Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

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BTC has already been legally ruled as property, not currency, I believe if I read the ruling correctly.

Not digital gold, but pharmaceutical grade gold as Saylor put it in a recent Odd Lots pod, and it's hard to argue that...also quoted from the same pod..[not a perfect transcript]

"...so that took us to cryptos and we looked at 6500 cryptos and we found that BTC is the dominant network. its 25x bigger than the next closest thing that looks like it, and has more than $200bil monetary energy in it. it is basically Facebook or Google for money.

and this is the nuance that most people haven't realized yet..what you have is a dominant digital network that has been engineered to host a safe haven treasury reserve asset superior to gold in all respects.

it's pharmaceutical grade gold [love this line]. if God [blurb] gold as a treasury reserve asset to hold for 100 years, he would create 21mil gold coins, he'd make it impossible to make any more, he would make it possible to audit it from anywhere on earth from any node every 10 minutes, make it unhackable and make it an open architecture where you could build it into an iphone or into Square or paypal or any other exchange without permission, and he would distribute it everywhere on earth with these crypto SHA256 miners so hat no company controls it, no CEO controls it, no country controls it, and no regulators control it..."[0]

[0] https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/6b8b72d0-455c-11eb-b9ed-377...

But given the dynamics of PoW mining, isn't bitcoin defacto controlled by a handful of Chinese mining cartels, which are themselves controlled by the CCP?

I feel like this whole pitch makes sense until you get to that part.

So in a way...who cares who mines it?

Do you care who owns your real estate before you buy it? Or who mines your gold before you wear it? Probably not.

Yes I suppose there is some political aspect to that side of it, but the crypto itself...it's about as apolitical as it gets.

> make it unhackable

This hinges entirely on control of mining, in fact you could argue who mines it is one of the most important questions to ask.

> who cares who mines it?

Cryptocoins are subject to majority attacks and rules that can change at any time based on the miners preference. Who mines it is very important.

You would also care about who owned some real estate before you buy it if it was some company known for dumping toxic wast into land and then selling it. Those things are not as apolitical as they look like in an organized society.

Your straw-man argument hardly settles our debate.

If I decided that I could profitably use toxic-waste laden land, then yes of course I would still buy it and, yes of course, still not care because that's what due diligence is about.

Your liquor store sells alcohol that kills more people under the age of 30 than any other way...why aren't you standing in front of it demanding it shut down?

It's not about who created the coins, obviously. It's about the fact that more than 65% of the hashpower securing the network is in the hands of a small group of mining pools in the PRC. Adopting BTC is de facto handing over sovereignty of your currency to the PRC [1].

They get to censor transactions, they get to decide what makes it and what doesn't, they get to double-spend if they want to. That's how authoritarian government works.

This is a natural consequence of the proof-of-waste system employed. The hashpower goes to the place where waste would be the cheapest, and that's China.

[1] https://news.bitcoin.com/65-of-global-bitcoin-hashrate-conce...

Crypto can be extremely political if those who mine get to decide what goes on the blockchain.

Let's say Dalai Lama decided to follow MicroStrategy with a 400M purchase.

His BTC could be near unusable if China were to control some amount over 50% of mining capability.

How could that happen? The blocks you mine you simply not process any of "undesirable transactions".

If any of the lesser miners find a block and try to add a transaction to the ledger you perform a double spend attack.

Yeah, the distributed part failed because of economies of scale and how they apply to the miners.

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