners went offline and mining reverted to individual GPUs, it might be a very long time before the difficulty reverted to something reasonable.

Bitcoin difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks, nominally 2 weeks. Each time it can adjust by a factor of at most 4 (in either direction). Many other cryptocurrencies adjust difficulty every single block.

No, that's not true. The problem isn't there protocol, it's the security argument. Bitcoin works with three people with one computer each, as long as none of those people has access to two more computers. As soon as one of the three can get three if their own computers, the chain's security arguments are broken. PoW doesn't work on compute, it works on scarcity of compute.

Uh.. any single person who owns more than 50% of the computation can basically mess everything up, unless I'm mistaken?

So, maybe you mean 3 independent parties.. but what's to stop those 3 people from colluding for their own benefit, etc..

Anyway you need a hell of a lot more than 3 to run it.

You need to think more along the lines of Zimbabwe during massive inflation of local currency.

tesla solar cryptoshingles

could you baseline that against solar output on a clear day?

1 TSC = 1 day of solar panel power with a clear sky at sea level at the equator, or something

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