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Comment by throw51319 | Hacker News Reader

I still don't see the point of Bitcoin beyond being a digital gold. And monero for anonymous purchases online.

Every country is still gonna have their currencies, and the most stable country is going to be used as the peg currency. Right now that's USD.

So basically Bitcoin is a digital gold, but the underlying trust mechanism is inefficient. Thus it gets centralized at big nodes, like banks or exchanges.

Thus it becomes basically a digital gold. You might as well have banks offer "Digital Gold, $1000 an ounce!"

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As a tech enthusiast on a forum heavily populated by people interested in disrupting aspects of the world through technology, you are missing a big, big boat here. And I'm not even referring to the possible investment opportunity - rather just the opportunity to watch with open eyes as some of the foundational facets of human society are disrupted. I find the anti-BTC tone of the discussion here very disappointing but also very interesting (I can't figure it out except through intellectual arrogance).

I offer the perspective: you hold a set of deeply held assumptions that are being actively questioned and poked at by this technology. The level of your reasoning is not up to the task of understanding what happens, even long after the disruption has happened. I recommend investing in education on this topic.

A recent podcast episode worth listening to: https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/what-is-bitcoin

The consequences of bitcoin have not been sufficiently questioned and poked at. Society allows the exchange of bitcoin for real currency. Bitcoin enthusiasts (at least until they are victimized) view the scams, crimes, and damage enabled by Bitcoin as externalized costs (borne by those who are "not up to the task of understanding", which is generally not something you should write immediately after complaining about "intellectual arrogance").

The cost of a Bitcoin speculator's "freedom" is paid by others. Real currency and banking systems actively try to prevent fraud and crime. Bitcoin is...whatever the exact opposite of that is. It exists only to be itself -- provably so.

Wasn't that how it was designed? Even the term 'miner' was based on gold mining. I think the only difference is that gold used to be the currency itself, not just what backed the currency, and BTC tried to be both.

> So basically Bitcoin is a digital gold

The hate is getting less hatey each year. I think networks like lightning might centralization some, but as long users remain able to pay uncensorably Bitcoin still checks the ecash box.

> uncensorably Bitcoin

Bitcoin can be censored. Do to it's transparent nature, miners can refuse to add transactions to blocks based on specific criteria such as sender, receiver, and transaction amount.

When miners start censoring payments for what I'll (for the sake of argument) call "non-engineering" reasons, then Bitcoin will no longer check the ecash box for me. Until then, it seems like self preservation combined with fungibility efforts prevent this kind of censorship.

I don't see your point actually. Yes bitcoin is both digital gold but a type of gold that can be used also as currency which is not possible right now. Also its not centralized that's a myth. So?

How much bitcoin is traded peer to peer vs traded on huge exchanges like Coinbase, Robinhood, etc? Seems pretty centralized to me.

It's centralised at the repository level. There is only one main version of BTC that miners run. The devs have full control.

How is the underlying trust mechanism inefficient? You can run a fully validating Bitcoin node on an old laptop without any issues. Even a raspberry pi can handle it.

Yeah but isn't it like, as the number of transactions increase the computing power must increase?

So if you had the world transacting on the blockchain ledger, it would take a crazy amount of computing power just to validate?

No, that's not how it works.

So why do they have farms in china for bitcoin mining?

The computing power used for proof-of-work is not proportional to the number of transactions. Computationally, it's relatively cheap to verify the entire transaction history.

The real energy consumption comes from miners who use a crazy amount of computer power to secure the network. Bitcoin's transaction history is immutable because changing it would require an even crazier amount of computing power - too much for any malicious actor who tries to attack the network.

The amount of energy used is a feature, not a bug. There are no alternative designs known that could replace proof-of-work while keeping its security assurances, permissionless participation, fair distribution of coins, unforgeability, etc.

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